Author: Andreas Tsouchlaris

Instant email: how we made Hotmail 10x faster

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

If you work with Hotmail, you’ll be very very happy. If you haven’t tried it yet, now it’s the best time to be really impressed. And don’t forget that you get an UNLIMITED mailbox for your messages (for normal email usage) with its “ever-growing storage” feature and you can set up your mailbox as an Exchange account in most mobile devices for the best experience (just use m.hotmail.com). Everything about the speed upgrade here: Instant email: how we made Hotmail 10x faster.

To get an idea… The data speaks for itself:

Hotmail
Dec ‘10		 Hotmail
June ‘11
Open message 3.3 seconds 0.18 seconds
Delete message 3.1 seconds 0.14 seconds
Compose new message 4.3 seconds 0.20 seconds

Data represents 75th percentile measurements from hundreds of runs of an automated test against a production server. Bandwidth is 300kb down/75 kb up/150ms latency, and browser is IE9.

Mobility: More patents than in pharmaceuticals?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Ericsson, RIM and EMC grabbed 6,000 (yes six thousand) patents on wireless technology from Nortel for $4.5 billion! Google was planning to spend just $900 million to get them. The enemy of my enemy… you got it. A blog post has a lot of details on this acquisition:

Some consortium members get patents, some get royalties, and some just get freedom from having to pay royalties.

At the end of the day this deal isn’t about royalties. It is about trying to kill Android.

At the same time Microsoft is getting $5 for each Android device from HTC, Wistron, General Dynamics and is heading for Samsung, Motorola and others. The patent strategy proves to be worthy, too.

A very good reading on smartphone strategy written by one of the best analysts in the industry: One cuckoo, two turkeys and three horses; how the mobile race has changed | VisionMobile :: blog. This article is five months old but I remembered it while reading about the fight over Nortel’s patents.

There will be an increase in the use of patents to fight the cuckoo club and the almighty Apple.

And he continues:

Microsoft + Nokia: running with four legs

In the past few months Nokia realised that in order to halt its slide towards irrelevance, it had to take its head out of the sand and instead take a leap of faith. The brave gamble that Nokia has now chosen is perhaps not the ideal one, but it was the only strategy available for long-term survival and is a bold rejection of the short-termism demanded by short-sighted investors in accepting the call of the cuckoo. In tying Nokia and Microsoft together they have created a rather old-fashioned type of partnership but it will be a partnership of bones not a collection of feathers.

We’ll see…

What’s behind WordPress.com and iCloud? Try Azure for free

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Did you know that WordPress.com and its 350,000 blogs is running on Windows Azure cloud infrastructure? And there are hints that even Apple’s new iCloud solution is using part of it… Get a 30-day Windows Azure Platform Pass and try by yourself the Azure platform.

And if you want to know how much it will cost you to deploy your IT stuff on the cloud, use the Windows Azure Pricing Calculator.

My notebook battery is dying. Why?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Most of us have suffered the loss of power of a battery after some months or if we are lucky (or select hardware wisely) after some years. There are a lot of misconceptions and a lot of myths around this problem. But there are experts that can tell us what’s going on and what we can do about it.

One of the worst things you can do to a Li-ion battery is to run it out completely all the time. Full discharges put a lot of strain on the battery, and it’s much better practice to do shallow discharges to no lower than 20 percent.

And for us leaving in Greece especially during Summer temperatures:

Another thing that Li-ion batteries hate is heat. This somewhat less of a problem for cell phones, but a big problem for notebooks. Even using a battery at room temperature for a year can bring its capacity down by as much as 20 percent, and the interior of most computers is a mite cozier than than that. So in a unfortunate twist of fate, laptop batteries usually spend the most time in the worst possible state: plugged in at 100 percent charge, running at an elevated temperature.

Read what you can do to take care of your Li-ion batteries here: Ask Ars: What is the best way to use a Li-ion battery?.

For more information on extending your batteries’ life:  Proper Care Extends Li-Ion Battery Life and everything about batteries here in the Battery University.

 

No internet connection? Fix the TV antenna!

