Simon's Notes

ILUG Presentation

2008-06-05T01:17:00.007+01:00

I had the very great pleasure of delivery of delivering a presentation at ILUG today:
Build or Bust:
Controlling your Designs from Development to Production

Click to download it as a PDF

I had prepared carefully:
A copy of my preso slides on memory stick
Printed copies of the slides for delegates
I had practised the session
I arrived in the room in plenty of time for setup.

Unfortunately . . .
the projector switched itself off every 5 minutes and the microphone switched off every 10 minutes. As one delegate said, at least the session was going to be remembered by everyone for a looong time!

In fact, these problems (nothing to do with the organisers and everything to do with the owners of the venue) didn't really cause a big problem. It helped that there were printed copies of the slides for some of the delegates, and it was also quite funny. In a twisted way. At one point I even had Rocky Oliver trying to fix the AV equipment!

It was a very well-attended session - over 100 people - at an event which will is proving to be quite memorable. Maximum credit should go to the organisers; people like Paul Mooney, Rob Novak, Warren Elsmore, Bill Buchan . . .

In fact, IMO (forget the 'Humble' bit cos I've been to more than a few shows in my time!) this is the best European event since the last Lotusphere Europe in Berlin. Anyone remember when that was? 2001??

ILUG

2008-05-30T13:10:00.009+01:00

I'm delivering a presentation at ILUG next week and I wanted to remind myself of the title of the session. So I go to www.ILUG2008.org . . . only to discover that the site is down. Texting Paul I discover that he's in the process of upgrading to 8.5.
Mmm . . . I didn't know this was released! Ah . . . it isn't :-)
Public Beta starts today!
Sounds like a Worst Practice to me!

Edit:
Anyway, having now found my presentation, I can now tell you that it's entitled:

Build or Bust:
Controlling your Designs from Development to Production
Wednesday 4th June @ 13.45

The Marketing people here at Teamstudio have chosen to add this subtext - sould I sue?

A clearly-defined process for the versioning & delivery of applications is essential to ensure the integrity of your development and production environments. Too often developers are unsure what version of a database they are working on. And administrators can find themselves without key knowledge of the applications they are deploying. During this session the procedures surrounding application versioning, testing & deployment will be discussed. Despite being neither as good looking as Bill Buchan nor as funny as Paul Mooney, this session is still worth attending.

Mission to Mars

2008-05-08T22:50:00.008+01:00

And it only took 2 hours to get there!
OK, so it was Mars the confectionery company rather than the red planet.
Still, makes a good headline :-)

's-Hertogenbosch

2008-04-30T19:42:00.009+01:00

Just returned from a town in the Netherlands that sounds like a big sneeze! Somehow it just doesn't seem right to have a place name beginning with 's-H.

Anyway, I was delivering a workshop to IS Projects, the winners of the 2008 Teamstudio Spotlight Awards for Remarkable Notes Applications. Part of the prize was a selection of Teamstudio products, and I was there to train them on the tools that were new to them and to show some of the new or advanced features of the tools they already owned. As you would expect, the team there is pretty switched-on, so this didn't take too long.

During the session one of the attendees, Erik Klessens, told me that it was possible to 'skin' the Notes client. Here's the site that tells you how:

http://blog.panagenda.com/pub/panablog.nsf/d6plinks/FLOR-7DRBHC

Nice job!

Domino Designer Not Installed? No Problem :-)

2008-04-25T00:12:00.015+01:00

I was in France this week facilitating a 2-day Teamstudio training/workshop at a large French bank in La Défense, Paris. I had arranged to visit the customer on the day before the event to prepare the training room but, at the last minute, my contact was called to a meeting and I was not able to do the setup.

The developers did not have laptops, so the company provided a batch from a pool of machines retained for training purposes. Great. Unfortunately, when we started up the computers we found that although Notes had been installed, Domino Designer hadn't. As this session was about using Teamstudio tools to develop & maintain applications, this was a problem . . . Worse, the machines were ultra-secure. USB disabled, limited rights etc.

