The iPhone design flaw

Hi Apple,

When I first got my iPhone it truly was a thing of joy. New apps were being created and continued to blew away my expectations of what a phone can do.

Not anymore, I have not found anything worth downloading or buying in the last month. I've browsing through the paid apps section now and filtering anything above $10. Still nothing that I'd consider truly must-have.

I will not buy anything above $10 for a platform that I’m considering to abandon in the next cycle.

I gave up a bit.
I cleaned out my iPhone apps list, call it a defrag, if you will - it is now down to only 20. At its height I had well over 7-8 pages full of apps.

I don't know what it is that you are doing - but perhaps it's also what you are NOT doing.

Whatever it is, I call it a design flaw.

Please bring back the developers and the great apps.  Otherwise you will lose your users - me.  There are plenty of other mobile vendors that are eyeing your market and they will happily take your developers from you.

I remember the days when I was using a Mac and we had no software.  I don’t know if you had forgotten those dark days.

SharePoint 2010 – sneak peek

Microsoft has begin to move and has blasted off with the SharePoint 2010 sneak peek website – I can’t help but think the timing was strategic – right after the NZ SharePoint conference, before the US SharePoint conference coming up in October.  If this had go up one week before the NZ SharePoint conference – there would have been many speakers ambushed with questions they might not know how to answer.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/

Anyway, the areas I’ll be paying extreme close attention to are:

Overview:

• Love the ribbon!
• Love the cross browser support!
• Love the AJAX – though the video looks like there were still full screen refreshes
• Curious about Visio services
• Curious about Business Connectivity Services
• Like the SharePoint designer – wish they allow more admin control to turn off features so that it can be more accepted in the enterprise.

Admin:

• Like new central admin
• Love SharePoint best practice analyzer!
• Love usage reporting and logging!
• Love the unattached content database recovery!

Developer:

• Curious about VS.NET 2010 integration – I hope it’s heaps better than VSeWSS 1.3
• Love LINQ for SharePoint!
• Curious about Developer Dashboard
• Love client object model!

Anyway, lots of love for now – no hate yet.

Google hates Bing and is evil? Surely not!

So Microsoft has an outage in their data centre for Bing travel.  I’ve heard great amazing stories over the grapevine about this one, but anyway…
Bad Microsoft – slap on the wrist – don’t put your eggs in the same basket!

Google caches it (on 4 July) – and displays it in their search for bing – long after the Bing servers are up and operational again (it is now 10 July).

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=bing&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
(Google result for Bing – currently)

http://www.bing.com/travel/
(Bing travel is running fine now!  And has been – for the last 5 days!)

Makes you wonder if GMail (their own internal product), or CNN (a major external website), or even Microsoft.com (MS itself!) had an error whether Google search would continue to show the cached error page for 6 days.

I guess bing.com (their competitor) gets special cache rules.

SharePoint – Blank IIS manager, events 6398, 6482, 7076

Working on a client’s SharePoint site – I wanted to pop into the IIS configuration screen:

Now when your IIS manager shows you a blank page – you know something’s up.
Event log shows a horrible series of errors repeating event IDs:
6398: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob (ID <guid>) threw an exception. More information is included below.
Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

7076: An exception occurred while executing the Application Server Administration job.
Message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

6482: Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.ExcelServerSharedWebServiceInstance (7d2d13a5-e9ca-4b92-972c-8e3bdfcaced4).
Reason: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Fortunately, many people have blogged about this issue – if you bing it you’ll see many references pointing to the same MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;946517

This is scheduled to be included in the next service pack – affects both Windows Server 2003 sp2 and 2008 sp2.  In our case we needed to request the hotfix and install it right away.

Facebook – tattoo ad and privacy?

So I was looking at my wife Lina using her Facebook and saw this ad on the right:

I exclaimed oh wow – Facebook told the advertiser what her husband’s name is.  Look it says John.  I started to wonder what are the privacy implications of that, and whether there are privacy controls for this…

So I flipped back to my Facebook account, and started refreshing the page to look for the same ad.

She exclaimed oh wow – who is Jen?

I am in so much trouble because of Facebook :-(

So it was all a false alarm – it looks like the ad only knows your gender, and displays John or Jen accordingly.