Category: Tech in the 603

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

What’s Hiding Behind “Low Resolution” Metrics?

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)
100 data points

I’m a software application developer, but I get this.  Metrics are the photographs of business. 

While I’m at it, here’s another classic cliché for ya…  “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” 

What if your picture has been reduced to a small number of data points? 

You get something like the image on the left…  there’s actually 100 data points in that image:  the resolution has been reduce to a very small number of pixels, each expressed as a block of color.  (The image it was originally reduced from is about 40,000 data points.)  

Anyway, this is what metrics are to a business… data points that, when taken collectively, become the model or picture of the state of the company.

Standard GAAP accounting is supposed to provide a meaningful definition of metrics for any company, of any size, and for some purposes this may be sufficient.

Problems generally come in with the specialization of a company… the metrics it measures its own processes and performance by. 

Too many metrics, and it can’t all be taken in… like getting a close up of the whisker I missed when I shaved.  (From the “be careful of what you wish for” department.)  Thankfully that doesn’t happen very often;  it’s hard to imagine justifying the expense of that kind of metric “resolution”. 

It’s far more likely there are too few metrics. 

Imagine what it would look like if we reduced the resolution of the picture further… say to one data point.

Imagine, for example, if you only considered the price of a share of common stock in trying to get an idea of how well a company is performing.   Indeed, that’s definitely a “single pixel” view, and it really won’t tell you anything about the stock or the company attached to it.

Now take this, again, to internal processes.  Let’s imagine a bank that measures its loan officers only by their average ROI on loans. 

Ok… so that’s a silly extreme, but let’s just run with it for a moment…

Imagine trying to provide a bonus-impacting performance review of a loan officer when the only metric you had was the ROI on their loans. The average interest rate of the loan may be a valuable metric, but only when taken with other metrics. 

It won’t be long before all the loan officers are writing a few extremely short term loans for a penny at hundreds to thousands of percent interest.  Hey, for $99.99, ROI on the penny just netted someone another $10k in bonuses, right?  Again, a goofy extreme example, but you get the point.

This is a problem that’s plagued more than just a few business units… more than a few businesses, corporations, conglomerates.  Really, it’s impacted more than just a region, and even the nation.  Poor metrics beget poor metrics. In the global economy, poor metrics, taken collectively, have hidden a great number of sins that contributed significantly to the global downturn referred to as “The Great Recession”.   (Who wants to know where they’re going when they don’t like the answer, I guess, huh?)

No one, from your boss, to world governing bodies, can point the ship in the right direction without a clear picture of where we’re at.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Publishing Content Separately from Presentation

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Separating content from presentation is a very old “Best Practice”™. 

Publishing using web technology is not new anymore, either, but mobile puts a newish urgency in that best practice.  I’m seeing ignorance of the old best practice bite some in a potentially surprising way as the age of mobile apps become the preferred way to consume content.

Here’s what I mean by publishing separate content and presentation… 

Take for example a menu from a restaurant.  I’m finding in many cases, restaurants have web sites that publish their menu.  Their menu items are content, and the web site presents it in a pleasant manner.  In many cases, the presentation and the content are published just in that web page.  (The menu items are “hard coded” as HTML into the page.)

If the restaurant’s menu items are “hard coded” into the page presentation, it’s very hard for anyone to re-use that information in any other presentation.  It’s not impossible.  It can be “scraped”, and some tools do a decent job of it.  It’s just not easy enough. 

The more technically correct path is to publish the content as a web service, and then publish the web site.  The web presentation layer should consume content it gets from the service. 

Why does this matter?

There’s lots of functionality that can be provided by a content service.  Users can consume portions of the content by filtering it, sorting it, or classifying it.

To expand on that, I’ll pick on Microsoft’s Windows Phone AppStudio a bit, since they’re the star in my circles right now.  Microsoft’s AppStudio is one of many ways to create apps for mobile devices.  (In this case, for Windows Phones, but that’s beside the point.)  AppStudio’s niche is making it easy for people to pull in content from various sources and present it in their own Windows Phone app.  LOTS of people are building apps for just about everything you can imagine…  members of the Granite State Windows Phone Users Group are producing a ton of apps based on it.  

