Bye Google.

This blog has now moved to http://imoritaltech.wordpress.com/

I explain more here.

Please come over and join me at the new site.

Stu.

Hot Stuff V… A Little Bit More

Just a quick one.

It seems I'm not the only one who thinks the Lumia 920 gets excessively hot:

So I may not have an issue after all.

One thing does worry me though. I'm in Canary Wharf, a site supposedly covered by a very strong T-Mobile signal, including 4G (I'm not on 4G), but this is what I see on my phone display (look at the leftmost icon, it shows no signal):

That can't be right.

I've also noticed the signal at home is weaker than it used to be (again, we've just been upgraded to 4G in my area) so I wonder if the two are related.

T-Mobile can't possibly be reducing the quality of their 3G coverage to push their 4G service, can they?

Hot Stuff - Part IV - The Final Chapter?

As I expected, EE switched off my SIM on Friday. I guess it says something about how unreliable the service was that I didn’t really notice until very late in the afternoon/early evening. I was expecting this to happen at any time, so whilst being a little inconvenient, it wasn’t too much of an issue.

In the meantime I popped in my old Orange PAYG SIM, and made a quick visit to Carphone Warehouse to top it up with a tenner (something I’ve not done for a good few years) so a few important people would be able to reach me in case of an emergency.

Amazingly, on returning home from work I discovered the new SIM from EE had already arrived, good work EE. What a shame their staff at the Stratford store weren’t up to the quality of the people on telephone support!

Putting the new SIM into the phone I expected it to be dead, however it worked straight away picking up a decent signal.

So end of story…. Probably.

I’m still getting a few signal problems in areas that should be well covered, but it seems I’m getting much better coverage overall. Additionally the phone is still getting very hot whilst doing seemingly simple things (like listening to a Podcast from the “Podcast Lounge” app, whilst using mobile Internet Explorer), so that remains some concern. I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and contact Nokia if things seem too bad.

So far then, a decent outcome, albeit with a couple of hiccups along the way.

I’m yet to try tethering, so that remains a concern I suppose, but that aside, this will be hopefully the last post on this little incident.

Now, I just need to take the phone back to the care point at some point, to get the dust cleaned out of the front facing camera.

Hot Stuff - Part III

A few updates for your delight…

On returning from my failed visit to the EE store on Tuesday, I tweeted for help from Nokia, followed by a tweet to complain to EE.

Nokia got back to me after a while and we had a small discussion of how to resolve the locking phone issue. Unfortunately I had already attempted the steps they suggested, but full marks for actually making the effort. Nokia also suggested taking the phone into one of their repair centers and avoiding EE altogether. I consider this good advice after my recent experience.

Wednesday rolled around and I made the journey over to Stepney Green to the East London “Nokia Cares” (repair) center. The guy reset the phone without much fuss, and I was out within half an hour (probably closer to twenty minutes) with a working phone. This is now sporting my backup Orange SIM. Slightly worryingly I notice the device still gets very hot, this time when downloading several of my missing apps over a WiFi connection… so I may not be out of the woods yet.

Also, as an aside, the guy in the Nokia shop pulled out a second tray sitting under the SIM tray and got the IMEI number from that. Why didn’t anyone in the EE store know (or care enough to know) about this trick?

As mentioned before, my old Lumia 800 now has my T-Mobile SIM, but this is proving to be interesting too. It seems that not only are calls being dropped of failing to connect, but that after a few hours in the phone mobile data is non-existent despite the display claiming otherwise. Exactly the same issues I noticed in my Lumia 920. I know the Lumia 800 is fine having used it with the Orange SIM, so it appears the suspect for all the problems has reverted to the SIM card, not the Lumia 920 itself. Perhaps it got so hot as it was spending all its time searching for a signal?

My next step in this saga was to call EE and relay that information to them. “Oh yes, that sounds like a SIM issue” was the response, “Pop into a store and they can replace it for you.”

