Ignite Dallas #3

I recently spoke at Ignite Dallas #3 about intelligence and learning. The video was released and can be seen here or below. I've heard from quite a few people about this and the feedback was interesting. It seems to have resonated with most people but some took issue with it.

The people who get it understand that my speech reflected traits in ALL of us. We meet expectations and only rise to the challenges presented to us unless we get inspired and self motivated about something. Most of the time, that is NOT work. It is what it is and that is why I said a few times to apply this "student for life" mentality to things you need to do and not just what you want to do.

I've been told by others who used to work for me, with me, or were just friends that they felt as if I was picking on them specifically. I wasn't talking about ANYONE in particular and in fact the speech was built to touch on EVERYONE because we are all guilty of many of these things even if we never would admit it to others.

I'm very proud of the experience and still stand firmly behind my message. I'm curious if any part resonated with you, and if you have any comments about it. I'm also curious if you've come across any systems or ways to keep yourself motivated and learning. Am I just an idealist or do others agree with my message?

Links:
Toast Masters (Public Speaking)
MIT Free Learning
Wikipedia (Online learning encyclopedia)
Google (Everything else, yes Google works when you want to learn and understand)

Testing Brightcove

I picked up a Brightcove account and I'm playing around with embedding a video into my blog. I'm very impressed with their platform and after evaluating many others, this is the best that I've seen. It's very afforable for a business who wants to do more than just YouTube. While there is nothing wrong with YouTube, it has limitations and this allows you to monetize and control access to your videos.

Learning Resources

It's a safe bet that if you are reading my blog, you have heard of the Amazon Kindle. I've still got and love my original Kindle as it's helped me read more and faster. The ability to search books and carry an entire library around is profound.

The reason most people don't have one if the price barrier. The devices were very expensive but the new models have come down quite a bit. Did you know that there is a free Kindle App for just about every device including mobile phones, iPads, and even your PC. You can download the app for the PC from here.

What is important about this is that there are thousands of free books that are available for anyone. These books are often classics which are public domain and have been input by passionate fans wanting to spread knowledge. There are many books that are free that are excellent sources of inspiration and learning. You can view the free ones here.

Old School Skills FTW!

So, I'm assuming you know that FTW means For the Win!. With that out of the way, I'm very pumped up right now that I was able to pull out my old school Linux skills to solve a very serious problem one of my best friends was having.

My friend has a small business with three people that doing quite alot of work but their data needs aren't huge. They are real and involve print assets but we aren't talking more than 2 terabytes. At his request for a solution, I talked him into a Buffalo Linkstation Pro that holds about 4TB in raid 5 so his data would be protected.

After 15 months of solid use with no issues, they arrived to work one morning and it wouldn't work. We unplugged and re-plugged it back in but the device was stuck in a pattern of running disk checks and not allowing access to the data. We called buffalo and they said it can take up to 8 hours per TB of raw disk. We waited two days and the device now showed up as offline.

We did what any normal person with business data would do and found a duplicate model brand new and tried to swap the disks into it. The only problem was that the problem followed the disks as the new unit had the same behavior and the old unit with new drives was fine. We were hopeful as the errors shown were things like fan failure, unable to mount, etc.

After trying various things over a few days, I threw in the towel. We went back to Fry's and purchases an eSata drive array and put in the troubled drives. We took a working PC, booted it with a Knoppix linux CD and within a few minutes using the commands below, it was all working.

Option 11

(Shell prompt)

fdisk -l

(validating I could see all the physical disks)

mdadm --examine /dev/sde6

(Told me that it was a member of a raid5 group and the other disks were present)

mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sde6 /dev/sdf6 /dev/sdg6 /dev/sdh6

(This brought it bound them together as a unit)

mkdir /mnt/raid

(This made a place for us to mount the new raid for access)

mount -t xfs /dev/md0 /mnt/raid

(This command actually mounted it)

cd /mnt/raid

(Next I went into the device and saw that my data was intact)

mkdir /mnt/share

(Made a place for my windows share to copy the data to)

mount -t smbfs 192.168.0.150:share /mnt/share

(This mounted it up onto the server)

cp -r /mnt/raid /mnt/share

(this copied the data off)

There really wasn't any magic but I had to pull out all my old school skills and think it through. I was honestly a bit scared to get this involved on a drive as it contained someone elses critical business data. All in all, it is done and I feel a HUGE relief. This post is only to document in case it helps someone else. :)

List of Windows Phone7 Apps & Popularity

I stumbled on this link and thought I would share. You can see the apps, and their popularity. So far, all my favorites are in good working order including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare. My hopes are high that the app market won't be flooded with crap like the Android and iPhone stores but I can already see the fart apps and others coming in.