Happily, one of the developers - Pascal - reminded me of a little trick. If you simply create a text file in the Notes executable directory called designer.exe then Designer suddenly becomes available - launch the Notes client and you'll now see the Designer icon in the bookmarks bar. Don't believe me? I didn't the first time I heard of this trick! Try it out for yourselves.

And if anyone can remind me of the way to do this for Domino Administrator I would be most grateful.

Notes 8

2008-02-08T20:11:00.000Z

Here's a most excellent post from LotusUserGroup.org all about installing & testing Notes 8

* Installing And Testing The Notes 8 Client, By Julian Robichaux

February 2008: the Lotus Notes 8 client has been "gold" code for 6 months, and 8.0.1 is about to be released. Have you started testing it yet?

IBM hasn't offered numbers on how many clients have upgraded to Notes/Domino 8 so far, but common speculation is that a lot of people were waiting for 8.0.1 to come out because they didn't want to install a "dot zero" release of software.

Fair enough, but have YOU been testing Notes 8? Do you have it installed on your workstation, playing with the new features and testing your applications on it? If not, here are a few tips on installing and testing the new client.

Understand the two different clients
There are actually two different versions of the Notes 8 client now: "Basic" and "Standard". The Basic client is essentially the same as the Notes client you're used to using, and it looks virtually the same as the Notes 7 client. This is for customers who want to upgrade but who either (A) don't have machines powerful enough to run the Standard client, or (B) don't want to shock their users with a modern, pleasant-looking new interface.

The Standard client is based on the Lotus Expeditor framework, which is an IBM customization of Eclipse. While it still runs the Notes executables in the background, the presentation layer is all done in Expeditor/Eclipse, which offers a lot of nice new interface and add-on possibilities.

From a functional standpoint, here's a good list of what the Standard client CAN do but the Basic client cannot:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21264877

Interestingly enough, you can actually launch the Basic client from a Standard client install by running nlnotes.exe from the Notes 8 install directory. As a Developer, you most certainly want to install the Standard client.

Install everything
Two of the optional components for a full (client + Designer + Admin) install are the Productivity Editors and the Composite Application Editor. Even if you don't plan on looking at those things right away, just go ahead and install everything. Either you'll want them later (like when you want to create a Composite Application), or someone will ask about them (like a manager who's curious about whether a spreadsheet will open in the new Notes editors).

Use a reasonably new computer
I actually do demos of Notes 8 sometimes on my 3-year-old Thinkpad with a Pentium 1.5 MHz processor and less than 1 GB of RAM, just to show people that you don't need a supercomputer to run the client. However, you may want something a little better than that.

At the very least, use a newer machine with more than 1 GB of RAM. If you're running Windows Vista, make it at least 2 GB of RAM. If you're the type of person who always has 8 or 10 programs running at the same time, give yourself another GB. The Standard client likes to do a lot of things when it runs, and the underlying Eclipse tooling means that everything is much more modular (and resource intensive) than the old client. This makes it powerful, extensible, and hungry.

And also, no matter what machine you run it on, it may take a while for the Notes 8 client to launch after you've double-clicked the icon. Get used to it. After it's started, things run much more quickly. If you can disable virus-scanning on the new Notes directory, that will tend to speed things up too.

You CAN install Notes 8 on the same computer as Notes 7
Yes, it IS possible to install Notes 7 and Notes 8 on the same workstation. That's what I do, and it's the same technique we've been using for years with concurrent Notes installations: rename the old install directory and adjust the registry when you're done. If you're not familiar with the technique, there are excellent instructions and information here:

http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Running-Notes-R5-6-7-8-concurrently

Just be aware that if you're not careful, Notes 8 will overwrite your existing Notes client installation. It's not that hard to avoid the problem, but you need to watch out.

It's mostly safe to edit Notes 7 apps with Notes 8, but be careful.
Just as a test, I kept going back and forth between Notes 7 and Notes 8 while I was developing my Lotusphere sample databases. Nothing seemed to break, but it was far from a scientific test. In older versions of the client there were sometimes strange issues with things like Action bars getting messed up if you used multiple client versions to edit, but I haven't noticed anything like that so far. The worst that's happened to me is LotusScript code that worked fine in 7 but required a recompile in 8 because of the old "Error loading UseLSX" error.

