Mauricio Freitas: My window to the world

Disrupting WhatsApp worries mobile operators

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:35:00 PDT

WhatsApp, the messaging app available for pretty much all smartphone and feature phone platforms around these days (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, S40, Symbian, Windows Phone) is the disrupting app that worries mobile operators most.

At least this is what I�ve heard around.

And it may be justified. Exactly one year ago (June 2012) Forrester said �SMS usage remains strong in the US: 6 billion SMS messages are sent each day.�

Today, almost one year to the date from that report we see the news WhatsApp is delivering 27 billion messages daily. This comes only six months after WhatsApp disclosed they were delivering 11 billion messages a day (December 2012) worldwide.

Some people will say �mobile operators are happy because they charge mobile data�. Remember though that mobile data costs the operator while SMS is a by-product of the platform.

DIA filter causing problems accessing Google services in New Zealand?

Tue, 28 May 2013 05:00:00 PDT

Someone reported on Geekzone about problems accessing Google+ Photos and Picasa albums from New Zealand.

An industry person involved in the discussion commented:

�Hi guys - thanks for the heads up on this. Something odd is going on but I can't be specific about what it is I'm afraid. We are working towards a resolution. This isn't affecting all ISPs but is affecting several in NZ.�

When asked if a Telecom solution would need to be implemented on Vodafone (another ISP who joined the DIA filter initiative):

�I'll tell John [Vodafone person] what's up. I'm not sure whether this specific issue will turn out to require an ISP specific solution or not. I would expect VF was affected as well - thanks for confirming.�

The next thing we know someone tells us that there�s a rumour about the New Zealand DIA Filter being configured to block an IP address belonging to Google, affecting not only the previously mentioned services but also GMail.

Remember, the DIA filter is optional for ISPs, but once an ISP sign up for it, then it will filter all traffic, for all its customers. From TechLiberty:

�The filter works by creating alternative routes to particular network IP addresses and passing them onto the participating ISPs. Traffic to those IP addresses is then passed to the DIA and checked by the filter to see whether it is going to the blocked site or another site on the same IP address. If it is going to a blocked site, the user is redirected to www.dce.net.nz, or else it allowed through the DIA's ISP and out onto the Internet.�

There is more commentary from Techliberty here.

I have contacted both Telecom and Vodafone about this issue. A Vodafone spokesperson responded �Thanks for your email, but we don�t have anything to add to the comments.� Telecom�s comments were �We have no specific comment to make. We understand that Google are looking into it, and we are happy for them to resolve.�

The DIA did not respond for requests for comments.

First Yelp app review from New Zealand is out!

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:38:00 PDT

The first Yelp app review from a New Zealand �customer� is out� And it�s not good. Except, of course, if you discount the fact the poor one star review comes from the competitor�s marketing department, as shown below:

Yelp launched in New Zealand 2nd May. The service is a local business guide and review site with social networking features, launched in the USA in 2004 and is now in 21 countries, uses 12 languages and had more than 100 million monthly unique visitors in January of this year. Localist is the local brand of a similar service. Someone there must be feeling threatened. Or is it a prank by someone else?

Thanks to @jaredvh for the tip.

Is Facebook two factor security message showing in timeline for you too?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:25:00 PDT

I have had two factor authentication in various accounts for ages, including Facebook. Just today I've noticed that every time Facebook send me a SMS with the authentication code, it posts a message in my timeline, like so:

Apparently I am not the only one, as someone commented in one of these entries "Good to see I'm not the only one with these messages popping up on my timeline"

Can Facebook really win anyone's trust one day?

Storytelling of Science

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 04:39:00 PDT

Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and others discuss the Storytelling of Science, hosted by Arizona State University�s Origins Project.

Telecom New Zealand decides to stick with Yahoo! email service, Yahoo! compromised again?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:46:00 PDT

A few weeks ago there was a massive breach of security in the Yahoo! email service behind the Telecom @xtra.co.nz addresses. according to information supplied by Yahoo! in a press release up to 20% of 400,000 active email accounts had been compromised.