Here’s some statistics to try to paint a picture of this.  The NH Windows Phone UG community publishes a list of apps produced by its members.  In the past three months since App Studio was released, I estimate that the number of apps in that catalog has doubled, and 95% of the new apps are AppStudio apps, consuming and re-presenting, making use of content provided by 3rd parties. 

What makes it easy to build AppStudio apps is that it has a simple presentation of its own… all folks need to do is find content that’s been formatted in one of a few very standard ways.

We have, for example, a grade-school aged member of the #NHWPUG community building and publishing apps with AppStudio.  His publisher name is YoungMaster, and his first app is called “Kids Zone”.  The cool part about Kids Zone is that he was able to add video content from YouTube.  His app merely queries YouTube for certain kinds of videos, and YouTube responds with a list (in a standard format) of items.  Users of the app simply tap the list for more information about it, or to watch the video.

Now, back to that restaurant…  if a patron/fan developer wants to make an app for a specific restaurant, it would be very hard to add that restaurant’s menu items if the menu item information is not published separate from the web site presentation.  

Another application might be to allow a person searching for a meal to browse menu items from a number of nearby restaurants.  Will your restaurant’s menu items be available in the list?

Lots of folks already understand this concept of separately published content and presentation, and apps pop up around the content all the time.  Movie theaters, travel agencies, transit authorities, social media updates, news agencies… all publish their content separate from their web site presentations. 

What’s rougher, for folks using a CMS (Content Management System), chances are, you have the ability to publish a Syndicated Feed or RSS Feed that would do the job… but if you’re not enabling and exposing it, you’re missing a chance for folks to help spread the word about your company in these new ways.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Feb 2014 Meetings for the Granite State NH Users Groups

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Two things for the Granite State Users Groups for February 2014…

  1. The Granite State SharePoint Users Group will be meeting on a special night in a special place for a special speaker. Monday, Feb 10th, Daniel Webster College, Eaton Richmond Room 100, Joel Oleson will be presenting “Your Enterprise Social Journey”.  Alexander Technology Group will have the pizza hot at 6 PM, the presentation will begin at about 6:30.  Please RSVP (FREE) Here:  http://granitestatesharepoint.eventbrite.com
  2. The Granite State Windows Phone Users Group will be meeting at its regular date & location (6 PM, Microsoft Store in Salem, NH on February 20th), but our format will be a bit different from the normal.  Instead of a feature presentation, we’ll have an exercise in community app reviewing & rating.  This semi-dynamic RSS feed represents the list of apps known community published apps:  http://www.kataire.com/gswpug/gswpugservices.svc/getdata .  Please, bring your friends, phone(s), and RSVP for the meeting here:  http://granitestatewinphone.eventbrite.com

Hope to see you there!

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Aggregating Windows Phone Store Apps into RSS

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Naturally, there’s an app for the Granite State NH Windows Phone Users Group.   🙂

I recently added the ability to aggregate listings from the Windows Phone app store to create a list of apps published by our members.  RSS seemed the natural way to present the info, since it was consumed easily by an App Studio app.

I showed it off a bit at the users group, and got a few requests for some of the code.

Once published, you should be able to go to http://{yourserver}/{optional}/GSWPUGServices.svc/GetData to load the RSS feed.

It’s currently published at http://www.kataire.com/GSWPUG/GSWPUGServices.svc/GetData

Here’s the project.

http://sdrv.ms/1cNYO9T

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Alaska, Undiscovered Country

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

There’s been a note of surprise in the money news of late about Alaska. 

It’s become a bit of a surprise that the most sparsely populated state in the US has suddenly become the hottest opportunity for corporate growth.  Alaska is a place where consumers have been largely ignored and fully under served…  yet suddenly logistics technology caught up with economists.  The change in tide has come about so suddenly that there’s actually a race to get established there before the market gets saturated by competition.  (For Example)

What’s a tech blogger doing, pointing out an economics topic?  Well… here’s where the post turns into a geek post…  🙂

I can’t help but notice a parallel between the Alaskan boom and the Windows Phone boom that’s also under way.  Corporations in saturated markets (IOS and Android) meet the growing, underserved market, and the realization that both past investments and new technologies can be leveraged…  and suddenly there’s a whole new customer base waiting to be conquered in terms of apps and customer attention and loyalty in the company’s native space.

