Jason Langridge has an excellent writeup on the availability of WM5. As you can tell by the summary this all but confirms that we in USA live in the third world of mobility – only one of those devices (Sprint 6700) is on sale in retail US; Other WM5 devices available in the retail channels are just rebranded HTC devices so you could pirate and apply one of the iMate roms but legally… its looking very sad to be on Windows Mobility in USA. In a related story, Palm 700w which is by popular aclaim the worst WM5 phone on the market, has promised MSFP release later this month (April).

  Orange
  SPV M5000
  SPV C600
  SPV M600 – in ROM by default!
  

  O2
  O2 XDA Mini S
  

  Sprint PPC 6700

  i-mate  all updates via www.clubimate.com
  SP5 and SP5m
  K-Jam
  JasJar

  QTEK all updates via www.myqtek.com
  9000
  9100

  Symbol MC70 – in ROM
  Gigabye – G-Smart – in ROM

In related news, Mike Calligaro of the Windows Mobile Blog explains why WM5 is slower than previous PocketPC systems. This is something that many have experienced since upgrading WM5. For those of you that have not met me in person but still struggle with a slow WM5 I only have one word for you. XCPUScalar (remember to kiss your warranty goodbye).   

Due to some peer pressure from Chris, I will be at the SMB Nation East conference in New York City May 4th – 7th. I actually have nothing better to do on the 7th (flight leaves around 9PM so if you're going and got a day to kill in The City let me know). Also, if anybody is getting to JFK around noon I could use a ride out to Islandia… or at the very least tips on how to get there. Staying at Hyatt Wind Song.

Woohoo, bigger and better than ever. Over the weekend I finally threw away Google's Blogger service and ported all of my posts and comments over to my own servers. The upside is that there are a whole lot more features and things I can do with Vladville now that I could not do with Blogger. The downside: spam. I feel its a good tradeoff and I am sure it will be easier to handle than all the downtime and mistakes Blogger used to make.

So here it is – fully powered by WordPress on CentOS Linux 4.3. There is still a Windows 2003 box behind the SBS Show for media streaming but that will soon either disappear or be upgraded, I have not fully decided how I'll be streaming future media content off Vladville – but you can bet there will be a LOT!

The move was very simple. Porting the Vladville theme to WordPress was less than amusing but after seeing what this can do I will be changing the theme again to something more Web 2.0ish. I would like to thank my friend Pablo Averbuj for helping me out yesterday with Apache Rewrites. You see, Blogger publishes the Atom XML as /rss/vladville.xml – its something thats in thousands and thousands of RSS feeds out there. Well, WordPress publishes feeds as /feed/rss2 or /?feed=rss. Since there was no way to do an internal redirect that would work here is the actual Rewrite rule Pablo came up with:

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss/vladville.xml /index.php?feed=rss2 [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

The interesting rule is the one that is matching requests to /rss/vladville.xml and redirecting them to /index.php?feed=rss2. We tried this over and over and over again and could not get it to do internal redirection. Finally Pablo threw in a P in there (for proxy) and it works. What more can you ask for?  Here is an interesting conversation we had after we decided it was good enough:

Pablo: So you're returning RSS2 but aren't they expecting Atom?

Vlad: Yes.

Pablo: Eh, F em if they can't take a joke

So if your feed is broken happy belated April Fools day. For different feeds from Vladville (if its broken) use the following:

http://www.vladville.com/feed/rss2

http://www.vladville.com/feed/atom

That ought to do it! 

Just a note on the maintenance window this weekend; Vladville, SBS Show and other sites may not be available as I move the content and back-end systems to WordPress. The current Vladville runs on Blogger, Windows Server 2003 and LAMP front-end. Needless to say is neither as affordable nor as stable nor as flexible as I would like it. So please pardon the dust. I expect everything to be back in one piece by Monday. The interesting part will be porting of the current hacked-up template over to WordPress.

Now this is very cool. One of my partners, Travis Creighton, posted this on a mailing list and it is very cool. You know how the Remote Assistance game works, right? You have to ask them to go into Help & Support center, request assistance, mail it to you, etc? Well, Travis found a way to get into the box without making the user create a request:

I found how to bring up the "Offer Remote Assistance" app w/o navigating to the "Server Management" app. (I know…I'm breaking the 70-282 rules.) The sweet thing is that I can use this URL on my XP workstation and not have to first connect to the server in order to 'offer' Remote Assistance. And without this URL, I had to talk them through sending me an invite. Here is the jewel (copy and paste it all on the same line):

hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,

C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/UnSolicitedRCUI.htm

Neat, eh?

