I couldn’t find your show’s name in the E-Mail contact page’s drop down of shows on the ABC website, so I thought I’d send you this on Twitter.

I decided to take a drive today down to the Port Of Brisbane to check out all the new roadwork that has been happening down there when I noticed some new signage. I’ll tell you what that was in a minute.

I googled this new signage and came across this blog post of yours from 2008: ( http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2008/09/ipswich-motorwa.html ) discussing what was at the time, some new changes being made to the route numbering system in Brisbane. One of the main points you made was “where is the M4?”. Well after 4 years of disappearing, route M4 is back in Brisbane! The Port of Brisbane Motorway now has the route number of M4, replacing the existing State Route 42 marking (well some signs do, they’re still working on it).

So I’ve decided to make 2 maps for you. The first map is what the route numbering situation was like back in 2004, when Brisbane was still exclusively using the Metroad marking system (those white hexagons with a blue border and blue numbers in them, these were only ever used in Sydney and Brisbane’s metropolitan areas, nowhere else in the world) and the only alphanumeric routes anywhere near Brisbane were the Pacific Motorway (M1) south of the Logan Motorway interchange and the Warrego Highway (A2). I apologise for the quality of my maps, I did them in Microsoft Paint with a mouse. The blue is water, the solid lines are roads of Motorway grade standard and the dotted roads are main suburban roads such as Gympie Road and Kessels Road or major rural roads with one lane each way (such as the Mt Lindesay Highway south of Park Ridge towards Beaudesert). Each continous route has its own colour.

Map 1 (Click the Map to Make It Bigger)

Brisbane’s Route Numbering System 2004

The second map is what the QLD government has implemented so far. Most of the implementation work is done, although I have issues with some of the decisions they’ve made.

Map 2 (Click the Map to Make It Bigger)

Brisbane’s Route Numbering System November 2012

For some reason, they still haven’t phased out Metroad 6 and replaced it with an M6 marker yet. Also, I don’t know what they’re going to do with the orphaned section of Metroad 2 along Granard Road, Riawena Road, Kessels Road & Mt Gravatt-Capalaba Road. They can’t change it to the A2, because we already have an M2 and you’re not supposed to repeat numbers for unconnected sections of road, even if they have different letters (although the QLD government broke that rule by deciding to use A3, A4, A5, A6 and A7 in rural Queensland and also in Metro Brisbane for unrelated roads, so now the system is broken, and we’ll be the only state who’s implemented this to end up with those mistakes).

The same orphaning problem will occur again when Legacy Way is opened, because I can almost guarentee that the M5 route will continue off the Western Freeway and into the Legacy Way tunnel and then terminate at the Inner City Bypass (M3). So what is going to happen to the Metroad 5 route that currently snakes its way up through the western suburbs of Brisbane and then across Stafford Road? Same issue, they can’t change it to A5, if the M5 route will continue up Legacy Way.

Finally, they also need to update the route number for the Mt Lindesay Highway and Beaudesert Road from the current National Route 13 (black & white shield) marker to A13 (and do the same with the Brisbane Valley Highway too actually, it needs changing to A17, not pictured on my maps).

So yea, anyway, thought I would just share that the M4 is BACK in Brisbane, 4 years after you asked where it had gone! It will now take you down to the Port of Brisbane (and thankfully that dangerous 90 degree turn at Fort Lytton is now gone. When it’s completely done, it should be 2 lanes each way of motorway from the Gateway Motorway to Export Street). Should be a quicker and safer journey for all the trucks going down there.

Andrew

Firstly I went to Myer. Most of the computers they had there were Windows 7 laptops unfortunately. There were a couple of laptops running Windows 8, but none of those had touch screens. There were also several Android tablets on display as well as the full collection of Apple hardware (iPads, iMacs, iPods & Macbooks). So pretty disappointing.

So I then decided to check out JB-Hifi. They again, had a stack of Windows 7 laptops they were trying to sell, as well as a generous selection of Windows 8 laptops. What I was disappointed to see though (at both Myer and JB-Hifi) is that most of the laptops were not of Ultrabook standard, they were bulky and and heavy and definitely didn’t have touch screens. I would have thought by now that we would have a nice selection of Ultrabooks to choose from, but sadly this isn’t the case. There were a few Ultrabooks, but not many.

Then I finally found some Windows 8 devices with Touch Support. I was also approached by a nice sales girl who wanted to know if I needed any assistance. I had a chat to her and apparently the only two touch Windows 8 devices they have are from Sony: the VAIO Duo 11 (which is a slider hybrid tablet) and the VAIO T Series 13 Ultrabook. I asked why they don’t have more touch hardware that’s specifically built for Windows 8 and she said to blame the manufactuers. This answered a question I’d been having about if it was the manufactuers just not bothering to ship Windows 8 hardware to Australian shops or the shops not ordering it because they want to sell off their Windows 7 hardware first. According to this sales assistant, it’s the former. She also agreed that they wanted to get some more touch hardware because it shows of Windows 8 better.

Here’s the positive part: This sales assistant really knew what she was talking about when it came to Windows 8. She showed me app switching by swiping from the left, knew about app snapping and was selling that as a feature, knew the difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 Pro and made it very clear that this was a Windows 8 Pro device and not a Windows RT one. She then also loaded up Fresh Paint on the device and demoed the pressure senstive pen that comes on the VAIO Duo 11. She even knew about the Surface but said that they didn’t sell it there.

So that was good to see, it appears that the training has been through and this particular girl at JB-Hifi knew all about Windows 8. It’s just sad that there is such a poor selection of proper Windows 8 hardware at the moment. Hopefully this changes soon, so that christmas trees all around Australia are filled with Windows 8 & RT tablets that best show off the new platform!

The Current/Past System

NSW already has a route numbering system (as does Australia, although not a national one), but it’s confusing and few people use it (they instead either use the name of the road, or just make up a name or number to suit themselves, often based on very outdated information). There are 4 different route markers in use in NSW today and 1 previous one that existed for a while but was abolished.

1. National Highways – These routes have a Green and Gold pointed shield and are major routes of national significance that the Federal Government funds. These include roads such as the Hume Highway, the New England Highway etc. The key point of these were that the Federal Government funded. These didn’t exist until 1974.

2. National Routes – These routes have a Black & White pointed shield and these are the rest of the routes that are of national significance, but weren’t important enough to be covered under the federal government funding. This system started in 1954 and initally, all major highways were marked using this shield, until 1974 when the really important ones got upgraded from National Routes to National Highways and got the Green and Gold Shield to replace the Black & White one. Current roads that have the National Route shield today include the Pacific Highway north of Newcastle, the Great Western Highway west of Lapstone, the Southern Freeway from Waterfall to south of Woolngong and the Princes Highway south of Woolngong.

