In December 2006, through the wonderful kindness of the wider IBM Lotus community, I was able to buy my first professional grade (and new to boot) machine. This started something big. Within eight months of receiving that splendid little laptop I had formed my own company and resigned from my employer of some twelve years.

I haven’t looked back!

But what of Kinky, the famous little black MacBook? Well, he lives! We’re on hard drive number three, and the keyboard is a little iffy, but Kinky is still pressed into daily service at Poole Towers :-)

Gurupalooza was followed by “Ask the Product Managers” which started with Ed announcing his move away from the IBM Notes product and into IBM’s mobile enterprise team (read more in Ed’s post, My new role: Moving to IBM Mobile Enterprise marketing). Ah, the end of an era. I well recall Ed starting up his blog a decade ago (initially hosted in Movable Type by that good mother vowe), and I wish Ed the very best in his new role. Ed also introduced Scott Souder who looks after Notes, iNotes and Connections Mail. Count the likes of Pete Jantzen and Dan O’Connor too, and I think the Notes / Designer world is in good hands.

A spot of lunch in the sun was just what the doctor ordered (not those flaming pretzel cookies though), before nipping off to attend the final Q&A session, “Ask The Developers.” All three of these panels were well-compered and full of good humour, with some excellent questions.

Byeeeee

I thoroughly enjoyed the closing session with the excellent John Hodgman and Steven Strogatz. I was especially delighted to see our very own Mr. Robichaux acquit himself so admirably on the big screen when discussing the proof for how 1 actually equals 0.9…. After the traditional blogger photo on stage (complete with reclining Hodgman!) it was time for the bit we all hate: a whirlwind of hugs and goodbyes, followed by (in this case) ten minutes of frantic packing and a mad dash through the Dolphin Rotunda (not for the first time) to catch a cab to the airport with Julian “Math Whizz” Robichaux.

All done then, for another year. It went too fast.

Highlights (people!)

There were sad and sombre times, but there was also jolliness scaled the very heights of joyful. Particular highlights:

• The Nerd Girls’ Spark Ideas session
• The Nerd Girls’ The Great Geek Challenge: a great job by Gab, Tim, Carl, Paul, Abigail and co.!
• Seeing folks like Joe, Rob McD and jonvon who came to Orlando to catch up with everyone: you chaps are the best :-)
• Friday night was an unexpected riot and set the tone for the rest of the week
• Chats, hugs and coffee (thank you Mrs. Elsmore!) in the rotunda
• When a seagull shat on the Wookiee
• Swigging superb homebrews and apple pie vodka around the pool courtesy of Devin, Ray and Karl-Henry…
• … then ending up in the hot tubs after said brews
• Seeing so many old and new friends
• Late night (and early morning) chats
• Hugs from Mat Newman!
• Flying out with Matt, Tim and Mark. Especially when the Wookiee got his IBM keyboard out and plugged it in to his Nexus 7. The stewardesses thought our little quarter of the plane rather hilarious

Uh, so… technology?

Oh yeah. Several people reported an upsurge in XPages-related activity, and I can well believe it. Having largely watched from the sidelines whilst doing other stuff (mobile web, Java and PHP), I now find myself getting involved in a reasonable amount of “modern” Domino development. Less forms, views and agents, more XPages and server-side Javascript and Java. The conference also exposed me to something I had hitherto ignored—DOTS—which I am most keen to get to grips with (assuming IBM see fit to include it in the server, scheduled hooks and all).

Beyond IBM, as I mentioned in my first post, I ended up buying a Nexus 7 at the airport, and used it a lot during the conference—definitely recommended. It beats out the iPad mini for me in a few areas: it’s slightly narrower, has a few more dots per inch to the screen, and is somewhat cheaper. Besides, my phone takes care of iOS things; as a technologist it’s good to have an Android device too (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it).

As an aside, the Wookiee used his Nexus most successfully to write and publish blog posts—if you want to know more about how he does that from pretty much any device that can use a text editor and Dropbox, you should read the following posts forthwith:

1. Migrating to Markdown Pt1-The Rant!
2. Migrating to Markdown Pt2 Nuts and Bolts
3. Migrating to Markdown Pt3 From Domino To Markdown

Wonderful. Can’t wait to catch up with everyone again. Which brings me to my last point: if you feel the same, and are in London next week, come and join a load of us at some informal #LotusBeers in The Counting House from 6pm on Thursday (the 21st).