Call me old fashioned if you will, but after my last experience, I’m not going anywhere near an EE store if I can help it, so even though I may be without a phone connection for a week, I asked them to post me a replacement. We’ll see if this helps soon I imagine.

So back to the Lumia 920. It’s still overheating, but since I had it in a case until recently, this may be “normal” (seems a bit too warm to me, but we’ll see). So it may still need to be checked by Nokia. Talking of which, the first thing they look for when you take the phone in for repair is physical damage. Fortunately my phone had none.

Had being the key word. “Had” no damage. “Had” been living in a case.

Can you see where this is going yet?

I’m using the L920 over WiFi (the Orange SIM in it is Pay As You Go and has no data allowance) for certain apps and as a glorified MP3/Podcast player until the new T-Mobile SIM arrives. This morning whilst getting off the train at Stratford station, phone in hand, I went to look at the screen, lost my grip and in the process of trying not to drop it, batted it up in the air for it to fall hard on the brick platform.

Arse!

So now the phone does show some signs of physical damage. The screen is still fine, thankfully, but the case has a couple of scratches and two sharp chips taken out of opposite corners.

So if I do take it in for inspection due to the overheating, when they look for physical damage they’ll find some. I wonder how that is going to play out.

Still, I take some small consolation that had it been a fruity phone, the front or back would be shattered into a thousand tiny fragments by now.

Hot Stuff - Part II

It seems like my fears of taking my broken Nokia Lumia 920 back to the store weren’t unfounded.

As mentioned from my previous article, the phone has been malfunctioning for a while, finally getting dangerously hot on Monday evening. The advice from T-Mobile was to take it back to the store for repair, which I just attempted.

Earlier this morning however, I decided to reset the phone back to factory state before handing it, and all my personal information, over to an unknown person. Unfortunately, on restarting, the phone just hangs at this screen 

I didn’t rush it, leaving the phone for a little over one and a half hours. A soft (or is it hard) reset by pressing the volume down and power buttons at the same time had no effect. Nokia Cares eventually came back to me with the same advice, but by then I had already been to the Stratford EE store…

On arriving at the store an assistant came over to me very promptly. I showed him the phone (still sporting its spinning cogs) and whilst I explained to him how the phone was finding itself in its current state, he barely pretended to listen, but was keen to tell me that they had no loaner phones in the store (OK then, I’ll keep the faulty phone instead then shall I?!!?!?!), which isn’t a problem as I have a few older phones to fall back on.

We removed the SIM card, and he told me he needed the IMEI number, which wasn’t on the SIM tray.

Fair enough.

He went to ask somebody else for a couple of minutes, then returned to tell me there was nothing they could do without the IMEI number, and I should take the phone and box into the Colchester store.

OK, inconvenient, but I convinced him the Stratford store was easier for me (you know, I have this crazy thing called work that tends to take me out of Colchester during the daytime, and would possibly explain why I was wearing a shirt).

Then another member of staff came over, who when questioned, mentioned that because I had bought the phone from that very store, my details would be in the system along with the IMEI number.

Bingo!

But neither my address or name appeared when searching by my postcode, which he was kind enough to show me on the screen. Back to the “nothing we can do without the box” line…

“But you can search under my phone number” I pointed out.

So we did.

I don’t know why I bothered. Results: 0.

What?!!

Guess what, back to the “nothing we can do without the box” line…

No suggestion that we might call the T-mobile service number (150 from a phone) on the off-chance they might have it.

No provision for taking the phone, which they sold me, in for repair (it’s under warranty so would be Nokia’s problem anyway!)

No sir. I have to go back in, wasting another lunch break, and will probably find I need something else they forgot to mention.

Thanks EE. Great service there!

Hot Stuff.

