Motorola Xoom Review

Got a Motorola Xoom from BestBuy but contrary to my expectation of making it my beloved tablet for a long time, I had to return it in a couple of days. I do see a lot of tweets from people claiming it's a great device and using video experiences as evidence and think it nice to share my own experience of the device.

Disclaimer: This is not to prevent any buyer from going ahead with their wish but for them to know exactly what they are paying so much for.

Likes

I like the feel of the device and the wide screen size that it offers. The power button location was well thought of and it fits nicely with my left index finger. Email application quite cool too and the concept of shifting view like a rotating cube I find appealing. Device battery life is great as I used this for hours without having to charge it. The video app is very good and play video nicely well.

Dislikes

The OS (Android HoneyComb) is still very buggy and you do not need to be a tech savvy user to break it. It's really not that functional yet due to the low number of available applications. I went ahead for sake of testing and installed the Asphalt game and some other apps. The game was rendered improperly, though works but the on-screen button will not work unless on some other location on the screen. GTalk app does not allow voice chat yet. Firing up the browser and navigating to Google, I noticed a twitch at the left side of the view causing improper rendering of the page. All other sites I was able to use it with seems fine though. Android market apps restrict the user to only landscape view.

The two segment at the back does not look all that nice but that's a little trivial. USB charging is not supported and makes use of Motorola charging port, though device has a micros USB port which is only for data transfer. The Motorola Xoom will also not recognize micro SD card yet, I understand Motorola is working on a fix as I called BestBuy concerning this. The volume buttons when depressed breaks the audio for a little while hindering smooth audio while increasing or decreasing volume. Also pinch to zoom does not work everywhere. The on-screen keyboard and key sizes does not make for great typing along with the form factor. Typing on this device is not smooth.

Conclusive View

I really do think Motorola and maybe Google rushed this device to the market and they should be nice enough to admit that. Paying so much for that device for someone with no access to credit, it's really was annoying that usability of the device sucks so badly for me that I had to return it before it starts taking scratches. The device have potentials no doubt but a lot of work still needs to be done on the overall experience.

The Xoom being a flagship android tablet has not been able to overtake the Samsung Galaxy tab with which runs a better tested OS (Froyo) and most android apps runs smoothly on it.

My HTC Desire Review

Much have been said about the HTC Desire since it's release in February, 2010. Reviewers has showered quite so much accolades on the device that I hardly could find any thumb-down review of it.

In all, honesty, it's a beautiful device, and with the Android 2.2 (Froyo) doing great on the device you'd think no device maker could ever get it wrong.

I recently made a painful switch from the iPhone 3GS to the HTC Desire. Painful not because the HTC Desire is inferior but because I have had the iPhone 3GS customized so much that I find it hard to separate from it.

As a phone, the HTC Desire is way lot better and as a PDA, it does come neck to neck with the iPhone 3GS. Comparison with iPhone 4 is an entirely different stuff and will not want to go into that as I am a bit biased with the Gyroscope addition from Apple and Retina display is insanely out of this world. I am particularly also happy for being rid of the Jobs/Apple's control on what you can and can do with the device and having to beg @geohot for a new hack anytime an update comes available.

Despite the HTC Desire being better, I missed quite some features from my iPhone 3GS and also some not initial pain points from HTC itself.

1. Memory

The HTC Desire runs on 512MB on-phone memory and ships with 4GB micro SD card upgradeable to 32GB.

This sounds cool on a review spec but sucks so much in reality. I had so much apps running on previous 3GS. I got apps doing way so many stuffs. A lot of the apps on the Android market I will say discriminates running on the SD card. They all prefer to run on the on-Phone memory. Only six apps (Blogger droid, Goggles, Opera Mini, Bible, ConnectBot and FxCamera) out of the little that I installed are disciplined enough to move to the SD memory so right now I am running out of phone memory and got services crashing due to this but got lots of space on the SD card.

2. Touch Screen

Apple seems to lead in this area and I wonder why the other device maker still struggle with smooth touch experience. I find the HTC Desire lagging a little in touch sensitivity.

3. Orientation Transition

Screen orientation transition on the HTC Desire not smooth. It's like a refined transition of my old HTC Tytn II screen transition. The iPhone gives better transition as you can see the screen rotating as you turn the phone but in the case of the Desire, you simply see a switch and no transition.

4. Message Alert

A user cannot separate email alert from message alert. All got bound under the name of notification alert. I currently use "Excuse me boss, you got a text message!" so I do get alerted for messages even when I got email or Fring Notification.