3. State Routes – These routes have a Blue & White rounded shield and these are all of the major roads that the State government wishs to assign a route number to (I’m not 100% sure, but I even think it’s possible that these are the roads that the State Government funds as opposed to the rest of the roads that the Local Government funds). These routes came into existance at various points in time between 1960 and 1997 depending on State, but no longer exist in SA, TAS or in Victoria (except Metro Melbourne). Current roads that are State Routes in Sydney include parts of Victoria Road, parts of Windsor Road etc and in regional NSW include roads like the Summerland Way and the Golden Highway.

4. Metroads – These are special. These routes have a Blue & White Hexagon shaped symbol. Sydney and Brisbane both introduced these routes (Sydney in 1993 and Brisbane copied in 1995). These only exist around Metro Sydney & Brisbane and are reserved for IMPORTANT roads. The idea was that tourists in these cities could just “Follow the numbers” (from 1-10 in Sydney, although 8 was never used and 1-6 in Brisbane) to get across the city and suburbs. A number of existing State Routes and Freeway Routes were changed in 1993 to form these new Metroads (just like what’s happening today), although personally I don’t understand why the government ever implemented these, considering TAS, VIC & SA were rolling out the newer Alpha-Numeric system (the one NSW is switching to) at the same time as these Metroads were rolled out. Examples of Metroads today include the M2, M4 & M5 Freeways, Ryde Road, parts of the Princes & Pacific Highways in Metro Sydney, parts of Pennant Hills Road, King Georges Road, Mona Vale Road and Pittwater road up in the Northern Beaches.

5. Freeways Routes – These routes had a special rounded shield with the word Freeway on it and the letter F and a number in it (e.g F1, F2 all the way through to F8). These routes only came into existance in 1973 and by 1980, the government had decided to ditch them and stop putting signs up for them because they just duplicated the existing National Highway, National Route and State Routes systems. By the time Metroads were introduced in the 1993, this system had been dead for 13 years and nearly all the signs were removed.

The Issues

So with those 4 route marking systems in place, some issues occured.

1. Every time the Federal Government decided to take control of or stop funding a National Highway, technically all those Green and Gold signs would have to be replaced. They obviously never got around to doing this, so the Green and Gold markers started to lose their meaning. The new system designates the type of road that the user is driving on, not who funds it, so changing route numbers won’t need to occur again unless a road has major upgrades done to it, which probably means they’ll be getting new signs anyway.

2. The government did a botchy job implementing the existing system. Whenever I go new places, I often see a sign that has the incorrect route number on it and I have lots of these photos on my computer. The various State government just have done a fairly botchy job at putting all these signs up and if they run out of one type of shield, they just put another one up that’s incorrect, probably because most people won’t notice. The people putting up signs around Tamworth must have all been stoned, because there are just so many incorrect signs up there. They’ve used Metroad symbols for certain roads when Metroads have never ever existed outside of Sydney & Brisbane. I’m not the only one who takes photos of this stuff, there are entire sites on the internet dedicated to it.

3. Apart from the National Highway system, the states were all doing their own thing regarding route numbers for state roads. It was just inconsistant, as is everything we give state governments, because they can never agree on anything! The USA has a national system, Canada has a national system, NZ has a national system, most of Europe and the UK/Ireland have a common system across countries (called the Alpha-Numeric system) and yet, Australia can’t agree on a system between states?

4. The Alpha-Numeric system came to Australia and it is simply a better system, one that was already in use internationally. In 1980 Tasmania decided to convert all of their State Routes into Alpha-Numeric routes (with the exception of 1 route due to some stupidity from the Federal Government at the time). Victoria and South Australia followed Tasmania’s lead in the 1990s and now South Australia has completely implemented the system (there are A, B, C, D & M roads) and Melbourne has also implenented the system (there are A, B, C & M routes there), with the exception of some State & National Routes around the Metro area which they never changed, but might eventually. In 2000, Queensland started to implement this system when we did a MAJOR upgrade of the Pacific Highway to the Gold Coast. This road is now known as the M1 or Pacific Motorway. Since 2005, many other roads around Brisbane and around QLD have been updated, although the Queensland Government has botched several parts of this and the rollout has kind of just halted, so now we have a dodgy mix of the old and new systems. I really hate the Queensland Government sometimes. WA & the NT haven’t really got around to doing this yet, but will eventually.

The Rollout Process

So with the history done, I should probably detail some of the rollout process. The NSW Government started the process of changing all the route numbers back in 2004, so I’m not exactly sure why they decided to come out today and announce this big change, that’s actually been happening since 2004. I also call bullsh*t on the opposition’s comments about this saying that it is a bad idea, because THEY were quietly working on this change for SEVEN YEARS before they were thrown out of office.

The first signs that are a part of this new system were actually revealed to the public in 2005. When the Westlink M7 Motorway opened, instead of changing the route of Metroad 7 away from Pennant Hills Road and various other roads through Liverpool, Smithfield etc and onto the Motorway, they instead made the route number of the Motorway M7 and then just abolished Metroad 7 from south of the M2 & Pennant Hills road intersection. So the only section left of Metroad 7 is the section of Pennant Hills road between Hornsby and the M2.

So from 2005 onwards, whenever signs needed to be replaced, the State Government just put the new Alpha-Numeric route numbers onto the new signs. If you take a drive out to towns such as Cowra, they’ve had these new signs installed for at least 2 years already (probably even longer). What they’ve done in a lot of cases (especially around Sydney) is that they’ve already changed the sign, they’ve just put a coverplate with the old number on top of it, so that when this transition does occur, they just remove a coverplate from the sign and bang, new route number in place. For the rest of the signs that haven’t been replaced yet, they don’t need to replace the whole sign to make the change. All they need to do is install a coverplate with the new number over the old route number on the sign and you’re done!

New Alpha-Numeric Signs, Already In Cobar!

So the bit that confuses me the most about all this is the $20 million figure. Is that figure $20 million that has been spent between 2005 and 2013 during this entire conversion process? Is this $20 million just next year to finish the process? Why is it costing $20 million to simply install small coverplates on road signs? I’m pretty sure a few thousand (even 10 thousand+) pieces of metal with a letter and some numbers on them don’t cost $20 million. I mean, if they’d have asked me, I’d go around installing these coverplates on signs for a years wage of $50,000. It would be a nice way to visit lots of new places through Sydney and rural NSW, plus I’d be fixing something that I care about. I really think the NSW government is getting ripped off somewhere.

I will say though, I will give the NSW government credit for actually planning to do this properly. The Queensland government started doing this, didn’t really announce it to anyone and has kind of stopped 1/2 way through and now our numbering system is even dodgier with a mix of old and new.

