Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2012

  • Open Mouth, Change Feet…

    For a moment there, I thought that Microsoft were improving. After a bad start in the process for rolling out updates for Windows Phone, they began communicating more transparently about the updates, and began rolling them out in a more timely manner. They even had Eric Hautala, General Manager, Customer Experience Engineering, posting weekly on the Windows Phone Blog about updates and their availability.

    Alas, all those improvements would appear to have come to a screaming halt. Yesterday, Hautala posted about a new Windows Phone update – 8107 – but also stated that it would only be available to those Carriers who requested it. Cue instant uproar from Windows Phone users who fought for improvements in the update process in the first place because Carriers were delaying the release of updates. And then to rub salt into the wounds, Hautala also wrote that Microsoft won’t be individually detailing country, model, and carrier details on the Where’s My Phone Update? site any longer.

    So much for a more transparent process.

    And what is in this update – 8107 – that carriers can elect to request, or not? Well, according to Microsoft it seems to have some pretty important bug fixes:

      • On-screen keyboard. Fixes an issue to prevent the keyboard from disappearing during typing.
      • Email. Fixes a Google mail syncing issue.
      • Location. Fixes a location access issue. With this fix, the Me feature in the People Hub sends anonymous information about nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers to Microsoft only if you agree to allow the Check In function to access and use location information.
      • Security. Revokes digital certificates from DigiCert Sdn Bhd to address an encryption issue.
      • Email threads. Fixes an email issue related to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. With this fix, when you reply to or forward a message, the original message is now included in your response.
      • Voicemail. Fixes a voicemail notification display issue that occurs on some European and Asian networks under certain conditions.

    With the exception of the last bug fix, none of these are carrier-dependent, so why on earth is Hautala saying that we will only get these fixes if our carrier requests them? Frankly, I find this a staggering misstep by Microsoft. How to destroy customer trust overnight… I really am scratching my head trying to work out how an organisation that sets up a function called “Customer Experience Engineering” can do any worse.

  • Storage in Windows 8

    The team at Microsoft responsible for building Windows 8 (the next version of Windows) have been documenting the detail of its design in a series of blog posts over at, naturally enough, Building Windows 8.

    I’ve been following this blog with great interest, because it gives a very detailed insight into the design, and why particular design choices have been made. It has certainly kindled my interest into wanting to take a closer look at Windows 8 (starting with the beta, to be released next month).

    Yesterday, for example, Rajeev Nagar published a detailed post on the design of storage for Windows 8. Windows 8 will introduce a capability called Storage Spaces. Interestingly, Nagar begins his post by setting the context, and referring to the now-defunct Drive Extender technology that was part of Windows Home Server v1, but which was removed in Windows Home Server 2011:

    …some of us have used (or are still using), the Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology which was deprecated. Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution, but it does deliver on many of its core requirements. It is also a fundamental enhancement to the Windows storage platform, which starts with NTFS. Storage Spaces delivers on diverse requirements that can span deployments ranging from a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacenter.

    Well, already, I’m interested. I thought that Drive Extender was a unique selling point for WHS v1, and bemoaned its removal in WHS 2011. I never wanted to take on the task of managing a RAID configuration in my home server. I have always agreed with Charlie Kindel that RAID is not a consumer technology.

    So now, with Windows 8, it appears as though we might get the second generation of Drive Extender, substantially improved. I should no longer have to even consider RAID as a means to implement a storage pool; in fact, in the blog post, Microsoft explicitly advise not to use RAID in conjunction with Storage Spaces:

    We don’t recommend it. Storage Spaces were designed to work with off-the-shelf commodity disks. This feature delivers easy-to-use resiliency to disk failures, and optimizes concurrent usage of all available disks within the pool. Using a RAID enclosure with Storage Spaces adds complexity and a performance penalty that does not provide any improvement in reliability.

    That’s good news, as far as I’m concerned.

    Looking down the road, then, what are the implications for Windows Home Server 2011? Well, it seems to me that Windows 8 will introduce a storage capability that exceeds what WHS v1 had, and that WHS 2011 will never have. So then the question is, what happens about the other shoe? That is, WHS (both versions) have an excellent backup facility for client PCs. The backups are efficient and allow rolling back a PC to previous points in time with ease.

    If Microsoft introduce this capability, even as an Add-on in the Windows 8 Store, then I have to ask: what is the point of WHS 2011? It would seem to me to be eclipsed by the potential capabilities of Windows 8.

    I seriously doubt that we will see a separate successor product to WHS 2011. Its capabilities (and more) can be fulfilled by Windows 8, with the possible addition of Store Add-ons for extensions to the base capabilities of Windows 8.

  • My Nokia Lumia 800

    It’s now been almost two weeks since I got my new Windows Phone – a Nokia Lumia 800. How has it been so far?

    I think I’m still very much in the Honeymoon period. The hardware (Nokia) and the software (Microsoft) of the device continue to delight.

    The design of the Nokia Lumia 800 looks good and feels right to me; it whispers I’m a quality piece of consumer electronics and when I heft it in my hand it feels solid and dependable. Yes, I know that these are very subjective things, but, to me, it seems that the Nokia designers have done a good job with this particular product.

