MobileViews Blog 1st Anniversary
Although the MobileViews.com site has been around for many years, this version of the blog just reached its first anniversary since its relaunch on July 22, 2006.

The blog had been down for many months after one of those former web hosts and broken software sob-stories. And, it took a while to decide to get back to blogging after that horrible experience.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to visit this blog more than once :-) And, a special thanks to everyone who took the time and effort to comment on a blog post. When you agree, disagree, or correct an error on my part, it is all appreciated.

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Windows Mobile Standard Edition Wireless File Transfers?
I discovered today that the little Windows Mobile videos I’ve been posting to YouTube has actually generated some questions via YouTube email over there. I created those videos to illustrate things I talk about in this blog. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. Some of the comments are interesting though. So, I’m going to try to muddle through a few this week. Here’s one from DargonPacer to start things off…

Just got my Dash a few days ago.. AWESOME device. I am able to connect to wifi and surf, but I cannot find out how to transfer files via wifi.(I want to be able to just drag and drop files on the laptop into the dash, w/o using ActiveSync)

I wouldnt mind using active sync over wifi or bluetooth so much, but I cant get either to work..followed your tutorial, didnt help. When it is connected via USB, all works well including active sync, but the only thing I can do with the wifi is surf faster.

The bluetooth pairs fine and the bluetooth software on my laptop ’sees’ the phone (and the phone ’sees’ the laptop), but active sync wont connect. Have tried using various serial ports (making sure to add correct comm) and all that..

I have the latest Active sync on my laptop and the days SAYS it has Windows Mobile 6 Standard (CE OS 5.2.1236 (Build 17741.0.2.1)) on the Dash (came with it). Any suggestions?

Couple of comments: First, IMHO Bluetooth under Windows XP or Vista is iffy at best. I, for example, was unable to use my Microsoft Bluetooth Presenter Mouse on my Dell D620 notebook after the June Patch Tuesday. I can’t diagnose your particular bluetooth problem. But, I can address your other question. Be warned, however, it doesn’t offer much help.

Microsoft removed the ability to use ActiveSync over WiFi with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5 and Active Sync 4. Older (Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Ed.) should be able to sync over WiFi using AS4 because it actually drops back to AS3.8 code when it sees pre-WM5 devices.

If you used a Pocket PC (Professional Edition) instead of a Smartphone (Standard Edition), you might have been able to use File Explorer’s Open Path function to access a shared directory on a network. But, honestly, that has been an iffy proposition too in my experience.

So, short of using a USB connection, putting the micro-SD card in a reader, or emailing a file attachment to yourself, I don’t see any other alternatives (perhaps someone who does know of one can chime in here). You might want to get a second set of eyes to look at your PC’s Bluetooth configuration to see if you can get it working with ActiveSync.

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Misc. T-Mobile Dash Questions from my YouTube Mailbag
Here’s another Windows Mobile question I found in my YouTube mailbag. This one is from dagdag32.

so on my dash…im wondering how do u change da background to oother things….like wuns dat dont come wit da phone….and how do u put new games and upgrade it to a bettel windows mobile.

First, it sounds like you would really benefit from just spending 30 minutes exploring your Dash. It is a very rich device and well worth learning more about. You’ll find yourself getting a lot more productivity and enjoyment from it by becoming more familiar with Windows Mobile in general and features specific to the Dash.

Take a look at the manual that came with the Dash. If that is not enough, browse through some of the excellent books covering Windows Mobile. I can heartily endorse my friend Frank McPherson’s excellent WM5 book: How to do Everything with Windows Mobile. It was written for WM5 devices. However, a good chunk of it still applies to WM6.

Fortunately, T-Mobile made the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the Dash available free of charge. You can find and download it from the T-Mobile USA (assuming you are in the US) website.

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T-Mobile Dash Video Recording Limits?

Today’s question from the YouTube mailbag is from mstakkrid who asks:

anyway how long is the video running time for this phone?! does anyone know?

The screen cap of the Dash’s video recording limits options screens shows you the recording limit options available. Basically, you only need to set this if you do not have a microSD storage card in the Dash. If you have a reasonably large microSD card (I see a Kingston 2GB microSD card for $22.99 with free shipping at Amazon), you can consider choosing the No Limit option I use. The 3 minute 49 second raw AVI file I posted on YouTube as a video demo (after converting it to WMV) is 12.8MB. You can get much smaller video files by using the higher compression MPEG4 format. However, you won’t be able to use low-end tools such as Microsoft’s free MovieMaker to edit those files.

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Windows Mobile View Menu Options All (or mostly all) at Once

The list of Window Mobile video size options in yesterday’s blog entry reminded of something that may not be common knowledge to Smartphone (Standard Edition) users: The Smartphone often presents single line scroll lists that let you scroll up and down in a single character high text window to select an option (say the reminder period for a calendar event). The next time you see one, try pressing the select button instead of scrolling up or down. There’s a good chance you will see the option expand to a full screen size showing you as many of the options as possible on the screen. You still need to scroll, but it lets you quickly scan and decide which of many options to choose.

