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Sometime after I attempted to buy Twittix from the Ovi Store and blogged about my poor experience with them, @shbib pinged me on Twitter and suggested that the problem actually lay not with Mojosmobile or Twittix, but rather with Ovi Store. Specifically, it seemed that Ovi Store was sending out the wrong version of Twittix (the demo version) to people who had in fact paid for the whole version. More than slightly incredulous how such a thing could happen, I nonetheless did indeed forward my receipt from the Ovi Store to the address suggested and sure enough, 40 minutes later I received a response (on a Saturday, no less!) with the right version attached.

At this point of time, I’m not sure who is at fault: is it Nokia which made a mistake with Ovi Store, or is it Mojosmobile that uploaded the wrong version. What is clear from this event is that a lot more work is needed on Nokia’s part to make the Ovi Store the kind of welcoming, easy to use and universal marketplace that it aspires to be. The steps needed are relatively straightforward, but the time for execution is very short. Let’s see what the new week brings.

Yesterday was supposed to be Nokia’s big day. After losing market- and mind-share to nimbler, newer competitors like Apple, Research in Motion and Google, yesterday was supposed to be the launch day for Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to RIM’s AppWorld, Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store, as well as Microsoft’s upcoming Skymarket. All of these essentially boil down to something I’ve been saying for a while, starting with my experience with Maemo 4.0: you can build all the potential into the platform from the get-go, but if you don’t provide end-users with an easy way to access the potential through applications (not packages!), there’s no point in building that potential in. So, I woke up yesterday, eager to try out the Ovi Store and, boy… what a day it was.

For the first 16 or so hours, though, I was sure that the Ovi Store was going to fail just because people would give up on trying to use it. After the first 16 hours, I am sure that it will be a modest success, but only if Nokia steps up and monitors the content far more carefully than they have to date. A chronology of my experience is after the break, but the main takeaways thus far:

1. Nokia needs to monitor its content more. Far too many fraudulent and bogus applications are making it into the list of applications. Nokia’s reputation is suffering and will continue to suffer as long as Nokia does not play a more active role in removing demo applications masquerading as the real thing. (For example, MojosMobile should be banned from ever putting an application on Ovi Store again.) I, for one, will never purchase another application from Ovi Store again, since I have no guarantee of receiving what I expected and there is no way to request a refund.
2. Nokia has done an admirable job of abstracting away the different hardware, screen type and other such issues. I am duly impressed. Some would rather have every single such detail available, but these people are the exception and not the norm, as long as all the applications, whatever the format, end up in the same place, or in a logical place for the application, as appropriate. In fact, the more that this is abstracted away, the better.
3. Nokia needs to tweak the UI some. I can’t think of a single reason that I would want to enter letters and other non-numeric characters in my credit card number or security code fields; entering the date was an exercise in madness. Ditto the discoverability of categories.
4. Launch day means lots of traffic. Nokia should have better planned the launch day of the Ovi Store and brought far more server capacity online than it had.

But so far, I’m modestly impressed – even in its early days, there looks to be a lot of promise. That’s not to say it was all fun and games though; chronology follows after the break, and it’s mostly negative.

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Speaking of Windows crashes, let me also observe that iPhone OS 2.x is significantly less stable than its predecessor. While I had the occasional crash with 1.x, mainly with the jailbroken apps, I can’t go more than a few minutes of browsing without Safari crashing. This, of course, is insult upon injury, given how just about no app in the store was tested before it was released and is hence crash-prone.

Despite having spent some money for apps, I’m seriously entertaining the idea of going back to 1.1.4, just for the stability and reliability improvements. Anyone else considering the same?

There’s this old story about a guy who comes to fix a problem. Spends a day looking at the widget, does something to it and sends a huge bill over to the widget’s owner. Said owner protests, saying “the fix cost $1 – please justify the rest of it”. The guy replies, “$1: fix. $ObsceneAmount – $1: knowing what to fix”.

That anecdote has real implications for Apple and the free software movement and Linux in particular.

For example, today I took a look at a Vista laptop that was bluescreening intermittently. Every few sleeps (not every sleep, nor every fixed x number of sleeps), it would start and immediately crash. And the question is, why?

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Look at the log. Find out what the exact crash number was: 0x0000009F.
2. Look at the Internet. Determine that 0x0000009F is a driver crash. So, it looks like a driver that’s not suspending properly.
3. Look at the reliability monitor. What was installed about the time the first crash started happening? Interesting – no driver installs.
4. Some more digging around logs shows the Realtek ethernet driver is crashing just as the machine is going into sleep.
5. What? The laptop is connected via the Broadcom WiFi driver.
6. Go back to the log to see when the driver was last updated. Nothing – still the original Vista driver for it.
7. But what is this? “ZoneAlarm Free”?
8. AHA!
9. Fix it by installing a patch.

Total time needed to fix: 10 minutes. Maybe less.

Right now you’re thinking: ZoneAlarm? That firewall program that runs just fine on the XP machine sitting next door?

