All posts by onlyconnect

amazon, cloud computing

AWS Summit London 2016: no news but strong content, and a little bit of Echo

I attended day two (the developer day) of the Amazon Web Services Summit at the ExCel conference centre in London yesterday. A few quick observations.

It was a big event. I am not sure how many attended but heard “10,000” being muttered. I was there last year as well, and the growth was obvious. The exhibition has spilled out of its space to occupy part of an upper mezzanine floor as well. The main auditorium was packed.

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Amazon does not normally announce much news at these events, and this one conformed to the pattern. It is a secretive company when it comes to future plans. The closest thing to news was when AWS UK and Ireland MD Gavin Jackson said that Amazon will go ahead with its UK region despite the referendum on leaving the EU.

CTO Dr Werner Vogels gave a keynote. It was mostly marketing which disappointed me, since Vogels is a technical guy with lots he could have said about AWS technology, but hey, this was a free event so what do you expect? That said, the latter part of the keynote was more interesting, when he talked about different models of cloud computing, and I will be writing this up for the Register shortly.

Otherwise this was a good example of a vendor technical conference, with plenty of how-to sessions that would be helpful to anyone getting started with AWS. The level of the sessions I attended was fairly high, even the ones described as “deep dive”, but you could always approach the speaker afterwards with your trickier issues. The event was just as good as some others for which you have to pay a fee.

The sessions I attended on DevOps, containers, microservices, and AWS Lambda (serverless computing) were all packed, with containers perhaps drawing the biggest crowd.

At the end of the day I went to a smaller session on programming for Amazon Echo, the home voice control device which you cannot get in the UK. The speaker refused to be drawn on when we might get it, but I suppose the fact that Amazon ran the session suggests that it will appear in the not too distant future. I found this session though-provoking. It was all about how to register a keyword with Amazon so that when a user says “Alexa what’s new with [mystuff]” then the mystuff service will be invoked. Amazon’s service will send your service the keywords (defined by you) that it detects in the question or interaction and you send back a response. The trigger word – called the Invocation Name – has to be registered with Amazon and I imagine there could be big competition for valuable ones. It is all rather limited at the moment; you cannot create a commercial service, for example, not even for ordering pizzas. Check out the Alexa Skills Kit for more.

Presuming commercial usage does come, there are some interesting issues around identity, authentication, and preventing unauthorised or inappropriate use. Echo does allow ordering from Amazon, and you can optionally set a voice PIN, but I would have thought a voice PIN is not much use if you want to stop children ordering stuff, for example, since they will hear it. If you watch your email, you would see the confirming email from Amazon and could quickly cancel if it were a problem. The security here seems weak though; it would be better to have an approval text sent to a mobile, for example, so that there is some real control.

Overall, AWS is still on a roll and I did not hear a single thing about security concerns or the risks of putting all your eggs in Amazon’s basket. I wonder if fears have gone from being over blown to under recognized? In the end these considerations are not quantifiable which makes risks hard to assess.

I could not help but contrast this AWS event to one I attended on Microsoft Azure last month. AzureCraft benefited from the presence of corporate VP Scott Guthrie but it was a tiny event in comparison to Amazon’s effort. If Microsoft is serious about competing with AWS it needs to rethink its events and put them on directly rather than working through user groups that have a narrow membership (AzureCraft was up on by the UK Azure User Group).

azure, cloud computing, Notes from the field

The case of the disappearing Azure AD application registration

Some time ago I wrote a simple web application which runs on Microsoft Azure and uses Azure Active Directory for authentication. The application is used constantly and has proved reliable; however yesterday it stopped working. A quick debug session showed that the problem was an Azure AD permissions error.

In order to use Azure AD, applications have to be registered in the Azure management portal. I use the old portal for this; I am not sure that the functionality exists in the new portal yet. There is a nice how-to here.

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One of the elements in the registration is a key which has a maximum lifetime of 2 years:

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My application was deployed about two years ago so I went to the portal to see if it had expired.

What I found surprised me. The application was not listed at all. It had disappeared.

Instead of simply obtaining a new key and updating my application config, I had to create a new application registration and update several keys in the config, which was an annoyance.

There is a wider point here, in the whole category of dealing with “things that expire”. Some time ago, Microsoft suffered an extended Azure outage because of an expired certificate. It is a shame that Microsoft insists on a maximum 2 year lifetime for this key but does not provide a check box for “alert me when this key is about to expire”, how difficult would that be?

