Patrick Verbruggen's Blog

Smartphones are everywhere. Go to any major city in the UK or the US, and everywhere you’ll see businesspeople on the bus, train and subway reading and responding to email, browsing, twittering, blogging  and IM-ing on their Blackberrys, iPhones or Windows Mobile phones.

Not here in Belgium, though.

Smartphones are real communication hubs and true timesavers, well worth their high price with a data connection, but they are just extremely expensive telephones without one. Mobile operators in Belgium seem to be totally clueless about this. In the US and the UK, you can just get an internet connection option for your 3G phone for a reasonable price. In Belgium, you have to hunt for a needle in a haystack to get one that won’t break the bank.

As an example, let’s say that you have a Mobistar mobile phone contract, and that under the christmas tree this year you’ve found a real nice Smartphone. The brand and type doesn’t matter. It’s got everything: high speed 3G capabilities, email, calendar, tasklist, synchronisation with your office Exchange server, webbrowser, instant messaging, twitter client, RSS reader, VPN, coffee dispenser, etc..

And then you find out that there’s no way to use all of those things unless you’re within reach of your WiFi connection at home or the office (which is exactly the place where you don’t need all that because you have other alternatives there. It’s a mobile phone, remember?). Mobile operators here in Belgium do not seem to understand that there is a need for an internet connection on a Smartphone that’s affordable.

There are several solutions if you want to connect your PC to the internet over the mobile phone network, but doing so with a Smartphone seems to be a concept that is totally beyond the intellectual grasp of our national mobile phone operators.

Do the exercise yourself: go to Mobistar’s website and try finding a 3G internet connection product for a smartphone (NOT for a PC, but for a smartphone, any smartphone!)  that you can add to you existing mobile contract and that won’t cost you an arm and a half a leg each month. I’ve haven’t done the research, but I’m pretty sure that the same is true for Proximus and Base. (I’m seeing prices like 30€ for 500MB, 5€ per hour, etc. All of these prices are completely ridiculous). 

Mobistar does have such a product, mind you, but instead of advertising it on their homepage in big red flashing letters, it’s buried deep on the Mobistar iPhone website, and Mobistar customer service personnel thinks that you can only use that product if you also have an iPhone. They don’t even understand that you can use it with any 3G-compatible smartphone, as I regretfully found out after about 20 phonecalls to them about 2 months ago when I was looking into this. They kept insisting that there was no way I could use that type of connection unless I had an Apple iPhone (which is complete nonsense of course: I had it activated on my contract anyway, and I’ve been using it ever since with a Windows Mobile device)

And then the limitations: first off you have to have a business contract already. If you’re a private person on a non-business contract, you’re out of luck. You can tranfer 1 (yes: one!) measly gigabytes per month for the sum of 25€.

I mean really, guys! This is a market, believe me! Create a cheap (< 25€/month) 3G internet connection product with decent limits (let’s say 5GB/month) that anyone with a mobile phone contract can just add as an option. You will sell TONS of them. Just about any business person with a Smartphone will buy it instantly, as will all self-respecting geeks, gadget lovers and technology-freaks.

After all: anyone who’s got 500€ to spend on a phone also has 25€/month to make it work the way it’s supposed to.

And maybe then we’ll start seeing people emailing, twittering and IM-ing from the subways, trams, streets and cafés of Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Liege too.

This time of year, everyone seems to be making all kinds of lists looking back over the year that has gone by, so I can’t stay behind.

Here is my personal “List of internet/software/computer-related things and trends that caught my eye in 2008″. And no: I won’t venture into predictions for 2009. I’ll gladly leave that to the more foolhardy among us.