That being said, be careful editing your production applications with Notes 8 if you're "just testing". It's possible that you might stumble across some weird cross-version bug that makes your users mad.

One known area of incompatibility is web services: web services created or edited in Notes 8 WILL NOT WORK on Notes 7. You have been warned.

Read up on the new features
And of course you'll need to read up on all the nice new features of Notes 8. It's not enough to just test your old apps on the new client and say, "Yeah, that works." You should also learn about things like the sidebar, the new mail template, and composite applications. Here are some links to get you started:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4359.html
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247506.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-new/index.html

Rocky Oliver joins Teamstudio!

2008-01-07T13:14:00.001Z

Read about it here!

Presentation tool

2007-12-13T10:45:00.000Z

I do a fair few presentations every year and was recently introduced to a superb new piece of kit - a Logitech Cordless Presenter. It's a driverless device that allows you to:
- scroll forwards and backwards through Powerpoint presentations
- blank the screen
- set vibration warnings that help you manage your delivery timing
- also has a laser pointer.
I ordered one from Misco for £25 + VAT

Agile Programming

2007-11-27T21:15:00.002Z

I thought this might strike a chord with the Notes developers out there. Remember, it doesn't have to be like this. Just because a technology allows you to do something quick and dirty doesn't mean you must to do it that way.

Got a Cool Notes App?

2007-11-23T12:36:00.000Z

Teamstudio is launching the first-ever Teamstudio Spotlight Awards to reward Notes developers for the most remarkable Notes applications. Prizes include up to $40,000 of software together with on-site implementation (by me or one of my colleagues).
It's worth noting that the panel of judges includes industry-leading experts from OpenNTF.org, The Taking Notes Podcast, IdeaJam, hadsl.com, joelitton.net and nsftools including Bruce Elgort, Julian Robichaux, Joe Litton, and Bill Buchan.
More details here.

The Mutt's Nuts

2007-11-16T09:15:00.000Z

These aren't my words, this is how one of our customers (yes, you Stuart) described the latest release from Teamstudio. And the reason I'm blogging about this release is that it represents a step change in our ability to manage versions of applications in CIAO! (our source control & version management system).
What you are allowed to do in Edition 24 of CIAO! is to branch & merge your codestreams.
Branching was never too difficult, but we've now made it even easier.
What's really sexy is the ability to merge 2 versions.
Here's a link to the release notes detailing all the changes.

OiNK

2007-10-27T00:29:00.000+01:00

Lost

2007-10-13T20:21:00.000+01:00

Lost - not as in the TV series (Heroes is much better anyway) but as in "Where am I?!"
I travel a lot, and I find sat nav a big help. I have Tomtom installed on my PDA and a separate Holux GR-236 GPS unit linked via bluetooth. That is, I *used* to have a GPS unit until it was stolen.

[What happened, in fact, was that I left it in my room at the very lovely Renaissance Penta Vienna Hotel in Vienna. I phoned the hotel as soon as I noticed the loss and, after a few days, they called me back to say they had found it. Great! They were most helpful and duly posted the device back to me. A month later I received a package in the mail postmarked 'Vienna' :-) Inside the package was a covering letter from the hotel, a packet of sweets (?) and . . . nothing else. The package had clearly been ripped open and the GPS stolen :-( I suspect that this was the UK postal service as this thing has happened to me a couple of times before.]

Anyway . . .

The point of this post is to recommend the product which I bought to replace the old Holux. I did some searching and came across a review for a Qstarz BT-Q818. What attracted me to this model? Well, the new MTK chipset (delivering slightly improved TTFF and accuracy) sounded nice. And the battery life of 32 hours sounded absolutely awesome. But the decider was the price.

On Amazon it's £67.86 + P&P
At SuperGPS.co.uk it's £49.98 + P&P
But at the SuperGPS eBay shop it's £33.98 *including* P&P.

How many databases?!