Back towards the mid/latter part of February I upgraded my Nokia Lumia 800 to the (then flagship) Lumia 920, complete with Windows Phone 8. I was very happy with this device and it worked well for several weeks. I’m not going to do a review of the phone hardware or Windows Phone 8 itself as there are plenty of those out there, but here are a very few notable points:

1. I don’t mind the weight of the device. Having upgraded from the smaller Lumia 800, itself no lightweight, the extra weight seemed a fair trade-off for a larger (excellent) screen. It also didn’t feel any heavier than my previous Desire HD, but that had been out of use for almost a year by this point. I suspect that if I had been coming from a similarly sized, but lighter phone, I would have noticed more.
2. The OS takes much longer to boot up than Windows Phone 7.5, which was one of the things I liked most in my older device, especially after the Desire HD got itself into such a state that it would take over seven minutes between turning on to being ready!
3. The new synchronisation software and capabilities were a step back in the new OS. Forget about the Zune name, the actual Zune software used to synchronise Windows Phone 7.x was magnificent and easily better than iTunes. The Desktop and “Modern” versions of the sync software for Windows Phone 8 are embarrassing, even now almost a year after release. Still, at least the phone finally mounted as a normal drive.
4. The OS itself seemed a little buggier. With Windows Phone 7.5 I wouldn’t need to restart for weeks on end, Windows Phone 8 sees me reboot far more frequently; however, this may be explained by the reason I’m writing this post…

My main issue with the phone first transpired when using tethering. On my train journey home I go through several dead-spots where the connection is lost. After a couple of months I noticed the phone would not automatically re-connect to the data connection whist hotspot functionality was enabled. I put this down to a bug in the software, since switching the tethering off or putting the phone into flight mode for a moment (disabling wireless signals) sorted the problem.

Then voice calls would start to drop, eventually refusing to connect at all without “restarting” the radio.

Recently I noticed the phone would fail to connect to 3G signals, and if it was reporting a connection, even a full connection, text messages were not arriving and calls were not being connected. Similarly, data connections for phone apps refused to connect despite the supposed presence of a signal too.

Not good, but things were about to get a little worse.

Quite often, when the phone was apparently working, it would get warm in use, even when doing light browsing. Not always though. And in areas I knew were well covered with a strong signal.

Then in the last week the phone has been getting very hot, to the point where on Monday night it became too hot to hold and I had to turn it off to cool down.

I initially suspected the SIM may need replacing, but yesterday I finally called T-Mobile/EE and walked them through my experience. I was pleasantly surprised when the lady in their help team told me that it sounded like a hardware fault on the phone (normally they make you jump through hoops resetting first) and the overheating issue sounded “dangerous” and advised me to take it into a store to be looked at be the engineers.

So now I need to blank off the phone and probably switch to the old Lumia 800 for a while whilst this is investigated. Hopefully the staff in the store will be as helpful as the advice I was given on the phone and it will get sorted quickly, but I am worried I may be palmed off and told to jump through a bunch of needless hoops.

Hardware faults are going to happen, I understand that and I’m not angry in the slightest. It’s just a shame that I’ve been so worried about the inconvenience of getting this sorted that I’ve delayed doing anything about it for so long.

I’ll let you know how I get on, watch this space.

Oh, and wish me luck!

I Like Chinese…

With all the recent scare stories about the Chinese and others spending untold man hours trying to hack the west (are they scare stories if they are grounded in at least an element of truth), the client I’m currently working for (a large multinational) have recently gone into lockdown mode to prevent themselves becoming victims.

Much of the actions being taken are somewhat sensible; The list of accessible web sites has shrunk (or rather the list of blocked sites has grown), administrator access is being removed from local/desktop machines, USB drives are blocked, only approved software can be installed and used, etc.

All sensible stuff.

Apart from the knee-jerk reaction manner in which it’s being applied is causing serious productivity issues whilst being inconsistent. Let me give you a few examples:

Among the applications being blocked were several tools used by numerous projects to perform development work, for example everything but the latest version of Eclipse, Cygwin, data folders for VM Ware slices, etc.

Then there’s the list of blocked sites, for example Facebook is fine, but MySpace is blocked.

Then there’s the additional issue of locking down the email systems. I’m running Windows Phone, but because they haven’t put it near enough the top of the list for testing (possibly because our user-base is so small) it’s not been certified in time as a secure platform (despite including BitLocker, an AES client, etc.) and so they have introduced the new security, but have to remove my remote access to email, calendars, etc. from the device. Clever.