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Yahoo! Go 2.0 for Windows Mobile

The earlier releases of Yahoo! Go 2 for Windows Mobile only worked on a small number of devices. However, if you visit the new…

Yahoo! Go 2.0 page for Windows Mobile devices

… you will find a huge number of supported Windows Mobile PDAs and Smartphones. I installed it on a Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (Pocket PC) and a Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. The over-the-air installation directly to the device using the direct installation site… http://us.get.go.yahoo.com

…went smoothly. The initial application startup was very slow. I suspect it is because Yahoo! Go attempts to cache as much as possible before displaying the initial screen. What they should do is cache 2 or 3 of the most used initial features (probably email, maps, and news), display the screen, then continue caching other content. The app seemed much faster than previous beta releases. However, they retain the same non-intuitive (from a Windows Mobile user point of view) GUI interface. Menus are navigated from the bottom-up instead of the top-down menus that most WM apps use. The side-scrolling menu on a Pocket PC is even more puzzling because choices are relative rather than direct: If you tap an icon 2 icons away from the center icon under focus, the menu just moves 1 icon in the direction your tap occured instead of selecting the icon you actually tapped.

The mostly text http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ web site is much faster to use and as a lot more content available. But, Yahoo! definitely deserves brownie points for making their app available in native binary form for pretty much every modern Windows Mobile devices out there.

As I mentioned in a previous note, I’ve joined Microsoft; working title “Silverlight Geek” (official title, Senior Program Manager, Silverlight Developer Division); and I’ve done so at a very exciting time (Silverlight 1.0RC and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 were released today!)

I’ll continue writing here about all things concerning my books, current and forthcoming, but for the latest on my babbling about Silverlight, please drop by my blog on Silverlight.net.

Thanks!

Ning: Build Your Own Social Network Site
Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:39:12

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GnuCash 2.2.0: First Windows Release
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:24:28

GnuCash 2.2.0. is an Open Source finance software that has been available for Linux and Mac OS X for a while now. However, this recent release (July 15) is the first production release that provides a binary version for Microsoft Windows.

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Democracy Player Changed Its Name to Miro
Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:11:14

The Open Source online video player formerly known as Democracy Player got a new name…

Miro (version 0.9.8)

I’ve had problems with the Windows version. But, the Mac OS X version worked fine the last time I tried it.

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The Open Library: Online Book Library
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:13:32

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Unlocker: Deal with Hard to Delete Files in Windows
Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:05:18

Windows does weird stuff with files. That’s not a secret, right? :-) In general, I’ve found that I can usually deal with those messages about being unable to delete files by stopping a service from Service, using Task Manager to terminate a process, or even reboot. But, if those options don’t appeal to you, this freeware utility might…

Unlocker 1.8.5

Head over to its website to see the simple process to delete stubborn files. I haven’t tried it yet. But, it looks like something useful to note here for future reference.

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Babelgum 0.9.1: On Demand TV
Sun, 15 Jul 2007 22:22:09

Babelgum touts itself as an on-demand free broadcast quality service. This sounded a lot like Joost. So, I decided to visit their site and try it out. Unfortunately, I was using a Mac at the time and Babelgum only offers a Windows client. I could have fired up Parallels and run Windows in a virtual machine. But, my interest had already waned. If you’ve tried both Babelgum and Joost, please let me know how they compare.

OSCON and Parallel Programming

I’m attending OSCON for the first time, and thoroughly enjoying it. I was briefly anonymously famous during Tim O’Reilly’s opening keynote presentation this morning, when Tim put up a slide showing the front page of ThreadingBuildingBlocks.org, a new open source project announced by Intel at OSCON. I wrote the text that introduces the benefits of Threading Building Blocks (TBB) to developers. I’ll be actively involved in that project, as community manager, blogger, and in as other ways as they come to mind…

I’m finding that there is a lot of focus on parallel programming and scalable architectures at this particular OSCON conference. I’m spending my time in the sessions that focus in that area. I attended the TBB tutorial yesterday, and right now I’m in the “Nested data parallelism in Haskell” session, given by Simon Peyton Jones of Microsoft Research.

Must listen now!

Truncated Menus on Smartphones with Landscape Screens

When the first Windows Mobile Smartphones came out way back in 2002, they all had Portrait oriented screens (screens that are taller than they are wide). That changed with Smartphones based on Windows Mobile 5 (one generation ago) when Landscape (wider than tall) and Square screens emerged. For those of us who went from a Portrait oriented phone (SDA for me) to a Landscape oriented one (Dash in my case), this meant that some of the full menus we used to see became truncated. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to scroll down to see those now hidden options. The Calendar menu, for example, only shows the first 6 items (see image above). However, if you know the number of the hidden option, you can still select it without scrolling by pushing the associated button number. Option 7 in calendar is go to today’s date. So, you can just press 7 and it will do the right thing even though you don’t see it on the screen.

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Microsoft Live Search for Mobile

Microsoft released a new version of Microsoft Live Search for Mobile. You can aim your Pocket PC, Smartphone, J2ME enabled phone, or even a Blackberry at…

wls.live.com

…to check on client compatibility. I didn’t expect to like it. But, it is actually pretty good and looks useful (i.e., it will stay on my phone). I installed it on a Dash Windows Mobile 6 smartphone. My home town isn’t covered by the traffic service. So, I selected San Francisco to see what it looks like (see screen cap below).