Update 4/21/2006: Thanks Charlie, the URI has been fixed; I moved my blog to a different platform over the weekend and it mangled the spacing in the blog during the post import. The one above should work now without a problem but remember to eliminate any spaces and paste it all on the same line..

Had the opportunity to chat with SBS R2 developers, PM's, GM's, and other associated R2 owners about what will be new in R2 and how things are changing. The attendance was pretty good and the answers were fairly direct, in spite of some poking and prodding questions from the peanut gallery. Here are the transcripts of the chat: Expert Responses Guest Chat Comments closed, I figure if you had a comment or a question you would have attended this public chat with the SBS R2 executives. For further transcripts and the chance to speak to other Microsoft Executives about software initiatives check out Technet Chats.

Now I must admit I was not too excited about Google Gcal (yet another beta) but I figured I'd give it a shot to see just what sort of a "me too" they have managed to put out now. Show me one person that had not lost some faith in Google developers after the Gtalk fiasco. Either way, I checked it out and I must say I am very impressed. It hurts when something shames my Exchange backend but this comes relatively close to being the best thing on the market. Agendas, speed, calendar sharing, permissions, public events, the search and most of all – the little things. For example, it gives you tips and examples as you work: When you attempt to add an event it gives you an example "Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow"; Such natural stuff has been available in Outlook for quite some time but I bet you're reading about it here the first time. Google is taking the page out of Microsoft's book – It's the little things that matter the most. The horrific privacy policy, beta status, no offline / backup and other deal breaking details aside… this could be a time management solution for a lot of people. Don't expect this one out of the beta for a long time either – there are absolutely no ads on it – anywhere. So how do they make money on this?

Today my blog was linked from a story on the front page at digg.com. Talk about a good timing, vladville.com gear was updated just recently. They even coined a new word – Vladfire! What the author of the article spotlighted was my outrage over promotion of beta software and my utter disgust with ActiveX. They did get that I was a Microsoft fan but I figured it was time to revisit the good old Vladvisory. You see, I'm a big fan of Microsoft software. They really put in a lot of time to get the things to work, look and feel right. But when they go bad, they really go bad. Microsoft Licensing and ActiveX are the retarded children of a drunken Microsoft marriage. I hate them, very much, and you will be hard pressed to find an IT Professional that does not share that view – even within Microsoft. I'm not a Microsoft employee, PM, not a PR appologist, not a fanboy. I am the voice of the Microsoft customer, Microsoft partner and a Microsoft certified professional, one that is knee deep in Microsoft software good and bad. I spend my day working on Microsoft software, talking to Microsoft professionals and IT business owners, Microsoft partners, Microsoft support, development teams, PM's, GM's, you name it. My motivation is to clear things up for some that are not used to reading between the lines and to help everyone be more effective – to a certain degree we all want the same things. I'm not ZDNet, at least in terms that I have a real job and don't make my living selling advertising, so I call it like it is. Sometimes I come off as a baptist sermon, sometimes just a geek… but always honest.

Microsoft.com again offers two e-books on Visual Basic as free downloads. The two titles are Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers and Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. I know, I know, this seems irrelevant but you should check it out. You see, back in VB6 days nearly everyone could be a coder because it was such a simple thing to nearly master – if it was possible, it was possible in a matter of minutes. With .NET and .NET 2.0 things are just as easy and a lot more powerful – but the intrface has changed quite a bit. So get it and catch up on the first few chapters. As for this weekend, there are a few things that have kind of caught my eye. First one is the ifolder server which appears very interesting. Not a server monster? Well, there is some stuff over at multiply.com that appears interesting but not quite useful. Either way, more fun stuff to play with.

Not a whole heck of a lot going on in the tech world (that is of any consequences) so here are some updates on whats going on with the "friends of Vlad" in as tight of a paragraph as possible: Last night I went to Exchange Connections event held in Orlando and got a chance to meet a bunch of my fellow Exchange and SharePoint MVP's: Peter o'Dowd, Jim McBee, Missy Koslosky, Sue Mosher, Kevin Laahs and Kieran McCorry. Thanks to HP for picking up the tab and to Missy and Sue for cluing me in about everything. As mentioned in the Orlando IT Pro newsletter. Susanne Dansey has a new blog and apparently blushes when complimented. So don't be nice to her today, bug HER about where SBS Show is and when she'll be mailing back the footage from SMB Nation Amsterdam. And while we're in the family, Bob Rebholz got a new job. Fred Pullen is talking about Vista and even has a product guide for it available! In the crazy corner, Susan Bradley is still losing her mind defending SBS R2. Jen Wakefield is pissing into the wind with the FPRA Blog week trying to encourage more PR people to blog. So ungodly.