And what a trip! As long-time readers will know (!) I don’t do the Lotusphere thing very often. I went courtesy of my old employer in 2006 and then thanks to team Elguji got to go again in 2010 as the indy coder I am now. Despite this paucity in my attendance record, Lotusphere always feels welcoming, it just feels “right”—and every time I leave, like everyone else I get the post-conference blues.

I decided to attend Connect 13 on a whim towards the end of last year. I think it came about because I went out for beers with Matt and the Wookiee, and their excited LS chat convinced me.

In other words, it’s all their fault.

Anyway, on to the conference. We flew out on the Friday before, in a surprisingly empty Virgin plane, which was just tickety-boo. The stewardesses were most amused by the ridiculous set-up witnessed in row 64: the Wookiee and I were in full geek flow, with Nexus 7s (I bought a new one on the way out—recommended!), laptops and various charging leads all over the shop.

Once landed, a car hired by Mr. White saw us all to the Dolphin for a swift check-in, and beers (of course). We opted to try and plough through the night in a bid to kill any jet-lag once and for all. This was achieved in memorable style with help from our colleague Mr. Woodward together with Mr. Alan Dalziel and Mrs. Abigail Roberts (never give me another Jägerbomb).

Saturday started gloriously, and we were on a mission: to purchase the remaining contents of our London Developer Co-op give-away this year. Controversially, we decided to move away from our t-shirts, and come up with something else. The Wookiee is a genius at this sort of thing, so everything was meticulously planned, and the “LDC Conference Survival Kit” was duly born—cue a morning pootling around various stores, followed by an afternoon of vigorous assembly:

These babies proved to be most popular as the week progressed; we have a tough job for future give-aways now.

The remainder of Saturday was passed in time-honoured tradtion at the Big River and in ESPN (the Dolphin bar also featured quite heavily as I recall). Of course, the highlight of Saturday was (re)acquainting myself with many many folk, some not seen in three years—including finally meeting the man himself, Mr. Mat Newman! (who was more than ready with a bear-hug of course, none of this shaking hands nonsense).

And so dear reader, I bring post #1 to a close, and shortly move to post #2…

Never fear, Apache and OS X web sharing are still there: you just need to re-enable it all (gah!) So, here’s how to do it. First of all, fire up the trusty Terminal, and issue this command (replacing “<USER>” with your username):

vi /etc/apache2/users/<USER>.conf

A new file will open, and after putting the file into “insert” mode (i in vi), paste in the following (again, replacing “USER” with the necessary):

<Directory "/Users/USER/Sites/">
  Options Indexes Multiviews
  AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Save and exit (esc, then :wq in vi) and start up Apache:

sudo apachectl start

Note that this will only start up Apache for the current session. If you want it to run persistently, modify the relevant daemon setting like so:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd Disabled -bool false

Once Apache is up and running, you should now be able to hit web pages in the usual way, e.g. http://localhost/~USERNAME/somesite/index.html.

If you’re still hitting problems (for example, I was getting 403 errors), these are probably permissions-related, and you need to alter permissions on the newly-created conf file from the step above (remember “USER”!):

  sudo chown root:wheel /etc/apache2/users/USER.conf
  sudo chmod 644 /etc/apache2/users/USER.conf

A great tool, well worth the (small) price. And it does Linux too.

(Talking of Coda 2, if you use it be sure to check out the tips on the Panic blog: Top 20 Secrets of Coda 2).

John Furrier, Apple’s $95 million Android Wet Blanket.

Google is changing the game by simplifying the application experience within applications. My take away from Google IO in SF is that Google is making the experience people-centric and integrating all aspects of the web, mobile, personal, and work experiences into one consumerized user experience.

What…? Eh? Spew.

Why?

It says nothing. Here’s a typical paragraph:

The Torx screws on the back are proudly visible, proclaiming to anyone who wants: touch me, open me, change me, adapt me. The charcoal grey is an updated pre-Apple beige. The multiplicity of ports sing: connect with me, send data to me, accessorize me, enhance me.