• Cloud computing. Computing resources are becoming like tap water: if you need more, you just turn open the faucet, and you pay what you consume. Amazon layed the groundwork, Google and Microsoft are hot on their heels.
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are really starting to pop up everywhere. It’ll be great to see how Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight will battle it out in 2009, and what that will mean for internet applications. And it just now dawned on me: AIR is RIA spelled backward. Coincidence? 
• The meteoric rise of social computing and user-generated content. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, and many others like them are now part of the daily life of millions of people all over the globe. They’re sharing experiences, interests, joys, actions, sentiment, and state of mind.
• The exponential down-spiral of storage space cost continues to amaze me. I saw a 1TB harddisk on sale today for 99,99€. Even SSD’s – while still about eight to ten times as expensive as regular hard drives – are becoming more affordable by the day.
• At Spikes, we’ve discovered this year that Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server is a real solution development platform. While it still needs serious work to better support developers, it’s amazing to see what can be achieved on MOSS with out-of-the-box functionality, a clear vision,  clever developers, and some old-fashioned domain-specific business knowledge.
• Smartphones are everywhere, except in Belgium. We’re limping waaaaaay behind here compared to other countries. I’ve been to the US and the UK this year, and each time I saw that just about every businessperson is either using a Blackberry, an iPhone, or a Windows Mobile-based smartphone. Not here in Belgium though, where our mobile  operators just don’t seem to understand that this is a market, and they continue to charge truly exorbitant amounts of money to transfer data over the air. (More on that subject later, in a separate post)
• The uptake of Service Oriented Architectures has been slower than probably everyone had expected. There’s lots and lots of talk about it, but there’s very little true understanding about the why and how, and even less action. The financial crisis probably won’t help it along either: paradigm shifts are not your concern when you’re struggling to keep your datacenter operational on a budget. We have to start finding gradual and incremental approaches to the implementation of new software concepts. The era of big bangs is over.
• The advent of model-driven development to dramatically increase developer productivity. We’re not there yet, but there’s real promise. 
• The success of netbook PCs. There have been efforts before, but the time just wasn’t ripe: there just wasn’t the combination of sufficient power, low price, small form-factor, and ubiquitous networking to make it a success. It is now, and it makes netbooks ideal travel companions.
• The rise of on-line storage, backup and synchronisations options. This actually is connected to the previous item: if you’re going to have separate PCs at home, at the office and on the road, you’d better have easy ways of transporting and synchronising your data between them. 
• While the overall number of spam messages still continues to grow, spam filters have really come of age, weeding out the majority of spam messages and letting the good ones through. One year ago, I still had to weed out a lot of spam by hand. I don’t any more. Spam filters don’t catch 100%, and there will always be spam and false positives, but on the whole, I’m not bothered about it any more. 
• On a slightly lighter and funnier note: the alleged death of Steve Jobs. Luckily, it proved to be just a rumour caused by someone who pushed the Publish button a bit to eagerly, but stuff like that really demonstrates that on the internet, you’re playing with live ammo. Publish something on the internet for just a few seconds, and there’s no turning back: it will be picked up and stored somewhere. 

…there was a revolution going on. Apparently there was this thing called “internet”. In the meantime, you’ve probably heard of it. If not, check this out.

A very merry Christmas to all.

In these days of plenty, don’t forget those who are less fortunate than you, and make a generous donation to your favorite charity. This is mine: Artsen Zonder Grenzen / Doctors Without Borders

For those of you running SQL Server 2005: get Service Pack 3 here.

I tried to install the new versions of some of the Windows Live stuff on my work laptop today. That didn’t work out so well: the result was a failure. And not just any old regular failure, mind you, but a catastrophic one!

At Spikes, one of our specialisation areas is creating and delivering solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, aka MOSS.  To keep updated on what’s happening with MOSS, I’m subscribed to several tags on Delicious. Subscribing to a tag puts an item in your feed everytime someone uses that thag when saving a link. It’s a really great way of discovering things that others find worth keeping.

MOSS is – obviously – one of the tags I’m subscribed to.

But occasionally, you don’t get what you expect, so it probably won’t suprise you that I’ve become really well versed in the life and times of this girl…

Most of Microsoft’s Windows Live applications have been taken out of Beta and into the real word. Get them here.

Best feature (if I really must pick one from the many…) is: you can now log on with Messenger on multiple machines simultaneously. No more “You have been signed out of Messenger because you signed in from another lcoation”. You do have to update all your machines to make that work, though.

Apple-ers among us may be pleased to find out that one of the improvements that were made to OSX 10.5.6, made available today via Software Update, is: “Improved performance and reliability of Chess”.