5. Keyboard

The HTC Desire onscreen keypads looks nice and the little vibration from the phone helps gives it's usage a close to reality experience but lags way behind the iphone keypads in terms of accuracy. I have so much typos in my tweets and emails than I have even in the stylus days.

Do check my recent tweets with HTC desire signatures to confirm this.

6. Speech-to-Text

I have heard much praises even from Friends about the Android Speech-To-Text feature but my experience of it is not convincing. I do email and SMSs while driving and need this to work great but not yet.

7. Do I trust HTC?

I got complaints from earlier HTC Android device owners on the delay from HTC anytime there's a new Android update and the risk of HTC not releasing an update refresh for older Android devices. I will expect the HTC to be able to run future Android updates but if HTC refuses to release an update for it, then I am back to the seemingly Apple spot.

Other Little Quirks

- Sometimes open emails only to reply same email and a message stating can't find recipient

- Sometimes click on a message but another message got loaded

- Sometimes delete messages, got confirmation it's done but message still on phone. Works when you redo the task

- No unified email experience

- No on-device screenshot feature

- I am a gamer - iPhone has better games

Conclusion

I can actually live with most of the issues above except the memory issue which seems to get a lot under my skin. The HTC is a lovely device with better Exchange Integration, awesome email and MMS capability (the iPhone sucks with MMS), radio capability, live wallpapers, true multitasking and better voice call clarity, Sense UI and Android Scene features.

Unboxing New XBox 360 Slim

After weeks of checking Best Buy stores all around Houston for availability of the new XBox 360 S, was finally able buy one. Shipping down to Nigeria took a bit longer too but alas I have it here at last.

I would have loved it shipped with MS Kinect but that could be purchased later. THe pack include, the XBox Console, ever humongous power pack (though much smaller that the one I used to have), a single wireless controller with 2 batteries, and AV cable (this is quite disappointing as I would expect HDMI cable instead).

With that said, I'd like to record a personal review.

To My Review
Seeing the black glossy device on my shelf was a welcome change to my former XBox 360 Arcade. Packaging was cool too.

Though Microsoft claimed the XBox 360 S was much quiet that the former, I still cannot help but get a bit mad with the humming sound coming out of the device.

The device buttons require light touch that even a mosquito bumping into the switch can flick on the device. Not particularly sure this may be in my wish-list while using the old XBox 360 but I consider this cool.

I use a NTSC TV in a region with lots of PAL devices so I love that it's got HDMI slot which is my main reason for changing to the new device. Just why did it not get shipped with a cable.

Most annoying is that I saw an immediate need to want my games and achievements on the old device copied to the new XBox 360. Microsoft did not have a zero cost pocket friendly solution to this simple need but for a purchase of $15 copy kit. Right now, I may have to replay my seven XBox titles. Kinda pathetic.

Before now, I have read quite a few review of this new hot-selling device but never noticed any complaint on the incompatibility of the memory card on the old device. I had four of this which automatically became useless and will just have to give these away to whosoever I sold the device to.

I love the new 250GB (would prefer more) but not finding making my former 120GB unusable pleasant. I bought this separately and having to do away with it hurts.

My recommendation is if you already had the former XBox 360, there is little to gain buying the new device but if you do not, this is a console you'd love to Jam a cool Xbox title on.

MVP Summit 2010 Ends

The day began like any other morning and MVP turnout at breakfast was quite scanty. A few MVPs had left at the early hours of the morning while the others are still in bed after a long night at the Garage, downtown Seattle.

Keynote was at 9am with Nestor Portilo and his supporting entertainers on Stage. Quite some new NDA stuff which I consider cool. A lot of new eye-opener to the Bing Paradigm. I enjoy that session most though

Find more picture of the summit at My Picasa

Summit is now over and all I got left are the side sessions and a party tonight with Nerd Dinner.

MVP Summit Day 1

Arrived at Bellevue yesterday aternoon like a few other MVPs but not much activities though. My MVP lead (Ruari Plint) was benevolent enough to take all MEA MVPs out to the PumpHouse for dinner.

Day One of the summit begin with MVP registration and the side sessions commenced 12pm till 3.30pm.

All MVPs were looking forward to the Keynote address with Nestor Portillo and Toby Richard.

Got my Team Canada Hockey shirt too

Thanks Mitch...

Later went rookie bowling at the Lucky Strike Lanes just across the sky bridge.

Windows 7 on MacBook

Having a MacBook is something I am quite proud about but then I am not ready to give-up the Windows that I have known all my life. I have been using Windows 7 for over a year and what a cool OS I find it to be. Even though the Mac OS X Snow Leopard is cool too. I still want my Windows running on it. What's the use of having an Intel-based processor if I can't run Windows as well. Even Linus if I choose to.

