All posts by onlyconnect

Windows Mobile sync pain

I use a Samsung i600, similar to the Blackjack, which I’ve upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.0. Nice mobile, but for a while now it hasn’t been syncing properly. It hadn’t bothered me too much, because the main thing I care about is email, which I retrieve via IMAP, and that always works fine.

Then something else went wrong. I noticed that some documents which I had on the storage card in the i600 had disappeared. No error message; they just were no longer there. That prompted me to fix it.

I started with sync. On Vista it is no longer ActiveSync, but two new things. One is called the Sync center, the other called Windows Mobile Device Center. Probably a lot of the same old stuff underneath. What’s the difference?

The new Sync Center is a convenient central location in Windows Vista from which you can manage data synchronization between PCs, between PCs and servers, and between PCs and devices.

Got that? Now this:

Though it unifies your various sync activities, please note that Sync Center does not replace third-party sync tools or functionality. For example, a Windows Mobile device will still use its own infrastructure—Windows Mobile Device Center—to perform the actual synchronization of data with a Windows Vista computer. If you want to change the granular sync settings for any specific relationship, Sync Center directs you to the Windows Mobile Device Center or, in the case of another company’s device, to the data management settings for that device.

I wish I’d read that sooner. Since it is the Sync Center that fires up automatically (or is meant to) when you connect via USB, I had wasted some time fiddling with it. I was trying to delete the partnership. Right-click, Delete. Nothing happened. File – Delete. Nothing happened. No error, nothing in the event log, but the partnership remained.

I Googled. Dear me. I hit the Windows Sync Center Blog. An archetypal example of how not to blog. Here’s the blurb:

With the advent of the new Sync Center folder in Windows Vista and a brand new programming model, the team felt that it was important to provide a way for those using these interfaces to interact with us and provide feedback.

Just what I wanted. Thing is, there are just two posts, the most recent in September 2005. And lots of comments, like this:

Please, oh please help me remove this thing from my machine. I just got Vista and an external drive. Created a sync partnership which didn’t work. Cannot delete the sync.Cannot remove systray application.

or this:

does anyone who can fix this mess read our blog? PURGATORY!!!!!

or this:

HELLO…….. BILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL RU listening to us?

You guys call this a blog?! You’ve answered NONE of your customer’s questions! And you’ve had, what, two posts in two years??

Not the best place for help apparently. Fortunately I realized that what I really wanted was the Windows Mobile Device Center, and hit this post instead. Downloaded and installed version 6.1, and everything worked. Easy. Though the comments to that post are almost equally depressing.

I’m also puzzled. I use Microsoft Update. Why hadn’t my Mobile Device Center been updated automatically?

Never mind. Time to look at the other problem. I looked at the storage card in the device explorer, which now worked. It was almost empty, yet had very little free space. I removed it and put it in a card reader. Right click – Properties – Tools – Check for Errors. As I’d guessed, it was corrupt. The error check restored my missing documents. It also revealed the likely cause of the problem. Live Search had created around 1200 temporary files on the card. I deleted them all. Replaced the card in the device, upgraded Live Search to the latest version. All seems to be well.

Was I just unlucky? I’m not sure. Windows Mobile devices do seem prone to this kind of runaround. Then again, my older Qtek 8100, running Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition, worked reliably for a couple of years. Oddly enough, it is not the errors themselves that are frustrating, but the lack of helpful error messages or troubleshooting tips that actually work.

It strikes me that Windows Mobile and the whatever-you-call-it sync software still has some way to go before it is truly user-friendly.

Asus Eee PC down to £199

The price of the Asus mini PC running Linux is falling. UK computer superstore PC World is advertising the 4GB model for £199 including VAT – and yes, right now there seems to be stock in hand.

An improved model with an 8GB solid state drive and 1GB RAM is available in the USA, and my guess is that this will come to the UK early in the new year.

It is not without annoyances but nevertheless a great little device, and will give desktop Linux a significant boost.

Presumably we will see Linux and Windows variants side-by-side in the shops before long. It will be interesting to see how the sales proportions shake out.