As a former Android G1 user, I'm delighted with the user experience and ease of use that I'm finding with the apps. I'm spending less and less time navigating and I get in and out quickly in my phone. It really is a phone to save me from my phone. So far, I've converted three people into making the switch. Each were iPhone users who have what I describe as iFatigue. They were ready for a change and I see Windows Phone7 being a slow growing that is going to start catching the buzz in the next few months. I'm thinking it's going to be a good time to buy some Microsoft Stock. their stock has been downgraded often because they aren't sexy but between Phone7, Windows 7, and Kinect, I'm thinking it's a great time to buy.

What do you think? Have you seen it yet? I'm smitten and I keep making the joke that I keep playing with it so much that I'm going to go blind. #Love iT!

I've got my HD7!

w00t w00t! So, I got my phone today at 2pm from UPS. I had to wait a week after everyone else because I wanted to save a little money by ordering through Amazon Wireless instead of waiting on T-Mobile to open up their ordering. Instead of $199 for the phone through T-Mobile directly, I got it for $169 from Amazon. To my surprise and delight, I received an email from Amazon a few days before it shipped stating that the lowered the price to $149. Sweet!

So, I get the phone, and it's gorgeous. Despite people saying the screen wasn't that nice, they obviously are much more picky than I am. I've been happily using my Android G1 for the last two years and this is a HUGE step above. The phone feels study and as others have reported, fits nicely into my hand and isn't too big.

For the unboxing and setup, I've been running into some stumbling blocks that might hurt the experience for those less technical or patient. My brother used to work at T-Mobile and I know he would have his hands full over the last week with complaints. My issues are detailed below to help others and they aren't meant as a complaint. I know what I get into with being an early adopter and I am hard headed enough to love it.

1. To be honest, it took me a few minutes to even figure out how to turn it on. there is a piece of plastic over the battery connectors so despite clicking power and trying to charge it, I had to open up the back and remove it.
2. Adding emails and linking accounts was pretty simple. I couldn't auth to my Xbox Live ID and it was driving me crazy because my other Live ID worked just fine with the same exact password. This one is resolved as it turns out this ID has a non Microsoft suffix and when I logged in via a web browser, I needed to authorize my account. A click of "Send authorization email" and then clicking the "Yes, I want to authorize this account" in the email made the problem go away.
3. During the setup, the initial Facebook setup process was easy, the only problem was that it brought in the contacts and shocking amount of information for my over 700 friends into my phone. Under settings, then people I selected to not list contacts that were not linked to others in my phone. My word of caution is to not select this until you've linked all of them up properly. If you only have an email from someone and it doesn't match their name or email on Facebook you won't be able to link the account and it will go away.
4. There is no option for "GPS" and only "Location" on or off. I've selected on, but the maps app has me about a quarter away from my house. This is a result I would expect on my G1 if I was only using wifi for location. The same issue showed up in Foursquare as it didn't realized I got in my car and drove a few miles away. I'll keep digging.
5. Outlook seems to complain when I type in the wrong server with a "Cannot connect to mail.xxx.com" and when it's right, and the password is wrong it tells me. But then, it says it's syncing and can't finish. The error is below and this is still an outstanding one. Googling isn't helping so far. Any takers?

"Outlook error

Not updated

We're having a problem syncing your

information. Try again later.

Last tried 2 seconds ago

Error code: 8500201D"

As mentioned above, I realize when it's wrong information on the server, username, domain, or password based on the information that is coming back.

I'm sure that I'll find more to post about later but those are my first 5 issues. I was able to stream Netflix like a champ and download apps very well. I'm still grinning ear to ear and loving the phone. I am a satisfied customer and I'm confident this is a good phone and the issues are only software bugs that are resolvable.

*Update: 11/16/2010 6:40am CST - I was troubleshooting some more and unchecked to sync email leaving Calender and Contacts selected. This actually worked. Selecting email again, resulted in the same previous error. So I've definately got the right settings in place, I might need to get my IT team to look at something on their end as the issue might be a server side setting dealing with security, permissions, or policies. I found this post that I'll be discussing with my IT team on shortly.

Additionally, I was able see this morning that maps did show me in the right location. I don't think I made any changes and I'm worried that it's going to be that slow. I will keep you updated here too.

