Macro Photography with Lumia 925

I am no camera expert by any chance but I love taking pictures. I have gone through various iterations of point and shoot digital cameras, then Bridge camera and finally a proper Digital SLR. I love the Canon EOS especially when I have a prime lens on it. However most pictures I take are nowadays with my phone.

Currently I am trialling the Lumia 925 and likes its predecessor Lumia 920, the 925 has Optical Image Stabilisation OIS in short – not many phone cameras have this feature – this is the 2nd ever device. Most phones out there would give you software based digital stabilisation which doesn’t really cut 🙂

So apart from taking normal pictures, I have taken to taken Macro shots using Closeup mode. The output has been great. Here are some of the shots. the detail in some cases is awesome – just click on a picture to view it in full res as saved by the device. I will update this post as I take more macros in coming days

Haswell Windows 8 Ultrabook review of sorts

I talk to many developers almost on daily basis and development machines always come up every so often. Everyone’s excited about the upcoming Haswell chip as it brings long battery life in addition to performance. We can now expect 10+ hour battery life.

I am one of the lucky few to have a device straight from Intel. Took a while to get to me but its here and its great. I wont be talking about any stats as this is a pre-production device and CNDA strictly forbids it 🙂

I have been using this as my main dev device for a week now and here is what it looks like

As you can see it clearly states that this isn’t mine 🙂 The device has a nice gun metal feel to it. Feels nice and solid. its a 14 inch device and weighs1.4 kg. It is very light in terms of available ports – it has

• power in
• 2 x usb 3 one on each side
• mini HDMI
• 1 x mobile SIM slot
• 1 x SD card slot

as far as sensors are concerned – this thing is packed to the brim – it has

• GPS
• NFC
• Light sensors
• Accelerometer
• Gyroscope
• and probably more – I just can’t remember

Additionally this is the first device that has a backlit keyboard. Personally this is the best thing about the device. It runs Intel Haswell 4th Gen i5 process clocked at 2.0 GHz. Its got 4GB of RAM soldered and 180GB SSD. Its spend little time getting its battery calibrated however it stays around 10 – 11 hour mark.

The screen is ultra bright and offers 1080p as the default resolution. It also features touch and the quality of touchscreen is excellent. It support 5 touch points.

I have been doing Windows 8 and Windows Phone dev on this and even the windows phone emulators support multi-touch. If you think you don’t need touch think again – touch compliments existing input devices. Once you get used to it, you will miss it when its gone 🙂

Many developer talk about MacBook spec device running windows including Mary Jo Foley and this baby is the thing. Most OEMs will be using this as a reference device and expect similar spec’d devices coming to an outlet near you.

My thoughts on recently changes in Windows Azure Mobile Services

Let me start by apologising for the noise I have been making – especially on twitter – I think I lost a few followers but I believe its a worthy cause to fight for. There’s still 28 days to go before the changes are enforced and I will continue being vocal and will try to engage the Azure team.

Last August Windows Azure Mobile Services were announced. You can read Scott Guthrie’s blog post about it. I to an extent agree with Scott’s statement “provides a super productive way for you to build out your app ideas”. Specifically it make it easy to expose your data in easy to use REST API form. Not just that, the wrappers make it super easy to query, insert, update data etc. In its early for (Preview), it gave Azure users 10 free mobile service instances.

Of course free doesn’t mean fully free and do whatever you please. It had a catch – you need to use Sql instance and having said that, you need to pay for Sql – fair enough. Over and above that, the free instances had a 165 MB / per day making it approximately 5GB per month of outgoing data. Finally since you are a leecher, the service will be on a VM which will share resources with other services. If you like what you see, you scale your services by first opting into Reserved instance (monthly payment) and then set the instance count (more money). This all makes perfect sense. Monetization when you need to use beyond basics.

Since that day substantial resources have been spent highlighting the mobile services and how you can get started using 10 Free Windows Azure Mobile Services. Hell, we at London Windows Store App Developer Group even had a session on the same. Now I don’t have any access to any statics of usage during preview mode so next paragraph is pure speculation.