Of course, this requires some explanation … and some arcane knowledge of Windows. It’s probably pretty clear to you that ZoneAlarm works by getting in between the user side and hardware side of transmitting and receiving stuff from networks. Exactly where doesn’t really matter in this case. However, this was updated for Vista, wasn’t it? This is the Vista version, so the changes in the networking design were accounted for!

However (and this is the bit of arcane knowledge you need to know to make the connection between ZoneAlarm and a blue screen), one major, non-networking change was made to Vista. You may recall setting a XP machine to go to sleep, or telling it restart, or ordering it to shut down, and coming back x units of time later and finding that Word or Notepad or Paint was waiting for a response, so the XP machine hadn’t done what it was told. What Microsoft did was build in a maximum time that Vista would wait for an application to respond to such a request to sleep, restart or shutdown. Then it would simply terminate the program or freeze the contents of the memory.

And now you see what is happening: ZoneAlarm, like every well-designed program, unhooks itself from the networking stack when it receives such a request. It’s wise and I wish more programs did so: get out of the way when the OS is doing something ridiculously complicated like suspending dozens of devices and hundreds of programs and preparing the computer to start right back up again. The problem is, when such a thing is happening, there’s a lot to do – and a lot depends on random factors like when was the last message from the network connection, where the computer is writing stuff to the disk and so on. So if ZoneAlarm was waiting for the final “goodbye” message from the router and it arrived after Vista had decided time was up, the computer suspended with ZoneAlarm still hooked into the network stack. Not good.

Thus why it was so random: sometimes the wireless router responded in time, sometimes not. And depending on when the reply arrived late, the network driver would crash and messily take the rest of the system with it.

Now there are good arguments that the network driver should be protected from doing something like corrupting the core of the OS – and there is a great deal of isolation already – but sometimes, crap happens. The question is how do you learn to fix it?

And so now you see the problem with Mac OS or Linux: if something similar happened in either of those operating systems, besides searching the Internet in the hopes of an answer, I would have NEVER figured out a firewall was causing the computer to crash when it was resuming. To me, it would have smelled of a bad driver or bad hardware – exactly what happened here.

Thus even though power users are by nature the ones most fascinated by other operating systems (I have a Wubi installation of Ubuntu on this very Windows machine, and an Apple Mac Mini), they are also the ones with the most to loose: all those years of knowledge gathering about the internals of Windows, obscure settings and arcane know-how all goes to waste. There’s no way to get around it.

So if Mac OS or Linux want to be successful, then they have to get people early, before they go down the Windows path. Even if Windows users are willing to unlearn the Windows way of doing things, as I am, it takes a long time to rebuild a knowledge base to fix things that go wrong. Since things will always go wrong, and people will always build up such a base, consciously or unconsciously, the only alternative is an early catch so people don’t get frustrated their knowledge is going to waste.

In the meantime, I look forward to another crash free Windows laptop.

But I’m pleased as punch to now announce that the work I’ve been doing over the past few weeks with the website is complete. The bright side is that not only is the backend working correctly, it’s also working a lot faster. I’ve removed post ratings since no one was using it, and it seemed to be responsible for much of the slow down.

The not so good news is that I’ve managed to reset my stats so I’ve lost track of the more interesting trends that I was watching earlier. C’est la vie.

Finally, I’m busy with an interesting project that I’ve dreamt about doing for a while but haven’t had a chance to do until now. I will say more when I have reached a stable point in the project, but until then, mum’s the word.

Things coming up this week:

1. A critique of mobile phones and mobile phone operating systems philosophies.
2. Backup strategies post (no, really this time).
3. A movie review I should have done a long time ago.
4. A comparison of quality between “regular” DVD and Blu-ray.
5. Some thoughts on the prevalence of network connected devices and a wishlist for some more devices.
6. Crazy kitten-age.
7. Should have the Blu-ray version of Bladerunner by the end of this week; I’ll post about the “definitive version” if it arrives here by then.

There are more things I will post about later on, but this should see me into the Christmas week. The Christmas post will likely be about the project that I’m working on, provided it all works. That’s my goal, so let’s hope it gets done by then!

Cheers.

Sigh.

iTunes must be the worst music management program on the planet… after Realplayer, MusicMatch, Windows Media Player, Winamp… oh. Wait. Oops.

While I wait for Songbird, here’s a question for you iTunes-lovers. Yesterday, I discovered that my new iTunes installation had not been copying songs over into the library, because the behaviour by default is not to copy, even if you setup iTunes to manage the files. So following the advice given, I hit Consolidate Library and boom. Everything was okay.

Or so it seemed. Today, I looked at the available disk space and… ZOMG! Where is my disk space?! How is there only 17 GB left of a 160GB hard disk!? I instantly suspected iTunes. It’s the only thing that could’ve done anything. Sure enough, iTunes was displaying a library of only 30 or so GB, but there was some 90 GB of music on the hard disk. iTunes decided that it would individually duplicate every single song – twice. So now I have to find a way to delete all of the repeated songs.

Any suggestions?