Welcome to Paris–Mostly

I’m here in Paris as part of the Nokia Windows Phone Jumpstart tour. Should be great fun. It starts tomorrow. Our hotel is just across the road from the tower in the picture, which is really nice. With a bit of luck we might find time tomorrow to go up it.

But I have learned one thing about travel, and that is “Don’t go abroad with a brand new, recently imaged” laptop and expect for stuff to keep working”. I tried to log in to Facebook and it said “Aha! Not seen this machine before and Rob seems to have changed country. I’ll lock him out”. Not a huge problem in the great scheme of things, but very irritating all the same.

I logged into the Facebook site to try and fix the problem and Facebook went “Aha! We are in France, I’ll give Rob the French version of the site and no obvious way to change this”. So now I’m being asked security questions in French about things I’ve never told it. The last five characters of my driving licence? As if? So I plump for a Facebook innovation, passwords by pictures. This was even more disastrous. I have quite a few friends, and many I have never actually met in person. So I don’t know what they look like.

Towards the end Facebook threw in the towel I reckon, and showed me some pictures of family members. That worked and I’m now back on line again. But my Flicker account steadfastly refuses to work. They’ve made it so secure it is unusable.

Speed up your life with an SSD

I dread to think how much of my life I’ve spend waiting for bits of iron oxide to arrive. By that I mean watching progress bars crawl across the screen while sectors on the disk are rearranged. My first experience with magnetic media was using cassette tapes to store programs. Things have moved on a bit since then, with huge capacity disks available for tiny prices, but I still get the feeling there should be a faster way to get at data. Particularly when the processor on my computer seems to be doing nothing but the hard disk is rattling like a bag of, er, rattlesnakes.

What brought the problem home to me was turning on a machine I hadn’t used for a while. Live Mesh, Dropbox, Windows Update and the search indexer all went nuts and for a while I had absolutely no performance at all, as files were shuffled about and modified. So, last week I ordered up a solid state drive for the laptop, just to see what difference it makes.

Answer: a lot.

I’ve had to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 (with over 150 updates – yay!) along with all my applications and files. But the machine goes like lightning now. I’m seeing processor usage in the 90% region where previously it wouldn’t get above 20-30%. Everything opens up very quickly and runs well. Interestingly, I’m not seeing a massive speedup of the transfer rate on the disk, but something is really making things go quicker. I think it must be the access times on the disk that have dropped.

If you want a fairly low cost way to give a big performance boost I’d recommend looking at SSD devices. I’ve only bought a 120G on, but that is plenty for all my applications and the stuff that I’m working on. I’m now very tempted to replace the system disk on my desktop PC with an SSD device.

For your information, I went for a OCZ Agility 3 SSD. This supports SATA III, although I don’t think my laptop does. Easy to fit, it was a direct replacement for the original device.

Health Warning: Although wear (failure of storage elements by repeated reads and erases) on solid state disks is less of a problem than it used to be, the word on the street is that when an SSD fails it loses everything, all at once. With a hard disk you often get funny rattles as the heads retry, or parts of files becoming unusable while others are fine. With an SSD, when it goes, everything goes at once. For that reason I’d advice that you are very careful about backups and make sure that if the disk does fail at any given instant you don’t lose all your work.

Windows Phone vs Windows 8

I’ve been playing some more with Windows 8 and reading a bit about how it works. Very interesting. The thing that I find most surprising though is how unsurprising a lot of it is to me. I think this is because I’ve been deeply into Windows Phone development for the last 18 months or so. The Metro user interface and the use of XAML to design the front end are just how I think about doing things, based on my Windows Phone experience.

The underpinnings of the operating system, with this new Windows runtime are the really fascinating parts, but if you just want to write Windows 8 applications using C# and .NET you could do a lot worse than get hold of the Windows Phone SDK and have a play. My guess is that when the Windows 8 Marketplace opens up it will have a very similar way of working to the Phone one too, so you would also be able to get experience in how to publish programs.

I thought at the time of the Windows 8 keynotes “We are all Windows Phone developers now”, and I reckon this is definitely the way things are going to go.

Czech Windows Phone Videos Online

David Gešvindr from the Czech Republic has published the videos he took of the two Windows Phone sessions I did last week in Brno:

http://www.wug.cz/zaznamy/79-Writing-Wonderful-Windows-Phone-Applications-using-Silverlight
and 
http://www.wug.cz/zaznamy/80-Creating-Great-Windows-Phone-Games-using-XNA

The XNA one is worth watching, if only for my poor attempt at a joke involving cheese which falls completely flat because the Czech spelling of “Edam” is not the same as the UK one.

Fez Ultimate Kits

My apologies to those of you looking forward to getting your hands on Fez Ultimate .NET Microframework kits. Because of the need to collect deposits for the devices I think it is best if we do this at the start of the session, when all the Hull students are back on campus. This will also allow us to open up the offer to any first year students who fancy having a play with hardware. Keep watching the blog for details of how to get your hands on fun hardware.