Problems like this also mean that things which “just work” may not continue to do so. Of course a well organised enterprise setup can deal with this type of problem, but imagine, for example, the case of a small business with an application running on Azure where the developers have gone out of business, perhaps, or are no longer available. In fact the only code I needed to change was in web.config, but I can imagine it could take some time to figure out what to do and what to change.

microsoft

Office 365 users: beware Outlook’s mysterious Not Implemented error

Outlook broke on my laptop the other day. Well, it still received mail, but many operations threw up an error, “Not Implemented”.

It was particularly annoying that the error affected sending emails, but the error dialog only showed when I tried to force a send and receive. Therefore, emails were stuck in the outbox with no notification.

This error can indicate a corrupt installation, but in my case it was simply an Office 365 mess-up. In particular, the problem was connected to a an automatic upgrade from Office 2013 Professional Plus to Office 2016 Pro Plus, for users on Office 365 E3 subscriptions.

Users are meant to see an upgrade notification before this occurs. I don’t recall seeing this, but it is possible. I suspect my problem was related to an issue that caused Microsoft to pause “Microsoft-initiated upgrades” on May 9 2016. Perhaps I clicked the upgrade offer back in May and had forgotten about it.

As far as I was concerned, Office 2013 had not in fact been upgraded. I use Office applications by clicking shortcuts on the taskbar, and these were still for Office 2013. I had not seen any notification of an upgrade completing.

When I got the error though, I looked a little more deeply and found that I had both Office 2013 and Office 2016 (the latter described as Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus) installed. Control Panel – Programs and Features also showed that both were installed on 16th June 2016, two days after “Microsoft-initiated upgrades resumed for computers that had downloaded the Office 2016 upgrade files prior to May 9 2016.”

The fix was simple. Remove Office 2013. This removed my taskbar shortcuts, but I could then reinstate them with the 2016 versions and everything worked.

Just a small issue perhaps; but certain aspects of this are disappointing.

One is the incorrect error message. I know raising the right error message is challenging, but it is important.

Second, I doubt the automatic upgrade is meant to leave both versions in place. Why cannot Microsoft figure out how to remove the old version, install the new one, and even preserve my taskbar shortcuts with their equivalent upgraded versions?

Notes from the field

Using Strongswan as a VPN client – and a Windows Firewall gotcha

How do you monitor a Windows server over the internet? This one is not in Azure but an actual server, running Hyper-V of course, and the requirement is to monitor both the Hyper-V host and the VMs for things like free memory, disk space and CPU usage.

There is a nice solution called Cacti which does this, using SNMP. You just have to enable SNMP in Windows Server, install Cacti on some other server, and make sure the two can communicate on UDP port 161 (or you can configure another port).

The target server is behind a Linux firewall which has a VPN endpoint, so a good solution is to have a VPN connection between Cacti on-premises and the firewall to enable SNMP traffic over a secure tunnel. This VPN endpoint is already in use using the excellent Shrew soft VPN client, so it was just a matter of finding a suitable Linux VPN client for the VM on which I installed Cacti.

I had installed Debian Linux on a VM to run Cacti, without any GUI (I mean, who needs a GUI on a server?) so looked for a suitable command-line VPN client.  I soon gathered that the usual choice used to be Racoon but is now strongSwan – though note that both of these are more often used to set up a VPN endpoint on a server rather than as clients, though they work fine in either role.

I am sure that someone with more experience than myself in Linux VPNs and networking would have had this up and running in no time, but for me it was somewhat arduous. There are two aspects to a VPN tunnel, one of which is creating the secure tunnel and the second being the networking. StrongSwan will do most of this on your behalf, but you do need to get the configuration right in /etc/ipsec.conf and I chased down several false trails before getting it working.

One issue was that I am using XAuth authentication, and despite strongSwan supporting this I thought by default, got the error “no XAuth method found.” What worked for me was to install libstrongswan-extra-plugins and then make sure that xauth-generic.conf is set to load the xauth-generic plugin.

Next, it was not obvious to me what to put in the strongSwan left and leftsubnet key pairs. I thought the left subnet should be the subnet of my local network (192.168.255.0/24) but in fact I needed the subnet that was configured for VPN clients, in my case 192.168.40.0/24. Until I figured this out I was getting “no matching CHILD_SA config found” and “HASH N(INVAL_ID)” errors when trying to connect.