Some Extra Thoughts

One of the extra reasons why I think this change is needed is because of the inconsistancy in the names people are giving to these roads. The best examples of the F3 and F6. These DON’T exist anymore. Those route numbers haven’t existed since about 1980. The current route number for the Sydney-Newcastle Frewway (what people call the F3) is National Highway 1 and the current route number for the Southern Freeway (what people seem to call F6) is National Route 1. When people say F3 or F6, they’re using the wrong name.

If I told someone who hadn’t been to Sydney before to drive along the F3, I’m not sure they’d find it easily. With the exception of some signs around the Hornsby end of the Freeway (which are incorrect signs), the signs pointing to the F3 don’t actually use the name F3 in them. They use the word Freeway, the National Highway 1 route symbol and the desination.

A sign for the F3 (Sydney to Newcastle Freeway)

Same with the M2, M4, M5 and what you call the F6. None of those use the names that most people give them on the signs, they use the various Metroad symbols and National Route markers.

A sign for the F6 (Southern Freeway)

A sign for the M5 (South-Western Motorway)

A sign for the Warringah Freeway

A sign for the M2 (Hills Motorway)

A sign for the M4 (Western Motorway)

The exception is the M7. It got the new route marker when it was opened and so it when you say M7, the signs actually have the M7 symbol on them!

A sign for Westlink M7

So yea, by switching to this new system, all route number symbols will match the signposted names and this should make things a lot more consistant. Hopefully it will also encourage people to stop using the wrong names that were abolished 30 over years ago.

Anyway, I’ll conclude now. This is a very long piece of writing, but hopefully it explains what is happening and why I believe it’s important. I do agree that actually fixing the roads in Sydney is important (I’ve got a lot to say about that too), but if the State Government had done this cheaply ($500,000 instead of $20 million), I don’t think this would have been a big issue. I really am concerned about what they’re paying for pieces of metal if it costs them $20 million to do this.

TL;DR Version (Too Long; Didn’t Read Version)

• The current system in NSW has 4 different route markers which all have various histories of where they came from and what they mean.
• The current system is fairly useless and the rollout I personally think has been botched by the government in several different ways
• We’re one of the few countries that doesn’t have a standardised route numbering system across the entire country, where each state does their own thing. The US, Canada, NZ, UK & most of Europe have consistant systems across each country (and in the case of Europe, multiple countries).
• The rollout has actually been occuring since 2005 (which means the opposition has been making BS statements about this being a bad idea) and is currently in place in some rural NSW towns.
• For many parts of Sydney, the system could be rolled out very quickly since the new signs are already in place and have been for ages, they’re just covered up with checkerplates still showing the old number.
• The $20 million figure means that this program isn’t the problem, it’s that they’re overpaying for it by $19 million I reckon. They don’t have to print entirely new signs, just little checkerplates to bolt on top of existing signs, so why is that costing $20 million? I’d do it for them cheaper if they wanted!
• Finally, the existing signs make little sense for people who haven’t been to NSW or Sydney before. When people use terms like the F3, firstly they’re using a name that was abolished 30 years ago, but secondly, F3, F6, M2, M4 and M5 aren’t actually written on most signs, the official names are. Changing to the Alpha-numeric system means the route number can match the name and everything makes more sense.

Dreamspark Vs Dreamspark Premium

In 2008, Microsoft started a student program called Dreamspark, which offers current students free access to popular Microsoft developer tools (such as Visual Studio), Microsoft servers (such as Windows Server) and other nice bits and pieces (such as a free account token to the Windows Phone Marketplace and 90 days free developer training on PluralSight). Dreamspark is FREE to anyone who goes to a valid university or high school (so basically anyone with a .edu address).

Microsoft also runs another program which up until this year was called MSDNAA (MicroSoft Developer Network Academic Alliance). Early this year, Microsoft renamed this program to Dreamspark Premium. Dreamspark Premium allows you to get access to everything on Dreamspark, plus MUCH MUCH more. You can access copies of Windows, Windows Server, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Project, Visio, Access and many many more products that you probably haven’t even heard of (it’s basically everything except Office). This program though normally costs hundreds of dollars to students to participate in. Now, through universities that wish to participate (and QUT does) can enroll students who study Science, Math, IT or engineering into Dreamspark Premium, so that those students can access the Dreamspark Premium program for free (whether the university has to pay for this, I am not sure, they probably do).

So essentially, while these two programs share the same name and Dreamspark Premium can be accessed from the Dreamspark website, they really are independent programs and the details used to log into them are separate (one is provided by QUT and the other you sign up for yourself).

Accessing Dreamspark Premium

In the past, to access MSDNAA (now Dreamspark Premium), you signed in with an email address in the format of student.number@student.qut.edu.au (where student number was the same number you use to log into the QUT network, starting with an n) and a password that was given to you, but you could change if you wanted . You can still sign in using that old email address and password and it will log you in, BUT you won’t be able to download anything from it, because the account will have expired.

As part of an E-Mail Newsletter that was sent back in May 2012, the QUT Science & Engineering Faculty mentioned that a login change to access Dreamspark Premium would be needed. Here’s a screen capture of the relevant section of that E-Mail.

Unfortunately, from my experience of actually configuring this, I wouldn’t say that this email is worded correctly. If you follow the steps in this E-Mail and actually log in to your Dreamspark Premium account using your old details and then try to change your E-Mail address, it doesn’t actually work, you can’t change anything, it won’t let you edit those fields.

What they actually mean (but didn’t write) is that you need to go in and register a new account. The reason your old account still works is so you can go in an retrieve product keys etc from any downloads you’ve completed in the past. What you need now though is a new account.

To do this, you don’t actually need a Dreamspark account (again as mentioned above, the Dreamspark & Dreamspark Premium programs are separate). QUT has registered a list of E-Mail addresses that they have approved for access to Dreamspark Premium and so if you try to register using one of those E-Mail addresses, you will be allowed in.

So to sign up:

1. Visit this link: http://e5.onthehub.com/WebStore/ProductsByMajorVersionList.aspx?ws=de646608-a98b-e011-969d-0030487d8897&vsro=8 (I would bookmark this link, it makes it easier to find the program).

2. Click on the Sign In link in the very top right hand corner of the page.

3. Click on the Register button under the ‘Not Registered?’ section.

4. Now, on the ‘Verify Account’ screen, it says the following: “To complete your registration, an administrator must first have created an account for you. Please enter your account identifier below” and then provides a box to type a username into. This is where you type in your E-Mail address in the format: firstname.lastname@student.qut.edu.au

Note: It MUST be @student.qut.edu.au, not @connect.qut.edu.au, because the @student addresses only last as long as you are at uni, but the @connect addresses last for life and they don’t want people using this service for life. E-Mails sent to the @student addresses do end up in the @connect inbox though for the duration of your time enrolled at QUT, so you don’t need to look in 2 places.

