Weblog by month (January 2006)
Don’t let them suck the life out of you!
Check this story out, which concludes,
The truth is that big companies don’t innovate. They can’t.
Great post, great story, and oh-so-true. Let me tell a similar story: I was once quoted in excess of £350 ($500) to get hold of a single source graphic, which I was going to re-size and re-purpose, for an application that my group owned. Who quoted me this figure? A person in a design bureau within my organisation. We had commissioned them to do this graphic in the first place, just months prior to my enquiry (and paid handsomely for it).
This kind of stuff is crazy, and depressingly wide-spread.
Via Volker Weber.
Related reading: Kathy Sierra: Death by risk aversion.
Lotusphere: What I learned
In no particular order:
- Michelob Ultra: the “ultra” refers to “Ultra lite”. i.e. it SUCKS
- ... but Sam Adams is still good
- I am pants at going round product showcases & snaffling goodies
- Two pairs of shoes: a definite. Thanks to Richard for making the suggestion
- No need to buy coffee before stupidly early BoFs: the LS organisers provide it for you!
- I can still dance like a teapot
- When you attend LS as one large party, it’s a lot more convenient to all book into the same hotel
- ... and you should make that hotel either the Swan or the Dolphin
- Disney resort staff can be amazingly polite. Even at 4am to drunken Brits
But seriously. I had a fantastic time, learned a lot, and met a lot of great people. If I didn’t meet you then more’s the pity: I hope we can rectify that next year (fingers crossed!)
For now, it’s back to work — though not on anything one tenth as cool as the stuff I saw last week. What a shame.
Lotusphere: Four thirty
It’s nearly 5am. Just got back to my hotel room. So this is what Lotusphere is all about eh? Some shots from tonight will follow. are now up. Ooof. Met Surjit Chana tonight too. Yay!
PS. If you ever bump into a certain Paul “Phil” Mooney, be sure to ask him about the Mauve Equipment Room.
Lotusphere: Finishing up
So we’re done. Crikey, that was over pretty quick. I thoroughly enjoyed my first Lotusphere, and really hope it won’t be my last. Apart from anything else, I should do a JamFest some day. Hah!
Anyway, I have a spare few minutes before the call for beer becomes too strong, so I shall finish this post with an overdue link to my Flickr Lotusphere pictures. Not an amazing photographic contribution I’ll warrant you, but there it is. I have a couple of ego-massaging shots in there. See if you can guess which ones... Tsk.
Once you’re done looking at my travesties, be sure to check out the better shots found in the full Lotusphere 2006 Flickr stream.
More thoughts will be collected and presented as and when. Over and out for now.
Lotusphere: DominoWiki futures
Lotusphere is like fantasy land. I’m sitting in the Gurupalooza session, listening to people geeking out on all things Notes and Workplace-related. There is a sea of OpenNTF t-shirts and I’m a sicko badges. I’ve spent several days immersed in this stuff, talking with people that hitherto, I have only "met" via email, Skype, iChat and wot-not.
This is very cool. This is nerdvana. So returning to work Monday morning will be very depressing
Anyway, what has really struck me is the interest in DominoWiki, and I’ve made some great new connections. You should know that Matt White has completed a diff engine for the wiki, and that I have a load of code changes to push thorough also. I have updated the OpenNTF pages, but look out for more activity in 2006 — what’s more, I have had a volunteer for documentation. Woo hoo!
This is all tremendously exciting, and I have to say big thanks to the mysterious pixie for getting that wiki parser really cruising.
Update: I have updated the OpenNTF “About...” page.
Lotusphere: Wednesday
Today was tremendous fun. It started early. I was up at 5.40 ready to get over to the Swan for the OpenNTF BoF session at 7am. Ouch! The BoF was well-attended all the same, and I have to say, Bruce was a great host. Very entertaining, he had plenty for us to talk about, and he brought books with him. I snarfled a copy: Open Source & Free Software Licensing. Anyway, the BoF: we discussed licensing, project support, podcasts, legal liability, the need for documentation, the need for help, projects old (OpenNTF mail experience, DXL Peek, domBulletin and, ahem, DominoWiki) and new — Andre Guirard’s sounded fantastic. It was a great session: thanks to everyone for coming along and taking part. I hope I made sense when I talked about DominoWiki. It was kind of early.
Shout out to Ben Rose too! This was the second session in which I got confused with “other one Ben”! Ben, you may not have been at Lotusphere, but your ears should have been burning nonetheless: Ed even had your site on one of his slides later today (see below).