I fixed that but it still did not work. After trying various things I hit upon left=%any in ipsec.conf and got a successful connection at last.

I had a tunnel, but traffic did not pass. Now, there are two things I did to get this working. One was to put auto=route in ipsec.conf.  The docs say “route loads a connection and installs kernel traps.” Note that the networking configuration is done not by modifying iptables rules, but through xfrm policy, and to see the current policy you type:

ip xfrm policy

in the shell. It was still not quite right.

The final step was to change left=%any to left=%defaultroute in ipsec.conf. With this last piece of magic in place, everything works.

It was not (for me) quick and easy to configure, but the result is excellent. Just type:

ipsec up [connectionname]

and the tunnel comes up almost instantly. Using snmpwalk I can verify that that traffic is flowing:

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That said, now is the time to mention a little gotcha with the Windows Firewall for SNMP. When you install the service, Windows creates a firewall rule that opens the SNMP port (normally UDP 161) for incoming traffic, for both private and public profiles.

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Note there is a separate rule for Domain profiles, which is a clue that something is different. That difference is the scope of the rule. By default, the rule for private and public profiles is scoped only to the local subnet, making it in effect disabled.

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The idea I guess is to encourage you to restrict traffic to specified IPs if you access the SNMP service from outside the domain, which is good security advice. You can also configure this on the SNMP service properties. But if you are wondering why the service is no responding, this is one thing to check.

microsoft

Microsoft and LinkedIn: some early thoughts

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Microsoft has announced its most expensive acquisition yet, taking over LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. The transaction is expected to close later in 2016.

Why? It’s about combining data from Office 365 with LinkedIn’s data on who works where. According to Microsoft, it’s “the word’s first economic graph, a digital mapping of the global economy,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “If you connect these two graphs, that’s where the magic starts to happen.”

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LinkedIn is not just a social network with a business flavour, but also offers online training thanks to its April 2015 acquisition of Lynda.com.

“A professional’s profile will be unified,” says the presentation, “and the right data at the right time will surface in an app, whether Outlook, Skype, Office or elsewhere.”

There is obvious synergy with Dynamics CRM for customer relationship building and “social selling” – which, at its best, is the ability to be there at the right time with the right offer for your product or service, having nurtured a relationship over a long period.

There is even an offer to “empower developers in new ways with rich APIs and new training opportunities.”

Will it work?

Microsoft is not good at acquisitions. That is in part because of its own internal politics, leading to tragedies like the takeover of Danger in 2008, a strong company with a strategic product that was so mismanaged following the takeover that it lead to the Kin disaster. Then there was Nokia, a perfect fit for Steve Ballmer’s strategy of “win at all costs” with Windows Phone, and a perfect misfit for Nadella’s “cloud plus any device” approach, leading to the dismantling of the acquired assets and most of the employees with huge destruction of value.

What about Yammer, acquired for $1.2 billion in 2012, to “accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype?” It is near-invisible today. Or Skype, $8.5 billion in May 2011? Skype still has lots of users, but Microsoft has failed on the technology side, fiddling with numerous different Windows and mobile clients and designs, making users unhappy, with poor connections, and absorbing Messenger to no benefit. Lync, Microsoft’s enterprise instant messaging system, has been renamed Skype for Business but still uses different technology.

Still, let’s presume the acquisition works and that LinkedIn continues to grow. Will it make sense for Microsoft? Will it make sense for Microsoft (and LinkedIn’s) customers?

Who are LinkedIn’s customers? In the first quarter of 2016, the quarterly revenue figures looked like this:

Talent solutions (recruitment): $558 million

Marketing solutions (advertising): $154 million

Premium subscriptions (users who pay): $149 million. Of LinkedIn’s 433 million members, just 2 million pay for subscriptions.

Why would you pay for a LinkedIn subscription? I’m speculating, but I’d guess that a paid subscription is excellent value for recruiters and fair value for job seekers, but little value for others. That means the recruitment aspect is if anything understated by the amount in Talent Solutions.

Those other 431 LinkedIn members are not customers. They are users whose presence forms the value of the service to the recruiters.

Microsoft could in principle find other ways to get value out of those users, by making them customers for its productivity offerings. I doubt that that this is the primary intent though. The intent is more about “the magic” of all that lovely data combined with Azure’s powerful analytics capabilities. Somehow that is meant to yield value in unexpected ways.

Google has enormous success with this approach. It services users highly value, such as search, Google Apps, YouTube, Maps, the Android operating system. Then it exploits the presence of those users to offer them contextual advertising. It becomes the portal to your life taking a little cut every time you spend money.