I installed Windows 7 on my BootCamp drive and it was smooth though Apple recommends on Windows XP and Windows Vista. After installation, I installed the bootcamp tools supplied by Apple. All my devices seems to work fine. One by one I checked them and tick them off in my head: Wifi- check, bluetooth -check ....

I decided to look a bit more under the hood. Fired up Device Manager and alas, two errored devices. Apple USB Ethernet and Co-Processor does not seem to have the right drivers. Fumbled around for hours without success to getting them to work. I can't live without an ethernet port even if the co-processor does not seem to matter initially; some computation will have to suffer.

Come Google to the rescue (thanks for not censoring anymore in China). Found out some other people have encountered this and no clear-cut solution until I came across a post by tnkgrl Mobile. In the post, a link to the driver is provided.

The Windows XP driver provided works like magic.

Things I hate about my Mac

The Mac is a very good machine. I am like the Paul of the Mac machine formerly Saul of PC - prosecuting the Mac System and stoning Mac users (not literarily) if you happen to have read the bible at all or heard from those that have read (like I did).

I find the Mac incomparable with the PC. The Spec of My Mac Book Air is about the Spec of my previously owned PCs I bought 2 years ago but much faster than my last PC with far better Spec. Believe me, you won't be comparing "Apple" to "Apple" comparing the Mac and PC.

I could hear someone whispering "That's cos u were running Windows". Wrong!! I have Windows 7 running on my Mac too and it's Blazing fast.

My conclusion is that I will like to believe this is due to some sluggish defect in the PC design.

Spoken by a recent Mac user ....

However, I hate a few stuffs about my Mac.

1. My MacBook Air has just one USB slot. This is no problem with Mac but on the other hand it is. I could have chosen other model other than the Air you would say, but then I had the option of a USB hub you would also suggest. Wrong! The Mac work's better with powered USB so I could not have my network running and still have my drive on. Solution - Buy a powered USB hub - $35

2. NTFS drives are loaded as readonly. Just wondered why Apply had to make this the default option in Mac. OS X reads NTFS pretty well and should also write if you ask me.
Solution - Include UUID in /etc/fstab file (tiresome and often require restart) or buy a NTFS Manager like Paragon NTFS for mac $40

3. Mac is too pretty. I find it hard to imagine the future of my Mac with faded keyboards and trackpads. Think I need the Wireless keyboard and mouse - mouse I say, I want the Magic Mouse $70+$70 = $140

4. Can't get Mail to work with Exchange Server used in most enterprise. Solution - Buy Mac Entourage bundled with Microsoft Office for Mac. $150

5. Miss Visual Studio So bad. Wish their a version of that the works on the Mac. Mac offers XCode, plus I got Eclipse working (even though they confused on Carbon or Cocoa) and MonoDevelop works great too. Solution is buy CrossOver or Install Windows 7 on your bootcamp and run from VM Fusion with Unity Mode. - average cost - $70 (cross over) + $80 /2 = $75

6. Can't upgrade my MacBook Air RAM beyond 2GB as it has no drive-bays. The RAM is soldered unto the board. I run quite a lot of VMs and 2GB would not be enough. These days my system locks up when I boot up my bootcamp Windows from VM fusion. Solution is buy a Mac Mini and moves task to it. $600

At the end of the day, I have $1040 worth of hatred for my Mac but despite that, I still LOVE IT...

Fixing Ghosted File

Just a few weeks old on the Mac and I already experienced a peculiar situation twice. It's been fun configuring the Mac and getting it as close as possible to my previous Windows dexterity as possible though it's been a lot of distractions too.

On moving files sometimes especially unto a destination NTFS partition, I realised some of the files moved are ghosted. I investigated and discovered this is due to incomplete copy operation. In my situation, the copy process probably did not clean up successfully after the copy. Why will this happen? I already lost files to this previously as I am left with no choice but to delete such files.

This time I had to make sure these files these files are recovered. On googl(e)ing, I learn about undisplayed file attributes of Unix and Mac files. Also learn that tools like RixStep ACP XFiles tools help with controlling such attributes. A single use license cost about $59.

Later I learn about the SetFile tool bundled with the XCode tools. An accompanying GetFileInfo tool will give

$ GetFileInfo [file name]

this is what's shown for Normal files. In my case I had "brok" as type and "MACS" as creator.

This can be corrected by using Send File as below

$ SetFile -c "" -t "" [file name]

Knowing myself not to be able to remember this months down the line, I added this to my .profile file under the unghostfile alias.