Telecom employees worked hard day and night to manage the situation. Most of the action needed from consumers of this service involved password reset. This caused lots of trouble to people who weren�t able to access their accounts from email clients or third party services.

After the event a review was launched by Telecom New Zealand: ��We share the frustration that our customers have been experiencing over recent months. We fully appreciate that repeatedly saying �sorry� doesn�t cut it anymore. We are committed to taking a close, hard look at the best way to meet our customers� email needs.�

Almost a month after Telecom announced they decided to stick with Yahoo! as the email provider for its consumer ISP service: �Telecom New Zealand announced today that it will continue to offer its Yahoo! Xtra email service with Yahoo as its email provider, after receiving strong feedback from customers around the high value they place on it and obtaining a commitment from Yahoo! that it would work with Telecom to improve the customer experience of the service.�

It took Yahoo! a week to acknowledge something was wrong:

Yahoo! is continuing to work with Telecom to ensure Yahoo! Xtra mail accounts that were compromised last weekend have been secured and its in-depth investigation into the circumstances surrounding this issue is on-going.
�There is a lot of misinformation around what may have caused this vulnerability in the Yahoo! email product and the type of information that may have been compromised. There is currently no evidence to support reports that access has been gained to any user information beyond the customer's email address book or that this issue is related to any issues overseas, although we continue to investigate this,� say Laura Maxwell-Hansen, GM Yahoo! New Zealand.

A �lot of misinformation� said Yahoo! so I asked the PR person if they could clarify exactly what happened, so that we could post the correct information and the reply was �It�s not appropriate to disclose that information as these details could be misused and may assist a hacker in the future.�

Either they were not sure what cause the problem in first place or there was no fix being released soon. Otherwise how could disclosing it �assist a hacker in the future�? Obviously we don�t know for sure because of all this security by obscurity.

Guess what? Almost three weeks after the events, and just a week after Telecom�s decision to stick with Yahoo! as its email provider it seems the @xtra.co.nz email service has been compromised again. This is from their network status page:

UPDATE: Here is what the Inbox folder of a compromised mailbox looks like when the account sends spam out and starts receiving bounces from servers reporting invalid addresses� Just look at the frequency of spam being sent:

(Imnage courtesy of Geekzone user possum888)

Geekzone experience using Pingdom RUM

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 01:15:00 PDT

After seeing a couple of my tweets about analytics and performance the folks at Pingdom asked me a few questions to put together a blog about Geekzone performance. How we maintain the site, how we collect data (including real user monitoring and analytics) and what makes the site run.

You can see some interesting information about browser usage and speeds in our State of Browsers on Geekzone March 2013.

We have been using the Pingdom RUM service pretty much from the start of the beta, released first week of January and should be out of beta soon.

Outlook 2013 going metro on you: how to really edit contacts

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:40:00 PDT

I just had the most strange experience after installing Office 2013 on my laptop� Someone pointed out to me that an Anniversary date showing in my Windows Phone calendar for a contact was wrong by a couple of days, so I went into my Outlook on the laptop to update the information.

It took me almost 24 hours of talking a Microsoft friend how to actually access the Anniversary field in an existing contact. I will show you why�

Let�s create new contact, which uses a �long form� dialog like previous Outlook versions:

After saved I find my contact in Outlook and this is what I see:

Double-click the contact in the list and we now get a different, �metro short form� dialog:

Nowhere to edit the Anniversary. Surely if I entered that information in my contact card then I should be able to edit it?

I asked my Microsoft friend and he kept telling me on Twitter to edit the contact and click �Details�. But there�s no details here. Someone else then suggested I change the Contacts view from �People� to �Card� before opening the contact.

Changed from People to Card view and that�s how the list looks now:

When I double-click the contact entry to edit I then get the old style �long form� edit form, the same one used to create the contact in first place:

And indeed if I click Details I get to the information I want to change, which is what I�ve done for the last fifteen years:

So let�s check this:

Regardless if you are in People or Card view, you always get the �long form� when creating a new contact
If you are in People view you get the all hipster �metro short form� when trying to edit a contact
If you want to actually, you know, edit the contact with all the information in the �long form� then you have to switch to Card view before opening the contact to edit because there�s now switch before �short� and �long� forms once you start editing it.