How does this work in a business context? This is not clear to me. What is the synergy between Office 365, which is essentially internal IT services outsourced to a public cloud, and LinkedIn, which is essentially about contact building to find work or sell services? I would say, not all that much. Yes, LinkedIn can be integrated into Office 365 such that it is easier to find freelance help for a need that arises, for example. Making it easier to leave your company by finding another job though is not likely to go down well with Office 365 customers.

Can Microsoft make LinkedIn an essential business destination, like YouTube for video or Google for search, to enable the kinds of contextual opportunities that drive Alphabet’s business? Anything could happen, but it is miles away from that at the moment. Is it the best source for business news? No. Is it the best way to keep in touch with colleagues? No, that’s your internal IT system (could be Office 365), or maybe Facebook or Twitter for social contact. Is it the best way to keep in touch with friends? No, that’s Facebook. And so on.

If you are talking Dynamics CRM, then there you can absolutely see the synergy, but that is not big enough to justify the $26 billion cost.

One of the issues is that LinkedIn is not loved. There is constant bombardment with contact requests which are just a chore. There are emails like this:

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which mean little to me because honestly it is not a network I value – being mostly composed of people who have asked to “link in” with me in the hope that I may be useful to them by writing about their stuff. Others tell me they get constant invitations to apply for jobs; IT recruiters can be an aggressive bunch and no doubt it is the same in other professions where there is skills shortage.

In other words, getting from here to a point where LinkedIn is woven into our business lives in a mutually beneficial way looks like a difficult journey.

This might explain the lame illustration of how great life will be after the acquisition.

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I have a meeting and Cortana is going to give me all kinds of information about the person I am meeting, social as well as professional. This is great for a salesperson going in to make a pitch. It might not be so great for the recipient of that pitch who may want to keep the meeting brief. It raises tricky questions about the overlap between personal and business data.

I recall the Outlook Connector, an add-on to Outlook that surfaced a panel of information about a person drawn mainly from Facebook. I found it intriguing but sometimes uncomfortable, that when someone emailed me for some business reason I would news of their recent holiday or some such.

Privacy and trust

One reason for choosing Microsoft over Google for cloud email and document services is that whereas Microsoft’s main business is in providing IT services, with Google you are always aware that its main business is advertising and that it wants to mine your data. Now that Microsoft wants to create “the world’s first economic graph” that distinction is less sharp. Microsoft wants to mine your data as well, in other words, and possibly not to your advantage. Now we will have to be alert, on Office 365, for checkboxes that say “Share this on my LinkedIn Profile” or “Notify my LinkedIn contacts” or some such.

I was disappointed not to hear more on the privacy and trust issues in the webcast following the announcement. It was left to a question at the end on maintaining the distinction between public and private data. “Nothing gets connected without customers opting in,” said Nadella. I would like to have heard that first. I would also like to be reassured that Nadella means “opting in” rather than “failing to opt out”, which is more the norm in this area.

The new Microsoft

What is the new Microsoft? The LinkedIn deal seems to be significant in several ways. It shows how the company is further tilting towards business rather than consumer customers. And it is not technology. Microsoft is buying data and an internet destination, not technical innovation. To me, Microsoft is at its best when it simplifies and democratizes technology – yes, it can do this, and I’d instance things like Excel, the original Visual Basic, Access, and more recently, things like HoloLens and Windows Phone (the best phone UI). You can even see this in Office 365; it has its complexities but compare it to setting up multiple servers with Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint and you will get the point.

Right now I am not seeing the magic.

internet, security

Passwords: time is being called

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Prompted by a piece on Charles Arthur’s Overspill blog I took at look at LeakedSource which has a database of leaked usernames and passwords.

There are two main ways for passwords to leak. One is that a web site had its user database hacked and stolen. The other is that malware on a user’s machine steals all the passwords stored in your their web browser and sends them off to hackers.

This last has become a huge problem. Passwords and logins are an inconvenience, and many of us love being able to have the browser store them, giving near-automatic login for favourite sites. Thanks to the magic of cloud, we can also have them sync across all our devices automatically. Nice.

Unfortunately, if you ever had a nagging sense that this is not security best practice, you were right.