A majority of WAMS users opted to use Free instance paying for Sql only. A few (Rowi and a few others maybe) required scaling and went the reserved instance mode. however majority of users stayed well away from paying too much – human nature.

So after almost a full year, Windows Azure announced public release of Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites. As a part of that, they added SLA – a full 99.9% and added tiers to WAMS and make it flexible in terms on what costs how much

A tiny line that escaped most people was “Up to 100 Active Devices” – for the free tier. And by active they unique  devices accessing services in the last 30 days (including today).

Of course we were all notified by email and we’re not told of the 100 device cap.

So what happens next. Under the terms of use, the team reserves the right to suspend a service for reasons above and beyond nonuse or inactivity. The way I see it, most users will get an email at some point saying your usage of Free is unacceptable according to T & Cs. Pay up or lose your service. Some will pay up, some will work their way around it and others will just wrap up. This is (NOT) fantastic news for Windows Phone and Windows 8 developers out there.

All is not lost – I have created a user voice issue on azure uservoice (not Azure Mobile services uservoice – didn’t think of looking for that – stupid me). I am working hard to ensure that developers are made aware of this change and I am trying hard to get Azure team to acknowledge the issue at hand.

http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting/suggestions/4134596-100-device-limit-is-very-limiting-for-free-tier-on

Please upvote the issue. Its only 3 votes and you can choose to reduce / remove votes later – you get those back when the issue is acknowledged.

Update: I forgot to mention that Azure Websites has 10 free option as well and there have been no changes there.

Update 2: Over the coming days, I will share details on possible work around should you wish to run as far away from WAMS as possible

What’s wrong with Windows 8

Everyone’s doing it and why should I not do the same ? Yeah yeah everyone’s been bad mouthing how horrible windows 8 and thought, why should I be left behind. So here’s my 2p on the subject.

I remember being one of the first to get a laptop with XP.. having used Windows 95 / 98 and ME plus Windows NT, Windows 2000, I was looking forward to it. I was young, naïve and stupid (actually last two don’t have an expiration date). I loved it yet in tons of places I kept reading that the changes were too far and users need to educate themselves yet again.

Just read this one.. it’s not that bad.. if you really want me to dig some, I will try

http://reviews.cnet.com/windows/microsoft-windows-xp-home/4505-3672_7-6534881.html

Of course we know how that went, XP did eventually coerce people into converting.. XP however wasn’t all that hyped..

Next up, we had the long anticipated Longhorn.. I was still relatively young (naïve and stupid) and what did I do, I installed the leaked alpha on my PC and played with it. Was a little disappointed not to see .NET integration into the system but oh well it was only an alpha.. things dragged on and we had Vista.

Vista was great, it did everything XP did and even more. There was only one drawback and that was a new shiny driver model. Crap Microsoft gave the OEMs just over a year to prepare drivers… Of course what happened, Vista was slated because of UAC and being buggy as hell (thank you OEMs.. my personal favourite was NVidia.. their drivers were worse than stock shipped by Vista).

“you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig”

All Microsoft did was to release rebranded Vista as Windows 7. Sure there were a few changes like toning down the UAC tiny bit but the main thing was that drivers had already matured in this time and bingo.. people loved Windows 7 like they loved XP..

Of course around that time, iPhones came and iPads came and Droids started running riot.. Microsoft was under pressure to deliver and they were working on Windows 8. The Metro UX plus a tiled interface was their answer. And they took away the start button. Just look at the two screen and tell me what you think of those !!

Most PCs after a few months of usage and installation crap-ware look like Picture 1. Is Windows 8 Metro UI that bad ? It looks cleaner and simpler, the icons are larger. Users can choose to pin / unpin what Start Screen shows. I keep hearing that power users hate Metro UI. What exactly is a power user ? My personal take is someone who has become adapt at clicking the icons on the desktop like in Picture 1. By that definition, I was never really a power user. Neither is my wife nor is my daughter, in fact they don’t even care about desktop forget the start menu

So if this is not a criticism of the larger easily clickable icons, what is it about ? You know it.. it’s the little blue orb that was called the Start Button. That thing that has been usually in the bottom left corner. This is about “Who moved my cheese?”
All would have been fine, if Microsoft had just left that in place and used that to toggle visibility of Metro UI / Start Screen.