To be fair, I suppose they are doing me a favour, where in the past I would look at emails and add tasks to my plan outside of work hours, I can no longer do this, so at least I spend less time working for free. Of course the down side is I can no longer refer to my phone to find the details of my next meeting or the phone number of a colleague in an emergency…

I could provide several more examples of how our productivity is being adversely impacted (the on disc encryption has slowed many machines down to a crawl for example, and I can’t view/edit environment variables without an “unlock code” from the helpdesk each time I try), but the issue here isn’t what or why this is being implemented. I can see a need and I agree with most of what is being done, but the implementation has been comically badly done and resulted in hundreds of lost hours.

Essentially the client has done a better job of hacking themselves than most seasoned hackers could have probably hoped for.

God job guys!

At last, a scratch!

I've had a Nokia Lumia 920 since early February, a little over five months, and in that time I've attacked it with all manner of sharp implements to demonstrate the strength of the Gorilla Glass 2 screen. Each and everytime it has come away unscathed.

This morning I decided to wipe the screen with my shirt, in the process catching the cable clip of my Creative Aurvana earphones.

Guess what?

My screen is now sporting a long but incredibly thin scratch. So thin it appears to be totally invisible when the phone is turned on, and you have to struggle to see it with the phone off. But I know it's there...

So it seems that after months of trying I've inadvertently manage to cause some damage by accident, which I guess was always going to happen.

Looks like I'll be needing a phone with a Gorilla Glass 3 screen.

Did somebody say Lumia 1020?

Windows 8 with Windows Home Server 2011

Just a quick one this time…. Hopefully.

After running the "Release Preview" and "Enterprise Trial" versions of Windows 8 over the last several months, I actually managed to get my laptop into a state where I was happy to blank it off and install Windows 8 Pro as its only operating system.

With the caveat that all new Windows installations tend to boot quickly (until you start filling them with… erm… useful applications) I'm impressed with the boot time of the system. This is a two year old laptop with mechanical HDD, yet I can boot to the log-in screen in 19 seconds (of which eleven seconds are taken by the BIOS check). This is fast enough that I'm tending only to sleep the system if I need to keep the desktop state. As a result I'm shutting down now (I used to sleep) in preference - although this is also partly down to the issue that sometimes after waking the machine (from sleep) the cursor tends to be a little erratic.

I'll have more thoughts on Windows 8 over future posts no doubt (but frankly there are enough reviews out there that I'm not going to bother adding to the noise), however in case you were in any doubt: I like the new OS, but I am aware there are issues that need to be resolved, some fairly major.

One thing I am pleased about is the apparent simplicity of adding the Windows 8 laptop to the Windows Home Server backup schedule. This, as you would hope is done exactly the same way as earlier versions of Windows, and seems to be running without issue.

The one thing that has got me puzzled is that I have only managed to connect via remote desktop from the web page once (as in the very first time I tried), after which I get the following error (every time since):

I have no idea why this is happening. I can connect without issue via the remote desktop client. Unfortunately I'm not given an opportunity to fix this issue, and don't know where I should look on the server to make changes. Even Google seems bereft of answers (or indeed questions). No doubt I'll have a poke around, but I'm not feeling confident at this stage.

Other than that annoyance, so far so good. Hopefully my desktop will be converted soon too.

Now to start filling the laptop with crap again!

Close, but no cigar

With the initial underwhelming release of the Microsoft surface (the price is a shade more than I hoped although probably not unreasonable, but with no GPS or NFC I feel there is a missed opportunity), and the general feeling that the next wave of devices should be substantially better, I had convinced myself not to get a tablet for another six to nine months. 

Then Saturday evening I settled down to a little surfing on my more than capable laptop. Five minutes in the screen flickered, then died. 

Bugger. 