I have been on the internet since the late eighties and have hundreds of logins. Many were created under protest – you have to log in to read our article, or get support, or download our trial. The nature of my work is that I often need to research things quickly, and new logins come with the territory. I found several results when searching for my email on LeakedSource. Some I knew about: LinkedIn, Adobe, MySpace, Tumblr (this last only recently revealed); others I had not thought about. I signed up for Xsplit, for example, though I have not used it for years, and did not realise that the passwords had been stolen.

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In my case, all the accounts are ones that either I do not care about, or for which the passwords were changed, or both. That is not the end of it though. There is potential embarrassment if someone logs into, say, a forum posing as you and starts posting spam or abuse. Further, if you use the same password elsewhere a determined hacker can attempt other logins, that have not been hacked, and try their luck. There may also be information stored with the logins, such as date of birth, address, secret questions and so on, which could help in password recovery attempts or identity theft. If someone manages to crack into your email account, the vulnerability is much greater since many passwords can be reset simply via emailed password recovery links.

Well, we have known for years that passwords alone are a poor way to protect security. The situation has escalated though, with huge databases of email addresses, usernames and passwords widely available.

What does that mean? A few observations.

  • The only sane way for anyone moderately active on the internet to manage their passwords is with a password manager. You should create an unique password for every login and store them in an encrypted password manager. It’s not perfect; someone may manage to hack your password manager. But it is the best you can do for most sites.
  • Using a Facebook, Google or Twitter login for small sites that support it is probably better than creating new credentials, if those new credentials do not follow best practice. On the other hand, this means the consequences of losing the master login being hacked are greater; and the site may cajole you into posting links on Facebook, Google or Twitter to promote itself. I do not like the idea of building dependence on one of these advertising giants into my daily internet usage; but there it is.
  • Follow a de minimis approach in completing information when registering for sites. In my case, nothing that is not a required field normally gets completed.
  • Do not rely on your fancy system for creating unique passwords for each login, like three letters from the site name plus your first telephone number or whatever. If you can work it out, a hacker can as well.
  • Be aware of the risks of saving passwords in the web browser. Personally I rarely do so. In particular, it’s probably a bad idea for sites where you can spend money, Amazon, eBay, PayPal and the like.
  • Secret questions are not there to help your security. They are there to undermine your security and to reduce the chance of you calling support. They are in effect supplementary passwords. I suggest making up new secret questions for each site that insists on them, and storing them in your password manager. Example: best gibber: flogalot. Putting stuff like mother’s maiden name, first school and so on is identity theft heaven.

How do we fix this? Nobody seems to know. Some things are improving. 2-factor authentication is more widely available and you can use it on many of the main sites now. Unencrypted logins (ie HTTP rather than HTTPS) are now a rarity though I still see them.

Still, if the problem gets worse, there is more incentive for it to get better.

Uncategorized

Last thoughts on Windows Phone

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Microsoft’s Windows Phone disaster lurched further towards oblivion last week, when Windows boss Terry Myerson emailed employees with the news that “Today I want to share that we are taking the additional step of streamlining our smartphone hardware business, and we anticipate this will impact up to 1,850 jobs worldwide, up to 1,350 of which are in Finland.”

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“Streamlining” is exec-speak for further withdrawal from the mobile phone business.

Microsoft is at times a dysfunctional company and nowhere is this better illustrated than in its mobile devices adventures. The failure of Windows Phone is a self-inflicted wound. Mis-steps include:

  • Aiming the first release of Windows Phone 7, in 2010, at the consumer market despite Windows core strength being in business computers
  • Launching Windows Phone while failing to do the spadework with operators and retailers to ensure that it was actually widely available
  • Using Silverlight as the development platform for Windows Phone and then abandoning Silverlight on Windows and releasing Windows 8 with a different and incompatible development platform
  • Promising that Windows Phone would be updated by Microsoft so users could stay up to date, while in fact leaving this to operators who did not care – this applied until April 2014 when the Developer Preview program kicked off, allowing users to update by signing up as developers, subject to hardware constraints
  • Long dormant periods while Microsoft went through one of its, “let’s pause while we make huge changes that will be great eventually” phases, such as before Windows Phone 8.0 which introduced the NT kernel and before Windows Mobile 10 which introduced the Universal Windows Platform

Despite all the above, the arrival of a former Microsoft executive at Nokia meant that Windows Phone was adopted by a company that actually understood how to develop and market smartphones. Visibility of Windows Phone at retail greatly improved and technology such as Nokia’s PureView photography gave it an edge in some areas. Windows Phone was also strong for turn by turn driving directions with Here maps.