Why didn�t I think of this? Perhaps because it�s not intuitive enough? Perhaps because it�s confusing? Even the Microsoft guy forgot to tell me that I had to switch between views. He kept telling me on Twitter �People, Contact, Details� and never mentioned that I had to switch views.

A friend on Twitter came on Microsoft�s defence saying that any upgrade project would require training, etc. But I don�t buy that. Do people seriously think John Doe walking into Dick Smith to buy a copy of Office 2013 to install on their new PC (or buying a new PC with pre-installed Office 2013) won�t get confused? Do people seriously think John Doe will buy a new PC and training to use at home? I got confused, and I use this every day, I can imagine what non-tech users will think.

Google Reader sunset impact on publishers

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:02:00 PDT

Here is an interesting insight on why the so much publicised closing down of Google Reader is probably going to affect the web as we know it. According to the blog Google Operating System post "Google Reader Data Points" the CNN RSS feed has 24 million subscribers on Google Reader. The second most subscribed feed is Engadget with 6.6 million subscribers. JoelOnSoftware has 148,000 subscribers.

As for our little Geekzone, here is our most recent stat from Feedburner (another Google service) showing we have 176,049 subscribers via Google Reader, out of 177,299.

That's 99% of our RSS subscriber base disappearing on 1st July. I imagine other blogs and news sites around the world will see a similar number.

In a single stroke Google is wiping a whole lot of information consumers from these publisher's stats.

Some might say "oh, but people can use Google+ Circles, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, LinkedIn Groups and so on to distribute this same information around".

Sure, this could be done sure but publishers would struggle to get the same number of subscribers on those platforms. And the amount of work (and money) required to reach readers on a diverse set of platforms, each with its own problems, would be huge.

I don't think Google is doing a great service to the web when they announce the Google Reader death.

State of browsers on Geekzone March 2013

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:52:00 PDT

It's almost one year since I've posted the last State of Browser on Geekzone March 2012, so it's time for the annual update. These charts are based on more than 600,000 visits (and a couple million page views) to Geekzone during the 30 day period ending 12th March 2013.

Since last year Chrome usage on Geekzone went up from 30% to 40%. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer had a very small dip, and Safari a very small gain. Firefox went down from 28% to 24% and Internet Explorer from 26% to 23%.

Now for New Zealand-specific numbers. Chrome went up from 30% to 39%, Internet Explorer is the second most used browser with 24% (down from 29%) and Firefox is the third most used browser with 22% (down from 27%).

Similar to the last update, here are two charts showing New Zealand only browser usage split in business hours and after hours:

And here is the split of Internet Explorer versions. Internet Explorer 9 is getting strong going up from 43% to 50%, but Internet Explorer 10 is gaining traction going up from 0% to 10% in the last twelve months. Internet Explorer Explorer 6 practically disappeared with only a couple of hundred visits to the site out of almost 70,000 Internet Explorer visits in total. Internet Explorer had a big dip from 43% to 30% but Internet Explorer 7 remains around the same number:

In the last few months I have been running some RUM services on Geekzone, including Torbit and a beta version of Pingdom RUM. So here is for the first time the fastest and slowest of the top three browsers on Geekzone. About 30% of Geekzone visitors use ad blockers, and I'd expect Firefox and Chrome users to use ad blockers more than Internet Explorer users. These numbers could be a bit shifted to those two browsers:

I hope you found this post informative. If you want some more specific measurements please post in the comments.