5. You should now be allowed to set a password and complete the sign up process. From now on, you just log on using that @student E-Mail address and the password you just set  :)

Accessing Dreamspark

If you have a Dreamspark Premium account, you probably don’t need to make a Dreamspark account, because Dreamspark Premium offers everything that Dreamspark does, except for ONE thing: a token to the Windows Phone Developer Centre. This is what you can use to submit apps to the Windows Phone Marketplace (hopefully they might start a similar program for Windows 8). So to get this, you’ll need a Dreamspark account (even if you already have a Dreamspark Premium account). You may also want a Dreamspark account if you study a subject which isn’t eligible for a Dreamspark Premium account but still want either Windows Server or Visual Studio 2012 Professional.

So to sign up for Dreamspark:

1.  Visit www.dreamspark.com and click on the Create An Account link under the ‘Get Started Now’ section on the right of the page.

2. On the Create a Dreamspark Account page, fill in the Sign Up Form. The fields to take note of are:

E-Mail Address: This address can be any E-Mail address you like (you’ll be asked to verify with a QUT E-Mail address later in the process. I’d still recommend using your QUT account, it’s probably best to use the same address to avoid confusion, although you don’t have to as the account aren’t linked.)

Institution/School: For reasons that I don’t understand, there seems to be dozens of different listings for QUT when you type either QUT or Queensland University of Technology into the search box, some of which list places such as the United Kingdom and Alabama, USA. It’s probably your best bet to simply type in: ‘Queensland University of Technology’ and pick the entry named that that’s located in Australia.

3. So once you’ve filled in the Sign Up form, click on Continue to Verify at the bottom of the screen and you should now be asked to type in your QUT student E-Mail address. This is where you type in your E-Mail address in the format: firstname.lastname@student.qut.edu.au

Note: It MUST be @student.qut.edu.au, not @connect.qut.edu.au, because the @student addresses only last as long as you are at uni, but the @connect addresses last for life and they don’t want people using this service for life. E-Mails sent to the @student addresses do end up in the @connect inbox though for the duration of your time enrolled at QUT, so you don’t need to look in 2 places.

4. Once this is accepted, you’ll need to click the link in the verification E-Mail you’re sent, but you should now be able to log in to Dreamspark!

Hope this information helps!

The (Over) Reaction
Australia will host this Summit in 2014 and today Julia Gillard announced that Brisbane would be hosting the event. This announcement caused a reaction from some of the NSW Government ministers that I would classify as embarrassing. NSW Planning Minister Brad Hazzard made this comment in a statement regarding the decision: “It’s insulting to the 20 leaders”.

I’m sorry Brad, but that’s a silly comment and you know it. Sydney is a wonderful city and so is Brisbane (and so are all of the capital cities I’ve seen, I’ve seen them all except Perth & Darwin) and I don’t that world leaders are going to feel insulted that they coming to Brisbane instead of Sydney. He also said this in his statement: “She’s chosen Brisbane simply to use the leaders of the world as political pawns in her game to try and win back the votes across Queensland”. This is something I partly agree with, but I’ll get back to it later.

Julia Gillard said the reasons behind choosing Brisbane over Sydney was that the Sydney Convention Centre would be under renovation during the time when the summit would be on and that Sydney Airport has restrictions that simply make Brisbane a better choice. I agree with most of the things she said in this area and that this highlights a bigger problem for Sydney.

Today on Sydney’s Triple M, The Spoonman editorialised about how Sydney’s crippling infrastructure is causing a drop in productivity, which is causing the working families of Sydney to be worse off than other parts of Australia (you can listen to that editorial here). I also believe that infrastructure is one of the key reasons why Sydney wasn’t picked to host the G20 Summit in 2014 and the reason why Sydney might continue to lose out on future major events if something doesn’t change. The infrastructure simply isn’t up to scratch anymore, due to years of neglect from all levels of government, but specifically the NSW State Government.

Airports
Firstly, Sydney only has 1 major airport which in itself isn’t a problem (Brisbane only has one major airport too, Melbourne has several airports). The problem with Sydney Airport is that due to it’s location, expansion isn’t a possibility (and the airport is already tight on space as it is) and there is a nightly curfew that is in place because the airport is too close to major suburbs. The solution would be to build a second airport, one that isn’t surrounded so closely with houses, so that it could operate 24 hours a day. A second Sydney airport would also mean that the Sydney air traffic could be spread out between the two airports, increasing capacity. Unfortunately it looks like this won’t be happening for many years as the NSW Premier doesn’t support a second airport in the Sydney and instead was suggesting absurd ideas such as putting the second airport for Sydney in Canberra and linking it with high speed rail.

Roads
Secondly, Sydney has horrible roads linking the airport with the city. Melbourne has always been the shining example of how you need to connect an airport to the road network of a city, because they have a freeway (the Tullamarine Freeway) which links Melbourne Airport to the Western Ring Road (the major Melbourne bypass road, which links the north eastern, northern and Western suburbs together) and the Melbourne CBD. The Tullamarine freeway also links to the CityLink tunnels which allow access to the city’s southern and south eastern suburbs too. The only major issue is that there is no train line to Melbourne Airport.

Brisbane had a horrible city to Airport connection until a few years ago (it involved a single road called Airport Drive in and out of the airport, with an extremely dangerous roundabout connecting Airport Drive to the congested Gateway Motorway and a road which took you to the the northern suburbs of Brisbane so you could navigate through them and eventually find the Brisbane CBD). This has all changed now, with a second, freeway/motorway grade road being built which provides direct access to an upgraded Gateway Motorway (for easy access to the Sunshine Coast & Gold Coast as well as the southern and south western suburbs) and as of the start of next month, a motorway grade tunnel named AirportLink which will provide direct access to the Brisbane CBD, completely avoiding the northern suburbs and in 2014, direct access to the western suburbs too, via Legacy Way.

Travelling from Sydney Airport to the CBD either involves travelling through some of the southern suburbs of Sydney (including Waterloo, Mascot & Redfern) or taking the congested Southern Cross Way & Eastern Distributor roads, which are really designed for traffic trying to bypass the CBD and end up in the Harbour Tunnel or Harbour Bridge, not for traffic trying to get into the CBD. Add on top of this the fact that the traffic problems in Sydney caused by the lack of an M4 East link, Sydney-Newscastle Freeway & M2 link and the Southern Freeway to Southern Cross Way link, as well as the M5 East tunnel capacity issues make it difficult to get places (near impossible in peak hour) and I can understand why the Prime Minister might think twice before organising a major summit in Sydney.

Venue
I don’t know much about the convention centres in Sydney so there isn’t a lot I can say about that other than what has been said publicly: The Sydney Convention Centre will be under renovation at the time the summit is on and Brisbane has a Convention Centre at South Bank that is ready for events. I don’t know if the Sydney Opera House would have been a better venue, but after discussing the two previous issues, I don’t think it really matters.