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My Mobiler: Control Pocket PC from the Desktop (Freeware)

My Mobiler is a Windows Mobile freeware utility for the Pocket PC (and maybe the Smartphone?). I tried it using a Windows XP desktop PC and a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC. You can see the Pocket PC’s screen displayed on my desktop in the image above. It has a unique installation that starts it up on the desktop and then automagically installs the Windows Mobile piece and starts it running. This freeware utility can copy and paste text between the desktop and the Pocket PC as well as drag and drop files (haven’t tried that yet).

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HTC Advantage 7500 Photos Look Pretty Good

I’ve been interested in cameraphone photography since the first time I tried a Nokia 3650 cameraphone way back in 2003 (The Nokia 3650 GSM/GPRS Phone with Camera, Bluetooth, and More). I also wrote a half dozen of the hacks in the cameraphone section of the book Digital Photography Hacks (2004). But, I’ve always readily admitted that cameraphone photos were nowhere near the quality of even low priced digital cameras. You just can’t compare a glass lens device to a (usually) plastic lens device. However, cameraphone photos have been steadily improving over the years and are starting to look pretty good. The T-Mobile Dash I use as my day to day phone takes decent photos in daylight conditions. I just started taking photos with an HTC Advantage 7500 (a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition with a 3 megapixel camera). So far, I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve seen so far (see a shrunken version of a photo from the camera above). I’m planning to perform more testing of the 7500’s still photo and video capabilities over the next couple of weeks and will post photos here and on other sites.

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Cameraphone Evolution: HTC Advantage Close-up Shot

Most cameraphones (at least the ones I’ve tried over the years) have limited the kinds of photos I take. Outdoor shots in bright but not too bright sunlight came out best. Indoor shots were grainy. And, close-up Macro type shots? Forget it. One of my early cameraphones (the MPx220?) had a flashlight sort of flash. But, it was essentially useless for indoor shots. I’ve heard great things about the various high-end cameraphones available outside of the US (or outside of my budget like the Nokia N95) but have not been able to test any. So, it has been very interesting to take the camera part of the HTC Advantage 7500 (Windows Mobile 5, the WM6 based 7501 is out now) through some tests.

The photo above was cropped and resized smaller to fit this blog. But, it is otherwise untouched. The original 3 megapixel photo was taken indoors. And, I used the 7500’s flash feature to light the Altoid can (I just discovered this Dark Chocolate dipped Peppermint candy last week :-) . The 7500’s autofocus feature seems to result in photos that are much much better than the usual photos I get from other cameraphones. I hope lower end cameraphones start getting these specs and features soon.

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All New MSN Mobile?
Like many of you, I received the mass email announcing the all new MSN Mobile found at…

mobile.msn.com

But, after a quick look, I can’t figure out what is new about it. And, despite all my complaints during a beta testing phase earlier this year, it still has way too much white space that forces me to scroll way too much on a smartphone. For some reason, many of the major portals have adopted the use of enormous amounts of white space in their mobile portals that forces me to scroll up and down a lot. Google went from a fast clean design to a scroll-a-lot design. Yahoo did this too for some reason. I thought their previous mobile portal was the best designed in terms of a small, fast, clean mobile UI. Is the same consulting team providing this awful advice for all of these redesigns?

For those with interest > http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2430928882

Update: Given the nature of Facebook, my guess is that this group would nicely facilitate things like announcements regarding local user group meetings, conferences, and other high level interactions that relate to dynamic languages on the .NET platform. In other words, there’s no need to duplicate what already exists (e.g. XSL-List, IPyDevList, Ruby.NET dev list, etc.), but there does seem to be a need to have a somewhat centralized place to communicate high level information at both a local, national, and international level, so this seems like a good place to do just that.

John Lam on Software: A first look at IronRuby

We’ve been working very hard over the past couple of months to get our first source code release ready. I’m happy to announce today the first drop of the IronRuby source code. IronRuby is licensed under very liberal terms as set out by the Microsoft Permissive License.

We’re also happy to announce that we will be accepting source code contributions into the IronRuby libraries. Right now we have a lot of logistical work that we still need to do, but we fully intend on getting IronRuby onto Rubyforge by the end of August.

Congratulations, John and MSFT! :D

Hi! I’m Kevin Farnham, a career software developer on Windows and non-Windows platforms (overall about 2/3 the latter, but turning more toward Windows lately). My core experience is in the area of high volume data processing and data access. I’ve worked with multiprocessor systems, and developed multithreaded applications, for a very long time.

It appears that programming has has reached a turning point — where programming for multiple processors, which hitherto has been a somewhat “arcane” endeavor, is about to become mainstream. Pick up any computer catalog you receive in your snailmail box, and you’ll see all kinds of multicore systems offered to you. Businesses tend to go with what’s current when they purchase new systems, and businesses that sell to consumers need their software to perform superbly on the new computers regular people are buying.

What this means is that: all applications need to take advantage of multicore processing chips, such as those currently offered by Intel and AMD. This means that applications have to be structured as multithreaded programs. What was once an arcane discipline now becomes critically important.

I have just started blogging over at the Intel Software Network Blogs site. I’m researching their “Threading Building Blocks” template library, which brings multithreaded programming in C++ to a new level… kind of raising it above the assembly-language-like patterns of raw threads that I and my long-time multithreaded programming compatriots are accustomed to.