As a last update on this post. I found the ability to import my Gmail contacts into my LiveID account. This was pretty huge as I was dreading putting my contacts into the phone. Switching from Android meant that all my contact information was there. Despite connecting to Gmail and being able to read my emails, it doesn't pull the contacts. This ability to import from the web interface easily solved my issue. It even linked up the majority of the contacts to Facebook and my Outlook contacts where appropriate. Good stuff. :)

*Update: 11/16/2010 9:40am CST - At work we have a hidden SSID for our wireless connection. This is a missing feature in Windows Phone7. I hope they add it later, and I would hope that T-Mobile would want it too so they can save their bandwidth. This is pretty annoying considering I just bought two games in the market place and I can't download them over the air or tethered. It only supports downloading via wifi. That means I have to wait till I get home. :(

*Update: 11/16/2010 1:49pm CST - We have Outlook! Even tho I had only selected to download email from the last 3 days, it appears that the amount of email in my inbox was causing it to freak out. As I was troubleshooting with my IT team, they noticed that when I was tethered, it looked like my laptop was making the queries to the Exchange server instead of the phone directly. Since my laptop was on the VPN, I changed the mail server name to the internal name and unchecked the SSL option.

This was the magic combination and in a few minutes, I had all my email. After that initial sync and subsequent tests, I disconnected and tried again but it failed because it wasn't on the VPN. Then I changed it back to the external name with SSL as it was originally set and it worked. Now I'm getting my emails without a problem.

My co-worker with a Samsung Focus on AT&T was having a similar issue with a different error code. My fix didn't work for him but he did get it resolved. It turns out that it didn't like him having sub folders under his inbox. Removing them allowed him to connect and resolved his problems.

Hot for Windows Phone 7

If you know me, you know I'm a nerd and an early adopter. I like the pain of issues from adopting early because it helps me learn more about it and lets me get under the hood. I'm happy when new technology "just works," but when it doesn't, it often forces the inner dork in me come out to play.

I was a first-day early Android adopter, and I happily plunked down my money for the HTC G1 from T-Mobile, which I still have. I've been happy with it since that purchase and it was a great investment. I chose Android over the iPhone for several reasons. Being open to any carrier, any maker, and the ability for people to customize their experience is what drove me to the purchase, and it has excited me to see the Android's popularity grow since its release.

I always find it interesting when open standards challenge closed, proprietary platforms. Take Beta Max versus VHS. Sony was the company behind Beta Max and they lost to the VHS open standard, even though at the time everyone believed beta max was better. Another example again features Sony with their AIT proprietary tape format, developed for the then niche market of digital media. Seagate, HP & IBM initiated the LTO Consortium in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats available at the time, and LTO has been the best-selling "super tape" format since 2002.

So given the theory above, my money was on Android against the iPhone, which is turning out to have been a good bet, now that Android apps are rushing to the market in droves, and Android phones are selling over 100,000 units per day. A key component with Android was the huge number of professional java developers that could get to work on something they were already familiar with.

What can beat a winning open formula like this you might say? The great combination of Enterprise and openness. Make something for the Enterprise but open it up for competition and you have yourself a winning combination.

Enter Microsoft Windows Phone 7 to the party. Not only do you bring the biggest paying and highest quantity of buyers to the party, but you bring all the vendors looking to get at the money and market share. Take it a step further and sprinkle in the Xbox gaming community that is currently 25 million subscribers per month strong and you have yourself the making of a huge shift in the market.

What will ultimately make or break the platform is developers. some say the new Palm Pre platform was pretty nice but the lack of apps at launch made it fall flat with very little success. Recently HP took a gamble and purchased Palm for 1.2 billion. Now they will be trying their hand into the tablet market but without developers, I don't predict much success. Windows Phone 7 is based on its popular Microsoft Zune device and hundreds of thousands of developers who already know how to program in Microsoft .Net, Silverlight, and XNA are off to the races. They don't have to learn a new language; they don't have to buy a new computer, pay additional fees or anything like Android of iOS development.

Given the technology demos and videos that have made it to light and the huge list of games, the platform doesn't seem lacking. The Xbox gaming integration, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare was enough to have me salivating and ready to go. If I was a betting man, my money would be on Microsoft for the win.

People have beaten on Microsoft for the last 2 years that they were late to the party and missed out. The same was said when the early versions of Windows launched and they had no developer tools or platform. Now they have .Net and are easily the most advanced, organized, and modern tools / platform in existence.

I don't have a date for launch, nor do I know what exact phone I want to get. I know my T-Mobile contract is up for renewal, and I've got a handful of cash ready to throw down for a Windows Phone 7 device. They may have been late to the party, but they are here now, and they brought a keg, shots, and some friends. Let's get it on!

Windows Phone 7 Complete Guide