Where The Politics Comes In
I mentioned before that I did agree with Mr Hazzard when he said that Julia Gillard was playing a politics game with this, but I disagree in the reasoning. For all the reasons I mentioned above, I don’t think Sydney was ever a credible contender for this summit. Where I think the politics comes in though is that Julia Gillard chose Brisbane over what I would have thought would be the next choice following Sydney: Melbourne.

Melbourne has an Airport that can be run at full capacity 24 hours a day and has a suitable road network connecting it to the CBD and I would assume Melbourne has a Convention Centre big enough to host the summit. So I do think Julia Gillard chose Brisbane as a way to try and improve her party’s polling in Queensland, but I think she chose Brisbane over Melbourne, not Sydney. I don’t think it’s going to be very effective though in changing many people’s vote. Surely most people wouldn’t suddenly decide to suddenly vote for a party, simply because the leader of that party offered them a major world summit for them to host?

Conclusion
So I hope this made sense and I really hope that all the ministers and representatives in Sydney today who were acting like spoilt children about losing the G20 Summit to Brisbane, saying that Sydney was the only World City in Australia, that Sydney was the only place they could properly experience Australia and that it was “insulting” to bring world leaders to Brisbane decide to grow up. You’ve brought this upon yourselves by not providing the poor people of Sydney the infrastructure that they DESPERATELY NEED. For the people of Sydney who care about this (and to be honest, I don’t think many regular folks really care where these summits are held), let your government representatives know that they need to build you infrastructure for your city.

Personally, I’m glad that Brisbane is getting a chance to hold an event anyway, most of the big events get given to Sydney and Melbourne, even though Brisbane is one of Australia’s fastest growing cities and isn’t a small country town anymore like some folks in Sydney & Melbourne think. Brisbane is a lot more similar to Sydney and Melbourne these days than it is to Darwin.

Over the last decade and a half, Brisbane has built SO MUCH infrastructure, the place looks nothing like it did a decade ago, especially in terms of our road network. We’ve upgraded or built: The Pacific Motorway, Ipswich Motorway, Gateway Motorway & Gateway Bridge Duplication, Clem7 Tunnel, AirportLink, Go Between Bridge, Port of Brisbane Motorway, Bruce Highway, Caboolture Bypass, Mt Lindsay Highway, Inner City Bypass, 2nd Airport Access, Duplication of Redcliffe Bridge, South-Eastern, Inner Northern, Northern (partly) & Eastern (partly) Busways. We also built a water grid, which should prevent us from drought again. We are in SOOOO much debt right now, but at least we have something to show from it and all of this infrastructure is an investment, not an expense and it should help us create more money in the future.

I’d also like to see the Local, State & Federal Governments cut the rubbish and the games they currently play with each other and do what they’re supposed to do: build and manage infrastructure and services for the people who vote them in. Sydney needs 4 major roads to be built/upgraded, additional train lines and a second airport so just build them. Melbourne needs some additional roads to connect up the network of existing ones more efficiently as well as a train line to the airport: build it! Brisbane needs a couple more tunnels, a train line to Coolngatta and some additional busways, so build them! We all need the NBN, so keep building that. There’s got to be a way to fund this stuff properly (I don’t know how, but I’m sure there’s a way if it needs to be done, cutting back on the pollie perks is probably a good start).

So Sydney, as a Brisbane resident I’ve got this to say to you: It’s not you, it’s your infrastructure [that's letting you down].

Finally: I’d like to note that I don’t want the G20 Summit to come to Brisbane actually. I do want Brisbane to host big events and I know this summit could possibly be the gateway to this occurring, but I am concerned about the violent protests and car burnings etc. that have occurred at previous G20 Summits, that’s something that I don’t think any city in Australia wants. I wish that it wasn’t this specific conference that we were hosting, but beggars can’t be choosers I suppose.

The Nokia Lumia 800 Now Appearing AS: The Motorola Defy

The Nokia Lumia 710 Now Appearing AS: The LG Optimus 3D

Now, I’m pretty sure the explaination is that Optus simply replaced the Motorola Defy and LG Optimus 3D with the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 respecitvely and just haven’t replaced the labels yet, but still, this reflects poorly on Optus and they have a history of incorrectly labelling Windows Phone handsets.

OPTUS, SORT IT OUT, WINDOWS PHONE DESERVES BETTER! I bet you wouldn’t let this happen to the iPhone, would you…

This first evolution of Windows started with a combined File & Program Manager (called MS-DOS Executive which was the Shell) before splitting that program into two seperate programs, the Program Manager (which stayed open the entire time Windows was running, it was the Windows Shell)) and the File Manager, which you could open when needed. There was also a Print Manager and Control Panel too. This screenshot was Windows 3.1, the first version of Windows that most people actually took seriously (Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were not seen as serious competitors).

The Second Evolution Of Windows (1995-2012)

The second evolution of Windows is what bought Microsoft so much success. This screenshot is of Windows 95, but all of the main elements that Microsoft introduced into Windows 95 are still the fundimental pieces of the user interface today in Windows 7. The desktop in Windows 95 could actually have icons that you chose (the desktop in the first generation of Windows only had icons for minimised programs) alongside the few that Microsoft put there including, My Computer, Network Neighbourhood (renamed My Network Places in 2000/Me then then simply Network in Vista) and the Recycle Bin. The second key piece of user interface that was added in Windows 95 that still exists today is the taskbar. It contained the Start Button, programs that were currently running (so you could switch between them) and the System Tray & Clock. The taskbar has morphed into a program launcher as well as program switcher, but the concept hasn’t changed too fundimentally since Windows 95 (Windows 7 was the first time the design had really been modified since 95). The Start Menu was the 3rd major piece of GUI that was added in Windows 95 that still exists today in Windows 7. Yes, the Start Menu today doesn’t resemble the simple one that debuted in Windows 95, but it’s still got the same concepts behind it, a place to list all the programs, documents and settings on your computer as well as the place where you can search for things, find help and shut down the computer (as they say, press the Start Button to Stop ). Finally all the extra concepts and programs that Microsoft bought along in Windows 95 including the Recycle Bin, Windows Explorer, Long File Names (255 Characters instead of 11), the design of the Minimise, Maximise/Restore & Close buttons, Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close frozen programs & much much more is all thanks to Windows 95. Lots of things have changed in Windows since 1995, but most of the key fundimentals have not.

The Third Evolution Of Windows (2012-??)