UPDATE: As requested, here is an OS distribution:

Samsung Galaxy SIII Sudden Death in New Zealand: your rights

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:50:00 PST

Over the last couple of months we started seeing a trend in our Geekzone forums: more and more people who bought Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphones being affected by the Samsung Sudden Death. But the worrying part of this trend was really the number of times people reported their handsets coming back from the repair service with a "no warranty repair" tag, saying the user must have tampered with the ROM on the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII Sudden Death is a well known problem and Samsung is quiet about it. Basically you are using your phone and with no reason at all it freezes. You can't turn it off, you can't do anything except take the battery out.

The boot might show something like this:

ODIN MODE
PRODUCT NAME:
CUSTOM BINARY DOWNLOAD: No
CURRENT BINARY: Samsung Official
SYSTEM STATUS: Custom

The "SYSTEM STATUS" shows customs because the NAND memory is corrupt and it can't read the product name or system partition therefore it defaults to 'SYSTEM STATUS: Custom'.

According to a discussion on XDA:

The following ROMs include a Kernel, bootloader and recovery with the Update 7 "Fixes" applied. If you have one of these, officially consider yourself "Safe". If you rooted one of the below stock ROMs, you will also be safe, however - if you changed to a custom kernel or recovery, you need to look at the below custom sections. If you have never rooted, the stock section is all you need read.

As It appears all 4.1.2 kernels have the fixes, there is no longer a need to test them all. See below for a list of tested kernels that have the fix. All kernels subsequent to these will also be regarded as safe.

XXELKC
XXELL1
XXELL4
XXELL5
XXELL6
XXELLA
XXELLB
XXELLC

People who have never rooted need not read any further. Essentially, if you have an official, never rooted 4.1.2 ROM, you're "safe"

You can check your handset by running eMMC Brickbug Check. At this moment there isn't firm information if this is really just a firmware issue or a hardware problem with some batches of the memory used on these handsets.

We read reports of people on Geekzone saying that repair services denied warranty repair claiming the phone was modified based on this system status, even if there was no modification at all.

If you get this kind of response, do not settle. Take the handset back to the retailer where you got it from and make sure they understand this is a known fault. You do not have to deal with Samsung as under the Consumer Guarantees Act this is what retailers have to do. Make it clear it's a problem that Samsung is aware of and it must be repaired under warranty.

Windows Phone 8 Portico update: at last here in New Zealand

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:13:00 PST

After waiting for ages we finally get the Windows Phone 8 Portico update in New Zealand. It's said it fixes some freezes and restarts, plus it corrects the SMS date problem.

Surprisingly, once the update was available there was none of that "staggered release" rigmarole. Once Windows Phone 8 Portico is available we just have to check for updates on the phone and it downloads over the air (OTA), ready to install. Install times will depend on how full your phone is, but in mine it took just around 25 minutes.

So, here is my score card for Windows Phone 8 update:

Easy of install: 10/10
Download speed: 10/10
Availability: 3/10

All in all pretty good having it available now and easy to update too. But not good enough. Last week I was driving to town when the Bluetooth speakerphone in the car announced "Connection lost". I looked down and the phone was restarting itself. The Nokia logo showed up and it just stayed there. That logo stayed on the screen for five hours (hey, great battery!) until someone told me about the soft reset procedure. Until then I was thinking "great, just before the update that supposedly fixes these my phone crashes and needs to go away to be flashed".

Luckily the reset worked and the phone seemed ok after that. And today the phone got the update OTA so I feel a bit better about not losing the phone.

As usual manufacturers say Microsoft is the one to be blamed for timing, Microsoft says the mobile operators are the ones who decide if updates can be deployed, and so on. A loop of excuses, where consumers are the ones with no say on when or how.

Basically, as I said before, Microsoft should separate app and UI fixes, new apps from network updates and delivery Windows Phone updates every month, instead of waiting for a twice a year release cycle. It's not like they have the leading mobile platform in the world and can do whatever they want. If they aren't good at this now, I'm sorry, they are toast.

Having said that, they do act like they have the #1 mobile platform in the world, and don't need users to download apps:

I know Apple and Android also do region locking. But they don't have to compete from the last position in the market.

Windows Phone updates, again

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:26:00 PST

The Windows Phone folks at Microsoft managed to raise my expectations and failed completely to deliver.

