Author: Adam Fowler

TechEd North America – Done for 2014

Posted on by Adam Fowler

TechEd North America 2014 is now over. You can read about the first two days of my experience here. The second half wasn’t too different to the first half unsurprisingly, and there wasn’t a huge amount of excitement in the air.

Wednesday morning started off slowly. There were a LOT of vendor parties on the Tuesday night beforehand, so maybe it was a difficult morning for many attendees. There wasn’t much to do as once breakfast was over, there were breakout sessions to attend (where you go into a room and listen to a presentation – one of the biggest parts of TechEd), but the Expo hall (where all the vendor booth are) didn’t open until 11am.

I found it difficult to push myself to attend the breakout sessions because they were all available on the next day for free via their Channel 9 service. It’s a great idea from Microsoft but many attendees I spoke to shared the lackluster of going to these too, saying they could watch them online later.

There were some highlights of sessions though. Anything with Mark Russinovich (creater of SysInternals) was highly talked about, and I attended “Case of the Unexplained: Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich” which was really interesting to watch.

For lunch, I caught up with Nutanix to have a look at their offering over lunch. They treated me in style, by giving me a Texas-style hat and using someone else’s leg power to get me there and back:

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I learnt that Nutanix offer a well priced sever based solution that’s half way between a single rackmount server, and a full chassis/blade setup that also uses shared storage between the nodes (i.e. blade servers). I’ll definitely be looking into that further from both a writing view as well as investigating for my place of work.

After that, I explored the Expo again, speaking to more vendors. Yes there was a lot of goodies given away (generally called ‘loot’) but again according to other attendees, there was a lot less than previous years. I didn’t really try and came back with a suitcase full of novelties which my work colleagues will hopefully go through and find some cool bits and pieces to make up for my absense.

Wednesday night came, and night time means more parties. I went to the Petri meet and greet where as the title suggests, I met and greeted another bunch of great people. After that the jet lag had gotten the better of me, so I went back to the hotel to order room service and pass out.

Thursday saw the final of Speaker Idol. It’s a competition run by Microsoft in the American Idol format (apparently?) where people perform 5 minute presentations until a winner is chosen, and that winner gets to present a full breakout session at next year’s TechEd. Aidan Finn ended up winning (and he wrote about the experience here) who was highly deserving of the achievement, but so were the other presenters I saw.

I had dinner with the friendly eNow mob who make reporting and monitoring tools for Exchange, Lync and others, as a +1 to someone who was actually invited.

The closing event was held at the local baseball stadium: The Minute Maid Park.

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Not having been to an American stadium before, it was more of a novelty to me more than others. Jugglers, artists, many stadium type food stalls and a mechanical bull surrounded the outskirts while attendees took tours of the pitch itself and listened to the bands that played. Here’s the full list of everything that was available. Disappointingly I wasn’t feeling 100% due to a cold, otherwise I would have sampled some of the nachos covered in American liquid cheese – something rarely seen in Australia.

Overall I’m really glad I went (I may not have been as positive on the very long plane ride home) as I met a bunch of great people – Particularly Kyle Murley and Phoummala Schmitt who both looked out for me, as well as Trevor Pott who convinced me to go in the first place. I made lots of new contacts, and had the opportunity to say hi to tech greats like Mary Jo Foley.

TechEd North America – Half Way Mark

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It’s now Wednesday 14th May, and we’re at the half way mark of TechEd North America 2014. This is my first TechEd outside of Australia, and it’s been an interesting experience. A lot of the following reflections will be due to my TechEd Australia exposure which gave me certain expectations.

For starters, the community is really a great group. Almost everyone is very courteous and respectful which is inviting and welcoming to someone who’s traveled here by themselves. It’s very easy to just start talking to someone, as everyone seems genuinely interested to find out more about others and have a chat. For example, as I was sitting writing this, someone mentioned that I should eat something as I hadn’t really eaten much of it. We had a quick chat about jetlag, and I thanked him for his concern.