Update

I reserved one of these myself, for collection at a local store. 30 minutes later I got a telephone call from PC World (yes, at 9.00pm). It was someone who “just wanted to check” that I understood that this runs Linux and is “not a laptop running Windows or anything”. Fascinating. I have no objection to being called, but I wonder what prompted this ring-round? Customers complaining? Or just a retailer nervous about this strange new thing? Should have asked, bother.

I’ve also noticed something odd about the product description. PC World has the white and the black at the same price – well, I am guessing, but one product is -GW and the other is -GB. However, the code and description for the white (PC2-GW) suggests it is the 2GB variant, which you would expect to be cheaper. There’s also no mention of the webcam (not that I really care about that). If you go for one of these, I suggest checking it is really what you are expecting before parting with money. I will.

Further update

Price is back up to £219.99 for the 4GB this morning. Looks like a temporary pricing snafu. Never mind, it is still a good deal.

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Visual Studio 2008 review, and the WPF business apps debate

Review just posted on RegDeveloper.

In it I quote Peter Lindsey of component vendor Infragistics, who says that:

Microsoft, in trying to capture credibility within the media market, has poorly represented the value of WPF to business application developers.

The problem is that Microsoft decided to tell its customers not to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for line-of-business applications, which is a strange way to launch your next-generation GUI API, and tough on vendors such as Infragistics who have been busy providing business-oriented components like xamDataGrid.

Not everyone agrees that WPF is a no-hoper for business apps. See this post from software architect Ivan Towlson:

For me, the killer application of WPF is not bouncing buttons with dancing elves trapped inside them.  The killer application is information visualisation, the kind of things you get from Tufte and the periodic table.  And that’s something that even forms-style, line-of-business applications will find worthwhile.

When Microsoft introduced .NET it made great efforts to get VB 6 developers to upgrade and migrate their projects, even though there were sound technical reasons for caution. Why is it that with WPF those reasons for caution, valid though they are, have been allowed to dominate the messaging to the extent that most developers probably have the impression that WPF is irrelevant?

Curious.

An Office Ribbon macro to control audio in Word

I wrote a macro to control audio via keystrokes in Word. Its main use is for transcribing interviews, but you could use it for music as well – easy to pause a song when the phone rings. The idea is that you can pause, play and rewind an audio file from keystrokes in Word, which saves switching applications or reaching for the mouse.

It’s work in progress, hence the smiley faces. Even so, I found it interesting to do. The ribbon is great for macro developers, but could do with a visual editor. I used the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor.

There is a little more info and a download link here.

The day my web site was hacked

Here are the gory details.

Let me add my thanks to the great guys at phorum.org for their help in trying to work out what went wrong. The WordPress folk seemed less interested, maybe because the forums there are so busy that a hack report makes barely a ripple. Further the WordPress code itself was not to blame, so it was not their problem to solve.

I loosened the permissions on the WordPress uploads folder in order to upload images with Live Writer. Lesson learned; I’m back to using SCP.

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Knol questions

The internet is buzzing about Knol. Google no longer wishes merely to index the web’s content. Google wishes to host the web’s content. Why? Ad revenue. Once you click away from Google, you might see ads for which Google is not the agent. Perish the thought. Keep web users on Google; keep more ad revenue.

Snag is, there is obvious conflict of interest. Actually, there is already conflict of interest on Google. I don’t know how many web pages out there host Adsense content (mine do), but it is a lot. When someone clicks an Adsense ad, revenue is split between Google and the site owner. Therefore, it would pay Google to rank Adsense sites above non-Adsense sites in its search. Would it do such a thing? Noooo, surely not. How can we know? We can’t. Google won’t publish its search algorithms, for obvious reasons. You have to take it on trust.

That question, can we trust Google, is one that will be asked again and again.

Knol increases the conflict of interest. Google says:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

Will Google rank Knol pages higher than equally good content on, say, Wikipedia? Noooo. How will we know? We won’t. We have to take it on trust.

On balance therefore I don’t much like Knol. It is better to separate search from content provision. But Google is already a content provider (YouTube is another example) so this is not really groundbreaking.