Unlike Alaska, the Windows Phone market is global.  It’ll likely literally take something earth shattering to make Alaska a bigger part of the US market than one of fifty states.  Windows Phone Store is already serving over 100 markets world wide.

Unlike Alaska, the Windows Phone market growth opportunity is virtually unlimited.  A company that conquers an Alaskan market will see growth, but it will not likely ever exceed the established markets in the lower 48.   In the Windows Phone market, a company could make it’s big break there in the relative scarcity of competition, and even as the Windows Phone platform market share grows, could end up seismically shifting the landscape in their market.

Unlike Alaska, there’s no logistics challenge.  Many companies already have all the elements required to make the jump to Windows Phone…  the talent pool, the code base, the infrastructure, very likely existing network services and even binaries.

Microsoft and Nokia have already taken the Windows Phone platform to the many Alaska’s of the world, and the platform’s already beating out the likes of both IOS and Android in many of them.   The US market is critical, but Microsoft (and Nokia) know that these the Alaska’s they’re winning in will eventually unite, and overwhelm from the edges as the incumbent platforms fade past their maturity.  Those with vision beyond this quarter’s numbers would be wise to jump on board before their competition saturates their market.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Windows Phone Email Sync Error Code 8500201F

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

A reminder to myself, and anyone else who may encounter this issue.  I have occasionally run across it and finally nailed down the symptom and work-around solution…   The problem is that in rare (maybe once in six months or so) I would get an error while syncing my mail in Windows Phone.  It’s an Exchange server, getting at the mail through OWA, and the fact that the error appeared & disappeared without warning, and only affected me, made it very mysterious. 

To make a long story short, sent a message to a fictitious address on my own email server trying to test something, and naturally got a administrator’s “non-deliverable address” message back.   This NDA message in my in-box was causing the error code 8500201F, making my phone fail to sync.  I discovered this by cleaning out my in-box, which got sync working again.  I then started putting messages back a few at a time until sync failed again.  I eventually narrowed it down to that NDA message.  Not sure why it’s a problem, but that’s what it was.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Late Summer/Fall 2013 in Granite State Users Group Events

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)
Fred Brandon Presenting at SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire 2012

Something I haven’t been doing enough of, ever, is blogging about upcoming events for the two users’ groups I help co-organize.   I generally think of this as a technology blog, and while I often like to blog about everything from nitty-gritty technical details to architectural level development stuff, I think I can spare a label for community involvement.  🙂 

While SP Tech Con is rolling along down in Boston, here’s what’s rolling just a smidge north of there.

We just had our August 8th meeting for the Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group at Daniel Webster College in Nashua.   Due to a scheduling conflict Rebecca Isserman couldn’t make it… thankfully Kris Huggins stepped up and presented on MS Project integration with SharePoint 2013 (as opposed to Project Server itself).  

We also organized a bit for volunteers for SharePoint Saturday, New Hampshire, 2013 as well as went over topics for SPSNH speaker selection.   All in all, we had a great meeting… those that attended really got to take part in what is becoming a special tradition for the users group and SPSNH.

Granite State SharePoint Users Group Meeting at the Microsoft Store in Salem

Our next meeting for the Granite State SharePoint NH Users Group meeting will be September 12th, with Richard Harbridge, from Microsoft!   In fact, we will be meeting at the Microsoft Store in Salem, NH, as well.  I believe this will be a fun easing-in “back to school” atmosphere event!  🙂

Richard’s visit should also be an excellent last call before SharePoint Saturday NH on September 21st.  We’re really psyched to have a new location for SPSNH:  the Radisson Nashua.   It has been host to bunches of great events I’ve personally attended… so I’m really proud that SPSNH has grown to this level!

We have a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics and even great vendors with cool stuff to show off there.