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

A consortium of companies like Microsoft, BBC, Sky Broadcasting and BT has started trials of transmitting data in empty spaces of the radio spectrum used by terrestrial TV. If they are successful, they will create “super WiFi” networks in cities and rural areas. The Financial Times have the rest of the story: Microsoft trial to use UK TV signals for WiFi

The needs for bandwidth and coverage have exceeded the available infrastructure (and way of thinking till now) due to the explosion of mobile devices, smartphones and tablets. That’s why in Japan, for example, KDDI, their principal telco provider, is setting up the largest nationwide WiFi network with 100,000 hotspots in less than 12 months. The most important thing is that the user’s device will switch between 3G (or 4G) to WiFi seamlessly without extra charges for the best experience. More on this here: KDDI and Ruckus Wireless Debut the World’s Largest Mobile Data Offload Network -PRNewswire.

 

 

Elephants love mangoes

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

I only had two missing apps to be completely satisfied with my Windows Phone 7, Skype and EverNote (there are still a lot of missing features that Mango, the upcoming update, will mostly provide). Skype has already been announced and will be available (probably with the Mango update) in Autumn and now EverNote released their first version for WP7. A simple but very useful EverNote client that can handle my basic needs. Not bad at all.

Detailed functionality here: Evernote for Windows Phone 7 Is Here! « Evernote Blogcast.

Read a detailed technical post about Evernote (and development) on WP7: Elephants love mangoes – a look behind our Windows Phone 7 client | Evernote Tech Blog. Damian Mehers, the developer of the WP7 version of EverNote writes:

Superb Tooling

As WP7 developers, we are spoiled.  Not only do we have a powerful, mature and rich IDE in Visual Studio, with great plugins such as Resharper, but we also get a fast emulator, and also a complete, standalone design tool in Expression Blend.

The emulator actually runs as a proper Virtual Machine, using the hardware virtualization features of your computer.  The upside to this is that you get snappy performance, but the downside is that you cannot develop inside a virtual machine, since the emulator will not run inside a virtual machine.

Blend lets you design, animate and tweak your app’s UI.  Although it was primarily created as a “high-end” tool for designers, there was such an outcry from developers, that Microsoft have made it available for free for WP7 developers.  It is a joy to work with, letting you focus on the look and feel of your UI, building storyboards and animations, without worrying about code.

Great Community

The existence of a strong community around WP7 development is far from unique to WP7, however perhaps because Windows Phone is something of an underdog right now, the community feels particularly tight.

Beyond the usual suspects such as Stack Overflow, and Microsoft’s own forum, there are sites such as Windows Phone Geek that provide a constant stream of high quality tips and tricks and articles.

Do you want Android on your PC? Or Mac?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

If you are a developer on a tight budget and need access to various Android environments, there is now a solution. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project team you can have your own Android PC or even better a virtualized environment (or two, or more) to test your apps.    You can install Android-x86 next to a Windows installation on an NTFS filesystem but I prefer and recommend to run it alone on a PC or under VirtualBox. I also liked the fact that my multitool Thinkpad X61t is supported (it also runs MacOSX!).

The current version is based on Android 2.2.2 (Froyo branch). Kernel is updated to 2.6.38. For more information, have a look here: Android-x86 – Porting Android to x86.

Bring the power of Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive to your site

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Almost everybody wants to integrate popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to their own site. Microsoft has made this task very easy for Live Messenger, Hotmail and Skydrive through some Javascript and the appropriate API. If you can handle some code, it’s fairly easy. If not, then just ask your nerdy dev friend to make the “adjustments”.

I liked this part:

Websites typically don’t just offer integration with one service provider. It is common for a website to want to enable sharing to multiple sites like Facebook and Twitter, or allow users to upload their photos from Flickr, Facebook, and SkyDrive.

One of the challenges with supporting services that identity multiple providers on a website is what many have dubbed “the NASCAR effect,” which is when a site has so many logos from so many different providers that it looks a little like a race car with too many corporate sponsors. This practice often ends up confusing users due to the paradox of choice.

To help with this, we make it easy for your app or site to check if a customer uses one of our services before even offering the option to connect.

More details and how to do the actual integration here: Developers: just a few lines of JavaScript connects your site to Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive.

Real-Status builds a bird’s eye view of a cloud

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

I always liked to get information in a graphically visualized way. So, if I could have an overview of the whole IT infrastructure of my company as a 3D graph it would be nice. Real-Status has developed such a solution that also covers virtualized servers (the solution to most of our problems) using expertise from game development.

Read more here: Real-Status builds a bird’s eye view of a cloud — Cloud Computing News.