SSIS vs Informatica

In a recent outing, I met with a product vendor wanting to do ETL for a Siebel CRM product from Oracle database.

Trust me, I was quick to recommend SSIS which I am very familiar and very recently just had a laudable success extracting and Migration of Billing Information from a Legacy ENDAN (SQL Server based) application to Singl.eView from Intec.

On further discussion with the vendor, he would prefer the use of Informatica (first time getting to know this). I was able to show him lots of cool features SSIS have to offer.

Afterwards, I decided to know more about Informatica and found this on the net

Informatica does not have an equivalent of SSIS’s UNION component . This is a big problem for what I’m trying to do because a lot of the logs that I’m trying to load are in different folders (to represent the different web servers). Informatica requires 2 pipelines (see #3 below) to extract this data whereas SSIS can just have 2 source adapters in the same data-flow and UNION the data together.

SSIS’s method of loading multiple files (i.e. the "Multiple Flat Files Source Adapter") is a lot better than Informatica's. With Informatica you have to, externally to Informatica, build a list of files to process and then pass that list back into Informatica. To make this dynamic at runtime you would have to shell out to an external process to produce the file list. This is not pleasant – especially compared to SSIS’s very simple method of just specifying “*.log” in the source adapter.

I have a pipeline (built in both SSIS & INFA) that filters out all comment lines from the web logs, extracts all the individual fields (e.g. Timestamp, ClientIP address, URI, Referrer etc...), and inserts into a SQL Server table. The SSIS pipeline is working on ~150000 rows and completes in ~23 seconds. The Informatica method (which uses 2 pipelines cos of #1 above) takes ~45 seconds. Even 1 Informatica pipeline on its own (working on about half the records) took ~27 seconds. Bear in mind also that the SSIS pipeline was run from BIDS and as I have previously mentioned, BIDS places a large overhead on the execution of a package. I would suppose that Informatica does not have the same restriction. In short, SSIS seems a lot quicker!

SSIS’s method of dynamically setting the destination at runtime (i.e. configurations) is a lot better than the Informatica equivalent. With Informatica you have to configure each task to use the dynamic value, and setting up the value itself is a manual process because you have to manually handcraft what is termed a parameter list. SSIS does this using the configuration wizard. Let me say again, EVERY Informatica task that uses an external connection has to have a dynamic configuration set up using this method; with SSIS you do it in one place, on the Connection Manager.

This even has more indept comparison
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/0/3/103fd39e-3ca4-4db7-a087-1263dc6ed0b1/CompIntTools.pdf

Happy New Year!

It's a New Year! Happy New Year to all you guyz and Hope 2010 holds so much great Software Experience ...

Me & My Mac

Just got a Mac. It's been quite a while since I have been longing to get a Mac which resulted in saving up money and spending it before getting to the Macbook Pro 17" target and all assorted. Finally settled for a MacBook Air and it's such a beautiful machine.

Such a great leap from my previous HP crap and even though the mac cost a lot more, it's worth every dime. I can go and on on features and cool stuff.

The good side, I don't have to be separated from my Windows, it's got an intel processor so I installed Windows 7 on it too.

Some old Pix

Some very old pix of me and mi pals at Telnet Basement working with SoftWorks Limited.

Duplicate Filtering in SSIS

Having being frustrated on lack of duplicate filtering in SSIS, I decided to take a work around, first dump the data in a temporary table and pick it up with "select distinct … “ in the next task. This work around works though but fails in instances that the filter had to be applied on some of the columns selected unlike “select distinct ..” that applies across all the selected columns.

Alas!!! SSIS provides this in the Sort Task and can be applied just as I want it in my project. Simply select the columns you want to filter on as the sort keys and check “Remove rows with duplicate soft values”.  Voila! problem solved.

 

IMHO, I consider the sort task an overkill for this purpose but no other alternative unless the developer will not mind building a dedicated filtering task for SSIS. SQL Central provides samples on how to build SSIS task.

Multipoint Collaborative Application

A client walked up to me after a recent presentation asking how to go about having a collaborative multi-mouse based application. I pulled back a bit before responding, quickly kicking around in my head. What will happen if I got multiple input device (mouse devices) in Windows? It should just work. Notebooks has had this features for years and it just work but then I gotta see what happens if I got more mouse.

Secondly, if it does work, how do I differentiate which device is in control in an application. They both most likely will  generate same Windows event. – brain dead lock.

“Ehmm“ I fumbled to respond. “It’s possible but I can’t give you a solution straight up. Can we talk about this again in a couple of weeks.”

I bought an extra USB mouse device (already got a Mogo mouse) on my way home. Connected this up to a notebook and it all worked. All controlled same mouse as expected which left me with the second question. “How do I differentiate this in an application”.