Sweet baby Moses. Utter wank.

Anyway, setting aside nonsense like this, the tech, the tech looks like it could be pretty good for MS, and may well win legion new fans. As ever, the devil is in the detail: I just hope MS execute right to the end—they didn’t quite get there with Windows Phone OS, although it was a decent enough start.

As for Code Year, what a great initiative!

If you are not a programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.

Douglas Rushkoff says it best.

To their credit, Netgear had beta firmware releases out in no time, which addressed this issue. However, one side effect seemed to be that for those of us who also use the ReadyNAS as a print server (it’s a Linux box basically, so you get CUPS for free), printing was b0rked. Bonjour detection of the printer was still OK, one could send print jobs to it, but something went awry along the way and OS X reported Unable to get printer status. Hmm.

A very helpful chap by the name of Dr. Christian Fries posted some steps on the official ReadyNAS forums to address this printing issue. I can report that whilst this tip did not work for me with the beta firmware releases, bizarrely it does now that the firmware is production-ready (I’m using the newly-released 4.1.8 for my SPARC-based NV+).

Here I reproduce Dr. Fries’ tip with some notes of my own, and I’ve also added a screenshot of the end result in CUPS (this is all assuming you’re on OS X BTW!)

1. Set up the printer as you would normally (it should just appear when you add a printer in system preferences (assuming you advertise ReadyNAS print queues over Bonjour). My device is a Canon PIXMA iP4500. It comes with reasonable drivers, but they won’t work if you use the printer on the network via a NAS. Instead, once you’ve opted to add your printer, choose the drop-down option to “Select Printer Software…” thus: … and then select the relevant Gutenberg driver for your printer (they cover pretty much everything out there). You should have Gutenberg drivers installed already, but you can always grab the latest versions at the Gutenberg site.
2. Open http://127.0.0.1:631 in your web browser. This is the CUPS page, the printing subsystem of OS X (you may need to alter the IP address or host, depending on your set-up).
3. Select “Administration” and then “Manage Printers”. Select the non-functioning ReadyNAS print queue.
4. Now choose “Modify Printer” from the “Administration” drop-down that appears below the print queue name.
5. On the resulting screen, look for the heading “Other Network Printers” and click the “Windows printer via spoolss” radio button. Click “Continue” and you should then see a screen requesting a connection string…
6. … this connection string should be in this format: smb://YOUR_NAS/YOUR_QUEUE, where YOUR_NAS is either the host name or private IP address of your ReadyNAS as it appears in the Finder (e.g. readynas.local or 192.168.1.1) and YOUR_QUEUE is the name of your printer as it appears in the ReadyNAS FrontView screen (note that you don’t need to include port numbers or extra bits like IPP as you might expect; just use the path as expressed here).
7. Done!

OK, so this is how my printer looks in CUPS (where iP4500_serie is the name of the queue in FrontView):

Read the original post - ReadyNAS forums: Re: Problems printing with 4.1.18

This is pretty handy if, like me, you use multiple addresses. OK, so here’s how to set that up in Mail.app’s preferences: go to the “Account Information” tab in the “Accounts” pane, and edit the “Email Address” field thus:

Just separate the addresses you want to use with commas: easy! Now, where things become a little trickier is in the realm of iOS. The lack of apparent multiple email address support in the iOS mail client was a bit of a bug-bear to me last week especially, whilst on holiday. Yes, you can set up multiple email accounts, one for each address you want to use, but that’s nasty—especially when it comes to downloading your mail (multiple copies ahoy).

In a moment of quiet contemplation I figured that perhaps the comma trick would work in iOS too, but you hit an apparent impasse as the mail client set-up precludes the use of commas in the “Address” field. Hmm. Ah, but a bit of lateral thinking suggests that if perhaps one has a comma secreted about one’s person (OK, in one’s clipboard), the lack of comma in the relevant on-screen keyboard becomes moot. Aha!

Well what do you know, it worked. When checking this wee tip out I found an excellent post which summarises what is required, step-by-step, with screenshots to boot. Take a gander:

Nick Cernis: Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses (the link is Google-specific, but I see no reason why the tips contained therein can’t work for your provider of choice).

Splendid.