With a T

Ah... Sweet Music...

2008-02-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

I'm a geek and a music junkie. That can be an expensive combination. Not only do I love listening to and making music. I also love all the great toys and gadgets that can be involved. Sometimes I get so hung up on the toys, I forget the simple joy of playing or listening to music. But I digress...

Every time I travel for work, I spend quite a bit of time listening to music on the plane, in the airport, etc. And, every time I sit there with my iPod earbuds cranked so I can hear them over the jet noise, I think I really need to get some noise canceling headphones so I can actually hear the music over the jet noise. I always figured part of the fatigue that comes with jet travel must be created by listening to that loud roar for extended periods.

Of course, being a geek, I had to do copious amounts of research before just going out and buying the ubiquitous Bose QuietComfort headphones. As I was researching I started reading about ear canal headphones from the likes of Shure, Etymotic, Ultimate Ears, and the like. These don't use active noise cancelling technology. Rather, they isolate you from the outside noise by creating a seal between your ear and the rest of the world.

After hunting all over, reading reviews, and checking prices, I found myself reading the HeadRoom site and looking at the Ultimate Ears super.fi 3 Studio earphones. They were on sale for $54.99 and I figured I couldn't go too wrong there. Then, I noticed a set on their B-stock page for $44.99 and called them up to place the order. That night I got to reading more reviews and started to worry that I might miss the lower bass on the super.fi 3s. As fate would have it, there was a problem with my credit card and my order didn't ship right away. I called HeadRoom the next day and got the problem straightened out. Then, I called back five minutes later and, after apologizing for being an obsessive geek, asked Jeremy's (awesome HeadRoom salesman btw) opinion of the super.fi 3 Studios vs. the super.fi 5 Pros. I had noticed a set of the 5 Pros show up on the B-stock page for "only" $135.99 and, although Jeremy didn't really push me, I ended up changing my order to the super.fi 5 Pros. Somehow my geek brain processed this as an incremental price increase rather than "it costs three times as much!" :-)

The super.fi 5 Pros are similar in design to the 3 Studios except they use two armature drivers for each ear instead of one. One driver for bass and the other for mids and highs.

Anyway, the super.fi 5 Pros arrived last Friday. Since, of course, I'd already read the manual and watched the fitting video on the Ultimate Ears site, I sat right down to give them a listen. What was my first song choice you might ask? Of course it was Boston's "More Than a Feeling." As the first words played...

I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away

...I truly did slip away. I couldn't help but think: Yes. This is why I love music. Music is SO much better when you can actually hear it. Duh!

Anyway, first couple days, I have listened to several familiar songs to get an idea of how well the little guys work. Every song is like I'm listening to it for the first time.
--Cut forward one week--
Here I sit in the Portland airport preparing for my first trip with these earphones. I'm listening to Mark Knopfler and enjoying free wifi in PDX. Honestly, if I don't look up, it's easy to forget I'm sitting in the airport. I'm in my own little musical world here. If they announce anything important about my flight, I'm screwed. :-)

I have a whole playlist prepared for my travels. I'll report back during or after the trip with some more opinions on

Lotusphere 2008 presentations all zipped up on ls08.net

2008-01-31T20:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, the nice folks running www.ls08.net zipped up all the Lotusphere 2008 presentations by track for your downloading convenience. Hit the ls08.net homepage and click the PDF Download tab. (Lotusphere online username and password required.)

Get 'em while they're hot. Only three weeks left before the ls08 site goes down.

Lotusphere Presentation Batch Download

2008-01-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Stephan Wissel for posting instructions to download all the Lotusphere 2008 presentations in one go. If you attended Lotusphere and would like to keep a library of all the various presentations, check out this entry on wissel.net.

Live from the jamfest

2008-01-21T18:47:00.001-08:00

Man I can't believe how much musical talent there is at Lotusphere. I am
lovin' Jamfest this year! The new venue is great and the music is AWESOME!

Rock on!
«« Sent via Blackberry »»

Do you bleed yellow?

2008-01-18T13:36:00.001-08:00

If you haven't seen it yet, you must take a moment right now to go to BleedYellow.com.

Nice job Lotus911.

Lotusphere Twitter

2008-01-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

Want another way to stay in the loop at Lotusphere? Chris Miller of IdoNotes.com has set up a Lotusphere Twitter for all of us.

