Author: Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Net Neutrality and the Return of AOL

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

For cable TV customers, there’s something oddly familiar about the idea of channel providers.  Trading off television channels by switching cable TV providers has long been commonplace in regions where there’s more than one cable TV provider, and long been the envy of those who don’t live in such regions.  If Time-Warner wants to cut off CBS over contract issues, and you live in a place where you only have Time-Warner, you don’t get your NCIS fix.

Flashback to a couple decades ago…  America Online, GEnie, and CompuServe WERE the “Internet”.  If you wanted IN on the “online craze” you had to go to one or more of these companies and buy your seat at their table.  Companies didn’t advertise their web URLs.  They advertised their AOL keywords.  CompuServe had great educational content providers, but AOL was king of chat at a time when chat was king.  Most companies flocked to AOL as a result, and so AOL wasn’t just an ISP, it was THE digital content channel provider.

The channel model died with the rise in popularity of the Internet.   Suddenly, all you needed to connect content to customers was the same thing that everyone needed.  A connection.  Thanks to a convention called “Net Neutrality”, the channel model built by services such as AOL & CompuServe were walls that were knocked down.  Your connection was every “channel”, simultaneously, all the time, with no bundling.  As a business, wanting to publish and contribute your content as a channel, you had only to invest in your own connection, and a little technical infrastructure, and you were in.

Facebook has taken serious shots at bringing the channel model back.  If you want to play certain online games or see some online content, you must join Facebook… and content/gaming providers who want to participate in that must come to agreements with Facebook, of course. 

Yet, with the breakdown of Net Neutrality, the pendulum is swinging solidly back to the channel provider model.  Your ISP now has the right to decide what traffic they carry over their networks and/or throttle performance from different content significantly…  if they want to cut back on Netflix… they can.  If they want to nix Google services, whatever.

Clearly this happened almost instantly with recent judicial rulings…  The jinni is already out of the bottle.  Verizon has decided to effectively drop the “Netflix channel” by cutting Netflix’ bandwidth down to reportedly unusable levels.  This means if you’re on Verizon and were using Netflix, you either have to find a new video streaming service, or you have to find a new channel service provider. 

How long will it be before this impacts every Internet service provider (and even cellular network providers, since VOIP services are reducing them to ISPs as well)?  

Here’s some fictitious quotes from a not so hard to see future (roughly within the next decade):

  • “I left Verizon for Time-Warner because Verizon charges too much for the Office 365 and Facebook channels.  Comcast is tempting, though, because they have Google Hangouts and enhanced YouTube in their HD package.” 
  • “I wish Verizon had the same educational channels as T-Mobile or Sprint, though, cause my kids could use that for school.”  
  • “Thankfully my channel provider and my folks across the country both have enhanced Skype.  I can’t Skype my sister at all, though.”
  • “I had to switch banks when I switched carriers.  AT&T hasn’t come to an agreement with my old bank, so I couldn’t use their online services.”
  • “Amazon’s gone bust since they failed to become a viable channel provider, and every other channel provider decided to compete against them.”
  • “Google is the new AOL.  Most folks can’t even get online except thru Google Fiber. Your business does not have an online presence unless it’s thru them.  It’s too bad your competitors already have exclusive agreements with them.”

ISPs love this, because as cable TV providers will tell you, there’s a lot of pricing power in being a channel provider, but not so much is being a connection provider. 

Businesses will struggle with this, however, because getting your website on the Internet will become a much more complicated proposition.  Sure, you’ll be able to get online the same, but your content won’t be carried the same.   Essentially, small business content will be at the whim of “local access channels” provided by each channel provider.  They’ll all have their own rules and regulations, and even more importantly, their own fees.  Is your audience growing?  You’ll have to hammer out deals with each channel provider to make sure your content gets to all your customers.

Further, how long will it be before we start having a resurgence in custom network interface hardware to the point of ending Wi-Fi and Ethernet as we know it?  We’ve already seen netbooks and tablets that have wireless Internet service tied to specific cellular carriers.  I’d be willing to bet that as channel providers gain hold and start to flex their newfound muscles, a breakdown in connectivity standards will take hold.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Jimmy Sudoku 5, Orange Edition

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)


Please don’t think of it as a hundred dollar app.  Think of it as a free app with the option to support an important cause.

Sometimes when things get “comfortable”, it becomes necessary to shake things up.

Such is the case with my hobby/charity project, Jimmy Sudoku.  

Previously, Jimmy Sudoku had two listings in the Windows Phone app marketplace… one as a free international listing, and once as a paid, US-only listing.  Both were the same exact binaries.

I’ve deprecated the paid US listing, and, in its place set up the single remaining international listing as free trial with the option to buy.  

Expecting to raise more awareness for the cause than direct proceeds, I’ve set the price to… something that will raise eyebrows.   This will take effect as soon as the WP App Marketplace approves the change.

There is no functional difference between the free trial and the paid mode… the app does not even check to see if you bought it, at this point.

Again, 100% of the proceeds from Jimmy Sudoku 5 purchases will continue to go to #NoKidHungry…  again, the app itself is free.  If you choose to pay what I’m asking, the proceeds will be donated. 

If you decide to go directly to the charity and donate to them, I’ve still accomplished what I’m hoping to do with the app.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/jimmy-sudoku-5/92251d32-ad5f-44e6-8f5c-43e834c5c28c
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.