I intend to post here as well, since Windows developers will likely be more significantly impacted by the shift to multicore processors than anyone else, given that most client applications (even for Unix server applications) run on Windows. I worked on the server side of Windows, leading the development of a Windows 2000 server application that successfully served tens of thousands of clients running on a 32-processor Unisys Windows box in 2003. That was a pretty powerful Windows system at the time..

Anyway, I’m happy to be blogging here, and please feel free to ask any questions you might have about Windows development using today’s new multicore systems.

Haute Secure: Browser Anti-Malware
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:24:02

Haute Secure comes in the form of an EXE installer that adds anti-malware protection to Internet Explorer (and for Firefox one of these days according to the website). I’m a little leery of installing an EXE file to, um, protect my IE browser. Maybe it would just be safer to sit on a cheap PC running Linux and Konquerer? Or maybe a Mac with the Camino browser? :-)

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Virb.com: MySpace Facebook Mutant Clone?
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:58:43

I heard Virb mentioned on the Net@Nite podcast. Not being much of a social networker, it seems like a MySpace or Facebook kind of site to me. It says you can put all the things that make you you on it. But, it only let me import one blog. Hmm. I guess I don’t get it. If you do, chime in and clue me in. You can find my uninspiring Virb page here.

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Microsoft SharedView Beta
Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:03:34

Microsoft SharedView Beta is client-side software for Microsoft Windows 32-bit clients (it does not support 64-bit Windows) that lets up to 15 people on the Internet share and update documents in real time. Reading through the FAQ indicates that it is a very early beta release with numerous features such as audio and text chat not yet available (but planned).

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Sun ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office
Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:13:18

The Sun ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF = Open Document Format). I originally planned to list it as Open Source here. But, it looks like it is closed source. Its download page does not link to its source code just a binary EXE file. I find this kind of ironic (closed source for an open format).

Microsoft has been criticized as being bloated, with too many layers of bureacracy. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has often been held up as a lean business machine. But an interesting new analysis holds that Microsoft is far more efficient than Wal-Mart.

On The Record

SLAC, which studies subatomic particles for the U.S. Energy Department, had been challenged to find ways to add computing resources quickly. “We can’t expand fast enough,” said Richard Mount, the director of scientific computing at SLAC, earlier this year in an article published by Bloomberg. Mount went on to say that Project Blackbox is “…the fastest way we can house computers.” The Project Blackbox system is anticipated to boost the SLAC computing capacity by a third.

Nice! So then what gives with the title?

SLAC’s box, painted white to stay cooler, contains about a million dollars of computing equipment.

Makes sense.

Congratulations to everyone@SunMicrosystems for delivering what can only be seen as a monumental turning point in the history of computing. Nice work! :D

TechNet Article on Windows Mobile 6 Security
If you are looking for a concise summary of Windows Mobile 6’s security features/options, take a look at this TechNet article…Improve Security with Windows Mobile 6

The problem is that some of the features requires Exchange Server and an ISA Server. Does anyone know if any of the hosted Exchange Server services offers full WM6 integration to provide features like Remote Kill?

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What’s New in IE Mobile in Windows Mobile 6?
If you target web apps for Windows Mobile 6 PDAs or smartphones, take a look at this blog entry from the IEMobile Team…

IE Mobile Standards Support

One of the sections of this detailed blog entry shows the new HTML tags, CSS support, and script/DOM support in IE for WM6.

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Digg for iPhone Incompatible with Internet Explorer

The popular Digg.com community news site introduced a special version of its site for Apple iPhone users. No big deal, right? Just another site streamlined for the small screen, right? No, there is something else going on here because the site not only is non-functional when viewed with Windows Mobile’s Mobile Internet Explorer, it is also non-functional when viewed with Internet Explorer 7 on the desktop. Clicking on the links results in… nothing. It works fine with Firefox and Safari though.

I’m guessing that Digg’s iPhone site should also work on new Nokia S60 phones using Webkit based browsers. It will be interesting to see if more sites start catering to the iPhone to the degree that they are non-functional on Windows Mobile.

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Microsoft Windows Mobile Staff Blogs Collected in a Single Feed

I’ve found nine (9) Microsoft staff related to Windows Mobile work that have blogs. Some blog almost daily (like Jason Langridge). Others, well, they are not so regular. So, it can be a bit of work to follow what each has to say and figure out what is new. It finally occurred to me that Yahoo! Pipes provides the perfect tool to not only collect these blog feeds for me but also for anyone else interested in Windows Mobile. So, I used it to create a single feed sorted by blog post date that makes it easy to see what is new in Windows Mobile. You can find it at…

Collection of Microsoft Windows Mobile Staff Blogs

Note that this feed collection itself has an RSS feed. So, you can subscribe to this single feed for your in-house Windows Mobile news.

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Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 Adds Support for Windows Mobile
If you’ve been following Windows Mobile based robotics projects like WiMo, you’ll be happy to learn that…

Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5

…(released on July 9, 2007) adds formal support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile through its .NET Compact Framework porting of runtime and other files.