I also have some questions about Knol. The example article (about insomnia) fascinates me. It has a named author, and Google’s Udi Manber highlights the importance of this:

We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

However, it also has edit buttons, like a wiki. If it is a wiki, it is not clear how the reader will distinguish between what the named author wrote, and what has been edited. In the history tab presumably; but how many readers will look at that? Or will the author get the right to approve edits? When an article has been edited so thoroughly that only a small percentage is original, does the author’s name remain?

Personally, I would not be willing to have my name against an article that could be freely edited by others. It is too risky.

Second, there is ambiguity in Manber’s remark about content ownership:

Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

Hang on. When I say, “non-exclusive”, I don’t mean giving other search engines the right to index it. I mean putting it on other sites, with other ads, that are nothing to do with Google. A slip of the keyboard, or does Google’s “non-exclusive” mean something different from what the rest of us mean?

Finally, I suggest we should not be hasty in writing off Wikipedia. First mover has a big advantage. Has Barnes and Noble caught up with Amazon? Did Yahoo Auctions best eBay? Has Microsoft’s MSN Video unseated YouTube? Wikipedia is flawed; but Knol will be equally flawed; at least Wikipedia tries to avoid this kind of thing:

For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Then again, Wikipedia knows what it is trying to do. Knol is not yet baked. We’ll see.

Update

Danny Sullivan, who has been briefed by Google, has some answers. Partial answers, anyway. Here’s one:

Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic, which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to if the primary author allows

The highlighting is mine. Interesting. I wonder what the dynamics would/will be. Will editable pages float to the top?

Second:

The content will be owned by the authors, who can reprint it as they like

You can guess my next question. If as the primary author I have enabled editing, do any contributions become mine? What if I want to include the article in a printed book? The GNU Free Documentation License used by Wikipedia seems a simpler solution.

Fun: Wikipedia already has an article on knol.

Amazon SimpleDB: a database server for the internet

Amazon has announced SimpleDB, the latest addition to what is becoming an extensive suite of web services aimed at developers. It is now in beta.

Why bother with SimpleDB, when seemingly every web server on the planet already has access to a free instance of MySQL? Perhaps the main reason is scalability. If demand spikes, Amazon handles the load. Second, SimpleDB is universally accessible, whereas your MySQL may well be configured for local access on the web server only. If you want an online database to use from a desktop application, this could be suitable. It should work well with Adobe AIR once someone figures out an ActionScript library. That said, MySQL and the like work fine for most web applications, this blog being one example. SimpleDB meets different needs.

This is utility computing, and prices look relatively modest to me, though you pay for three separate things:

Machine Utilization – $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed.

Data Transfer – $0.10 per GB – all data transfer in. From $0.18 per GB – data transfer out.

Structured Data Storage – $1.50 per GB-month.

In other words, a processing time fee, a data transfer fee, and a data storage fee. That’s reasonable, since each of these incurs a cost. The great thing about Amazon’s services is that there are no minimum costs or standing fees. I get billed pennies for my own usage of Amazon S3, which is for online backup.

There are both REST and SOAP APIs and there are example libraries for Java, Perl, PHP, C#, VB.NET (what, no Javascript or Python?).

Not relational

Unlike MySQL, Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server, SimpleDB is not a relational database server. It is based on the concept of items and attributes. Two things distinguish it from most relational database managers:

1. Attributes can have more than one value.

2. Each item can have different attributes.

While this may sound disorganized, it actually maps well to the real world. One of the use cases Amazon seems to have in mind is stock for an online store. Maybe every item has a price and a quantity. Garments have a Size attribute, but CDs do not. The Category attribute could have multiple values, for example Clothing and Gifts.

You can do such things relationally, but it requires multiple tables. Some relational database managers do support multiple values for a field (FileMaker for example), but it is not SQL-friendly.

This kind of semi-structured database is user-friendly for developers. You don’t have to plan a schema in advance. Just start adding items.