Oh Microsoft what have you done !!

Enthasiasts beware

I have been a keen buyer of unlocked / sim free devices for years. The reason.. more manageable contracts and you get the latest and greatest updates without worrying about Telco’s update approval red tape.. Unfortunately my experiences over the last 1.5 years tell me that things aren’t the same..

Ever since Nokia released first Windows Phone 7 product, the update release cycles have been secretive. Even developers do not have access to new releases like before. I don’t necessarily blame Nokia for it but something has changed with Microsoft WP Team. Windows Phone 8 was supposed to get around this by OTA… guess what..it hasn’t.. Portico was released days after #WP8 became public and surprise surprise.. its rolling across all locked / Telco managed devices.. the only ones who are left behind are the enthusiasts who getting it the last. So much for shelling out your hard earned cash..

If you think this was the end of my rant.. it isn’t… I also learned recently that by default, Windows Phone while having the capability to do NFC Secure wallet payment has been shipped neutered.. yes it has a big piece missing and it requires your Telco to release that piece.. now you my enthusiast friend are stuffed.. if your Telco starts supporting Secure Wallets stuff, be prepared to flash your devices with Telco ROM.. that’s your only hope as things stand today.

I suppose I better go back to coding now. Have a fantastic evening..

OT: UK and the European Union

I guess what has happened recently is probably for the good of European Union.
I personally believe that EU as a single market doesn’t work. We need a closer union, I’m a unionist while being capitalist.. i know usually they dont go hand in hand.

I was hoping that EU would become a formal federal country but those plans were dashed by our ex-prime minister Tony Blair who favoured weaker ties and single market and opened EU out to new members.

I guess it was about time for UK to make its mind up. And by the looks of it we have decide to be outside the private members club. Having veto’d the changes to Lisbon Treaty will essentially force rest of the countries to work / coordinate by other means / creation of a new club and since UK didn’t signup to it, it won’t have a say – which is good for Federal Europe but not for UK’s single market idea.

i personally would have prefered budgetary caps – rather than being able to borrow more and more. we shall see what happens next

OT: What the Creation Hymn means to me.

Let me start by saying that I am an atheist. Most people – a lot of Indians at the very least (I know) have found my thoughts very non-Indian. Well I was born in a very moderate Hindu family and I studied in a Catholic school. If that was not enough I have travelled across India and substantially around Europe.
My search for what Hinduism is – led to critical review of what religions really are. And last time i thought of it was “ancient control mechanism which were justified before the evolution of civil laws”…. i know that’s a mouthful.

So where does creation hymn come in. Well its a part of Rig Veda.. the first of the Veda (Sacred Hindu texts that for a long time were not accessible to the general population). I came across this translation and something inside me just clicked. You have to remember that Rig Veda goes a long long time back – at least around 2500 BC. To me, it adds to my atheistic view of the world and universe as such. If this thought existed before any of the religions, do we have to believe in such obviousness just for the sake of believing ? Here it goes:

Not even nothing existed then
No air yet, nor a heaven.
Who encased and kept it where?
Was water in the darkness there?
 Neither deathlessness nor decay
No, nor the rhythm of night and day:
The self-existent, with breath sans air:
That, and that alone was there.
Darkness was in darkness found
Like light-less water all around.
One emerged, with nothing on
It was from heat that this was born.
Into it, Desire, its way did find:
The primordial seed born of mind.
 Sages know deep in the heart:
What exists is kin to what does not.
Across the void the cord was thrown,
The place of every thing was known.
Seed-sowers and powers now came by,
Impulse below and force on high.
Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
 Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He.

This translation was done by V. V. Raman. He’s a professor at University of Rochester and i found him on WordPress 🙂

http://acharyavidyasagar.wordpress.com/