I’ve been told it’s a sold out event, with about 11,000 people in attendance, which dwarf’s Australia’s 2000-3000 headcount. The venue itself, the Houston Convention Center is huge, along with all the areas inside. The general dining area looks bigger than a soccer field to me.

The Expo area is about as big, which contains all the vendors giving away shirts, pens and strange plastic items, while trying to convince you to know more about their products. The staff are quite nice too, not being too pushy. There’s also a yo-yo professional, a magician and probably other novelties that I’ve not seen yet.

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Many competitions are going on with the vendors too. One had a chance to go bowling with Steve Wozniak and I was standing next to him which was awesome. Sadly didn’t win the bowling part though:

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There’s a motorbike to win, countless Microsoft Surfaces, headphones and other bits and pieces that vendors are using to get the attendees to come visit.

Moving onto the keynote (which I liveblogged here), the focus was Mobile first, Cloud first. There wasn’t much noise from the crowd for the whole keynote, as most were probably coming to terms with having to start worrying about Azure now. Microsoft made it very clear that Azure was THE way now, not just an option.

The announcements of the keynote were all features for Azure. Good features which others have written about in detail, but no new products or services. Not even a mention of the upcoming Surface 3 and Surface mini. No mention of Nokia either, but there was an iPad on stage to show off some Microsoft technologies. Times have changed!

There’s hundreds of sessions going on every day, so we’re rather spoilt for choice. I’ve only been to a few and expecting to focus on that more today, but they’re a bit part of what makes up TechEd and so far have been very informative. The 1 hour and 15 minute format means they don’t go on for too long, but don’t feel rushed.

Microsoft also decided to make one exam free to all attendees – the 70-409 Server Virtualization with Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center. I decided to take it and passed, which was a nice bonus.

Vendor parties make up all the non-TechEd times and there’s many going on at once – again spoilt for choice. It’s another great way to meet others and find out what’s going on for other IT professionals, while sampling the local food and beverages.

There hasn’t been a huge buzz from attendees, but everyone is still happy to be here. It’s been a good two days so far, and I’m looking forward to the next two!

 

Microsoft TechEd AU Split Up

Posted on by Adam Fowler

An interesting official announcement for Microsoft TechEd. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m off to TechEd North America next week as press, and looking forward to an amazing event. In contrast, TechEd Australia has just been announced as being broken up from a single event into multiple cities here.

From the page:

For 20 years, TechEd has been hosted as one event at a single location.

This year that format will be changing. Microsoft is excited to announce, that in 2014 TechEd will be held in multiple cities, in order to increase the accessibility to Australia’s premium learning conference for technical professionals. This new approach will provide the opportunity for more people to benefit from the TechEd experience throughout the year.

TechEd 2014. Coming to a town near you.
Kicking off in Melbourne before being repeated in Sydney, these events will retain the quality of the TechEd brand by focussing on two days of deep technical training, access to experts and hands-on technology.

On twitter there are already some negative comments around this:

People are pretty upset. The clash with Europe is interesting – you’d have to think that some amazing speakers can’t attend both because of the conflict, but at the same time there should be enough great speakers for one of the biggest software companies in the world.

The event is also cut down to two days – previously it was 3 to 4 days. So will less time, there must be less content?

The other reason I think people are upset, is that it’s often their only big reward in the year. Going off to a nice location, catching up with all your fellow minded IT people and being swept up in the conference itself. That will change by splitting it into two events.

Brisbane/Gold Coast people may not be able to go because they’re used to being able to travel locally. Sydney and Melbourne people will most likely go to their local conference instead, which takes them less away from their work. Friends and contacts people have made and see each year may go to difference conferences.

There are some upsides though. Smaller companies that only have a few staff and can’t afford to send them all at the same time can now send them separately to each event, without people missing out. I think this is what they mean by the accessibility reasons, with most attendees coming from Melbourne and Sydney anyway.