I tried for one last time updating two Windows Phone 7 devices I have here (mine and wife's) to the latest 7.8 release and again Zune says both are up to date and no updates are available. This is when Windows Phone 7.8 has been available for almost four weeks here in New Zealand.

Seeing that Microsoft persisted with the crappy experience in the Windows Phone ecosystem - taking this same "managed release" idea to Windows Phone 8, I just removed Zune from my laptop and won't bother updating the old handsets. And when they die we will just replace them with something that, you know. works.

If only they actually treated Windows Phone updates as serious business and delivered these instead of playing around.

As for my Nokia Lumia 920 (the one I use as my day phone), I will continue to use it. If anything happens then this too will be replaced with something else that just works. It might even have something happening by "accident" to this handset if I just get worked up enough.

Geekzone over the years: the tech behind the scenes

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:49:00 PST

As part of keeping up with times, this last weekend I finished moving the Hyper-V VMs behind Geekzone to Windows Server 2012. Someone in our forums was curious on how we could have Geekzone running on a single VM instance with no load balancers and so, so he asked me to post what's behind our website, how it changed over the years and what do we do to keep performance up.

We currently serve around 230,000 pages a day (user requests and AJAX request for some pages) plus other resources such as images, scripts and CSS files.

When I started Geekzone it was a domain in a shared host service called Ocoloco, provided by a small Masterton-based company called SiliconBlue. In 2003 Auckland-based ISP ICONZ bought Ocoloco and with that they became our hosting providers. Back then we had a single domain running on IIS, Classic ASP and a Microsoft Access database. We were serving 10,000 pages a month after a few months and that was BIG.

Our first project was to move from Microsoft Access to Microsoft SQL, still in the shared environment. We know Microsoft Access doesn't scale well, but back then we never thought we'd be serving more than 10,000 pages a month.

This worked out well until we got big enough that we had to sometimes call our provider and ask them to restart their SQL server two or three times a day, due to the server crashing under our load. ICONZ suggested we should really get our own server (back then virtual environments weren't a big thing).

We bought our first server from ICONZ, an Acer server with 3GB RAM. We installed Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL. An entire server just for us! It worked fine for a few years until we got to the point where our requirements were really pushing the limits of that 32 bit hardware.

HP came into play and we were supplied with a HP Proliant DL360 server (like the one in the picture above) with 10GB RAM. Loaded with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V we had enough to run a VM for Geekzone (IIS/SQL database), a test VM and a monitoring VM.

That's when I started getting serious about performance. While many companies solve their performance problems by installing more hardware we tried to use more of the resources we had available. The monitoring VM runs SQL Sentry and SQL Monitor for database monitoring, cache plan testing and other management tasks. I spent a lot of time optimizing indexes, working the database model and so on.

At this time I also decided to move from a single IIS worker model to a multiple workers (IIS web garden). To get to this point I had to write our session management routines using the SQL database to allow for persistence between the odd server restart (we do restart servers after applying the monthly patches released by Microsoft every second Tuesday of the month) and to allow session to persist between IIS workers. I also worked with Redjungle's Phil to have separated email notification delivery from the web application, as well creating a metaweblog API for our blogging platform and a couple of .Net MVC web sites (Geekzone Mobile and Geekzone Jobs).

Another advantage of this approach is the ability to scale out - and it does work well as I found out when migrating our applications from the old Windows Server 2008 VM to the new Windows Server 2012 VM. I was able to move web applications one at a time and sessions worked across different hosts, sharing the database across a Hyper-V private network.

Around the time we started playing with performance I got to meet the folks at Aptimize, now Riverbed Aptimizer. Aptimize was a Wellington-based company until Riverbed acquired them in 2011. The software works automatically, examining all pages served from our servers and applying rules that determine how to optimize web pages for best client performance. This includes image sprite creation, script and CSS minification, URL rewrite for CDN resources, lazy loading images, loading async scripts and so on. We start using Aptimizer and it improved page speed almost instantly so we had time to put a lot of effort into the database side of things, to get everything a step further.