2007-10-09T23:49:00.000+01:00

I was meeting with a customer last week who had 100,000 users and 50,000 notes databases (not counting mail files). Wow, that's a lot of databases. Not only is that a lot of databases, but that works out at 1 database for every 2 Notes users in the company.
Then yesterday I was speaking with another customer who had 8,000 databases (not counting mail files). Not so impressive you may think. However, they only have 4,000 users. For the mathematically challenged that's 2 Notes databases for each and every Notes user! 3 if you include Mail files.
What are these databases being used for? Does anyone know? Who’s managing these databases? How quickly are they growing? How often are they being accessed? Who by? Are they all secure? Are they still being used at all?
What’s the highest ratio of databases to users that *you’ve* seen?
BTW, an updated version of this post may be found on Teamstudio's corporate blog together with a number of responses.
I was also gratified to note that Ed Brill also picked up the thread on *his* site.

Terror-fied

2007-10-02T13:20:00.001+01:00

On a totally separate note, I watched a movie last night which completely blew me away. If you like your films to have:
- excessive violence
- a high body-count
- extreme gore value
- more monsters than people
- gratuitous nudity
I would recommend Planet Terror (aka Grindhouse) most highly.

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia on the subject of the Grindhouse genre (into which category this film eponymously falls):

Exploitation film is a type of film that eschews the expense of "quality" productions in favour of making films on-the-cheap, attracting the public by exciting their more prurient interests.
Exploitation films feature forbidden sex, wanton violence, drug use, nudity, freaks, gore, monsters, destruction, rebellion and mayhem.

Perfect :-)

Pass the Coffee

2007-09-24T13:23:00.000+01:00

I've been in Boston for the last week attending a Teamstudio conference; an annual event where we all get together to share our experiences, learn about new things coming and so on. Great fun, though very tiring.

Flying back on American Airlines, I was in the process or ordering a vodka & lemonade from a steward when his colleague inadvertently poured half a cup of warm coffee over my shoulder. Well, at least it was warm rather than hot . . .

To make up for this, they gave me *2* mini bottles of vodka free (they normally cost $5 each). OK, I thought, that's nice of them. Then the steward returned a few minutes later with what must have been their full complement of vodka - a further 9 bottles!

Needless to say that upon arrival at Heathrow, my colleagues had to decant me from the plane.

Notes 8 - Topical Links

2007-08-24T10:39:00.000+01:00

A colleague - Grant Norman - collates useful links and sends them to interested parties in Teamstudio. Here's his latest collection, mostly related to Notes 8.

22/08/2007 - Notes 8 view from an impartial individual (first link is a good opinion on the article)
http://sake.besystems.eu/LVM/LVMBlog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-8-incredibly-not-bad.htm
http://www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=348

20/08/2007 - Talking Notes Podcast on ND8
http://www.takingnotespodcast.com/blogs/takingnotes.nsf/dx/TakingNotesEpisode65.htm

17/08/2007 - Notes 8.0 shipped and available now
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-and-domino-8-now-shipping?opendocument&comments

16/08/2007 - Notes Domino 8 resources
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/notes-8-resources

14/08/2007 - Notes 8 launch on Fri 17th Aug
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/notes-and-domino-8-channel-announcement-including-ega-date?opendocument&comments

09/08/2007 - Notes 8 deployment guide
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg247506.pdf

And finally, nothing to do with Notes 8 but everything to do with good development practice:

22/08/2007 - Discipline is the key to controlled development
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000931.html

How sure are you that your software is up-to-the-job?

2007-08-21T13:06:00.000+01:00

I have a strong interest in software quality and I came across this rather telling story recently:

At a recent software engineering management course, the participants were given an awkward question to answer.

"If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software how many of you would stay on board?

Only one man raised his hand. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay on board.

With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.

Not Another Blog!

2007-08-12T16:06:00.000+01:00

In a product meeting today I saw some of the new features coming in the next release from Teamstudio. CIAO! and Delta in particular have some cool new stuff. Unfortunately, if I tell you what the features are, I would have to kill you. You'll just have to wait until November.

Latest YouTube funny . . . not sure I approve, but it *is* rather cool.