A disadvantage is that it is inherently undisciplined. There is nothing to stop you having an attribute called Color, another called Hue, and another called Shade, but it will probably complicate your queries later if you do.

All SimpleDB attribute values are strings. That highlights another disadvantage of SimpleDB – no server-side validation. If a glitch in your system gives an item a Price of “Red”, SimpleDB will happily store the value.

Not transactional or consistent

SimpleDB has a feature called “Eventual Consistency”. It is described thus:

Amazon SimpleDB keeps multiple copies of each domain. When data is written or updated (using PutAttributes, DeleteAttributes, CreateDomain or DeleteDomain) and Success is returned, all copies of the data updated. However, it takes time for the update to propogate to all storage locations. The data will eventually be consistent, but an immediate read might not show the change.

Right, so if you have one item in stock you might sell it twice to two different customers (though the docs say consistency is usually achieved in seconds). There is also no concept of transactions as far as I can see. This is where you want a sequence of actions to succeed or fail as a block. Well, it is called SimpleDB.

This doesn’t make SimpleDB useless. It does limit the number of applications for which it is suitable. In most web applications, read operations are more common than write operations. SimpleDB is fine for reading. Just don’t expect your online bank to be adopting SimpleDB any time soon.

Another pro musician gives up on Vista audio

I occasionally highlight interesting comments to this blog, because they are less visible than new posts. This one for example:

After months of struggling with Vista, I have now completely removed it from my quad-core, purpose-built audio recording PC. With all the same hardware, XP 64 bit edition is working as I had hoped Vista 64 would. The machine now records and plays back flawlessly.

The question I originally posed was whether Vista audio problems are primarily to do with poor drivers, or indicate more fundamental problems. Initially I was inclined to blame the drivers, especially as Microsoft put a lot of effort into improving Vista’s audio. However, read this post by Larry Osterman. He mentions three problems with audio in XP, and says:

Back in 2002, we decided to make a big bet on Audio for Vista and we committed to fixing all three of the problems listed above.

However, only one of his three problems is unequivocally about improving audio. The first is actually about Windows reliability:

The amount of code that runs in the kernel (coupled with buggy device drivers) causes the audio stack to be one of the leading causes of Windows reliability problems.

Therefore, Microsoft moved the audio stack:

The first (and biggest) change we made was to move the entire audio stack out of the kernel and into user mode.

though he adds that

In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers (and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver).

So, not quite the entire audio stack. Some pro musicians reckon the removal of the audio stack from the kernel is the reason for Vista’s audio problems.

However you look at it, it is to my mind a depressing failure that a year after Vista’s release you can find pro musicians giving up, and even vendors (who have an interest in Vista working properly) making comments like this one from Cakewalk’s Noel Borthwick:

Vista X64 (and X86 to some extent as well) is known to have inherent problems with low latency audio. We have been in touch with Microsoft about this and other problems for over a year now so its not that Cakewalk hasn’t done their bit. There are open case numbers with MS for this issue as well.

It does look as if, for all the talk of “a big bet on audio in Vista”, Microsoft does not care that much about this aspect of the operating system.

Anyone tried audio in Vista SP1 yet?

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450 fixes in Office 2007 service pack 1

Microsoft has released Office 2007 service pack 1. But what does it fix? If you go to this page you can download a spreadsheet which lists around 450 fixes. It is a little misleading, since many of the fixes reference pre-existing knowledgebase articles, which I reckon means you may already have the fix. SP1 is still worth it (presuming it works OK) – there are plenty of other issues mentioned.

Of course I went straight to the Outlook 2007 section, as this is the app I have real problems with. This one will be interesting to some readers of this blog:

  • POP3 sync is sometimes slow.  An issue that contributed to this issue was fixed in SP1.

I believe I have noticed this one too:

  • A large number of items may fail to be indexed.

As to whether Outlook 2007 will perform noticeably better after SP1, I am sceptical but will let you know.

As it happens, the top four search keywords for visitors to this blog who come via search engines, for this month, are as follows:

  1. 2007
  2. outlook
  3. vista
  4. slow

It is similar most months. Hmmm, seems there may be a pattern there.