Around 2009 we decided to move our server from ICONZ, mainly due to colocation and traffic costs. We know 60% of our traffic is New Zealand-based, and of those 75% is from Auckland alone, so when the time came for us to move hosting companies we examined a few companies around Auckland and decided to go with Datacom. They were really good at putting together a package for our small one man operation. And so one day we unplugged the server at ICONZ, loaded it into Nate's car and drove across Auckland to its new home. The Datacom datacenter is so huge that I am pretty sure i might not ever see the server again.

The Datacom move was really good, with improved bandwidth giving our users even faster access to our website. But we know a lot of people access Geekzone from outside New Zealand so we started using a CDN to distribute the heavy resources around the world. Initially with MaxCDN (their prices are really good) and lately with Cloudflare. There are two reasons we moved to Cloudflare: they have a POP in Sydney, which is pretty close to New Zealand, so we could move to them with low impact to our users and their Pro plans support SSL for the CDN - which was a problem for us before (we used to have different CDN rewrites for SSL and non-SSL pages, now we have only one).

We do not use Cloudflare for page optimization because that would add unnecessary round trips for the majority of ours users. But using Aptimizer together with Cloudflare for CDN we can get our resources closer to users, manage the cache expire in their browsers and in the ISP's proxies making all faster than ever.

Since then we increased memory on the server to 24GB to allow for better memory management as well. And while our Windows Server 2008 was working perfectly well, I decided to move to Windows Server 2012 for a few reasons but mainly because of a faster OS startup, OS support for NIC teaming, and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. And also because this is Geekzone so why not then?

So that's it. A bit of geek history and things I've done the last few years. More to come (and if you need more information or some help with your current setup, contact me and we can have a chat).

Testing image blogging from Windows Phone 8 with Diarist

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 02:41:00 PST

Diarist is a Windows Phone app developed by fellow Geekzone user Kev Daly. It has some cool features including Share option in photos so we can upload and blog an image and it works with Metaweblog API.

Testing it on Windows Phone 8, you can ignore this post.

Reminder: NZNOG 2013 is upon us

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 01:00:00 PST

If you are subscribed to the NZNOG list you might have seen this announcement. Otherwise if you are in any way working in the network operations landscape in New Zealand, read on...

The NZNOG 2013 programme is now available online. Confirmed speakers are:

Scott Bartlett (Orcon) - UFB one year in
Andrew McDonald (Vodafone) - RBI Wholesale 12 months.
Colin Dyer (GeoNet) and Ewen McNeill (Naos, Consultant) - Geonet: 1pps to 10,000 hits/second.
Beatty Lane-Davis - SDN: accelerating the pace of evolution in packet and transport networks
Sam Russell (REANNZ) - Thimble: OpenFlow-enabled device
David Brownlie (REANNZ) - perfSONAR for measuring performance, and troubleshooting.
Donald Love - UFB realities
Philip Smith (APNIC) - IPv4 / IPv6 route table analysis for NZ
Phil Regnauld (NSRC) - DNSSEC
George Michaelson (APNIC) - Last words on IPv6
Stu Fleming (WIC) - On being a WISP
Plus updates from NZRS, APNIC, CityLink, IPv6 Task Force, WAND and InternetNZ.

The NZNOG 2013 is happening in Wellington. Workshops 21st - 23rd January, Tutorials 23rd January, Conference presentations 24th - 25th January. There are two side events happening as well (a drinks evening and an official dinner).

Check the programme for more information and registration.

Are mobile phones sold in New Zealand locked?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:28:00 PST

Just to make it clear: mobile phones sold in New Zealand through mobile operator stores are not locked, except the ones sold by Skinny.

If you buy a mobile with support for at least three 3G bands (850/900/2100 MHz WCDMA) then you should be covered to use those in all mobile operators around the country. That's because Telecom New Zealand runs a 850 MHz WCDMA network, while Vodafone and 2degrees Mobile have the use of the 900/2100 MHz WCDMA bands.