Tickets should be cheaper too, less time should equal less money.

The other interesting side is how sponsors will take this. Will they spend less because they have to spread it over two events, with fewer attendees at each event?

Although there’s negativity now (which I completely understand), it will really depend on how the events go. Then it will be up to Microsoft to weigh each option, but as it is now they’re planning for more cities in 2015. Maybe it’s about getting more exposure, and getting more people onto the Microsoft Cloud?

Otherwise if you don’t like it, you could always go to TechEd New Zealand (TechEd North America is sold out!) :)

Windows Phone 8.1 Is Out

Posted on by Adam Fowler

The Windows Phone 8.1 OS update is now available to ‘Developers’. In this case, a developer is anyone who downloads and briefly sets up the Preview for Developers app and then runs a phone update. This is actually a decent way to let people who are happy to play with an update do so, before released to the general public.

The upgrade process isn’t very exciting, but can take a while. On my Nokia Lumia 1020, there was a small 2mb update which took about 10 minutes to install, before the big 8.1 (of unknown size) update which took about 25 minutes. A very smooth process but don’t do this when you’re expecting a call.

After upgrading I had a headache, but that was unrelated. Overcoming this, I was looking at a phone that had many obvious improvements. 8.1 is a BIG update, and here’s some of the more interesting bits I found:

Screenshots – The button combination used to be Power and Start, but it’s now Power and Volume Up. They nicely tell you this when you try to take your first screenshot (say if you were writing an article):

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Notification Center – Yes, Microsoft has followed Apple who followed Google. I see this as a standard requirement for a smart phone now, and this notification screen gives you enough information. Yes, mine’s a bit blank but it shows you unread emails, SMSes and so on. It also can take you to the settings page, which for me means one less tile on the start screen.

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Another handy part of the Notification Center is the ability to turn screen rotation on and off. Now you can control it once you’re in an app, as I usually have it off for lying in bed where gravity is going the wrong way for the accelerometer, meaning my screen orientation is sideways.

Start Screen – At first glance this is no different, but under Settings > System > start+theme, there are two things you can do. First is having a photo background for your tiles, which will probably make your tiles unreadable (unless you pick the right photo that’s not very detailed), and more interestingly the ‘Show more Tiles’ option.

Turning this ‘On’ then gives you a lot more tile space, which I haven’t even managed to fill yet:

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I’m a big fan of this change, as now it feels similar to the Nokia Lumia 1520’s giant 6″ screen in terms of space used. To me, Windows Phone 8 works best when you’ve got a single front screen that both shows you everything you want to see at a glance with live tiles, as well as having all your commonly launched apps. Shrinking everything down allows this to happen.

Calendar – Before 8.1, the calendar wasn’t great. It was barely usable. Now it is great. At a glance you can clearly see what’s planned for the week, and drill down further with a single touch. It’s not flashy and pretty, but it’s functional, and that’s my primary want. You even get to see the weather forecast:

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FM Radio – Something Apple refused to put in their iPhones is now in Windows Phone. It’s hardware driven, because when you launch it without headphones plugged in, it will tell you to plug some in as that’s what it uses as an antenna. This is one of the basics that I wonder why it wasn’t done earlier.

Podcasts – I’m from Australia, and Podcasts has never been available here previously. But for everyone, this is a new app which is standalone, rather than being part of the Music hub. I added a few podcasts easily, and although it doesn’t have advanced options around when to delete podcasts, or a ‘select all’ button

VPN – There’s now VPN support! This is a big one for enterprises, you can now have your remote WP8 users connect to work resources. Not much else to say on it, but it’s a welcome addition.

Data Sense and Storage Sense – Data sense will show you your data usage on both mobile networks and Wifi, while Storage shows you what you’re using and where. If you have the ability to add external storage, this will also let you choose what gets saved where. Very good for keep track of your 1’s and 0’s.