Of course, Google to the rescue. After hours of google(ing) it with B’ing, I came across this article by P. Opdahl from on CodeProject.

It’s quite an interesting Read and done with C++(Not so happy about that, so quick to understand C#, VB and Python these days). I search some more and and more and came across Microsoft Multipoint SDK. How could I have missed this?

SDK is installed with sample application of which I find the Quiz sample most interesting.

The Microsoft Multipoint SDK can be downloaded here. Note: This won’t install on Windows 7 unless maybe you install in XP-Mode. I don’t have Intel-VT so this is no option for me.

More Resources

Microsoft Multipoint Blog

Record Value Frequency In SSIS

I blogged last week about a problem on Record Value Frequency in SSIS. I suggested in the blog post on how to go about taking care of this.

“The only way I could see out of this is to write a CLR function to achieve this which I am feeling so lazy to do but still has to be done.”

This I finally had time to do and pasted below is the simple CLR User Defined Functions (UDF)

static readonly Dictionary<SqlString, SqlInt32> myDic = new Dictionary<SqlString, SqlInt32>();

    [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]

    public static SqlString SvSequence(SqlString colValue)

    {

        SqlInt32 nextValue = 1;

        if (myDic.ContainsKey(colValue))

        {

            myDic[colValue] += 1;

            nextValue = myDic[colValue];

        }

        else

            myDic.Add(colValue, 1);

        // Put your code here

        return nextValue.ToSqlString();

    }

    [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]

    public static SqlString RestartSequence()

    {

        myDic.Clear();

        return new SqlString();

    }

Notice the readonly used in the static declaration for the dictionary. This is enforced by the compiler for static class member as a requirement. I also had to create a reset function which IMHO is not that cool but I need a way to reset this as the value kept increasing each time the UDF is called.

dbo.RestartSequence ;

select AccountId, dbo.SvSequence(AccountId) from dump

PDC 2009

I have always known that PDC event will be in November but not sure if the date has been fixed. Today, I had to start writing plans for November and realized I have no idea of the actual date.

After some Googling with ‘Bing over the net, found the dates to be from Tuesday, November 17th through Thursday, November 19th. Not so excited that it’s going to be in LA (LAX Convention Centre) again!. Would have preferred some other city like San Francisco or any other cool place Microsoft may think up.

Do join the wave @pdc09 and search for the tag name #pdc09 for the excitement buildup. Also register for the mailing list.

Mike Swanson had so much to say about it in his blog.

Pimp my Notebook

After months of feeling so sorry for my Hp notebook and prayed silently that i can afford a new mac pro. decided to shape it up a bit. Stepped up d RAM to blazing 4G, OS to Win 7, HD to 320GB (7200rpm) and then adorn it with these stickers.

That should get d Mac off my mind 4 some months hopefully till apple rethinks its pricing.

Hi Pal!

A dear friend I met at the summit earlier in the year.

He had this as cover of his presentation in China just after the summit. Hi Pal!

Record Value Frequency

First I’d like to quote my recent tweet on this issue

Have always considered SSIS to be extremely flexible but lately found wrong. Nevertheless, yet to find any ETL too that can beat it

I think I may have been wrong to blame this on SSIS but rather on limitations of TSQL itself. My situation is a need to have frequency of a record value indicated in a column as indices as below

Value
SEQNR
1
1
2
1
2
2
4
1
4
2
4
3

I tried to use Rank() with partition as shown in snippet below but got a different result. Also ‘Bing(ed) this but came up void of a similar issue.

select value, Rank() over (partition by Value order by Value)

This is like to use and inject into SSIS package. Doing this with combination of SSIS task is not quite straightforward.

The only way I could see out of this is to write a CLR function to achieve this which I am feeling so lazy to do but still has to be done.

Ftp’ing files in Folder in SSIS

Recently, I came across a need to copy all csv files generated from an SSIS process to a Unix server. FTP became handy for this purpose. The FTP SSIS task will not work with folder/directories – came up with error message

File Usage type of connection "xxxxxx" should be "FileExists" for operation Send

This error message is quite misleading. The interpretation is that once you the File Connection Manager being used in the FTP task has a property Usage Type and this Usage Type must be set to “File exists”. This automatically limits the usage of the FTP task to files rather than folder/directories.

The solution is to use the Foreach Loop Container task and place the FTP task within it. Literarily, the loop container enumerates all the files and place them in a variable. This variable is then used in the FTP task.

 
Foreach Loop Container with FTP task embedded

Loop Container configuration

FTP task configuration