Click through and join in the fun!

Sometimes sharing a server can cause confusion

2008-01-15T20:31:00.001-08:00

I simply couldn't resist. Seriously though, Google's a little confused.

Lotusphere 2008 Online is up!

2008-01-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

It's at http://www.ls08.net/. If you haven't seen your email yet, the username is your registration email address and your password is the confirmation number (lowercase) you received via email when you registered.

We have a choice between Domino Web Access full or lite. Very cool. The Agenda looks pretty sweet. A lot of the slide pdfs are already there.

Lots of fun stuff to play with on the LS online site this year. Seeing mostly".nsf" in the URLs. :-) Good job guys.

Get out there and fill in your profile. See you there!

Requirements Gathering and Communication

2008-01-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

I was taking a little afternoon walk today and a funny train of thought ensued. As I was walking, it started to rain. As an Oregonian, my first thought was. Oh. Rain... Great. Hood up. It's such a part of life here this time of year. But, it suddenly struck me how odd it was that little drops of water were falling from the sky. Imagine if you lived in a world where it never rained. I don't mean a world where it used to rain and now it doesn't. I mean a world where there never was rain and you didn't even have a word for it in your vocabulary. (The rest of this little mind trip only makes sense if you pause and really grasp that concept.) How would you feel if one day it rained? It would be an entirely new experience. You'd run inside and say, "Hey everyone, there are little pieces of ocean falling from the sky!" or something crazy like that. In our world this would be something like hamburgers falling from the sky. (For those intrigued by that, here is some assigned reading)

It struck me that this is somewhat like our daily lives as IT professionals and consultants. We are always confronting people with ideas they hadn't thought of before. I was comparing this idea to requirements gathering meetings that I frequently lead and often wish I could do better. What if a business person from my crazy world came to you and said, "Hey, we need your help.
The ground is entirely too dry here." What good would it do to sit down with this business person and say, "Right, what you need is a little rain. Would you like an estimate to implement that?" The business person would be thinking, "What is wrayne and how will that make the ground stop being dry?" So many times there is this gap between technology people and business people that makes it hard to communicate. We truly do come from different worlds with different environments and vocabularies. As technology people, we need to be able to fully understand rain's capabilities but also be able to avoid unreasonable lingo and explain to the customer that we have a solution that will actually cause small droplets of water to fall from the sky which will evenly moisten the ground.

I understand this topic is older than dirt but I find that I need to remind myself of it on an approximately annual basis. It's so easy to get wrapped up with my little development environment and all my dev servers and forget how to communicate. I tend not to be detailed enough in my communication and fear that I'm boring people with details. My new year's resolution is to push myself to be a better bridge between business and technology but also stay hands-on in the design and coding I love so much.

Register now for Lotusphere 2008 Hands-On Sessions

2008-01-10T08:34:00.001-08:00

Scratch that. Make that "Register yesterday for Lotusphere 2008 Hands-On Sessions." I saw the email pointing the Hands-On Session Registration last night as I was getting in bed. So, I tried to access the page using Opera Mini on my Blackberry but it didn't work too well. This morning, I went to the page first thing and, guess what, every session (except for a couple portal sessions) says "Session enrollment closed." Wow, that was fast!

It's hard to say if pre-registration for these sessions was a good idea. I'm sure many people just snagged the spots in case they want to attend. Anyway, more than anything, I'm just impressed that it filled up so fast. It feels like this is going to be an exciting Lotusphere!

See you in 10 days!

Moving to Blogger

2008-01-05T21:35:00.000-08:00

Currently, my life is completely consumed with developing applications on the Lotus Notes/Domino platform. I've been doing that for 13 years. Over the past couple years I got really into blogging and had a lot of fun but then things got crazy busy at work and I just fell out of the groove. With Lotusphere coming, I can't help but start feeling more creative.

Anyway, due to port issues on my FIOS line and hardware issues with my little Domino server, I'm moving my site to Blogger. Hopefully the Domino folks out there will still talk to me. :-)

I'm going to migrate over some of the more interesting old posts and try to start posting again. I'll still post on Notes/Domino topics but I'd like to broaden into some new areas. For example, I am very interested in mobile application development and am trying to ramp up on Android. I have some big ideas!