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Games – These are no longer hidden under the Games app only, and will be listed in the full app list. Might be annoying for those who previously had a bunch of hidden games.

Keyboard – Swype is now active! There’s nothing to turn off or on, you just start swyping around and away it goes. I have to remind myself to do it, but for short messages I do find it a lot quicker to get words down. Changing your mind to spell ‘hello’ as ‘helo’ does take a bit, but it’s worth it. Early days too, as I tried to write ‘sucks’ and it really thought I was trying to say ‘sticks’ which is sort of the opposite.

Store – It looks different. I wasn’t a huge fan of the old layout, and maybe the new layout is better and I’m not used to it… but we shall see. It does have smarts built in to show you apps you want before you know you want them (called Suggestions):

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There’s a bunch of other additions in this update that I’m sure I’ve missed, so get in there and start playing!

One problem I found was that after the update, Google would no longer sync my emails. I had to remove the calendar from syncing under Settings > email+accounts > Google > untick Calendar. Without this, I was getting a sync error code of 801901F5 which may be due to this change from Google dropping CardDAV support.

Windows Phone 8.1 is one of those updates you can actually get excited about. It reminds me of the early Apple iOS updates where each update gave you some nice new features, but at the same time left you wondering ‘why wasn’t this already there!’. Microsoft is still playing catchup in the mobile world, and now 8.1 has made them several steps closer. If only the Windows App Store had more apps…

Media Player Quest

Posted on by Adam Fowler

For the last several years, I’ve been on a quest. A quest that has finally been completed.

I can’t remember exactly when it first started, but I remember a happy time. I owned a modded Xbox (the original!) and it had a media player installed on it. It was called XBMC which aptly stood for XBox Media Center. It was an absolute delight to use.

My gaming machine became my lounge room media player. It connected to my TV via S-Video as that was slightly higher quality than Composite video, it had a 100mbit Ethernet port so I could steam media from a PC in another room. It supported SMB file shares which meant no client was required on my Microsoft Windows PC, it just had credentials to navigate through folders and play the videos I wanted. The navigation of the software itself was quick and smooth. I could quickly jump to any point on a video, or fast forward and rewind with ease. I could even easily adjust the sync of the audio and video if my source was out of sync. There was even an official Xbox Remote and IR Sensor that worked brilliantly with the setup, so no death trap cable was running across the living room (unlike the network cable, but that’s another story).

This delightful time ended eventually. Higher resolution TVs came out with their fancy new standard connection – HDMI. The Xbox was cast to the side, as a full tower PC took it’s place. Windows Explorer along with a keyboard and mouse was the easiest thing to use to navigate and play files. A VGA cable simply connected the PC to the new TV and supported 1920 x 1080. Sure, lots of the media I actually watched was still nowhere near that resolution, but there was no other decent solution at the time.

As flexible as a PC is, I wanted something that required less maintenance. I didn’t want to worry about finding the right codecs, or having special cards to output video and audio in different ways based on what TV and sound-system I had. I wanted a native remote to the device, and not sit there mapping out buttons for each function I wanted it to perform. With that in mind, I patiently waited for something better to emerge.

Fast forward a few years and all-in-one media players finally started to emerge. My first experience was a device I can not recall the model or even brand of, but it required the media to be on a local USB stick. It worked mostly, but was still a pain to copy stuff around constantly.

It was at this stage, I decided I really needed another XBMC. How hard could that be?

Late 2009, I obtained a Western Digital WDTV Live for around $100 which was half price of the RRP. It seemed to fit the bill – A remote control. 100mbit Ethernet and able to read from SMB shares. HDMI. Support for pretty much any video format out there… and it was good. Smooth navigation of the interface, it was nice to use. Still no XBMC experience, but I accepted it as being good enough.