It was an uphill battle against iPhone and Android, and with Microsoft’s too-slow platform development, but Nokia made some impact and built significant market share in certain territories, though in Europe rather than the USA.

Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices business in 2014, along with CEO Stephen Elop, and it was here that everything went wrong. Specifically:

The transition period along with the coming Windows 10 resulted in not much happening in terms of new phones or announcements

Steve Ballmer was replaced as Microsoft CEO by Satya Nadella, before the acquisition completed. Ballmer had a strong belief in “Windows everywhere” and the importance of Microsoft not conceding the mobile space to competitors. Nadella came from a server background and believes everything will be fine as long as Microsoft’s server and cloud products are strong.

There was no consensus at Microsoft about whether Windows Phone was a key strategic asset or a waste of time and after running around in circles for a bit the inevitable happened: in June 2015 Nadella cut back the Windows Phone staff, cancelled some forthcoming devices, and parted company with Elop, who presumably had no appetite for presiding over the death of the business he had nurtured.

Myerson’s memo still presents the illusion that Windows Phone has some kind of future. “We’re scaling back, but we’re not out!” he writes. However you cannot be a little bit in the mobile phone business any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. The reason, as Elop announced when Nokia chose Windows Phone, is that you need an ecosystem. No, Continuum (the ability to use a phone like a desktop with an external display) is not an ecosystem. Maybe there will be some specialist business cases where a mobile device running Windows meets the need, but it will be a tiny niche.

This is also the reason why June 2015 was really the date that Windows Phone died, at least in public. Once it became obvious that Microsoft no longer believed in its own mobile platform, there was no hope, and sales suffered accordingly.

Could it have been different? Of course. The Nokia acquisition was not necessarily a bad idea: in theory it gave the hardware the backing of Microsoft’s deep pockets and brought to the company the skills that it lacked in how to make and market phones.

The saga has not been pretty to watch. In particular, the destruction of value in acquiring and then disposing of Nokia is distressing, as is the destruction of value in the Windows Phone operating system itself.

I have used a Windows Phone as my main mobile device for several years, and yes, it has a lot going for it. Navigation is easier than on Android or iOS, performance is good, and the integration with social media was for a while excellent. The camera on a Lumia 1020 remains superb. The development platform is strong, with Visual Studio and C#.

The subject of operating system design is another story; but there is another take on this narrative which looks like this:

Old world: Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6

Lurch towards mobile: Windows 8, Windows Phone 7

Lurch back towards desktop: Windows 10, Windows Mobile 10 with Continuum

Windows 10 is not as good as Windows 8.x on tablets, and Windows Mobile 10 is perhaps not as good as Windows Phone 8.x on mobile. I say perhaps because I don’t hate it; but there is a trade-off with performance and touch-friendliness worse while the capability of the operating system and its apps has improved.

In this way of reading Microsoft’s strategy, the death of Windows Phone is a consequence of the unravelling of former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky’s strategy to make Windows a secure and mobile-friendly platform.

The new Microsoft

That is it then; Microsoft is exiting mobile and trusting in server and cloud, plus a large but declining desktop Windows business, plus applications for other people’s mobile platforms. It is a software company after all.

It is too early though to say whether or not Ballmer was wrong and Nadella right in steering away from Windows everywhere. For sure Google will continue to do all it can to push Android users towards its own cloud services. Apple’s is a more open platform in this sense, because the company has no real equivalent to Office 365 or Azure, but Microsoft is vulnerable here as well. There is also Amazon Web Services to think about, the dominant cloud player, with its own offerings for email, cloud database and so on.

Still, this is the new Microsoft; and from a customer perspective there is good news in that both iOS and Android should be well supported for Microsoft’s services, and that Office 365 and Azure have to compete on technical merit, not just on the basis of integrating nicely with Windows.

android, microsoft

How to run Android Studio on Windows without disabling Hyper-V

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Update: This post is out of date; you may still be able to get it to work but there are stability issues with the emulator. Microsoft has announced a better solution, if you are on the latest Windows 10 April 2018 Update or later, and you can now use the official Android emulator with Hyper-V. See also my more recent post here.

Original post:

If you run Windows and use the Hyper-V hypervisor, which is used by Visual Studio as well as being handy for testing stuff in virtual machines, then you will encounter an annoyance if you go on to install Android Studio, Google’s official IDE for Android.