Powering off and even removing the battery failed to help, but something odd was happening, the bios and boot loader screens were displaying, but as soon as the OS selection menu should have appeared power to the screen would stop (as seen by that completely black appearance where even the backlight is off). 

This was all very strange and it looked like this would be my third laptop in a row rendered useless by a failing graphics chip. 

So Sunday saw me reluctantly looking over the few details I can find on upcoming convertible tablet/laptop convertibles. 

Nothing I could see grabbed me. Several look good, especially a couple of models from Acer and Lenovo, but nothing without significant compromise from what I have convinced myself I want (not necessarily need). 

I consider myself a power user, and compared to most this is probably true, but I came to a realisation some time ago that for 90% of my usage something way behind the bleeding edge would be perfect. 

I don't play games seriously on my laptop, just the odd puzzler and other simple stuff. In fact the main need I have for a powerful processor is video editing and encoding, along with the ripping of my CD collection, and even most of this can be done adequately on a mid range laptop now. 

I do run many applications concurrently, and being a developer I also need plenty of memory and a decent speed processor, but easily less than I probably think I need. 

What I want is something along the lines of the Asus Transformer line, a mid range Ivy Bridge i5, at least 4 but preferably 8 Gb ram, at least 8 hours real world battery life but the more the better (12 hours or above would make me very happy). But here's the killer - something that docks so I can have the kind of setup that Mike Taulty wrote about. 

It looks like I'm a little too early to get all this in a suitable package. It seems to me that the technology is very close, but not quite there. 

So I started thinking about how I can manage without a proper laptop until something suitable is a reality. I have the Xoom, and whilst this is a marvellous device it doesn't quite tick enough boxes to work all the time, in the same way that a Windows RT device doesn't (think development and video tools). 

All things considered though it looked like the Xoom would need to fill the gap until details of all the release devices were available, possibly longer. 

Then I got to thinking - my laptop actually contains two graphics chips, perhaps one had failed but the other was still working, hence why the initial boot screen displays (although still looking a bit odd that it fails at the OS selection screen). A quick jump to the BIOS revealed I can change the setting for graphics from Switchable to force Discreet, after which I rebooted and everything works fine again, soviet with power/performance being less than optimal now. 

Suddenly, and to more relief than I'd imagined I have a working laptop again, but it has revealed a few things about myself in the process: I've been looking forward to getting a convertible tablet/laptop ever since my last Windows tablet died (from a failing graphics chip) several years ago, and thought I'd rush out and get something as soon as the new devices were released alongside Windows 8. However it appears I'm actually a little more controlled than I gave myself credit for. This is good. 

Or is it just that the devices I've seen so far have just not been particularly compelling? 

Either way, in sure that when a device does eventually come out that meets enough of my criteria, I'll get it. 

But at least now I'll be more sure that the decision wasn't completely rushed

XBox Music - One Month On

As mentioned in my previous post, I've been subscribing to the Zune Music Pass recently, to see how well it suits me and how much use I'll get from it. I have now been subscribing for a little over a month, and as such now seems like a decent time for a quick update on how I'm finding it.


My primary usage has been on my phone. I've been making use of both download and streaming methods of listening. Primarily I will download albums for listening to during my daily commute, but also I've been increasingly streaming music directly rather than downloading.

A nice feature of the Windows Phone client is the ability to save the current track list as a playlist. Doing this doesn't download the tracks, instead it refers directly to the online location of those tracks, which speeds up the entire process should I want to listen again as it avoids the need to search the marketplace first. It only saves a couple of minutes but is very convenient and means I don't have to keep those tracks in my phone memory.

On plugging the phone into my main PC downloaded tracks are copied to the PC library automatically. This isn't quite the behaviour I want but it's not the end of the world. I would guess there is a setting somewhere in the Zune PC software to stop this happening, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable default. Possibly more of an issue in future will be the fact that this also registers the PC as one of the current download devices, of which you are only allowed a finite amount.

The phone interface is simple enough that it's my go-to device, meaning that so far I have not really made much use of streaming music from the web. I did try this near the start of my subscription and I don't recall it being very impressive. This will be something I'd make more use of if I worked from home, but currently not a high priority.