Tomorrow, Microsoft will debut Windows 8 in full for the first time and it really is going to be the 3rd evolution of Windows. While it will retain the old Windows 7  style (second evolution) shell, this will be called the Classic Desktop and it WON’T be the default. The new Start Screen & the associated Metro style guidelines will be the future for Windows GUI design from 2012 onwards. Just like Windows 95 was a real step away from the Windows 3.1 (first evolution) shell, away from all those Manager programs and the useless Desktop, Windows 8 will be a real step away from the Windows 95 (second evolution) shell, away from the Taskbar, Desktop and Start Menu. This is the ultimate UI, the one UI that Microsoft says will be scalable from a 7 inch tablet to a 70 inch TV screen and everything in between!

I really am so excited about what Microsoft has to announce and I’m ready for the rollercoaster ride ahead that Microsoft has planned for us!

P.S: For some perspective, I just wanted to mention the Mac in the context of all this. Just like Windows, the Mac is currently in the second evolution of it’s GUI design. When will we see the 3rd evolution of the UI? I do not know.

Mac OS First Evolution (1984-2000)

Mac OS Second Evolution (2000-??)

Today, Microsoft released the final version of the Zune 4.8 software, which allows phones that are running Windows Phone 7.5 to communicate with the Zune PC Software (Zune 4.7 can only communicate with Windows Phone 7.0 handsets). During the announcement, Microsoft put up a fairly pathetic table (very undetailed) and announced some new markets that the software (and some of Zune’s associated services) would be expanding to. The service expansion today only included the Zune Video Rental section of the marketplace and that only expanded to 5 countries (Denmark, Finland, Japan, Norway and Sweden). The next question is, will the Zune Music Marketplace (and associated Zune Music Pass & Podcast Marketplace) be expanding soon and if it does expand, which countries will it expand to? For a brief period of time during the Zune 4.8 beta, the Music Marketplace was enabled in Canada and Australia and the Podcast Marketplace was enabled in Canada, Australia, Ireland, UK & New Zealand. These disappeared a few weeks ago and still aren’t present in the final version of the software. I’m not sure exactly how the software detects feature availability, but as far as I know, it isn’t hard coded into the software, but rather the software checks Microsoft servers for the information to enable and disable features as appropriate, which means Microsoft can enable and disable pieces of the Zune Software to each region from their end without making us download new builds of the software. Clever really!

So I’ve decided to have a poke around the final version of the Zune 4.8 PC and see what I can find. What I’ve found isn’t huge (I can’t hack software, I’m no Rafael Rivera or Chris Walsh) but I know enough to find interesting things here and there by simply changing the settings on my computer and seeing what impact that has on the Zune Software. So here’s what I’ve found.

There’s a small bug in the Zune 4.8 Software, that if you’re in a country which has the Windows Phone App Marketplace available AND you don’t have any music in your Zune Collection (aka a blank My Music folder on your PC), even if your region doesn’t have access to the Zune Music Marketplace, you get a message saying “You Have No Music In Your Collection” and a link which says “Find Music At Zune Music Marketplace”. I think Microsoft meant for this link only to appear for countries where the Music Marketplace was actually available, but with most software, bugs creep through and that’s a part of life (the same bug didn’t make it through for Podcasts or Videos though). Here’s a screenshot of that message and link (taken while regional settings were set to Australia).

So if you click that link, you get sent to the Music Marketplace, well it attempts to send you there. You get a display like this one, where the browse section of the left navigation is displayed (but clicking the links does nothing) and the genres sections, but without any genres listed. I set my computer’s regional settings to New Zealand and took this screenshot.

That’s how it appears for almost every country you try it on. The 2 exceptions that I could find were Australia and Canada, the SAME two countries that did get the Music Marketplace during the beta before it disappeared again. When you set your regional settings to Australia and perform the same trick as before, you get slightly more information than you do for most countries. In addition to the browse section, you get a full list of genres listed under the genres heading (all these links work too) and you get a listing of the top songs and top albums. You can even manage to get to an artists page (with metadata and everything) and get to the screen with track listings. You can even listen to previews. I set my computer’s regional settings back to Australia while taking this screenshot.

For completeness sake, I’ll show what it should look like if you actually do have the Music Marketplace enabled properly (which is currently the case in the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain & Germany). I set my computer’s regional settings to the United States while taking this screenshot.

In addition to this, Windows Phone 7.5 includes a feature called Bing Music Search (sometimes called Bing Audio) which works in a very similar fashion to Shazam: It listens to a portion of music and tries to match it to a name and artist. The Bing Music Search links very closely with the Zune Music Marketplace (which is what it uses to find the name and artist of music it scans), when you find a track, there’s a Marketplace button which will take you to that track in the Zune Music Marketplace.  This feature is going to be released in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. All of those countries currently have the Zune Music Marketplace except Canada and Australia. If Microsoft didn’t enable the Zune Music Marketplace for Australia and Canada and left that feature in, they’d have a broken Marketplace button appear each time someone did a search and I personally don’t think Microsoft would do that. So all this information makes me continue my assertion that Australia and Canada WILL be getting the Zune Music Marketplace sooner rather than later. Additional questions such as will Australia, Canada and Germany get the Zune Music Pass are ones that I don’t have any answer for and all I can do is HOPE that they will. The other question you may be asking is, will the Zune Podcasts Marketplace be expanding too? I also don’t know the answer to this, but if what was discovered during the beta was correct (and the beta is looking like a pretty accurate source), then the Podcasts Marketplace may expand to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK.

Finally, I was looking around in the Registry Editor and found a key called Features under the Zune key in the Current User root of the registry. This appears to be the place where Microsoft tells the Zune Software what features to enable for which countries. I tried to add Australia (AU) to the Music value and start the Zune Software, but Zune must check for new information each time the software loads and replaces the keys with what they want you to see prompting that message saying that the Feature Availability for Zune has changed and to restart for changes. I didn’t restart and I could actually see the Music pivot reappear (like it did during the beta, when I use that trick to make it appear in the final version of the software, it doesn’t actually make the pivot reappear) and display the same Marketplace that Australia currently sees using my trick, but the settings revert to how Microsoft wants them on the next load of the Zune Software. I’ll post the screenshot of this registry key for your interest, but there’s not much to see here really.

So that’s my afternoon of playing around with the Zune 4.8 software. There’s actually not a lot of new UI options in this version of the software. Something makes me think that Zune 5.0 might be here sooner than we think, I suspect Matt Akers has a surprise for us at some point . I hope that you see my logic and see why I think the Zune Music Marketplace expansions are still coming for us in the near future, even if they didn’t appear today alongside the Zune 4.8 release and Video Marketplace Expansions. Microsoft certainly has the technical capabilities to simply flick a switch and we’d get it the next time we loaded our Zune Clients (and the next time we load the Marketplace Hub on our phones too, since I think it also checks a server to see what to display in there too). Feel free to leave any feedback or thoughts in the comments.

