It’s clear Microsoft has perfected human cloning as it would explain the duplicate contacts issue I’ve been having on my Windows Phone 7 that has spiraled out of control. Check out the short video above to see the Frankenstein of a contacts list I now have.

A quick search reveals that at least two other people are also experiencing the same problem which might even be noticeable at first but slowly spreads to different contacts like a virus. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are affected who haven’t noticed yet.

In terms of troubleshooting, the problem doesn’t seem to transfer into the cloud as both my Windows Live and Google accounts show contacts without duplication. Removing all of them but the irremovable Windows Live account yields no results either. Editing or removing any one of the duplicates does not impact any other duplicates.

Of course as last resort I could hard reset/format the phone, but it’s painful to lose all my saved game progress and to reinstall all applications manually. Gee I wonder if it would help if there was a way for me to save the data from my phone and reload them at a later date.

Until then, I’ll just pretend many of my friends have very popular names.

We have some pretty awesome Microsoft developer evangelists down under. To help prove it, they’ve just launched a cool one-page site today called “Noise to Signal” (together with 9×9) that casts a clear and broad light on everything the company is doing for developers presented in comic sketches of all things.

What’s awesome about it is that not only is it so different but it works so well. The light hearted humor and informal atmosphere is a stark contrast to the Utopian corporate marketing spiel that commonly creeps into evangelism for the worse.

Although there are already plans to make it more interactive in the future, I think there’s an opportunity here to tell an engaging developer story over time in the form of an ongoing comic series, much like what Valve does with Team Fortress 2.

Oh and Rick is extra awesome.

I must admit I use Firefox 4 day to day, only because I’m still a web developer by heart and can’t live without the Swiss army knife of the web, Firebug. That being said, I take my hat off to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 team for making the web better for everyone, even for those like myself who don’t use it.

When Internet Explorer 9 was first announced at PDC09 more than a year ago, I dubbed it “a free upgrade for the web”. Turns out that wasn’t a bad analogy.

With the final release launching next week on March 14, looking back throughout its development cycle, its not only proven it’s very much a next-generation browser but one that’s also keeping the competition honest. Surprising considering its previous position.

Granted Internet Explorer is still far from perfect (ex. no CSS3 text-shadow still), what instills confidence for me in their ability to compete is that their hardware-accelerated rendering technology was not only groundbreaking when it was first demonstrated 17 months ago, remains the leader still.

Neither the upcoming Firefox 4 release nor Chrome has been able to match it. Not surprising since Dean Hachamovitch told me it was a complex engineering feat during an interview, of course I couldn’t comprehend just how far ahead they were at the time.

The fact that Mozilla and Google tried and will try even harder for months to come is why all Firefox and Chrome users should also appreciate how IE9 has influenced the whole industry for the better. Competition, at its finest.

A series of comedic TV advertisements featuring the winner of Miss Australia 2006, Erin McNaught, appears to be part of a new campaign to boost the promotion of Windows 7 and Windows Live 2011 in Australia.

At least three ads have been produced which star the beauty pageant winner with three less-than-desirable dates in various scenarios where Windows 7 and Windows Live has proven useful. Features shown include internet media streaming, Photo Fuse and Live Mesh.

Of course Erin is no stranger to being associated with technology as she used to host the Cybershack technology TV show before she suffered physical injury whilst taping an episode.

Although these ads remind me of the show “Beauty and the Geek” (I only know of, never seen, I swear), I find them far more enjoyable than the American “To The Cloud” ads whose catchphrase annoy the hell out of me. After all, she won a beauty pageant for a reason.

I’m reposting this from the official MetroTwit blog to facilitate a discussion.

As some of you may know, we begun a little experiment in the last update with the integration of an advertisement to hear what you, the users, thought of them. Since then, we’ve received an abundance of feedback through many mediums which we’re very grateful for.

Unfortunately, we may have mis-communicated our intentions when we released the update. Just to clear the air, it was never our intention to restrict your choice as a user which is why we’re making some changes, immediately.

Immediate changes

Many users told us that they would be happy to pay to support our application and its development but were displeased with the lack of immediate functionality to permanently remove the ads.

In response to this valid concern, we just released an update that removes the ad for all users until a practical solution to permanently hide the ad is implemented.

The future

To be perfectly frank, the net loss of developing MetroTwit is starting to catch up with us. Don’t get us wrong though, we have no intentions of giving up. We had and still receive a lot of intangible value out of developing and sharing what we believe to be a great software experience, only that we would love to deliver more features and improvements even faster, if the opportunity makes sense.

We hoped and still hope there are scenarios where we can strive towards our goal to deliver the best Twitter experience on Windows without any financial contribution from our users, but none have presented itself at this point in time.

The ads

With the context above, we begun exploring some more practical solutions. We stumbled across 140proof who, although offers an advertising solution which is all too common, stood out as an interesting option.

Their solution served ads which in theory should be much more relevant to a user’s interests. Based on feedback we’ve seen in the last 24 hours, this has proven to be true, for some at the least. We look forward to more feedback on this in the future.

The company also has a very clear and concise privacy policy related to the personalization feature of the ads which we’re very confident about.

We want your feedback on a few ideas

Last but not least, not only do we want to keep you in the loop but we sincerely do value your feedback. With that, we would like some feedback on two alternative monetization models we’re considering.

• Freemium – a free ad-supported version with the option to purchase a once-off registration that permanently removes the ad and potentially enables various “professional” features
• Microtransactions – a free ad-supported version with the option to purchase only the premium features you want, for example $2 to remove advertising or unlimited multi-account users

We look forward to your input,

Long Zheng, David Golden and Winston Pang.

As a huge Reddit fan, I just had to share this awesome Windows-related video shared on the site that’s becoming popular.

The premise of “Chain of Fools”, although simple but extremely fascinating, is an experiment to upgrade from each major version of Windows to the next. That’s right, 26 years worth of legacy support from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7. The ultimate test of backwards compatibility if you will.

Subtly but not forgotten, Windows ME is missing. ಠ_ಠ