It did last a few years, but eventually technology overtook the device again. Western Digital stopped updating the WDTV Live, and newer media formats came out. Newer Operating Systems also came out, which started to cause random issues with being able to see the network at all. I wasn’t the only person experiencing this, many others were too but none of the recommended fixes helped. Rebooting all devices on the network several times eventually kick-started the WDTV Live again, until it was rebooted.

Frustrated, it was time to go back to searching for the XBMC replacement.

I’d kept my eye out looking for a $200 or less device that again fit my requirements, but didn’t find anything suitable for a year or so until Android Media Players started to become popular. Being in Australia, there weren’t any local options for a while until I spotted the Kaiser Bass Smart Media Player which was stocked at a local retail chain.

It ticked off the requirements on the phyiscal side of the device, but it was woeful to use to the point of completely unusable. You can read my review on the link above for the full story, but it was really surprising to have such a poor experience with a store-bought product.

Without a different local Android based Media Player to try, I found a second hand Raspberry Pi Model B for sale which was already in a case, IR sensor attached with media remote, and an SD card for $100. It also had Raspbmc installed, which is a linux distribution with XBMC designed for the Raspberry Pi. Others I spoke to had set up the same and claimed it was a great media player. It sounded perfect!

Except that it wasn’t. It was decent, but not great. Controlling it was slow and laggy – from just navigating around the menus, to playing a video and trying to do basic fast forwarding and rewinding. I put up with it for a week after reinstalling Raspbmc from scratch and hoping it’d get better but it never did. It’s not bad for the price, but the old WDTV Live did a much better job overall.

I was giving up hope again, but someone told me about the Intel NUC. I’d heard about this before – it was a tiny PC, but not a very cheap one. Since then though, a newer generation of the NUC had been released which had two important additions: support for 2.5″ HDDs (compared to the original expensive mSSD or external USB stick only options) and an IR sensor on the front. It ticked all those other boxes I expected too (apart from coming with a remote, but I already had one from the Raspberry Pi to use), so I started to get hopeful again.

They’d also dropped in price, so the entry level Celeron NUC was around the magical $200 mark. Even better, there seemed to be official XBMC support for it! I reluctantly ordered one, while being less than optimistic about the upcoming experience.

The Intel NUC arrived, and I thought I’d get away with using a spare laptop sized 4GB DDR3 stick, but soon found out it didn’t work at all due to the NUC requiring 1.35v rated RAM, which I only had 1.5v. Another $50 later I had the correct RAM, and had a spare SSD to install. The device powered up with a clean looking ‘Intel NUC’ logo, so I proceeded with the install.

Windows 8.1 was installed onto the device quickly, followed by the latest version of XBMC. I found a utility called XBMCLauncher which made some small changes so XBMC auto loaded when the device came on, and much quicker than I thought the box was ready to go.

This time, I was impressed. Menus were able to be navigated smoothly. Videos started up instantly, and rewinding or fast forwarding just seemed to work. It flawlessly played 720p MKV files which nothing else so far seemed to be able to do consistently. I was getting excited.

As mentioned earlier, I had recycled the remote from the Raspberry Pi project. That was in use for a few days, until I discovered that using a smartphone or tablet with the Android Official XBMC Remote or the Windows Phone xbmc remote free was an even better experience than using a IR driven remote, so started zooming around the menus even faster. I could even view my indexed TV shows and movies, and jump straight to them to play.

After a week of this, I was sold. This was actually better than my original XBMC experience due to the amazing smartphone driven remote. I couldn’t fault it, so my quest was finally accomplished. I still find it amazing that I took so many years to get back to where I was with the original Xbox which wasn’t even designed to be a media player. I own a new Xbox One which can barely stream from a DLNA enabled device (it works as long as you trigger it from the other device, you can’t use the Xbox One itself to do anything apart from receive the media content!).

It wasn’t exactly the all-in-one device I thought I wanted, but installation was simple enough and without issue that I don’t mind that. It works, and it works perfectly.