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Canon PowerShot A710IS (6X Optical Zoom w/Image Stabilization)

The Canon PowerShot A710IS has been available since last fall. You can see it on the left compared to the Canon PoweShot S1 IS (current version is S5, btw). Although it only has a 6x optical zoom (with image stabilization) compared to the 10x for the S1 (and 12x for the S5), its smaller size won me over. I think it may tend to shoot a bit overexposed compared to the Panasonic Lumix TZ3 I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. But, for the most part, I am very pleased with the A710IS. And, I really like the fact that it runs on two standard AA batteries (vs. the proprietary batteries needed by the Lumix). I suspect Canon may be pushing the Canon PowerShot TX1 camera with 10x zoom and near-HD video recording. If you can find a A710IS, is will probably be heavily discounted. And, you can probably expect a new model to replace it this fall. But, if you find it at a good price, you might want to consider it.

Sample A710IS Macro photo below…

MySpace Minisode Network (Old TV Down to the Basics)
Thu, 05 Jul 2007

The MySpace Minisode Network takes a bunch of old TV shows and compresses them down to their basics. This results in start-to-finish episodes that are about 6 minutes long viewable in a web browser. The service includes about a dozen or so very familiar TV series including the geek classic Dilbert. Looks great for taking a mini-vacation from reality

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JkDefrag 3.16 Follow-up
Thu, 05 Jul 2007

I tried out JkDefrag 3.16 today and it looks pretty good so far. The only minor gotcha is that the GUI version only looks at the C: drive by default. But, that is a minor issue and can be addressed from the command line.

It is not as fast as Auslogic but seems to be more, hmm, complete in its attempt to defrag a hard drive. I also like the inclusion of a screensaver version of the application that can run during idle time.

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JkDefrag 3.16
Wed, 04 Jul 2007

I’ve never quite understood why Windows has such problems with disk file fragmentation that does not appear to be much of a problem on Linux or Mac OS X boxes. But, if you use Windows, you gotta deal with it. I’ve been using the freeware Auslogics defragger that seems to keep staying in the list of all time popular blog items. However, recently, I learned about the Open Source…

JkDefrag 3.16

And, I’m planning to give it a try sometime soon.

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FeedBurner Pro Services Became Free
Tue, 03 Jul 2007

You probably read that Google bought FeedBurner (the RSS feed service)recently. But, did you know that one of the benefits of this purchase is that FeedBurner’s formerly for-fee services FeedBurner Stats PRO and MyBrand are now FREE. Check out the FeedBurner blog entry titled…

FreeBurner for Everyone

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Microsoft Virtual Machine Remote Control Client Plus (VMRCplus)
Mon, 02 Jul 2007

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (say that 5 times fast) is managed through an Internet Explorer web interface (ActiveX is involved for some functions). However, Microsoft released a formerly in-house tool as a free unsupported utility today.

Virtual Machine Remote Control Client Plus

read more

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EasyEclipse 1.2
Sun, 01 Jul 2007

It may just be me, but I find installing or upgrading the Java JDK/JRE, Eclipse, and various plug-ins to be a gigantic chore. If you feel the say way but would still like to use Eclipse on a Mac or Windows box, check out…

EasyEclipse 1.2

It claims that: EasyEclipse packages together Eclipse, the open-source software development platform, and selected open source plugins. We select, assemble, test, patch, build installers and document a full IDE, offered as reliable distributions and plugins.

If you were one of the people who forked over extra money for Vista Ultimate because of Microsoft’s promise of soon-to-come “Ultimate Extras,” you haven’t been particularly pleased with Microsoft. The company has only delivered a handful of underwhelming “Extras” to date, and it’s not clear at all what it will deliver in the future.

Windows Mobile Remote Desktop Connection

I played around with Remote Desktop Connection on a Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC this evening. You can see a sample screenshot of it connected to a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC with remote access turned on for an account. You can see that Windows Mobile’s RDC does a credible job of showing the entire screen. But, it complains that I have too many menu items (true) to display correctly.

The right soft-key is a toggle between full-screen viewing and normal viewing with menus and navigation bars displayed. You can choose to display more colors but I left it at the default 256 colors to speed up the display.

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Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums (Web Newsgroups)

If you have a bunch of questions about Windows Mobile and I, cough cough, have not seen or responded to them because they are buried in a comment somewhere in this blog, you might want to check out the relatively new (I think)…

Microsoft Windows Mobile Owners Circle Forums

I prefer the good old client-based NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) based newsgroups (sometimes incorrectly referred to as USENET newsgroups) because they are fast to scan and respond to. But, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer a web-based newsgroup, check of Microsoft’s forums for WM users linked above. I’m popping over there now and then myself to answer a question or two.

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More Opera Mini: Why Can’t PIE Render This Well?

I played a bit more with Opera Mini Beta 4 on a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC. Of course, it took a little bit of work since Java always gets confused about the status of the network connection. I had to go into WM’s memory manager and terminate the Java midlet manager, restart it, and launch Opera to get it to work (faster than a soft reset). I headed over to this website which correctly ID-ed it as a mobile device and through me into the mobile friendly viewing mode. Fortunately, the plug-in has an option go to the full site view. I couldn’t get the spiffy feature described by Opera to provide an experience similar to the iPhone’s full page view with the option to zoom to a section of the page. However, the default view was pretty good. In fact, it is so much better and seems to render so much faster than Pocket Internet Explorer (AKA IE Mobile), you have to wonder what is going on at Microsoft that they couldn’t have solved this problem long ago.