I’ve always found Chess to be one of the weakest points of OSX 10.5, so I’m over the moon that there’s finally an update which – from the sound of it - should take away all concerns.

Google has taken it’s Google Chrome web browser out of Beta and released version 1.0 (actually, mine says that it’s version 1.0.154.36). That’s less than 4 months after releasing the first beta to the - at the time more or less unsuspecting – general public.

That’s in very sharp contrast to Google’s Gmail, which was released more than four and a half years ago (April 1st, 2004, actually) and which still carries the Beta logo (same goes for Google Calendar and Google Docs by the way, and probably a few others).

I must confess I like Chrome. It’s simple, no-clutter, straightforward browsing. It doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles nobody needs anyway, it’s fast, I like the integrated search mechanism, I like the way the tabs work (the ability to “peel off” tabs is really great). I’m using the Application Shortcut feature a lot. Another great thing is that – because tabs run in separate processes – if one tab crashes, it doesn’t take all of your other tabs with it to the great bitbucket in the sky (and it certainly doesn’t crash the entire Windows Explorer process, like IE sometimes still does).

And yes: it does SilverLight.

Be that as it may, unfortunately I still need to use a couple of websites that only support IE on a daily basis (when oh when is Outlook Web Access going to recognize the fact that the world does not end with IE?). If there was a plugin like IETab for FireFox available for Chrome, I would finally give in and switch default browsers (which would be a first for me: I’m an IE die-hard…). Also, I use a Mac at home, and there’s still no Chrome for the Mac (although it’s rumoured to come RSN)

Internet Explorer 8 has a new major competitor with Chrome (that is if  Microsoft ever decides to release IE8. Why does this take soooo long, guys? It seems that even Windows has shorter beta cycles…)

Almost without exception, devices we use in our homes these days either don’t have an on/off switch at all, or only have a “soft” switch that sits behind the power supply, meaning that the power supply stays connected to the mains continuously. Even worse: many have only a standby switch that just puts the device in a so-called low power state. Whatever “low power” means is highly dependant upon the device in question. The only way that such devices that can only be turned off completely is by physically unplugging them from the wall socket.

“Hard” switches, that really cut power to the entire device, including internal or external power supplies, are becoming extremely rare.  

I’ve done a quick list from memory of the number of devices in my home that have no hard switch. Here’s a list:

• Flatscreen TVs (I’ve got 2 of them, one big, one small). Standby switch only.
• Telenet HD Digicorder (or regular Digicorder or Digibox) One of the worst culprits of all. Standby switch only, and it’s anybody’s guess if that switch actually does anything at all, because the fan and hard disk keep running 24×7 even when it’s on standby. And if you have this one, you need the next one as well.
• Telenet cable modem. Yup, same company as the previous one. No switch at all.
• D-Link netwerk switch has no switch at all. No pun intended.
• Logitech remote control charger. No switch. Has a big white LED that is lighted all the time, as if I was dumb enough to actually forget where it was.
• XBox 360. Soft switch only, and has a huge external power supply (and I mean really massive. It’s about half as big as the Xbox itself) on which an LED is on all the time and which always feels very slightly warmer than room temperature, even if the Xbox itself has been off for days.
• Bose SoundDock (got 2 of them) No switch of any kind. I’m guessing that would probably ruin its’ design. However: I must confess that because of it, I don’t need separate CD players, amplifiers, etc. which would probably have soft switches too… 
• Mobile phone charger. No switch. Go figure.
• Apple iMac. Soft switch only, which is hidden on the back so you have to feel around to find it, and it’s clearly not intended to be used a lot. And I must confess that I don’t: it’s much easier and faster to put the iMac to sleep.
• Desktop PC. Same story as the iMac. This one does have a “hard” switch though, but it’s hidden on the back between the cables under my desk.
• Laptop PC. Soft switch only. I usually just put it to sleep.
• PC monitor. Soft switch only, I don’t use it as it goes to standby when I put the the desktop PC to sleep.
• Printer. Soft switch only, which is hidden under a cover, so I never use it.
• External USB harddisk. Soft switch only. Goes to standby when the iMac goes to sleep.
• D-Link DNS-323 NAS. (See here) Has a soft switch, but using it takes about a minute to power down the device, and starting it up again takes 2 minutes, so I don’t use it. It remains on all the time, but it does put the harddisks to sleep after 30 minutes though. Fan is on all the time.
• PC speaker set. No switch. I so love that constant 50Hz hum in the background.
• Tootbrush charger. No switch.
• Combi-oven. Soft switch only. About 22 of them actually. I’ve only ever used about 2 of them.
• Washing machine. Soft switch only, probably for those times I need to urgently wash something.
• Clothes dryer. Soft switch only. If need to wash something urgently, I better be able to dry it without wasting a second.
• Cooking plates. Touch sensitive soft switch only. They don’t work with greasy fingers, by the way. How’s that for saving energy?
• Cooker hood. Soft switch only. Only Zanussi knows why.
• LED-based mood lights in the floor sides in the living room. No switch, they’re on 24×7. I’m a sucker for mood lighting.