PS: As a free plug to myself, I updated the Windows Phone ‘Mango’ 7.5 Feature Availablity Matrix Today (after loading the final version of the Zune 4.8 Software AND loading WP7.5 Build 7720 onto my phone, thanks XDA-Developers and yes commenters I know that it’s not complete until the manufacturers drivers appear, which is why I’ll be restoring to NoDo when Telstra approves the update). Check out the near final version of the chart here.

Learning OS X from a Windows User’s Experience

I found this article by Stephen Chapman on ZDNet which tells the experience of the author switching from Windows to Mac OS X. Apple in many of their ads say you should switch from a PC to a Mac and that it’s easy to do so, but the author of this article questions that. I have Mac OS X running on my Dell Inspiron 15R (n5110) as an experiment (mainly to keep myself up to date with what’s happening on the OS X side of the technology world and also to prove that your Mac isn’t anything more than a PC built with parts that OS X has exact drivers for) and I can tell you I’ve found some really weird behaviours that would confuse any user who had been using Windows for quite a while. The Green button with the plus (which is the approximate equivalent of the Maximise button in Windows) doesn’t actually make a screen take up as much space as it can in OS X like it does in Windows. In most apps it just stretches the window to a point where all the content is visible (such as the width of a webpage in Safari), but in other apps such as iTunes, it actually transforms the window into a mini player which is completely unexpected behaviour. In Windows the Maximise button always just makes the program fill up the entire screen from the top of your monitor to the top of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The only program I’ve found which breaks this rule is the Command Prompt, but you’re not going to find most regular users going in there. There are countless other things that I could list, but I’m not going to. My real point is, if you’re a Windows user who is used to the way Windows works, switching to a Mac isn’t something that is just “going to happen painlessly”, it’s going to be a bit difficult (just as the transition from OS X to Windows will be too) and this article reminds us of that truth.

 Two PC Industry Surprises In One Week!

This week we had 2 very surprising announcements during the week, both of which could possibly work in Microsoft’s favour. The first one occurred on Tuesday and this was Google announcing they were acquiring Motorola Mobility. There’s so much that can be said about this story, but the main point to get from this is why they decided to purchase Motorola Mobility: Patents! Google wants the 24,500 patents that Motorola Mobility has, so it can defend Android against Apple & Microsoft’s patent lawsuits. One of the most curious things that was noticed by a few bloggers was the page of quotes that Google put together listing all of it’s major partners and their apparent support of this acquisition. The quotes all sounded very similar as if they had all been written by the one person. So someone put together an Android Press Release Generator where you can make your own Press Release for this event. I think this is just brilliant.

The other big story was that only about 1 year after they acquired Palm for their WebOS software, HP announced that they were not only dumping all their WebOS products (which included Tablets & Smartphones) but that they’re looking to sell of their consumer PC business and switch to being an enterprise software services company and this includes acquiring a British company called Autonomy for $10 billion. HP essentially announced they want to follow the exact footsteps that IBM had taken many years ago (and there’s nothing particular wrong with that, IBM is a very successful company, it’s just nobody knows exactly what they do because they don’t produce consumer products). Although most people expected HP to give WebOS a little more time before making any decision about dumping it (the new HP Touchpad wasn’t doing very well in the market, but it had only been out less than a month or so), nobody expected HP to announce they wanted to exit the consumer PC business, especially since they’re the number 1 supplier of PCs in the world. There’s talk that Microsoft might buy HP’s consumer PC business so that they can produce Mac like systems that have completely integrated hardware and software (especially useful for tablets), but that’s unlikely I would think, although after the shock announcements of this week, anything could happen really!

Wow…

No, not the video game, I’m simply saying the word “wow…”. The ABC this week published an article on their news website titled: Most Australians duped by science fiction. This article went through to publish some quite amazing statistics of a number of different surveys that had been giving to many Australians about what conecpts in science fiction that they believed were true or not. One survey found that around 1/2 of the survey respondants thought that humans can be frozen and thawed back to life. Another survey found that 30% of the survey respondants thought that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on earth (a story that many religious organisations have spread because the discovery of the dinosaurs put a dent in their creation stories) and 1/4 thought the earth travelled all the way around the sun in just 1 day (despite it actually being 365 and 1/4 which is where the concept of ‘the year’ comes from). Apparently a similar survey last year found that 30% of respondants in the UK city of Birmingham thought that time travel was possible. Sometimes I just just shake my head and wonder

Interesting World War II Tactics

This week the ABC also published a story about some of the possible tactics the Allies came up with during World War II to try and beat the Nazis. One apparently was to have spies put the female hormone oestrogen into Hitler’s food to cause him to be less aggressive. Apparently others included dropping poisonous snakes onto Nazi soldiers and bombing them with glue to cause them to stick to the ground. I hope they mention some of these proposed (but never executed) tactics in history classes in the future, because they’re actually quite amusing.

Love You Brisbane

Growing up just east of Brisbane City here in Australia, I have a connection to this city and I know quite a lot about it (especially transport related as we’ll come to in a sec), but I didn’t know that it had it’s own song. The other morning when I was getting ready to go to University, my Mum was listening to Spencer Houson on 612 ABC Brisbane and I heard this song play with the lyrics “Love You Brisbane”. I found out that Brisbane actually has a song written about it, well nearly anyway. The song is actually a Jingle that Channel 7 wrote in the 1980s for Brisbane, and it was also used in Darwin & Perth too (with the word Brisbane replaced appropriately), although not to the same success as here in Brisbane. Regardless of its origins and purposes, I still think it’s pretty cool. You can watch it below.

Adelaide’s Southern Expressway

I went to Adelaide a couple of weeks ago and one of my favourite parts of the trip was driving down Adelaide’s Southern Expressway (M2). This road holds the record for being the world’s longest one-way reversible freeway, 24km of Expressway that can only be open in 1 direction at a time. It operates 2am-12:30pm inbound and 2pm-12:30am outbound Monday-Fri and the opposite on Weekends & Public Holidays. The 1.5 hour gap is used to close the expressway to make sure all cars get off it before opening it to traffic in the opposite direction. I recorded a video of my trip down the entire 24km of Expressway travelling southbound and 2km of the return northbound trip to show how the reversible freeway works. Only Adelaide could do something like this . Apparently they will begin the duplication project late 2011, so by next time I visit, this will probably be no different to any other freeway. You can watch the video below.

Microsoft & Windows 8

With the BUILD conference less than 1 month away now, the Windows 8 news is starting to heat up. I thought Ars Technica wrote an excellent piece on Windows 8 in their article entitled: “A sort of PC”: how Windows 8 will invade tablets (and why it might work). I won’t go into any detail about the article, because I think it explains everything really well itself, so if you have time, checking out the 4 page artuic

Busways & Tollways

Finally, since I’m so interested in roads and mapping, I will soon write a few blog posts about 2 related issues (when I’m not busy with something else). One of them will be about Today Tonight’s Toll Road report that they aired last week and the second will be about public transport in Brisbane and more particularly, in the Redlands City Council.