If Java didn’t make Opera Mini so annoying to start up, I’d definitely use it more often. As it is, I need to make sure I have a couple of minutes to terminate the midlet manager and go through hoops to get it running (or a soft reset). That is not a lot of fun.

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Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Windows Mobile
Years ago when I was beta testing Office 2003, I tried out Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 and liked it a lot. Unfortunately, much of Microsoft is not in tune with Windows Mobile and there was no way to sync up BCM with a Pocket PC or Smartphone (which had just come out during beta testing). So, imagine my surprise when I read the contents of this blog post with the bone dry subject title…

First Half of Year 2007

Among other things, the post has download links for BCM for both the Pocket PC and the Smartphone… For free… And, both versions support Windows Mobile 6. Nice…

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What Do You Want in a Windows Mobile SDK FAQ?
If you have an important Windows Mobile SDK question that you think should be answered in a FAQ, head over to Microsoft’s John Kennedy’s MSDN blog and post it to his blog item titled:

Windows Mobile SDK: Questions Please!

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Video of Silverlight Running on Windows Mobile
Eric Griffin’s MSDN blog has an item linking to a…

Kool Video of Sliverlight on Windows Mobile

This is just a demo of an early port that is not available to we outsiders. But, it is interesting to see what is in the development queue.

[Note to readers: Ever the editor, I have taken the liberty of updating this blog and tightening its arguments since first posting it last weekend. — John Osborn]

If you were among those who attended one of the seven Live Earth concerts held around the world on 7/7/07, or tuned in via MSN or NBC, you were asked to commit yourself to six steps, the last of which entailed adding your name to a seven point “Live Earth pledge”, making for a total of thirteen environmentally friendly acts. Of these, according to event organizer Al Gore in a pre-show interview, the first of the Live Earth pledges is by far the most important. It reads:

“[I pledge] to demand that my country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth.”

By Sunday afternoon, July 8, when I wrote this this entry, roughly 163,000 souls worldwide had signed up, yet I’d wager that few even remotely understand what is being asked. Which pollutants are we talking about, for example, and why is a fifty percent worldwide reduction the right number? What do we mean by “in time for the next generation?” And are the seven actions on the list sufficient (the first clearly is not) or merely representative?

Answering these reasonable questions — something I could not have done a week ago — requires a quick tour of current climate science and a look at a useful tool — “stability wedges” — devised by two Princeton scientists at the Carbon Mitigation Institute. And a good place to start is with “Field Notes from a Catastrophe”, an exemplary 200-page piece of reporting and science writing by New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, which I read on two steamy New England afternoons over the July Fourth weekend.

If you supplement Field Notes with two or three of the scientific papers and essays she cites as well as the three recent working group reports of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you’ll know as much as any informed citizen can be expected to know about the science behind the Live Earth pledges, and can decide for yourself whether you wish to sign on. In the meantime, here’s a summary of what I learned.

Carbon dioxide is the primary engine of global warming

First, to the question of “pollution.” The key villain in our climate crisis –whether you believe it’s here or in the future — is carbon dioxide. That’s the gas that climate scientists and policy-makers typically single out for their greatest attention, though methane, nitrous oxide and soot also play important roles and will have to be dealt with. Reducing carbon dioxide is a good place to start. Here’s why.

Average carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere reached 378 parts per million (ppm) in 2005, well above the 299 ppm reached 350,000 years ago, , according to paleontologists, and last equaled 3.5 million years ago. Some scientists believe that carbon dioxide concentrations haven’t been this high since the Eocene period, fifty million years ago, when, as Kolbert puts it, “crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today.” And of course, because we continue to pour more of the gas into the atmosphere, concentrations will continue to rise through the end of century, with various models predicting levels of 549, 717, 856 and even 970 ppm by 2100.

High concentrations of carbon dioxide are of concern because the gas traps heat, and plays a leading role in driving global warming. There seems to be broad agreement that temperatures today are on average a half-degree higher than they were at the start of the 20th century (1900) and that the many observable changes to our natural environment and climate, which we’re hearing more and more about on the nightly news, are due to that seemingly small increase. The half degree rise in temperature has closely followed the explosive rise in carbon dioxide. Even if we were to somehow stabilize carbon dioxide concentration at 450, 500 or 550 ppm, average temperatures are still likely — according to the IPCC and nearly everyone else — to rise another degree or two by 2100, if not more. No one really knows what the consequences are likely to be, whether some gotcha — or as climate scientists call it, a “disastrous anthropogenic interference (DAI)” — lies in wait, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or a dramatic slowing down of the circulation responsible for the Gulf Stream.

How much carbon dioxide is too much?

Many scientists seem to have settled on 500 (+/-50) ppm as an objective point of danger for carbon dioxide concentration. Five hundred ppm is roughly double that of preindustrial levels, though, as Kolbert points out, “this figure has at least as much to do with what appears to be socially feasible as with what has been scientifically demonstrated.” Some scientists think 450 ppm is a threshold, while others argue that it’s likely to be 400 ppm or lower. An influential paper by James Hansen of NASA says 475 ppm may be too much. The truth is that no one really knows.