I encountered an issue a few days ago where the phone seemed to lose track that I am an active subscriber. The effect of this was that every track I tried play only had the option to buy, while streaming resulted in 30 second preview clips. This is exactly the same behaviour you would see if not subscribing. I checked my account status online and everything was active, so it appears to just be a glitch in the system. It's not the end of the world as the problem was sorted the following day, but likewise I believe I have seen this behaviour before, so if it happens too often I'll not be overly impressed.

Saturday also saw me finally renewing my Live gold subscription for the Xbox. I had been sitting on a pre-paid code for this for several months, but not having had the time for online gaming recently I was keeping this until such time as I would make more use of it. The tipping point came when I tried to stream a Zune track from my Windows 8 laptop to the Xbox. Not having an active Live Gold account I suspected playback might be prohibited, but then again for £8.90 a month you'd kind of expect this scenario would be an exception (much like the BBC iPlayer).

Apparently not. What the hell Microsoft?!!!

But with this (not insignificant) downside aside, the interface and playback on the Xbox is great. If available the screen cycles through artist photographs on playing tracks (if not then recent or random album covers from your collection are displayed), and the interface is controllable via Kinect voice and movement. It's all very swish. I've only tried streaming tracks, I don't even recall if there is an option to download locally (see the comments or an update later since I'm writing this on my commute, so can't verify this for sure right now).

Going back to the Kinect integration, this is where the killer feature is also found…. almost.

I can regularly be found barking orders to the Xbox (and amusingly more than once I've heard a call from another room asking "who are you talking to?"), but something I'd never bothered doing is searching Bing via voice. I guess I had nothing to look for in the context of the Xbox. Now I do.

With the Zune app there is an option to voice search Bing for music. Calling something like "Xbox, Bing Squeeze" will then launch the Bing app and perform a search for the aforementioned artist… bringing back a list of results for both music and video. This worked first time for the five or so artists I searched for, but I expect plenty of misheard requests going forward. Either way, this king of thing has been available for some time on the Xbox and other Microsoft technologies like Windows Phone, and is a general reason why I tend not to be overly impressed at Siri. Whilst the Siri integration on iOS is better than much of what Microsoft offers on their various platforms, the Microsoft voice algorithms are some of the best around though.

There are also a couple of clues in that last paragraph that explain why the voice search isn't all it promises to be. It's all very impressive, but the integration is not quite there. When asking Bing to perform a search, you have to (confirm) exit the Zune app, you're then dropped into the separate Bing app that performs the search, then put back into the Zune app to play your final selection. Anyone with experience of switching apps on the Xbox will be painfully aware how slow this process can feel.

It's not the end of the world, but it does take the edge off the user experience. I would like to be able to search and queue up music this way without interrupting playback of the current track. Perhaps this will be improved in the next dashboard update… hopefully.

So looking to the future I see on ZD Net that more details have just been revealed about the Xbox Music service that will be coming to Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the next Xbox update. Some of the details have left me a little confused at the moment (like exactly what the problem is running the new software on Windows Phone 7, especially when iOS and Android devices will eventually be covered), but I dare say things will be clearer as I read more, so I'll update in a future posting.

For now though I'm pleased to say that I'm making more use of the service day by day, and once the questions of the upcoming changes to the service make sense to me, I can see myself switching to a yearly subscription. I'm also starting to listen to a lot more recent stuff and classic albums I have missed.

Talking of which, right now I need to search for something else interesting to listen to…

Here's a video from Microsoft on the new service.

• Update: It seems the Xbox is getting updated now, with Windows 8 being updated on 26th October and Windows phone soon after release.

The power of the team

As mentioned in my last post among my roles I am, at present, primarily the main developer of the C# client application. I also mentioned that I was transferring to C# and that aside of some small projects in the past, this is my largest and most involved project in the technology.

The problem is that often I am the only developer on this project.