The problem is that Google’s Android emulator uses Intel’s HAXM (Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager) which uses the same CPU virtualization extensions as Hyper-V. This means it is incompatible. It is not only that you can’t run Hyper-V and HAXM simultaneously; the PC has to be configured at boot to use one or the other.

The solution (if you do not want to disable Hyper-V) is to use Microsoft’s Android emulator, which is a free download here.

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In order to use this with Android Studio, you need to run the emulator first. Then, in Android Studio, go to Run – Edit Configurations and select Show Device Chooser Dialog under Deployment Target Options.

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Now run your project, and select the VS Emulator, ignoring the invitation to “Turn off Hyper-V”:

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Now you can debug your application in the Visual Studio Emulator – which is pretty good.

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concert reviews, Elvis Costello, music

Elvis costello at Warwick Arts Centre, 9 May 2016

I was fortunate to get a late ticket to this mainly solo Elvis Costello concert, on the campus of Warwick University near Coventry.

Why Warwick? Costello remarked that he had played there before in the early 70s, at the Student Union, under the name Rusty (probably a duo with Alan Mayes).

I have seen Costello perform on a few occasions but not for several years. I was re-enthused after reading his book, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, which I loved. (If you follow the Amazon link above you will find my review, or you can read it on this blog).

What follows are a few jumbled impressions the morning after.

The venue is delightful, small enough that everyone gets a good view, though the sound was not great from where we were sitting; it was a bit echoey making the lyrics indistinct at times, though it improved as the evening went on (or I might have adjusted to it).

There was a short opening act from Larkin Poe – two sisters from Atlanta, Georgia, Rebecca and Megan Lovell, with guitars and harmonies. I enjoyed the set, though they said they found the audience a bit too British and restrained.

After a short break Costello came on. Apologies for blurry picture! He was wearing a suit with an open neck and looked his age, but in a good way: affable, not pretending it was forty years ago, slightly hunched a lot of the time, but in very good voice as he kicked off with a fast and powerful rendition of Lipstick Vogue.

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He talked a lot between songs and sounds just like his book – even to the extent that I wondered if the book had been dictated. I actually enjoyed his patter as much as the songs, but then I loved the book too: stories from the road, reflections on his father and later his grandfather, sharp remarks about politics and our failure to learn the lessons of history. There are reasons for his anti-war stance.

There was a lot of talk; but a lot of songs too. I’ve copied the set list below, and there were 30 songs, with plenty of hits and plenty of less usual numbers as well. Had I been nearer the front I might have shouted for Indoor Fireworks; but I think most fans will have heard what they wanted to hear.

The set was dominated by a huge “television” on which we saw video to accompany the songs, a trick which worked pretty well. I’m pretty sure we also saw Costello’s father Ross MacManus performing, as well as some stills of his grandfather Pat MacManus.

Some of the highlights for me were Shipbuilding, performed from the piano; an energetic Watching the Detectives and an impassioned She.

After 17 songs we thought the concert was nearly over but not so. The first encore was six songs with Larkin Poe, including Pads Paws and Claws, Clown Strike, and a song called Burn the paper down to ash sung by Rebecca Lovell which I think is about the perils of tobacco.

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After that we again thought it was all over, but no, Costello returned in his TV and sang Alison followed by Pump it Up.

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Then it was back to the piano for Side by Side and I Can’t Stand up for Falling Down, followed by a reminiscence about his granddad, injured in the first world war by someone who did not know him, said Costello, and later reduced to busking in the economic depression of the 1930s.

By this time there really seemed to be some rapport with the crowd and I got the impression that Costello enjoyed the atmosphere.

An emotional Good year for the Roses followed by (What’s so funny ‘bout) Peace Love and Understanding, and it really was over.

I am a fan of course but this was a great concert for me. Costello is to my mind one of the great songwriters as well as being an unashamed entertainer. Last night we got a wonderfully varied performance with everything from journeys back to the punk era (Pump it Up) to the more reflective songs of a man looking back on a long career of watching the world.

