Category: My Menu

Why are wireless data rates in Canada so absurd?

I recently bought a SIM card for the Acer laptop I got at Microsoft PDC. Although it took a hour or more to get the new SIM card set up and provisioned (because the guys at Sounds Fantastic had never provisioned a laptop that had a built-in 3G card), it is sedt up and works great.

My only complaint is with the price of data-only plans here in Canada. I mean, $30 for 500 mb? $85 for up to 5 gb? Why do we not have reasonably priced “all you can eat” plans like they do south of the border?

The answer came to me while I was waiting for my card to be provisioned – the phone and cable companies here in Canada cannot afford to reduces wireless data prices. If people could buy high speed wireless broadband for a price comparable to their home internet service, why would they buy DSL or Cable internet? This would effectively kill one whole profit stream for the Phone and Cable companies.

While I understand this form a business perspective, it concenrs me that this is holding our nation back in terms of development of mobile applications and services which take advantage of wireless broadband. Should the existing carrriers be allowed to artificially inflate wireless broadband rates in order to protect their wired internet businesses, to the detriment of the country as a whole?

Isn’t this what the CRTC shuld be protecting us against? God knows the CRTC needs SOMETHING useful to do!

What Should a Slate Tablet Look Like Today?

I was sitting in a meeting today, and I got thinking about my computer. I have 4 right now. The one I had with me was my Acer convertible tablet from PDC. I also have a Dell XPS laptop, a Motion Computing LE1600, and from work I have a pretty standard HP laptop.

I use all of these for different things.

Right now I am using the Acer a lot, just because it is new and I am experimenting with multi-touch.

Mostly I use my XPS for gaming (which I don’t do much anymore) and for programming. It has 4 gb of RAM, so I have enough room to run a VM for development environments.

My favourite is still the LE1600, however. For day-to-day none programming work I love the slate form factor. Many people crap on the tablet because of handwriting recognition. Personally, I have always found handwriting recognition Windows XP to be more than satisfactory. In Windows Vista it is even better, and even better in Windows 7. That said, I really do not do a lot of handwriting recognition. Mostly, I use OneNote to take notes and leave them as handwriting. I also use applications to mark-up Word and PDF documents (in ink).

My LE1600 is 4+ years old now, though, and it is starting to show its age. It only has 1 gb of RAM, and a 60 gb HDD. I could upgrade the HDD, but it does not seem worth it.

I would like to replace my slate, but there is nothing out there in a reasonable price range that really strikes my fancy. It does not seem that the slate tablet has progressed much at all in the last few years – and there does not seem to be much interest in slates in the marketplace.

There is a lot of interest right now in eBook readers, and while I think they are cool, I cannot see carry yet another device for nothing but reading.

So I got thinking today “what would the perfect slate tablet look like for me.”

Here is a list of what I came up with:

  • A form factor similar to the Kindle DX (maybe a larger screen, but similar thickness);
  • A real back-lit screen – maybe with the ability to turn off back light to conserve power. Without backlight, should look as good as Kindle;
  • Ink input – and maybe touch;
  • Running a full OS – a light version of Windows or a Linux distribution (I do not want just an eBook reader);
  • Software support: Reader for PDF and Office, etc., eMail, Browser, OneNote-like app, Media support;
  • No extras: no modem, no optical drive, minimal ports, no video out, no web cam;
  • No HDD – maybe an SDD, maybe the OS in ROM or something;
  • No keyboard except maybe by USB or Bluetooth;
  • Maybe assume that most applications I need will be in Browser (cannot believe I said that lol);
  • Price point around $500

So that is my quick and dirty wish list – can anyone add anything more?

Off to PDC09

Really looking forward to the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference in LA this week – except for the getting up at 4 AM to get to the airport tomorrow!

There are a number of areas I am exciting about for the conference. On Monday I am in an all day workshop on Software in the Energy Economy which should be very interesting given a number of projects I am involved in lately regarding energy management systems and systainability support.

At the conference proper, other than the keynotes, there are a fair number of session I have put in my schedule related to Azure – still very much interested in cloud computing, even though I have had little time to look at it.

I am also planning to attend a number of sessions on Workflow Foundation 4.0, even though it will not be available in SharePoint 2010 (at least initially).

Then there are a number of sessions I want to go to just out of personal interest – those involving Silverlight, touch and multitouch applications, and many others. As always, far more things I want to learn than I could possibly have time for!

While there is some great content around SharePoint 2010, I will probably not focus on that since I got a lot of good SharePoint information at SPC09 a few weeks back.