Cutting current carbon dioxide concentration in half over a generation (say twenty years), if that’s what the Live Earth organizers are proposing, would be a challenge, to put it mildly. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lasts for roughly 100 years, so to cut the current concentrations in half anytime in the next century would mean stopping all man-made carbon dioxide emissions today, tantamount to shutting down the world economy. Even stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations within a generation at 500 ppm — the consensus danger point — looks beyond reach, unless, as two Princeton scientists, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, wrote in an influential 2004 paper, we find a way to hold constant the number of tons of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere annually.

Mankind is adding roughly 7 gigatons (7 billion tons or 7 Gt) of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year (7 GtC/yr), and under Socolow and Pacala’s 2004 “business as usual (BUA)” scenario, that amount will grow to 14 GtC/yr (or more) by 2054. To stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at 500 ppm over that period of time, they wrote, we need to find ways to run our world without letting our output of carbon dioxide rise any further. Can it be done?

Socolow and Pacala say yes. But the problem is huge. How can the world economy continue to operate (and grow in places like India and China) without adding more and more gas to the atmosphere. Socolow and Pacala proposed breaking the problem into segments, or “wedges”. What we need they wrote, are at least seven major initiatives, each of which is capable of preventing one billion tons of new carbon output from being emitted by 2054. Here’s a visualization of the problem and its solution.

In fact, Socolow and Pacala managed to come up with 15 initiatives — “wedges” — each capable of keeping one gigaton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over the next 50 years and each possible with current technologies. Among the wedges they proposed were a doubling of nuclear power capacity, the mandating of carbon capture and storage for all new coal burning plants, exchanging biomass fuel for fossil fuel, reduced use of vehicles, and so on. The numbers involved are huge, and the U.S. and China, in particular, will have to be on board for most of the initiatives to work. For that reason, the Live Earth organizers suggestion that 90% of the reduction in climate changing pollution needs to come from the developed countries of the world is probably not correct. Each “wedge” needs its own analysis and plan of action, and for any one option, a developed region may or may not have the greatest role to play.

Pick a wedge, one for now another for later; we’ll need more than one

For more details, take a look at the list of fifteen wedges posted at the Princeton-based Carbon Mitigation Institute (CMI) website. You’ll find that several shed light on one or more of the seven Live Earth pledges. For example, there’s Live Earth Pledge #6: plant new trees and join with others in preserving and protecting forests. Socolow and Pacala propose that one-half wedge can be created by reducing the clear cutting of tropical forests over fifty years to zero and another one-half wedge added by planting 741 million acres of new trees (I’ll leave it as an exercise to figure how many states that’s equivalent to). Clearly the numbers required are huge, well beyond anything attempted to date.

Or take Live Earth Pledge #4: work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of, among other things, our means of transportation. Socolow and Pacala create one wedge by increasing the fuel efficiency of the two billion cars they expect to be in use by 2054 from 30 mpg to 60 mpg. They can create a second wedge if everyone in the world drives on average 5,000 miles per year instead of a predicted 10,000 miles per year. But wait, are we even at a fleet average of 30 mpg? Watching the current struggle in Congress over fuel efficiency standards for U.S. automakers does not raise one’s confidence. And the increased miles U.S. commuters are driving — in he country with the most cars — makes the second wedge look equally daunting.

So, it’s conceivable that seven wedges aren’t enough. What if, for all sorts of reasons, some are unable to deliver their one GtC/year of carbon dioxide savings or are simply beyond the will of our institutions? What if carbon dioxide output rises faster than the currently projected rate? At least we have 15 wedges to choose from. But Martin Hoffert, an emeritus NYU physics professor, argues that we’ll need more to get to where we need to be. In a much discussed 2002 report that preceded the helpful notion of “wedges”, Hoffert advocated for research and investment in a number of futuristic technologies that have the potential to provide us with additional options for the second half of this century, when we may need them desperately. Unlike the CMI wedges, those on Hoffert’s list are carbon free. They include fusion, space-based solar power, wind turbines suspended in the jet stream, a Buckminster Fulleresque world-uniting power grid and much more.

Taking the pledge

Such thinking takes us a long way from the Live Earth pledges, but also suggests how big the problem is and how enormous the scale of solutions required.. We’re the ones who are going to have to start the work and pay for it. Sacrifices lie ahead, even if we can’t fully predict yet what they’ll be or who will have to bear them. Sure we can kick them down the road, but then we’ll be leaving our children and grandchildren with an even bigger problem. The next generation could find itself dealing with carbon dioxide concentrations of 600, 650 or 700 ppm and mitigation will seem even more impossible.

At least the science now provides us with numbers that we can use to create a kind of global dashboard. On the one-hand, 500 ppm seems like a number we don’t want to exceed if we’re to limit the amount of warming that occurs over the next hundred years to one degree Celsius or so and if we’re to avoid potential DAI events whose triggers are seemingly unknowable until they occur. On the other hand, the notion that we can approach the problem in terms of a series of “stabilization wedges” — some for now, others for later — gives us a tool we can use to create solutions of appropriate size (and seriousness) and to measure progress.

Will we do it? There’s no evidence we will. At present there are few incentives to implement any of the wedges that have been proposed. No carbon taxes, no carbon caps, no worldwide treaty, no strong signals from the marketplace. So it can’t hurt to take the Live Earth pledge, but we need to understand what we’re signing up for. If we’re agreeing to fight for a 90% decrease in our own production of carbon dioxide, or even a 50% decrease in worldwide growth (7 GtC/yr versus 14 GtC/yr), then we need to be prepared for changes that will be a lot less fun than a rock concert.