Make sure you look at the WCDMA (3G) specs. If you buy a mobile with 850 MHz 2G it will not work on Telecom as Telecom runs a 100% 3G network.

Do not rely on Phone Arena to check if the phone is suitable, as most of the times the bands listed do not take in consideration different models sold in different markets.

Stay away from any mobile phone seller advertising phones with "Works on 2degrees only". In special if you see this on Trade Me close the page and walk away. They are most likely reported stolen or lost and blocked from working on Telecom and Vodafone (hence the "works on 2degrees only" in the ads).

If you have a locked Skinny mobile you can get a free unlock code after nine months or pay $30 to get the code. Check the Skinny page about phone locking.

More Windows Phone account troubles

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 05:36:00 PST

What's with Microsoft and badly designed/implemented account management systems?

First I couldn't add a credit card to pay for things (take my money already!), and now I can't remove an old Windows Phone device from my account.

Then as I try updating the phone number on my new device, I get another error:

They sure have some problems implementing basic stuff there.

UPDATE: And it seems if you go device.live.com and from there to the Windows Phone list the "Remove" link doesn't work. If you go through the windowsphone.com website through the device list and select "Account Settings" then you can remove the device and update the number. Why two different ways of getting to the same place, and only one works?

Also, having said that. Posted a comment to @WinPhoneSupport on Twitter and receive a reply in less than five minutes with a good suggestion (unrelated by good troubleshooting start). Plus karma points for them.

Wireless charging Windows Phone

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 09:07:00 PST

And it is here:

Wireless charging. If you have a Nokia Lumia 920 then you just need to plug the charger to the wall and as soon as you drop the phone on the plate it will charge.

The Nokia Lumia 920 has everything needed for wireless charging out of the box. If you have a Nokia Lumia 820 then you need to replace the original cover with a special one that enables wireless charging.

Very cool, having the charging plate on your desk, just lie the phone on top of it and charge away. As you can see in the photo it even works with the Otterbox Commuter case.

Microsoft should update Windows Phone update

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 04:39:00 PST

I previously commented on how I thought Microsoft should split Windows Phone 8 updates in different types and deliver those without interference from the operators and OEMs. It seems this is something is being done - if we actually have had updates yet.

We now see that some OEMs have been receiving Windows Phone 8 updates before others, and some countries come first. This means we will again get into that old game of waiting, waiting, waiting for updates.

Here is how I would like to see it working: use the Windows Update infrastructure for deployment. It's tested and supports heavy loads. Every second Tuesday of the month (Wednesday 7am New Zealand time) Windows Updates are available to everyone, around the world, at the same time. You can manually start an update at that time, or let your PC do the automatic update which will happen sometime during the next couple of days.

I would also like to see this certainty in Windows Phone. Something like "every last Friday of the month there's an update available". And that would be available to everyone, exactly like the Windows Update for desktop is available. This could be for example small fixes, like the SMS timezone bugs affecting New Zealanders who see SMS with +13 hours difference - almost like they're applying the timezone shift twice. This should be a simple fix, so why do we have to wait months to see it here?

Yes, I understand some updates require the mobile operator blessing, but those should not block updates that fix things in the OS and don't touch anything related to the mobile network. These should have a separate schedule.

This is another thing Microsoft could do to differentiate itself from competitors in the smartphone market.

Game Masters at Te Papa Museum of New Zealand

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:41:00 PST

I visited the Game Masters exhibition at Te Papa with some journalists yesterday, before its opening from today 15th December.

We were given an hour tour highlighting the different aspects of gaming development, moving from entertainment to art form, social and family integrator. Lots of hands on stuff around the floor - from old early 1980s arcades to the latest Kinect games using a huge projection screen. You will also see artwork used to develop characters and backdrops for famous games, plus a handy store on the way with lots of memorabilia.

Here are some photos so you can have an idea of what's available around.

Windows Server 2012 Standard lands, work begins

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:39:00 PST

The boxes are here:

Now I can start the "official" work on planning our Geekzone migration. Exciting.