More to come soon!

@Function Brain Cramp

2007-08-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

When I first started developing applications for Lotus Notes (V3... Good times.) I used to spend my spare moments reading the list of @functions and commands in the help database. It was so helpful to have a good handle on what options where available and it was all new to me at the time. Over the years, I thought I had been doing a good job keeping up by reviewing all the "what's new" docs after each upgrade.

I got slapped (happily) by a simple one the other day. I was modifying a web app and needed to parse a query string parameter for a computed field. Refusing the write the same old @If, @Left @blah,blah,blah formula yet another time to complete this task, I set about finding an example to copy/paste. Much to my surprise, there has been a simple, one-line function to do just this since 6.0: @UrlQueryString( parameterName ). How much easier could it possibly be?

Consider this a public service announcement.

Lotusphere Comes To You - Portland 2007

2007-04-06T21:55:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a while since I've posted. Hello again everybody!

I attended Lotusphere Comes To You in on March 22. I took a bunch of notes and I was thinking: "I'm finally going to start posting on my blog again." Here it is two weeks later. Where does the time go? Anyway, here's brain dump from the general session.

Alan Lepofsky! Giving us, as he says, the fluff. He did a great job of explaining the increasing importance of Lotus to IBM.

He talked about how teams are increasingly geographically dispersed. It's not about finding the right person in your office, it's about finding the right person regardless of their location.

Lotus is really developing this idea of the virtual team and how social software is so important in solidifying these teams.

The most effective teams are when everyone shares their skills and you function as a unit. The claim/hope is that this and the coming generation are and will embrace this idea.

* Sharing
* Finding expertise (how many people using social network today? (Do you have kids? They use it already.)
* "Email, that's what my grandparents use."

IBM wants to bring social networking into the company.

It's all about keeping up with the culture. First it was VCR, then it was email, now it's social networking (Kids learned them first)

The development of ND8 is a great example of how this is changing. Look at how the new interface was developed in public using blogs, etc. People and companies are starting to share information that would previously have been kept private.

Web 2.0: Lots of definitions. It's all about people and knowledge and sharing. The community. The power of crowds.

Talking a bit about what they're doing with the Eclipse framework. Opening up the platform. Allowing others to build new solutions on it.

Open Document Format: Again; opening up the standard. Don't want to get locked into a certain document format. New IBM tools will use this format.

Out in the future...

Talking a bit about IBM's involvement in Second Life. IBM is very interested this more immersive interface and how it can be used for business. IBM is starting to conduct virtual meetings inside Second Life. Alan talked about leading a training session or a meeting in Second Life. He likes to start by asking everyone to sit down and then he asks everyone: why did you choose to sit where you sat? Interesting question...

It's not that IBM is interested in Second Life specifically. They are exploring the 3D interface. Looking to the future...

IBM is also looking to future interfaces. Getting away from keyboard and mouse and looking toward new ways to use touchscreen. Again, they're looking at how this can be developed for business purposes.

Now, talking about the new products:
"Industry's richest continuum of communication and collaboration tools for business" He accented "for business"

He asked: How many people have downloaded Notes 8? In the room, only a few hands were raised. Surprising. Hopefully everyone will go back to the office or home and immediately get it.

It's about a brand new kind of client. "Now an integrated high performance work environment"

ND8 will bring much of what users need into one common interface. Eclipse has allowed them to build a Notes client that is completely extensible.

Alan gave a great explanation of what RSS is. Hmmm. Are there still people out there that don't know what RSS is?

He talked a bit about composite applications and how it brings ND8 into the SOA future.

He is often asked if there is continuing investment in Notes. His response: With ND8 they have opened the waterfall!

Of course he discussed the productivity applications. Talked about how all of this will allow us to build incredibly different types of applications.

Unified Communications

Video, voice, data

Sametime is no longer just about text chat. It's an extensible collaboration platform.

Portal
Moving beyond content aggregation.
Executive scorecards

Mashups

Employee self-service dashboards
manager self-service dashboards
performance management dashboards

Quickr

All about taking the different forms of content in your company and bringing them together. The evolution of quickplace, domino.doc, portal doc mgr. The automatic storing and linking of attachments in emails is going to be so great. Domino administrators rejoice.