If you haven’t gotten your FREE SPSNH attendee ticket, please do so…  they are limited, and we won’t get much notice before we run out.   You can knock that off your to-do list at http://spsnh2013.eventbrite.com


As far as my other group, the Granite State NH Windows Phone Users Group goes, our next meeting is this week, August 15th.  We’ve got Roman Jacquez, UI Developer Lead of Qvidien, with

“Creating Multiplayer Turn-Based Games with Windows Phone and Windows 8”, again, at the Microsoft Store in Salem. 
 
Going out through September, the NHWPUG’s meeting will be September 19th (just days in front of SPSNH!) with Gary Ritter, who will be chatting about “Favorite Windows Phone Development Tips ad Shortcuts for Beginners”, also at the Microsoft Store.

I’ll also take this opportunity to thank Daniel Webster College, the Microsoft Store, and Alexander Techology Group for their steadfast support of the users groups, and Edgewater and Atrion for their core-team support of SharePoint Saturday!

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I happened across a copy of “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint” at the local Barnes and Noble today!   

How could I not be psyched that Jason Himmelstein, good friend and co-organizer of the Granite State SharePoint Users Group, SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire, and the Granite State Windows Phone Users Group has copies of his book (co-authored with David Feldman) on the shelf at the book store?!   (and according to B&N’s website, it’s at stores all over NH…. and I’m sure well beyond that, too)   (ISBN: 978-1449320836)

The guy even had the nerve to put my name in it, too…  🙂

I’ll post my (fully unbiased) review as soon as I’m done reading it…  🙂

I also figure that if I can be in any small way an inspiration to someone accomplishing something like that, I might possibly have to stop resting on my published apps, give myself a boot in the butt and get some pages out there, too… as soon as I find time.  

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

The Lumia 1020: Threat to the Status Quo

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I stopped by my local AT&T store today [Saturday, July 27, 2013] (the corporate store at the Mall of NH in Manchester) to check out the Lumia 1020.  I’d heard lots about it so I was pretty psyched…  I already have (and love) my Lumia 920… it was released back in December, so it hasn’t been a year yet.  No real hope of upgrading just yet, but being a founding member of the NH Windows Phone Users Group, I take the supposed obligation to checked it out, as I did with Verizon’s 928, and T-Mobile’s 925.    🙂

I know the competition between mobile devices is a bit hot, despite the decline in popularity of iPhones, the non-restart of the Blackberry, the fragmentation of the Android, and the slow rise of the Windows Phone, but I never thought the competition might be this hot until today…  I came to hypothesize that there might be sales reps who, for whatever reason, have their favorites, and possibly….  just maybe… feel threatened by devices that rival them.  

Walking into the store, I was really happy to see the Lumia 1020 display…. they had a yellow and a black unit out.  

Getting closer, I had to second guess myself that these were actually 1020’s.  They looked much like my 920, and these units looked… worn…  like they’d been on display since… December of the year before.   The yellow unit was powered on, at the start screen.  The black unit was off.  Both had been scratched pretty heavily, especially at the point where the security device attached to the face of the display…. (hindering some of the UI, I noticed… the search button was fully obscured.)  especially the black one.   Given how tough the surface is… I can only imagine that someone spent some time working at scratching up the unit.   (If you examine the image below carefully at full resolution, you can just about make out the scratches… I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time taking the picture with my 920’s great-but-not-1020-awesome camera…. but they’re there.)  

I ignored the scratches for the time being… these were brand spanking new units that clearly almost no customers had been shown in the less than 24 hours since it was unboxed and put on the shelf.  I was just excited to see the 1020.

But still, I was unsure… could these be 920’s?   I had to pick it up and look at the back to see the 1020’s camera spot…  yes, clearly 1020’s.   It was the yellow unit I’d picked up, since the black unit was not powered on.   I asked my son to pose for me, so I could take his picture with the awesome 41MP camera.

The unit powered itself off almost as quickly as I fired up the camera.

OMG….  Did it just crash?

No…  this unit is not charging.  It has this big honkin’ lit-up security device attached to it, but that’s not providing any power to the Lumia.   Someone had failed to provide power to the devices;  they were on the factory charge and had run dead.  Yes, batteries on both Lumia’s were dead as doornails.