Migrating Geekzone to Windows Server 2012

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:33:00 PST

It seems I now have something to do during the holiday period. Thanks to Microsoft I will soon have some software delivered here and will start testing, planning and executing a migration, updating our HP DL server to Windows Server 2012. This will also include updating three Hyper-V clients running the IIS, SQL Server, SQL Sentry monitoring and testing platforms powering Geekzone and this blog (among others).

It seems a fresh install of the physical server (running Hyper-V) is indicated. If all testing and planning goes well, the final migration will be done by end of January I think.

It will be fun.

Windows Phone 8 SMS wrong date/time

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:53:00 PST

It seems there's a problem with Windows Phone 8 and the way it processes date/time on SMS.

The ones received at "23:10" were actually received at 10:10. The one marked as 2/12 was actually receive 1st Dec @ 1:45pm.

It seems the messaging app is showing dates with a 13 hour shift. I am told both Telecom NZ and Microsoft NZ know about this problem but in our forums they are quiet about what's causing it and when it will be fixed.

By the way, this does not happen in Windows Phone 7.5.

UPDATE:

@freitasm Yes, should be a fix in next software update, no eta at the moment however. ^AB
— Telecom New Zealand (@TelecomNZ) December 1, 2012

Windows Phone billing

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:35:00 PST

It is business as usual: we all have to give a publisher our credit card information so that we can buy apps, subscriptions, etc. One would think Microsoft would make it easier for every customer to give them money, but that is not so.

My main credit card, the one used for online purchases, expired yesterday so obviously it was time to update it so that I could continue buying apps for my smartphone.

So I go to windowsphone.com and see the following:

So far so good. I click "Edit payment info" and get this:

Bummer Microsoft, something wrong with your systems uh? By the way, "contact customer support" is just an helpful suggestion. It could be hyperlinked to a page with a real phone number to contact support. But not, it is not. The "Contact Us" at the bottom leads to a page suggesting I contact my operator or OEM. Very unhelpful because neither has control over YOUR billing.

So I click "View billing info" which instead takes to me a page https://commerce.microsoft.com/PaymentHub/PaymentInstrument which seems to work:

That's my new credit card there. But it wasn't easy to get it there, because that page doesn't have any "Add payment option" link. I suspect it would be in the other page appropriately named "Edit payment info" that already spat out the dummy on me before.

The way I got that credit card there was by using the Windows Phone 8 Wallet app. It worked, but in a cumbersome way. It should work on the "Edit payment info" page but it didn't. I had to enter a new card in the Wallet app and check the box "Set up card for app and music purchases". Lucky there is an app for that, right?

Note though that unless you check the box to make the new card a payment option for your app purchases, it will not be stored anywhere else but on your phone. If you check the box to make the card a payment option for app purchases you are actually redirected to a page outside the app (no way to see the URL but I suspect linked to the Windows account) to add the card information. In effect it seems you are adding the card to the Microsoft account payment info and this is then downloaded to the phone. Works for me but. . .

When I started entering my data I was thinking "cool, I can enter the information here and once it syncs to the cloud I can restore the data in case this phone needs to be reset or if I get a new Windows Phone". The sync in this case exists only one way - from your Microsoft account to the phone. This means updates you make inside the Windows Phone Wallet to an existing credit card doesn't reflect on the Microsoft account - I tried, when my card expired and actually was told by the app to first delete the card online then go back to the app.

No problem, I hear you saying, just enter the data directly in your Microsoft account and it will flow to the phone. Except that as we saw before, one page brings an error and the other doesn't even have an option to add payment options. This means If I want a backup option then the way to go is setting up on the phone itself while having all credit cards set as "App purchase" options, which is not ideal.

Anyway, the card is loaded. I wonder if this was a problem with my account only and how it would have worked if I didn't have the Wallet app (like Windows Phone 7 users for example).

In the next post I will comment on the Windows Phone Wallet app itself and how it works (or it was supposed to).