Quickr is not a stand alone product. Users don't necessarily think of going to Quickr to do something. It integrates into work they already do. Into Notes, windows file manager, Sametime client. A lot of the integration is about centrally storing files in Quickr and sending links around. Quickr handles this and makes it easy. This all happens via connectors.

There are two versions.

First version has content libraries, team work spaces, team blogs, wikis, calendars, content workflow. This is the standard edition. Quickplace customers are entitled to use the product.

Content repositories supports nsf, FileNet (not first release) and java jsr environments. Looking to add stellant, sharepoint, etc.

The personal edition has content repositories and document sharing. This is part of Notes. No extra licensing involved.

Notes is now...
* Notes client
* Word processing, spreadsheet, presentations
* Quickr personal
* Sametime chat

All for the cost of the Notes client.

Lotus Connections

There are five capabilities: profiles, communities, blogs, bookmarks, activities. Profiles are a way of sharing and finding expertise. More than an address book. Much more information about relationships and capabilities. Tagging will be a big part of this.

Communities are about common areas of interest with other people in your organization. Creating virtual groups of people with common interest.

Blogging. 'nuf said...

Bookmarks. People store and share their bookmarks. In IBM they call it dogear. They dogear websites and Notes databases that they use. Alan says he, as an employee, uses their dogear system before he goes to Google.

The IBM Lotus collaboration strategy

Is to surface all of these capabilities to many different inferfaces: rss/atom, office, eforms, rich client, browser, portal, mobile

Bringing consumer concepts to the business world.

And that was all in the opening session. I attended a great technical session on activity-centric computing and then I started getting interrupted by work.

If Lotusphere Comes to You is in your area and you're on the fence about going, I'd say Go for it! It's well worth your time.

A little security reminder...

2006-07-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

I've been so darn busy lately, I haven't had time to post anything. I even have a very tempting stack of books waiting for my review that I've been neglecting for weeks now. More on that soon hopefully.

In the mean time, I thought I'd share a fun experience I had recently. I've been going through some network changes in my data center (i.e the closet in my home office.) I wanted to upgrade the speed on my DSL line and that meant I had to move from an old frame circuit to a new ATM circuit. This conversion process meant my line would be down for up to two weeks. Since I host three (admittedly small) websites and mail servers on that line, two weeks of down time didn't sound very appealing to me.

So, being a resourceful guy, I took Comcast up on their $20/month special for three months of cable modem. Got the cable up, moved my DNS entries over to the cable modem IP address (no port blocking!) and proceeded to begin conversion of my DSL line. So far, so good...

This is all just background so you'll understand what happened next. For months, I've been hosting my web sites on a DSL line and a Linux box running Domino. I also have a failover Windows box running Domino that replicates periodically. So, if I need to do some maintenance on my Linux box, I just change some router entries and the Windows box takes over for a while.

Since there was some expected delay in getting those DNS entries changed from DSL to the cable modem IP, I left the Linux box up on the DSL line's router and put the Windows box on the cable modem's router. That way, both IP addresses would respond properly while routers around the world got the message.

Now, I have had RealVNC running on that Windows box for a year or so. It's password protected and I never had a problem with it. It was still running when I switched over to the cable modem. Now, I only have very specific ports open through the router from the outside: 80, 1352, 25, 110, the basics... Of course, I also had the VNC port open. Within days (possibly hours, I haven't nailed it down) of opening that VNC port on my cable modem, someone hacked it and was playing around on my server. What's worse is that it took me a couple weeks to notice it.

Here's the fun part. The other night, I was standing near my home office door and I heard a 'ding' sound from the computer. As I was coming around the corner walking toward the computer, I looked at a reflection of the monitor and saw a dialog box on the screen. When I came around the corner and looked directly at the screen, the dialog box was gone. What the...? As I sat down to look more closely, I saw the mouse moving! I noticed the VNC icon in the tray was black, meaning it was active, so I right clicked on it and disconnected the user. Then, I immediately closed the VNC port on the router and waited for my pulse to slow.

I did some poking around and found the nice folks playing on my computer had installed an FTP server and had been happily using my bandwidth and disk space to serve files. There were also several backdoor and virus-type things they added for me. Gee, thanks.