Set list:

Lipstick Vogue
I Can’t Turn It Off
Mystery Dance
Accidents Will Happen
Ascension Day
Church Underground
45
Oliver’s Army
Shipbuilding – on piano
A Face In The Crowd – on piano
Walkin’ My Baby Back Home
Ghost Train
She
The Woman Makes The Man
Watching The Detectives
It’s Not My Time To Go
You’re Wondering Now

Encore 1
Pads, Paws And Claws – with Larkin Poe
Love Field – with Larkin Poe
Clown Strike – with Larkin Poe
Burn The Paper Down To Ash – with Larkin Poe, sung by Rebecca Lovell
Vitajex – with Larkin Poe, EC on ukulele
That’s Not The Part Of Him You’re Leaving – with Larkin Poe

Encore 2
Alison – inside the TV
Pump It Up – inside the TV
Side By Side – on piano
I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down – on piano
Jimmie Standing In The Rain – including Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
Good Year For The Roses
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? – with Larkin Poe

Setlist thanks to the Elvis Costello Wiki

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Microsoft Financials: steady, but a turning point as on-premises server business declines

Microsoft has announced its latest financials, and I have made a quick table summarising the year-on-year comparison for the quarter. See the end of this post for what the confusing segment categories represent.

Quarter ending  March 31st 2016 vs quarter ending March 31st 2015, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Operating income Change
Productivity and Business Processes 6522 +65 2994 -210
Intelligent Cloud 6096 +193 2188 -345
More Personal Computing 9458 +89 1645 +596
Corporate and Other -1545 -1545 -1544 -1352

A few observations.

Overall the figures are flat. That is not a bad result if you think of Microsoft as a PC company, considering that the PC is in decline; disappointing if you think of Microsoft as a cloud company. The answer is that one is offsetting the other, which is not too bad.

Microsoft says that revenue and income would be up, were it not for currency fluctuations. Of course there is that big hit in “Corporate and other” which is “net revenue deferral related to Windows 10 of $1.6 billion,” according to the earnings statement.

On-premises server business is in retreat. It is not possible to migrate customers to the cloud while at the same time growing on-premises business. That truth finally showed up in Microsoft’s figures. CFO Amy Hood referred to a “larger than expected decline in our transactional on premise server business” in the earnings call.

Margins are not so good in cloud. Selling software license is almost all profit, once you have developed it. Not so with cloud, which requires data centres, networking, and ongoing maintenance. “Our company gross margin percentage declined this quarter driven by our accelerating mix of cloud services in our Intelligent Cloud and Productivity and Business Processes segment offset by higher gross margin percentage performance from products within More Personal Computing,” said Hood.

Office 365 continues to grow. CEO Satya Nadella said that “Commercial Office 365 customers surpassed 70 million monthly active users and we grew seats by 57 percent” year on year. This is key to the company’s health. Customers in Office 365 are hooked to the platform and more likely to buy other services such as Dynamics CRM, Enterprise Mobility Services MDM (Mobile Device Management), or applications hosted on Azure. “Dynamics CRM Online seats more than doubled this quarter with over 80 percent of our new CRM customers deploying in the cloud,” said Nadella.

Windows 10 is being taken up. The nagware is working according to Nadella, who said that “The number of Windows 10 devices is twice that of Windows 7 over the same time period since launch.” Nevertheless I still hear a lot of caution out there, with people advising one another to stick with Windows 7. Windows 10 pushes users more strongly to Microsoft services than 7, with Cortana driven by Bing. “Over 35 percent of our search revenue last month came from Windows 10 devices,” said Nadella.

Windows Phone is dying fast. “For phone we expect year over year revenue declines to deepen in Q4 as we work through our Lumia channel position,” said Hood.

Linux is growing. Nadella made a few comments about SQL Server on Linux and Linux on Azure. Why SQL Server on Linux? “We look at that as an expansion opportunity,” he said. Over 20% of VMs on Azure are Linux, he added. Microsoft made Linux “first class” on Azure in order to be able to host an enterprise’s “entire data estate across Windows and Linux.” People don’t move between operating systems, he said, but “now they have a choice around database.”

I’d add that we are now seeing scenarios where Linux is ahead of Windows on Azure. The new Azure Container service is currently Linux only, for example, though a Windows option is planned.

What Microsoft does with Linux in the coming years will be interesting to see. Office on Linux? Microsoft Android?

A reminder of Microsoft’s segments:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, both commercial and consumer, including retail sales, volume licenses, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Skype consumer, OneDrive, Outlook.com. Microsoft Dynamics including Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, both online and on-premises sales.

Intelligent Cloud: Server products not mentioned above, including Windows server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, as well as Microsoft Azure.

More Personal Computing: What a daft name, more than what? Still, this includes Windows in all its non-server forms, Windows Phone both hardware and licenses, Surface hardware, gaming including Xbox, Xbox Live, and search advertising.