What does that mean? Well  can be a bit more blasé about making minor code changes directly on the trunk/main branch (version number increments and the like), but it also means that when I hit an issue I have nobody to discuss this with. This causes an additional delay in finding an appropriate solution.

Whilst the value of teamwork has always been obvious to me, this situation has bought it home to me on a couple of occasions. Two heads really are better than one.

With others working on a team I often find ideas and experience sharing multiply (at least up to a point). I'm not talking about pair programming (of which I have had only good experiences), but the fact that individuals will have different experience and approaches, and in some situations this proves to be invaluable.

Of course we all need to know how to work on our own (sometimes for extended periods of time, or entire projects), but having others to hand to bounce ideas off and suggest solutions is, I feel invaluable.

Naturally the effectiveness of this depends heavily on the nature of those involved. Those involved in software development are often not the most gregarious or social of people, however even those bordering on extreme autism (as I sometimes encounter in this industry) can turn out to be valuable colleges with the right approach.

Of course, there are also occasions where individuals are just plain obstructive, I just hope these people are quickly identified and moved on to more suitable roles (such as standing in line at the job center).

One other key skill I observed in my very first boss (whom I learned much from that I still use to this day) is not being to proud to learn from those with less experience than yourself. To paraphrase what I remember him once saying to me; "If you suggest fifty things which are just plain wrong, and only one thing that I had never occurred to me, then I'm better off because I have learnt something from you."

Crucially, he also had fifty opportunities to educate me in some way, which certainly happened.

Working alone is great, and sometimes required of desired, but even when this is the case having a team to fall back on is, I feel, invaluable. Nobody knows everything, but most people know something worthwhile... sooner or later.

Changing times

Since joining my current company two years ago I have been on a single project, transferring from a Java server development role to a position that also sees me as the main C# client developer, a situation that I actively pursued. This has helped keep my interest in the project alive(we developers are a fickle bunch who get easily bored) and allowed me to extend and expand my experience practically at the same time.

During this period the project has seen an initial major delivery and a second large delivery, but along with my mutating responsibilities the composition and size of the team has also varied during this period. As the bulk of the development work has been delivered the team has shrunk in size in all areas, development, test and management resources have come and gone, but mostly gone.

The time spent here has given me an opportunity to work with some good people, in terms of both talent and personality. Several of the people I've had the pleasure of working with have made my job better and more enjoyable than it may have otherwise been, and I'm pleased to say that comes from people both above and equal to me, as well as those with more and less experience than myself.

One of the things I have noticed is how specialised our current roles make us over time, and I believe this is something that is getting more pronounced as the breadth of technologies and libraries expand. That's not really news, it's something I've noticed before, along with probably virtually all others in this profession I would imagine. It should have come to be expected to a certain degree.

By specialised I mean that depending on what our current task has involved, or more specifically involves on a regular basis, each of us inadvertently becomes more knowledgeable in those particular areas than those we visit infrequently, we become a domain expert. Again, this is only to be expected, by my point is just how pronounced this knowledge unbalance now appears compared to how I viewed this in the past.

Years ago I knew people (and was hopefully one myself) who were competent in vast areas of a language or libraries, but specialised in a subset of those. Now it appears (at least to me) that the programming domain has grown to such an extent that we are becoming increasingly ignorant of areas in which we have no recent experience. The difference here is that where we once may have "known a little", we now know "a very little or nothing at all".

This is to be expected as the technology expands, but I feel it reveals an underlying problem in recruitment going forward, both in my future roles as an interviewer and an interviewee.

I suspect everyone who has looked for a job in development will have seen plenty of jobs requiring experience in just about everything going in a particular technology, most of which we will be aware of to a certain degree; some we will know inside out, others we've not visited for some time will be "rusty", and the final few we've never knowingly encountered.

As time goes by and technology expands this category of inexperience continues to expand rather than shrink. But here's the thing - if it's expanding for me with over twenty years experience, how are people with just a couple of years able to claim knowledge in these areas?