I cleaned it up as best I could and I plan a full reformat, OS reinstall in the near future. So, my lessons?
1. Keep up on security patches. VNC had released an important security update that I hadn't installed. I was only back one level, but it was an important one.
2. Monitor your logs. I had plenty of messages in my event log that would have caught my attention if I'd looked.
3. Beware cable modems. Why was I fine for so long on DSL but got tagged immediately on the cable modem? Packet sniffing? Or just a more popular subnet for mining?

Dollar music downloads are a good deal?

2006-05-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Apple's recent "victory" in retaining 99 cent song downloads has me wondering: What is wrong with the music-buying public? I've been interested in digitally-stored music for some time now. For me CDs are simply a transportation mechanism to get the music onto my computer. I use a Roku SoundBridge (highly recommended) to listen to music in the livingroom, my iPod for portable listening, and J. River's Media Center (also highly recommended) for listening on my computer. When I get a CD, I immediately rip it as high-bitrate MP3s and put the CD in a box.

I have tried a few times to get comfortable with downloading music but I keep running into issues that make me wonder how these companies are staying in business. I can't wait for downloadable music to replace physical CDs as the music distribution mechanism of choice. But, I have a few issues with the current system.

Digital rights
So, let me get this straight. I buy the music and I'm limited to what I can do with it? I might only be able to burn a limited number of CDs? You want to limit the number of computers I can play my music on? I have five computers running just in my house and I replace parts often. Oh, and if you go out of business, my music collection might go with you? This doesn't sound like a good investment.

Price
I can go to the store and buy the physical CD for around $15. Or, go hit Amazon and buy it new for around $13 or get it through their marketplace for like $8. But, the music sites want me to pay $10 to download highly compressed files that sound terrible. I don't get any of the packaging or physical media. Is this simply about convenience? Why would I buy the files when I can probably get the physical CD cheaper and rip it myself at a higher quality?

Audio Quality
You want me to spend $10 to buy an album and be happy with your "CD-quality" encoding? The ~160kb quality I hear from the popular services is NOT CD-quality. It might sound fine through a $5 set of earbuds. However, when I compare quality on a decent sound system the difference is obvious. Large portions of the music are often missing from the compressed files.

I'm not an audiophile, but I take sound quality seriously. Given decent audio equipment, I can tell the difference between a CD and a file from iTunes and I think anybody else without damaged hearing would be able to also. I've had some recent experiences that have caused me to give this digital audio revolution a lot of thought.

First, I traded some airline miles for 400 song credits on SonyConnect. I started downloading music like crazy. Sony's Sonic Stage software is pretty awful but the music is encoded in a format that no other jukebox software can read. Of course, since I host all my music on a single server in my house, I wanted to convert it all to mp3 to make the files useful at all. I found a way to get it converted and I enjoyed this "free" music for a while but then I started noticing the audio quality problems. In the end, I feel like my free music wasn't worth the cost. As you might guess, I would not pay SonyConnect any money for their music.

I like iTunes much better but, again, I just can't justify $10 for an album given the low quality and DRM issues.

I recently had the opportunity to try out allofmp3.com. This is what really caused be to see the light. Before I go any further, you should know I want allofmp3 to be legal. I mean, they say they are legal but it seems too good to be true. But, putting legality aside, I hope the music industry will study peoples' reaction to allofmp3.com before they start sueing everyone in sight. This site is unique. You can choose the quality of the music you download. You pay by the megabyte, not by the track. The higher quality you choose, the more you pay. But, even at the highest bitrate mp3 encoding, the price for a CD is in the $3-4 range. And, to top it all off, the files you download are not crippled with DRM.

I assume the record companies would consider this all lunacy. But, I think they'd be missing the point. What's the first thing I wanted to do when I found allofmp3.com? Go fill a bunch of holes in my collection! And, at those prices, I wouldn't hesitate to go pick up a new album if I wanted. I wouldn't have to go through any mental cost/benefit analysis to justify the expense. I would't have to carefully listen to each track to ensure it's worth buying the whole album. I'd just buy it. Heck, if I like the artist, I might just buy all their CDs. And, for those who argue that DRM must be included, why would I steal the music when I can go buy it so easily and cheaply? It wouldn't be worth it.

Think about it. If albums were the price of a coffee how much music would you buy? The music industry is missing the boat! But who's fault is it? Theirs for creating this crazy business model or ours for buying the product?