    And, heavens, I think that the Microsoft software designers have done a good job with Windows Phone 7.5. I know that I spend a lot of my time pointing out flaws in Microsoft software (Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Windows Home Server 2011, I’m looking at you), but the Windows Phone operating system is pretty damn good, particularly for what is essentially a brand-new operating system, when compared with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android – both dating from 2007. The user interface (Metro) feels fast and fluid, even on what is fairly basic hardware. Android lovers seem to turn up their noses at the hardware in typical Windows Phones, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft’s OS seems to be doing a better, and more efficient, job at exploiting the hardware. Then there are features such as the live Tiles on the Start screen, and these seem to me to be a clear step forward over Apple’s iOS and Android’s static icons.

    Of course, all is not perfect. The performance of the camera in the Nokia, despite the 8 megapixels and the Carl Zeiss lens, strikes me as being lacklustre. Nokia have acknowledged the issue, and say that a software upgrade will be forthcoming this month. The same goes for a battery life issue – some owners are struggling to get through a full day on one charge. Nokia say that there will be a software update this month to address the issue.

    But, on the whole, I remain very satisfied that I made the switch from a Nokia dumbphone to a Nokia smartphone running Windows Phone.

    I’ve been struck, when reading blogs and newspaper articles by others on their experience with the Nokia Lumia 800, by the fact that not everyone is as positive as I am. It seems to me that some of the negativity comes from the fact that this is not a Nokia Symbian or Apple or Android phone. If you’ve been running your life and social interactions through your smartphone, then the change from the Symbian environment (or an iOS or Android environment) to Windows Phone is more than just a culture shock to some people. It’s apostasy, and deserves death – preferably for Stephen Elop, for singlehandedly destroying Nokia. I’ve been dipping in to the discussions on the Nokia forums, and some of the vitriol from Symbian users is quite staggering, but, given that we are all human (I think), not surprising.

    Perhaps I’m fortunate in that, having come from a dumbphone, I have no previous smartphone religion to deal with. All I know is that I like what I see, and thus far, it seems to be an environment that I can comfortably live with.

  • Grumpy Old Man

    Yes, I freely confess that I’ve become a Grumpy Old Man. The latest thing to trigger a stream of grumpiness from me is the experience I’ve just had with the many-tentacled Google…

    It all began innocently enough. I went to check what new postings there were in the Help forum for Picasa. When I arrived, it was to discover that the furniture had been rearranged, so to speak. The old forum had been replaced by a Google Product Forum. Well, that’s not so bad – the old forum capabilities were pretty limited (you could not post images or screenshots, for example), but one thing really irritated me: the display language had been changed to Dutch. Yes, I realise that I live in the Netherlands, and I do speak Dutch, but, call me old-fashioned, I just prefer my PC and web environment to use English whenever possible.

    So I then spent the next ten minutes trying to find out how to change the Dutch pages back into English. Finally, after much hunting around, and wandering through various haunted wings of the Google palace, it dawned on me that the change of the forum software was not all that Google were up to. It seems as though they want us all to move over to Google+, and change over our old Google accounts to Google+ accounts.

    Oh, mercy, not yet another bloody Facebook social networking and time-wasting gewgaw! I have thus far successfully resisted joining Facebook, and I really did not want to join Google+. However, I underestimated the sneakiness of Google (whatever happened to the “do no evil” mantra that Google were supposed to have? Seems to me that they are just like any other faceless Corporation). It turns out that I could elect to have the new forum (and other Google sites) displayed in English – but only if I signed up to Google+ and upgraded my account. Sigh, so that’s what I’ve done, I’ve drunk the Kool-aid.

    And then, to really light a fire under my grumpiness, I then received an email from Google+, that started off as follows:

    google plus 1

    Er, “Hey Geoff”? I’m sorry, but that’s Hello Mr. Coupe, to you, you insolent young whippersnappers. You already know my age – it’s in my old account – and I expect to be treated with a modicum of politeness as befits my age. And I very much doubt that “you’re glad I’m here”. I suspect the phrase has all the sincerity of “have a nice day” being uttered by some poor benighted wage slave in a fast food establishment. Also, if there’s a word that invokes in me the same pain that I feel when I hear fingernails being scraped down a blackboard, it’s that last word in the screenshot above: “cool!”.  People who use the word “cool!” (the exclamation mark is audibly present) as a term of approbation deserve to have a special Circle of Hell invented just for them.

    Oh well, I’ll just wallow in my grumpiness for a bit longer. I expect I’ll have to go and pat the dogs at some point to restore some semblance of normality.

  • Slice of Life

    I was writing a reply today to an email from old friends who had recently emigrated to Canada. In it I wrote that, having arrived here in the Netherlands 27 years ago, and in spite of having dual Dutch and British nationalities, that I nevertheless expected to die here, and not return to the UK.

    One of the reasons is that, despite my disappointment in the rise of Geert Wilders and his Christian xenophobia, there remains in Dutch society a residue of the tolerance and openness that attracted me here in the first place.

    On this New Year’s Eve, for example, the main entertainment programme on TV was presented by Paul de Leeuw, an out, and married, gay man (and who always strikes me as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”). His guests were the Dutch equivalent of the Speaker of the British House of Commons, a cocaine-using Dutch Olympic gymnast (wearing a very tight T-shirt that displayed his body and arms to their best) and twins who are the oldest working prostitutes in the Netherlands. Somehow, I can’t imagine the equivalent happening in dear old Blighty…