I am hoping do more blogging from PDC than I did at SPC – not hard since I did not blog at all from SPC! Damn twittier took all of my time!

SharePoint Conference 09 Wrapup

It had been my intention to write daily blog posts from SPC09, but honestly there was just too much going, and I was tweeting all day anyway. I thought I would, however, post a summary of the things I saw and learned at the conference (well, the SharePoint things, not the “people acting silly” things 🙂 ). It was a great conference, well organized, and with lots of information – too much information actually, so much that I could not see all the sessions I wanted to and will have to wait for the videos to be posted.

There is a lot of new stuff coming in SharePoint 2010, and a lot of improvements to existing features. Before I get into my thoughts on the conference and SharePoint 2010 in general, I would like to recommend looking at this post. Tony Byrne makes some good points. For me, it can all be condensed down into one statement: No matter what the hype, no matter what fancy new features are there, always, ALWAYS, keep business needs front of mind – upgrade when there is a clear business reason, and not before. All of the features in the world will not help you if you do not know what you are building and why.

So, on to the good stuff! There are many things I saw at the conference which really make me excited about SharePoint 2010. The things that caught my interest can be broken down into the following groups:

  • General SharePoint features
  • Service Architecture
  • Office services
  • Development support and tools

General Features

I am not going to dwell too much on the general SharePoint features, as I am sure there will be lots of articles covering them. Obviously there are considerable user interface enhancements (though the design experts out there will no doubt crap on the overall UI). The ribbon interface is pretty impressive for things like editing pages, working with lists, and similar activities. I am not sure how well it applies in a more generic “web” world, and how it can be made to be non-intrusive in a highly customized deployment.

It is also nice to see a considerable amount of AJAX-like behaviour in the UI, thus greatly reducing the number of post backs and screen refreshes. This includes the new dialog framework – many of the actions which previously sent the user to a second page to collect information, and back again when the action was completed, are now done through layered dialogs (which are also customizable for consistency with your desired look and feel).

There have also been significant improvements to the capacity and scalability of SharePoint lists and document libraries.

Finally, it is nice to see SharePoint moving towards compliance with standards such as WCAG, XHTML, and CMIS.

Services Application Architecture

A major change in SharePoint 2010 is architectural – the introduction of the  Service Application Architecture. This is a replacement for the Shared Service Providers (SSPs) in SharePoint 2007. SSPs hosted such things as the User Profile Service, Search Services, and BDC Services. There were a number of deployment, scaling and manageability issues with SSPS, however.

Service Applications are a far more flexible approach. A Service Application can consist of a package of assemblies, databases, and other components which are deployed to a SharePoint App Server. The service is exposed via a proxy deployed to the WFE. This proxy knows how to talk to a custom WCF service on the App Server. The client (for example a Web Part) talk calls the proxy in order to consume the Service Application, without having to know where the Application Service is deployed – on the same farm or even another farm. The architecture also has built in round-robin load balancing.

Office Services

Among the services deployed in SharePoint 2010 are various office services:

  • Improved Excel Services
  • Improved InfoPath Forms Services
  • Visio Services
  • Access Services

I know there are some great improvements in Excel and Excel Services from the keynote. Excel rendering is improved, as in the interaction experience. Additionally, Excel Services now exposes REST interfaces, making it easier to consume server-based calculations and charts from other pages or web applications.

Something that specifically caught my interest is PowerPivot – which allows Excel to work with huge datasets in an effective way (the keynote showed it working with 100+ million rows – but that of course was a demo). I did not get a chance to go to the PowerPoint sessions, but will definitely have a look at the recordings when they are available. In the meantime, have a look here.

Something new which has been added in SharePoint 2010 are Visio Services allowing for the rendering of Visio diagrams in the browser, with interactivity and data binding. The Visio diagrams are rendered in a SharePoint web part using Silverlight technology. I already have a few ideas for how this could be applied to projects on which I am working.

Also added are SharePoint Access Services. This allows the publication of Access Solutions to a SharePoint where they can be centrally managed, and provides multiuser access and distribution difficult to achieve with an Access desktop solution.

There are a lot of improvements for developers in SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  So much so that I am going to do a completely separate post to cover them. To summarize:

  • Many new and improved templates in VS 2010
  • Visual designers in VS2010
  • Support for Features and Packaging in VS2010
  • Improved APIs (way too much to get into here)
  • Developer Dashboard view
  • Development support on 64-bit Vista/Windows 7
  • Improved tools in SharePoint Designer

I will be posting another write up later today specifically focused on the development improvements.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog has a post summarizing these and many other features I have not gotten into here.