 A rep finally approached me, and asked if he could help.   I asked him if we could please get some power to these Lumia 1020’s so that I could take a look at them.   After a few minutes, the rep returned with the power cords (as seen attached to the USB ports in the image, below.)

I waited several minutes for the devices to charge enough for the power to come back on, and played with them for a few moments.   There was a box on the left of the display bay designed to allow you to take a picture of a picture within it, simulating various lighting conditions.  It wasn’t much more than a simple box, but it was misassembled, and the point of it was lost unless you read a bit.

I enjoyed playing with the camera a bit, taking a few different photos, and experimenting with the new zoom gestures & such… and was duly impressed with it.   It was also lighter than my 920, and I found myself wishing I could just bite the bullet and upgrade.  🙂

Most Windows Phone devices, I’ve noticed, when put on display, get set up with demo accounts so you can download apps from the app store and try them out.  I often like to see how my apps behave on newer devices.  Neither of these units were set up with connectivity… no cellular, no Wi-Fi.

The final bit that really got me thinking about how someone at this store might really feel threatened somehow by the Lumia 1020 was because I realized, as I looked around the store….  no other unit in the store had a big honkin security device obscuring part of the UI as both these 1020’s did.   The security devices for every other unit in the store was entirely attached to the back of the devices with nothing else on the faces of them…  so it felt like someone spent time to fit these particular devices with these old security rigs that they used that also damaged the devices and hindered any demos…

Really, I’m a big Windows Phone fan and Nokia Lumia fan, but this display was almost enough to make me think AT&T doesn’t want folks to see this as the flagship upgrade in the Windows Phone lineup.   In any case, I don’t think I’ll send friends & family to that store to check them out.

So my only problem with my hypothesis…  why, really, might a rep at a mobile store want to sabotage their own products?   Could they really feel the 1020’s a threat to… iPhone?  Android?   Any other hypotheses on that level?

[Edit: 7/30:  I got a response from this… (Surprised… unexpected… humbled… but appreciated!)   If I understand it correctly, the suboptimal demo experience was officially deemed “accidental”, and the units have been replaced…  and so have the security devices… so that the demo experience will be as it should be… and I’ll be happy to recommend to friends & family to go to the AT&T store & check the 1020 out.  🙂   ]

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

D11: What’s Wrong with Devices Everywhere?

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Reports coming back from D11 indicate that most companies are focusing on (according to a report attributed to Mary Meeker)  “Wearables, Drivables, Flyables, Scannables”.

Simply put, I tend to disagree still. 

While all these brilliant minds are gathering, I think the feedback leaking out feels as out of touch as the iPhone…  I’m not sure it even sounds different anymore.

With respect to wearables, I believe the pre-backlash against Google Glass is telling, and has more to do with the fact that people are very comfortable with their smartphones… and not so comfortable with the Borg-like assimilation of them.  

I think Apple will run into the same sorts of issues with the iWatch.  I’d rather put an iPhone on an arm- or wrist- band than have both an iPhone and an iWatch…  that makes two devices to manage the care & feeding of…  this goes directly against the premise of the SmartPhone… the idea that *one* device is your buddy and your complete “away-mission” kit.

The idea of drivables is similar.  Computers in cars is one thing.  I don’t want to have another computer interface in my car. 

Blame it on R2-D2 and the Borg.

No one wants to be assimilated. 

Further, why carry an X-Wing (or Y-Wing or B-Wing) fighter around when you can have your astromech (smartphone) follow you from fighter to fighter?

While I fully agree…  any company worth their salt should be looking at making everything have a well connected computer in it,  they should not, necessarily, be looking at having a human interface on those devices.  These should be control & reporting processors built into devices, not redundant smartphones built into devices.

Let the interface be our beloved astromech… I mean smartphone.

I love where some auto manufacturers are going with things like Ford SYNC.

The ten year cycle on the smartphone is only just beginning, and wearables, drivables, flyables and scannables probably won’t work as stand-alone products, but as extensions of the smartphone era.