I’m not counting things like electric clocks, freezers, alarm systems, thermostats, central heating, etc, which clearly need to be powered on all the time to be of any use, and I’m probably forgetting a few, but you get my drift. A quick count shows that at any one time I have something between 25 and 30 power supplies constantly connected to the mains, and around 10 devices that are in some form of standby state.

And as you probably know, even the most efficient power supply still draws a little bit of current when it’s plugged in.

For devices that have a significant startup time, like PCs etc, I can accept a small cost for the convenience of having it available for use in a couple of seconds. But I really don’t need to be able to charge my toothbrush or mobile phone instantly, I can live with that fact that my Xbox takes a minute or two to power up (it does anyway), and I certainly don’t need my washing machine or combi-oven to respond on the second I touch the buttons.

The problem I’m having with this is that some of these devices could actually have a hard switch and still remain completely functional, but they are actually designed not to have one. No one really knows why. I have no idea whatsoever what this costs me on a yearly basis. It won’t probably be that much, but what I do know is that it’s purely wasted money. You may think Im’ nitpicking (I can already hear you say: “just unplug the damned things”. That’s not always an option, as plugs are sometimes hidden behind closets or buried under desks), and I don’t want to suddenly become all “green” (there are many areas where I could conserve much more energy than with this),  but it’s just energy waste that could be avoided sooo easily, yet we seem to take it for granted.

As I’ve said before, when designing for WF 4.0, Microsoft really looked at common use cases and enabled a number of scenarios that were hard or next to impossible to achieve with the current version.

Take a look this description of the new runtime model, or the way asynchrony and persistence work in WF 4.0

This is probably the gazillionth time you read this, but hey: I’ve had a busy day, so forgive me for coming a bit late to the show! Anyway: you can grab a copy of BizTalk Server 2009 (aka “The Server Formerly Known As Biztalk Server 2006 R3″) beta on the Microsoft Connect site.

I’ve had my Gmail account almost since Google made the product available on April 1st, 2004 (no, that’s not a joke…). One thing I’ve always appreciated about Gmail is the quality of their spam filter and the way they handle spam: I can count the number of false positives or false negatives per month on the fingers of one hand, even though all mail I receive on all of my other email accounts is either forwarded to Gmail, or pulled in by it.

Because Gmail has a complete copy of my incoming email traffic, spam and all, and beacuse they keep spam messages around for 30 days and then delete the ones that are older than that every night, the number of spams messages that sit in your spam folder in Gmail at any given time can serve as a good general indicator of the levels of spam you receive.

There used to be times – 2 to 3 years ago - when my spam counter over the last 30 days was constantly at around 3,000 messages/month, sometimes with peaks of up to 5,000 messages. That started to drop at a more or less constant rate about 2 years ago, and has now gone down to around 600 messages/month. That’s a fifth or less of what it used to be. If this trend continues, I’ll be spam-free in about a year (Yes, I know there’s something wrong with that statistic…)

Anyway: that’s a positive trend, and I sure hope it’ll continue.

I’m more of a Canon guy myself, but Nikon sure has a funny ad…