In her book, Kolbert lists a number of natural feedback loops that threaten to amplify the environmental changes already underway, in the absence of collective action. But, she concludes:

“Perhaps the most unpredicatable feedback of all is the human one. With six billion people on the the planet, the risks are everywhere apparent. A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean current, a major drought — any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react be finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could, in essence, choose to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

Microsoft Windows Live Folders: 500MB Free Online Storage
Wed, 27 Jun 2007 22:52:26

Microsoft Windows Live Folders gives you 500MB of free online storage. It may not seem much compared to some of the other online storage services. On the other hand, it is free, looks simple to use, and should be around for a while.

read more

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Google Docs Gets Organized (and a new look)
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:18:50

I use Google Docs daily (usually several times day). So, I was a bit surprised to see its new look and features when I logged in tonight. So, I headed over to the official Google Blog and got the details at…

More organizing tools

The major feature addition is the ability to create personal folders to organize documents.

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Microsoft PowerShell Community Extensions
Sun, 24 Jun 2007 23:30:12

I haven’t had the chance to refocus on Microsoft PowerShell (their relatively new shell and scripting language for Windows XP, Vista, and Server). However, it has been great to see the community building around what I think is a more important development than Windows Vista in the long run. I noticed a collection of what are being called Community Extensions available over at Microsoft’s CodePlex site…

Microsoft PowerShell Community Extensions

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The Sun ODF Plug-In for MS Office has now been officially released. It enables users of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to read and write documents in the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF). It works on Windows in Office 2000, XP and 2003 and is a completely free download.

http://www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/index.xml

Official Google Blog: All aboard

We’re pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.

To all of you MS Office gurus out there, here’s a chance to help out with a *GREAT* cause: As many of you will already know, Lawrence Lessig has made a shift in his fight for Free Culture, placing his attention on fighting the corruption that sits at the very foundation of the problems that keep us from living in this same mentioned free culture: Free from the corruptions that keep things in a state of… hmmm… not so much free and instead, not free.

As Professor Lessig makes mention in the same linked post from above,

A little late on this one, but none-the-less it’s worth bringing to the surface.

In a post to the IronPython Users List dated June 29th, 2007 Dino Viehland reports,

This may be the last time I can speculate on the future of Silverlight, so I thought I’d do so out loud here. (On 7/9 I start my new job as Senior Program Manager on the Silverlight team at Microsoft).

The problem for many developers with Silverlight is the “what is it?” phenomenon. And this is often expressed as “what does it compete with?” Clear favorites are “Flash” and “Flex” These are reasonable categories for the current (1.0 and 1.1) incarnations but I think the fact that Microsoft chose to call the second version, 1.1 is very interesting.

The difference between 1.0 and 1.1 is that in the latter the CLR and managed code is included, and you can program in C# 3 and VB9 rather than Javascript. You would think that is a very big enhancement; enough to name it version 2.0. The fact that at least for now they are calling that 1.1 must mean that 2.0 will bring… what? I don’t know, but it is interesting

Every couple years I buy a consumer product that I think will be good, but turns out to be so great as to be almost embarrassing. The most recent example was buying my first DVR (e.g., TIVO). I thought it would be a cool alternative to a VCR, and pausing live TV would be “convenient.” It was so great, and so useful that even my gadget-averse family agreed that it was wonderful. In Maslow’s pyramid of needs, it isn’t down there with food and shelter, but it s at a more important level than, say, “self-actualization.”

I call this phenomenon YOWZAs. My newest YOWZA is the iPhone. I bought it because I wanted to see if Silverlight will run on its browser, and because it is cool, and because I use my telephone, pda and iPod every day and the idea of combining them into one device was very appealing.

Background: I have been using a Treo for over a year. I like the treo, though I don’t love it. The browser is only barely usable, the keyboard is barely usable (one feature they despeaately need is a switch to turn of key-repeat) but much of it is great. For some reason, however, my Treo likes to go back to “Time Set” after every call, which I’m sure I could fix if I took the time to figure it out.

The iPhone is, however: the best PDA I’ve ever had, the best iPod I’ve ever had and (nearly) the best phone I’ve ever had. The more I use it the more I love it.

Apple iPhone Launch Impressions

I went to a local Apple store today after work to take a look at the iPhone. I expected to find a couple of hundred people lined up there (the larger Apple store a few miles away probably drew many more people) and, indeed, found around 500 people standing in segmented lines (to allow foot traffic). There were a number of things that surprised me while standing in line… Read more…

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Picasaweb for Mobile Devices

Google announced Picasa Web Albums for Mobile Devices. You can find the announcement at… Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone … and the mobile friendly site itself at…

http://picasaweb.google.com/m/

I tried it on both a Smartphone and Pocket PC (see screencap above) and the site worked fine on both platforms

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Clusty Mobile Search Engine

I guess you can’t have too many mobile friendly web search engines. Here’s another one you can find at:

m.clusty.com

It differentiates itself by dividing (or clustering) search results into groups such as web, images, and deeper drill downs into the category (say “windows mobile”).

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HTC Advantage Pocket PC Phone Edition Unique Keyboard