Onwards. At 8.30 the room was heaving in anticipation of the Worst Practices presentation from Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney. Well. It was superb. We were rolling in the aisles, and the technical content was splendid. If you ever get the chance to see either of these chaps present, grab it with both hands, and don’t let go — even if you have a ferret in your pants.
Continuing the entertainment theme, I just had to go see Ed in action doing, of course, The Boss Loves Microsoft: Where Does That Leave Lotus? Another great session, with Ed supported by Sara Nagelvoort. Good job guys: they really socked it to those MS people, and made some excellent points along the way. I could get picky about the trumping of multi-client support in Notes (Linux has nothing ’til Hannover, the Mac client isn’t full-featured), but that’s kind of missing the point: IBM are firing on all cylinders, MS are just full of red bull.
An interesting Workplace development session followed before lunch. And then the afternoon, wow. It was excellent. A summary:
- Mac Guidera gave a presentation on using XSL and DXL together to generate splendid Web 2.0 applications in Domino. The room was packed, and indeed, overflowed into two more seminar rooms. Good going! IBM have snared a real talent in hiring Mac.
- Wild Bill was back, this time re-visting last year’s session on object oriented programming with Lotusscript. An excellent refresher, as entertaining as ever — again, another packed room.
- Rocky Oliver was extraordinary. The poor guy was in hospital with chronic bronchitis this morning, yet he still blew us all away with a splendid presentation on DXL for Lotusscript coders. He apologised for being spaced-out on drugs for his condition, but if that was a man was wasn’t really “on it“, what on earth is he like when he’s well?? Great presentation Rock: the “righteous hack” is indeed, um, righteous (Rocky demonstrated an approach for generating dynamic forms on the fly using DXL and recounted a beautiful tale of geekery that we could all relate to).
The day finished with the official Lotusphere party at Seaworld, which was great. The organisation was impeccable, and the food and drink plentiful. Delicious cookies especially!
Lotusphere: Tuesday
As I touched-upon in my last couple of posts, I’m being pretty slack on the ’blogging front from Lotusphere. Well, I have no excuses. My HTML skills simply don’t stand up to posting live from sessions, and I don’t want to miss anything. There is a lot going on at this here conference. No doubt you’ve already seen the news about the key announcements: Hannover of course, Sametime 7.5, Notes 7.0.2 on the Mac this year (complete with Domino Web Access support in Firefox), and so on and so forth. In today’s repeat Hannover And Beyond session, we saw a bit more of the stuff that was brought out to show in the opening session... And It Was Good. The Notes client for the Mac, is waaaaaaaaaay more OS X-like. For example, I think I will soon be able to retire the Mac Fonts tool. Hurrah!
What else we did see... activities embedded in the Hannover client. SAP timesheet and vacation recording embedded in a customised Notes mail template. Click-to-call in Sametime, integrated with Avaya initially, more telephony providers in the pipeline. What else... Oh yes! Notes on Linux? The Notes client on Linux. Does that do it for you? How about Hannover on the Mac??
Personally, I have been blown-away by what IBM are doing with Workplace, and more specifically, the managed client technology found therein. I’ve been following all this stuff since just before version 2.0 came out, and each leap forward has been a quantum one. Tools like Workplace Designer, or the Eclipse tooling for creating composite applications, and the stand-alone IBM productivity tools are all really maturing nicely. For example, it’s abundantly clear that a great deal of thought has gone into the APIs available to the Workplace Designer developer, and the Javascript wrappers to core Java classes has been well-executed.
Down-sides of the conference? Well, there’s the Great Coffee Crisis of ’06 (each coffee break only seems to result in drinks being available in the Swan, not the Dolphin).
Lotusphere: Crikey
Too busy, no time... to ’blog. Hah! Well, what a show it has been so far. I’ve spent a whole heap of time on Workplace, the managed client, Workplace Designer, looking at Hannover, J2EE tricks with Domino, and so on and so forth. Have also met a whole load of people, many of whom have been utterly surprised as I lurch out at them in the highways and by-ways of the Swan and Dolphin Hotels.
Sorry about that guys. Anyway, so far it has been a blast. I will post thoughts and “analysis” (hah!) at some point I swear. Others are providing far better coverage of the key themes and news though. Go there.