Using Twitter at a conference

I am finding an interesting use for Twitter at a conference. Normally I would be taking notes during the sessions. Instead, I am just tweeting the interesting points. Then, back in my room, I can pull up all my tweets for the day, and POOF – there are my notes for the day.

I think I may write a OneNote add-in to import my tweets to save them as my notes 🙂

Kindle 2 not coming to Canada? Who Cares?

 

Kindle 2 not coming to Canada | Quill & Quire

So, Kindle 2 is coming to 100 countries worldwide, and Canada is not one of them. Certainly not surprising. From the quote in the above post, it would seem that most of the issues preventing Kindle form coming to Canada involve digital publishing rights and negotiations with wireless carriers (isn’t that what held up the iPhone from coming to Canada for a long time?).

For me, it is really a non-issue. I cannot imagine spending that much money (it will probably be $500 in Canada, even with the favourable exchange rate) on yet another single-purpose tool.

I read eBooks on my slate Tablet PC. Google Reader and other tools in full screen mode provide a great reading experience. I can also use tools like PDF Annotator to mark up, red line and highlight  to my heart’s content. I can take pieces of text and print them to OneNote to consolidate research on a subject. Then on top of that, I have an actual PC so I can do all of the PC things I want to do.

Why on earth would I want to downgrade to a Kindle?

UPDATE:

Also reading this article on CNN. I notice the statement:

Apple is working on a tablet computer that is expected to launch in the coming months and which includes all the functionality of an e-reader.

Either the author did not do any homework, or is purposely biased (as most of the tech media is) towards the uber-coolness that is Apple (note extreme sarcasm here). Microsoft has had Tablet PCs for 7 years which also includes all of the functionality of an e-reader (I know, since I have been using it for that purpose for most of those 7 years).

It must be nice to be like Apple and Google, and have the so-called press do much of your marketing for you.

Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really?

I hate to point this out, but contrary to what the Apple fanboys would have you believe, Microsoft beat Apple to the Tablet 7 years ago lol – they just f***ed up the marketing (as always).

As always, Apple loses the time-to-market battle, but will no doubt win the fanboy opinion battle. A few months a from now, the notoriously anti-Microsoft media will be proclaiming how brilliant Apple is for “inventing” the Tablet. 

Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really? « Sharing the truth one thread at a time

Does anyone else hate video on news sites?

This is something that really bugs me – when I am looking around on news sites (CNN, Canoe, whatever) and I click on a headline to see what is behind it. Then I get a video – generally with little to no textual summary. While video is a wonderful medium, a lot of the time I have no interest in watching a video. I can find out what I want to know in an article by scanning the text in 10-20 seconds. On the other hand, if there is video I generally have to sit through 20-30 seconds of advertising, and then 2-3 minutes of content to find out the little bit of information I want.

So please, news sites, stop wasting my time!

What’s Wrong with SharePoint?

So, I am watching Twitter updates go by (as I always do, even on a Saturday night), including my search that shows me all the tweets with “sharepoint” in them. As anyone knows who watches any amount of SharePoint commentary go by, there is a fairly constant flow of comments of the “SharePoint sucks” variety.

So this evening this led me to ask the question “What is wrong with SharePoint?” No, I do not mean I want a list of every nit picking, annoying little defect – every platform has defects and annoyances. I also do not want to know why SharePoint is note good for everything – no platform is good for everything. I also do not give a crap if your opinion is “it comes from Microsoft therefore it MUST suck” – it that is as deep as your analysis can go, well, you’re a moron.

What I want to see from SOMEONE is an intelligent, well thought out description of why SharePoint sucks. Why is it a bad choice for anything? Why should you perform an exorcism on all servers running any version of SharePoint?

I did a web search (notice I did not say “google” – contrary to popular usage, google is not a verb) for “what is wrong with SharePoint?” The only relevant results I found on either Google or Bing were written in 2005 or before, and hence are not particularly relevant at this point. For example, the post Five Things Wrong with SharePoint from back in 2005 tries to talk about what is actually wrong  with SharePoint. Even though I disagree with a lot of what it says, I will not refute it since it is so old.

So – if SharePoint is so bad…if all the otherwise intelligent people implementing solutions over SharePoint are wrong – where the heck are the statements as to what is wrong with it. So tell me – WHAT IS WRONG WITH SHAREPOINT? I really want to know, and to share it with others.