Microsoft made a beta version of the Mango OS to flash to Windows Phone devices available to registered developers on the App Hub in late June. The process of upgrading your phone to Mango included reading & accepting the terms and conditions on the Microsoft Connect site that developers were invited to, then downloading the Mango bits, creating a complete imaged backup of your device in it’s current NoDo state, then upgrading the phone to the beta of Mango. Microsoft has said that to be able to upgrade to the final release of Mango, you will have to actually restore back to your Telco approved NoDo state and that’s why the backup that was created is so important: because this is the only way you’ll be able to get back to NoDo so you can upgrade to the final Telco approved version of Mango.

This is something that Microsoft wanted to make absolutely clear to people downloading and installing the Mango Beta onto their phone. In fact, a message warning about the absolute extreme importance of backing up was mentioned no less than 3 times in the terms and conditions. Here are the relevant sections from the Terms & Conditions page:

2. WP Backup: Prior to updating your Retail Windows Phone
device, the instructions will walk through the steps required to back up the
data on your Windows Phone, ensuring that you will be able to return to a
supported state when the program is complete. Restoring from this backup is the
only way that your phone can be updated to the final, retail version of ‘Mango’
for your Retail Windows Phone.

To participate in this program, you must make a back-up before
upgrading your phone as specified in the instructions, and you
must keep this backup in a safe place during your participation in this
program. Microsoft is unable to support developers who have not taken or
retained a backup of their device.

6. WP Backup: It’s still very important that you understand
that you really must take a backup of your device and save that backup. It is
probably also a good idea that you save a copy of that backup somewhere, just in
case.

10. WP Backup: It really can’t be stressed how important it
is that you take and retain your backup in a safe place. Once you see and use
‘Mango’, you’ll want to continue using it once we release it – and we want you
to, as well. Keeping a backup is the only way that you can get there in a
supported fashion. Please keep your backup.

As you can see, even Microsoft found it slightly amusing the amount of times they wrote that you needed make sure you kept a backup. They wrote it in a very non technical way and in a way that was quite obvious how much they were stressing that you NEEDED to do this. Finally, you had to tick a box under each of these paragraphs (and the other 7 non backup related points too), confirming that you’d read them.

Well, today Microsoft released build 7712 to these registered developers, which provides a near complete version of the Mango update, which should make developers happy (I know I was excited). For a few developers though, today has not turned out to be a good day, because they’ve lost their NoDo backups. It turns out a that a combination of not reading these instructions about backing up your NoDo update and an arguably poor decision made by the people who wrote the backup tool, which should have probably created 2 backups (one in the AppData folder and a second at a location that the user running the tool could have chosen themselves) has caused a number of people to lose their backups because they never made a copy of the C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Phone Update folder, which apparently gets deleted when you uninstall the Zune 4.8 beta (although, this is not entirely Microsoft’s fault really, they made it absolutely clear that you needed to keep this backup in a safe place and the AppData folder isn’t somewhere that I’d call safe, the Documents folder & a USB hard drive is what I’d call safe). So many developers have lost their NoDo backups (Microsoft has confirmed that this issue does exist on it’s Windows Team Blog). There is hope for them though as one final safety net could possibly exist for most people.

Microsoft has had a technology called Previous Versions since Windows Server 2003 (and it’s been included in client versions and turned on by default since Windows Vista). This technology is essentially the same technology that Apple has built into their OS X Lion operating system (which was released last week), although Apple have made the technology more accessible and usable by creating a Time Machine style UI to access it (which means that many people will unfortuantely incorrectly attribute this technology to Apple, when it was really Microsoft who first started using it in client OSes). Well, if you’re lucky, Previous Versions might have a backed up version of the Windows Phone Update folder that you can restore and then make 2 copies of, one to put back in the AppData folder (so you can restore from it) and one to keep in your Documents folder, so that you don’t lose it again. You need to do this pretty quickly though, the Previous Versions don’t hang around forever, especially if you use your computer a lot. Here’s how to attempt to restore your Windows Phone Update folder using Previous Versions. I’m going to write these instructions in a really specific manner (probably overly simplistic for people who are Windows Phone Developers) because following instructions isn’t something that people who’ve had this issue are good at it seems (I joke, but you kind of know it’s true).

1. Hold Windows-Key and R to open the Run dialog. Type %userprofile%\AppData\Local\ and press Enter.

2. Right click the Microsoft folder and choose Properties. The reason we’re going to restore the entire Microsoft folder is, it’s likely the entire Windows Phone Update folder got deleted, so you don’t have it to right click on to access Previous Versions within it, so you need to go one level up!

3. In the Properties Dialog click the Previous Versions tab. Select an entry from the list AFTER your NoDo backup was created (so somewhere after you updated your phone to the Beta 2 release, it’s going to be after about June 30) but BEFORE you lost the backup folder. So probably the earliest point available after you upgraded your phone the first time would be the best point to choose. Then click the Copy button, NOT the Restore button. This is important. The Microsoft folder has a lot of important files in it that get changed on a regular basis by simply using Windows, you don’t want to restore a previous version of it over the top of the existing one, you want to make a copy of it somewhere else so you can fish out the Windows Phone Update folder and then delete the rest of the copy of the Microsoft folder. So click the Copy button.

4. A folder chooser dialog box will appear. From this dialog, choose somewhere easy to find (I suggest the desktop) and then click the “Make New Folder” and name your new folder something appropriate such as WP7 Backup folder. Then select this newly created folder and click Copy. Now you will need to wait. This is probably going to make a copy of possibly GBs of files, so it could take a while, so just let it run.

5. Once you have this copy of the Microsoft folder in your new folder created on the desktop, you can now open it and find the Windows Phone Update folder. In the Windows Phone Update folder should be a folder with some type of identification string (this is the GUID of your phone) which contains the phone’s backup! All you need to do now is copy the entire Windows Phone Update folder from your desktop restored version of the Microsoft folder to the real Microsoft folder you restored from AND then make a second copy of this Windows Phone Update folder to somewhere else safe. Once you’ve done this, you can then delete the Microsoft folder that’s on your desktop (not the original one). To test if this worked, plug your phone in, open Zune, go to Settings, Phone, Update and you should see a button to restore to a previous version with the date you first updated your phone from NoDo to the Beta 2 update.

Hopefully this guide has saved your Windows Phone NoDo backup, so you don’t have to contact Microsoft support to see what your options are (which will probably involve taking your phone to the Telco shop to get it reflashed or sending it to Microsoft so they can do it on your behalf). The moral of the story is, read the instructions carefully and always make backups when Microsoft strongly suggest you do, because, sometimes things happen!