That's quite simple, just by having a basic understanding. I can probably tell you enough about rewiring a house to make you think I would be able to do it. If I actually did then re-wire the house, you'd probably find you got through a lot of fuses (possibly also a few calls to the fire brigade).

The same is true for the people claiming experience in multiple unrelated categories. I may be able to read an article or overview on a new technology/library/methodology, and this will be enough to get me through that section in an interview, but should I then need to use that skill I'd be starting from scratch - the exact same position as somebody who claimed to know nothing.

This raises two issues itself. 1. How can the interviewer tell how much you actually know from the interview (or indeed experience to a certain degree), but more importantly 2. How much does that actually matter?

The more important thing is to find somebody who has a core competence and who is willing to embrace new concepts, anything else can be learnt. We do it all the time, it's regularly part of the job. The trouble is if we're not learning the right things to tick off the right boxes we appear less skilled.

I'd argue that it is often those who don't appear to know a little about everything who know the most. Good luck making the distinction in one or two hour long segments which need to cover other areas though.

As time goes by I become more aware that many of the most consistently competent developers I've worked with have been focusing on a few key areas. They turn out consistently good code, and most importantly can actually be relied on to deliver.

In contrast I've also worked with a number of developers who have latched onto a wide array of technologies, who would be able to suggest any number of new tools appropriate to deliver a particular solution, but who ultimately turn out code that barely works, is poorly constructed and is over complicated (by either use of too many technologies, patterns, or just generally over engineered). And that's is they manage to deliver anything at all.

The trouble is who is going to look better in the interview?

Seeing through this is an art that is not necessarily possible in a series of interviews, you sometimes just have to go with gut instinct, but one thing that is worth considering is this: A good developer will be able to learn a new skill and apply it to get results as required. A "less capable" developer may know everything about everything, but if they can't deliver on that...

Unfortunately looking at job advertisements it seems this latter class is expanding quickly and being sought more highly.

Perhaps that's why the architecture is now a separate beast to development, they have to go somewhere when they're found out.

Going forward with the Home Server...

As mentioned several times before, I upgraded from Windows Home Server Version 1 to WHS 2011 some time ago. Since then I have experienced absolutely no critical problems, and generally it runs solidly for months on end. It's fair to say that the server doesn't come under much load, but even so I'm very happy with it.

The biggest issue I have had is with the server backup drive (the drive to which the server itself backs up to) filling up. This seems to be a bit of an oversight as the clean-up process seemed flaky, but even this has settled down now I've tweaked a few settings, although it's anyones guess if I now have a below par server back-up running, but I think it's fine for my use case.

Overall WHS2011 works well for me, and since the latest roll-up pack appears to have addressed compatibility with the forthcoming Windows 8 machines, I have no urgent requirement to upgrade to the WHS2011 replacements for the moment, but it's always worth keeping one ear to the ground.

Recently Paul Thurrott has comment on the transition to the next wave of servers on his A Tale Of Two Home Office Servers post, and his thinking is similar to mine, although he does come from a slightly different perspective.

Essentially the choice appears to be purchasing Windows Server 2012 Essentials at around $450, or running a Windows 8 client.

The current price of Windows Server 2012 Essentials removes this from my choices for the moment, at least until it drops to $150, possibly less. WHS2011 dropped to a very good price, but then this was a more specialised product. Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a higher end product, so I don't expect a similar price drop will happen.

Similarly using Windows 8 Pro, whilst it could offer advantages such as providing that always on media center so many of us had been hoping would be in WHS2011, will fall down on the vital area of remote access and automated PC Backups (the killer WHS feature for me) as far as I am aware. This will make it a step back in ways that are important to me.

Since I splashed out for the marvelous DrivePool, I'm not overly concerned about Storage Spaces at the moment so that's not a driver to an update either.

So I guess it's going to be a case of sitting tight and waiting to see what happens. As long as Windows 8 machines work with the current system I'm in no particular hurry. I guess it's going to be a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I guess my backup server is a rare case where I don't actually feel the need to have the latest shiny...

Still, I know what I'm like, so that will probably change soon.