BTW, I did attend a panel on weblogs today (featuring Ed, Volker, Rocky, and others... but I couldn’t bring myself to post from the session: that would have been far too weird, even for me :o)
Lotusphere: Kicking off
The first braindump from LS06! Forgive me if this is a ramble...
The opening session was fun (Jason Alexander, he of Pretty Woman and Seinfeld fame) was an entertaining speaker. With regards the technology, well I’d had a few hints of what was to come, but even so. Notes 7 on the Mac! Sametime 7.5! “Hannover”!
It was great to see Sametime 7.5 — some tremendous strides, very timely! In addition to the myriad new features: overhauled UI, spell check, rich text support, emoticons, doclinks, expanded user details, screencaps, splendid new web conferencing, an Eclipse-based application framework, how about IBM linking up with AOL, Y! Messenger and Google Talk? Very cool.
The Mac: Notes 7 is finally here, and included instant messaging / presence awareness for the first time on the Mac. Domino Web Access on the Mac, using Firefox, has been sorted out. Oh, and Intel Mac support is coming later in the year. The Notes client UI looked a lot more “Mac-like”, so that was good to see. No mention of Java in Notes on the Mac though...
Moving on: Workplace 2.6 is now shipping, and “Composite applications” is definitely going to be one of the buzz-phrases for this conference. It was very interesting to see a Notes app (in Hannover) combined with a Workplace portlet and a third-party portal application. Clicking on a row in the Notes view updated the associated portlets. “Click to action” in a Notes client??
I can&8217;t not mention Activity Explorer: its reach is extending beyond the Workplace Managed Client to a new web interface (complete with Ajax etc.: as Bob Balaban says: “fully buzzword-compliant”), Lotus Notes, and other applications. It’s a great tool, and good to see that IBM are pushing it beyond the Workplace family.
The network is as over-stretched as ever. You’re lucky if you can get an IP address. Ah well.
Lotusphere: Getting ready
Argh! Packing. This is the bit I hate. Oh, and travelling — I’m not one of those people who enjoy the journey a whole lot either. I just want to be there! Hey ho.
Well, I’m flying from London to Orlando late morning my time. Should get to Disney by six I reckon. I’m staying at the Caribbean Beach resort, and will no doubt check in to see what everyone is up to at the Turtle’s bash at ESPN, if they’ll have me.
Right, onwards. This stuff won’t get put in a bag by itself. See you on the other side!
Meeting doodles
I just had to join in on this one. Both Pete Lyons and Ned Batchelder have recently posted some meeting doodles on their sites, and they’re great! Unfortunately, most of my meeting notes nowadays tend to be in electronic form, so until I can get to my old notebook (in a cupboard somewhere), I have no idea whether I can contribute to this in any way.
So why post at all? Well, whilst perusing Flickr I came across a useful meeting doodle aid, posted in a colleague’s photostream.
Take a look. What do you reckon??
Before The Great Reboot Of Thursday Last
Check this out. Last Thursday, I updated Ethelred to the newly-released 10.4.4 version of OS X. But I just had to take a screenshot of SysStat before that: thirty eight days baby! And he was still running fine.
It’s good, this UNIX stuff.
CoverFlow
Volker mentioned this application a week or so ago. CoverFlow is all about browsing your iTunes music collection in an intuitive, visual fashion, as if you were shuffling through CD cases. Anyway, I noted Volker’s post, but didn’t really explore the application, thinking it was just another take on what Clutter attempts to do.
Well, yes and no. If you run a Mac, and have a hefty iTunes library, I would urge you to check CoverFlow out, it’s pretty nifty. Beware though: the initial indexing process, in which the application grabs all the album art it can, is very heavy on your machine, so don’t do this when you’re in the middle of something!
I really like this thing. It doesn’t replace the way you use iTunes’ library, but augments it very nicely.
Laying claim to DominoWiki?
Interesting...
I’m the author of the OpenWiki template, and run the weblog www.badkey.com.
John, if you’re out there, be sure to (a) upgrade to the latest version of DominoWiki, (b) ensure you have full paths to your CSS and Javascript files so that your site is styled, (c) update any links referring to “OpenWiki” and finally... change the wording in your personal page!!!
What weblogger ISN’T going to do this?
Via Bruce, naturally I had to give this a go. My score is nowhere near the giddy heights of Bruce, Ed, vowe and co. though
All that said, if I ego-surf my name plus DominoWiki I get another thousand points. Woo hoo!
