mattwhite

ILUG2007 Wrapup

So it’s early on Saturday morning and ILUG is all finished, for me at least, there is a geek tour today but I have to get back to London to get on another plane to Boston. I’m going to be posting slightly more sporadically than usual as I try to fit in as much relaxation time as possible over the next couple of weeks until I get home again.

ILUG couldn’t have gone better all round. There were well over 200 people in attendance plus the cream of the Lotus speaking community. Everyone needs to offer great thanks and appreciation to Paul, Eileen, Kitty, Warren, Duffbert and Bill for the incredible amount of work they’ve put into organising this completely free event. It seems like it will be happening again next year so make sure you get registered for ILUG 2008 if you didn’t manage to get onto the list this year.

Thursday night, IBM laid on free beers both during and after the Speedgeeking , I think everyone made the most of the free booze, I know I did and was regretting it Friday morning. But a lot of water and a tea later all was well with the world again. There was an excellent set of sessions on during the day with a behind the scenes look at Lotusphere, Portal integration with Domino and Rob Novak’s free code (and beer) ones all standing out for me. We also learned that pulling up all of the AV cabling was a lot easier than putting it down. 15 minutes after the closing session everything was packed up and stored away in the overnight room. And we were off to the Geek dinner.

A really fun evening, I’m guessing there’ll be a few storeis doing the rounds on the different blogs, there were certainly some incriminating photos that were being planned for blackmail use. I had to duck out at about 11 to try and get some sleep before the early start this morning so I don’t know what state people are going to be in this morning. I’m going to take a wild stab and say that there will be some sore heads on the geek tours today.

When I get to Heathrow in a couple of hours it will be a quick terminal transfer and another plane journey off to Boston for a while. If you’re around and fancy a pint one evening then just drop me a line.

Now hopefully I can get some sleep on the plane!

May 26, 2007 by 3

ILUG2007 Day 1

The journey over to Dublin yesterday was as painless as you could hope for. I bumped into a few people headed over here as well so we shared a taxi from the airport.

I had volunteered to help out with the setup and was taken at my word, a whole group of us were down in the conference area organising the cabling to Warren’s amazing amount of kit. Everything was done by about 11pm by which time everyone was so knackered that I had a single pint and then off to bed.

We were all up early to finish the setting up and registration area at which point I managed to enjoy the sessions rather than worrying about organisation like Paul, Kitty, Warren and Eileen have been all day. Honestly when you see how much work they put into this you really have to take your hat off to them. It also gives a huge insight into what organising a big conference like Lotusphere must be like. Just enourmous amounts of effort.

The day seems to be going well, there’s a really good crowd, over 200 people, with a lot of the big names from the Domino community either presenting or attending. Tonight is “Speed Geeking” reprised from Lotusphere followed by an IBM hosted drinks reception at a local bar. So I’m guessing there’ll be even less sleep than last night.

Just as well I have a few days off next week to recover!

May 24, 2007 by 0

Quote of the day

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

(Brian Kernighan) via

May 22, 2007 by 0

Off to ILUG tomorrow

I (and seemingly a large proportion of the Domino world) will be off to Dublin tomorrow for ILUG 2007 on Thursday and Friday. I’m flying mid afternoon so should be in town by about 6pm. I’m staying at the Alexander Hotel and my mobile number is +44 7767 384970 if you want to catch up with me. Looking forward to catching up with everyone over the next few days.

May 22, 2007 by 0

Annual New Phone

I got the annual call from Orange over the weekend asking whether I’d like to renew my mobile contract. I’m never sure why they bother as I always end up getting more service for less money and a new handset into the bargain. I’m not an especially good customer for them, I mean I do have a monthly contract but I rarely exceed my package talk, text or data limits.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, however, I managed to wangle a spanking new Nokia N95 out of them plus free, unlimited data on evenings and weekends (not sure if they know what they’ve let themselves in for there!) and a few more free SMS messages per month.

The N95 is a really impressive piece of kit with every type of connectivity you can think of, a GPS receiver, a 5 megapixel camera and even a proper 3.5mm headphone socket! There are so many toys on it that I was kept busy all yesterday afternoon playing. Bizarrely the camera on the phone now has a higher resolution than my old Sony point ‘n’ click, I still think the pictures from the Sony are better but the convenience of everything in one device can’t be overstated.

Of course with the Symbian operating system there are lots of software goodies to download and play with as well… Jaiku, Salling Clicker and Shozu are three of the first. I may give the Nokia podcasting application another try as well.

Ah, you have to love shiny new toys. 🙂

May 21, 2007 by 0

Interesting Rumour

Google Blogoscoped is reporting an interesting rumour that Google will be taking over Feedburner. This has the potential to be really good. The stats that Feedburner provides about your blog are unrivalled and in conjunction with Analytics it would make a pretty impressive combination. For those of us running Google Adsense I guess it will also offer the opportunity to put ads into our feeds. Not sure this is such a good thing, but it’s a price I think I’ll be willing to pay if the takeover happens.

May 20, 2007 by 1

VPN Client for Mac

With my current client I’ve been granted access to their internal network via VPN with the caveat that I have to use a specific VPN supplier, namely Checkpoint. Luckily they do have a VPN client for OS X called “VPN-1 SecureClient R56”. It works pretty well actually but I have had a problem when not using it that the airport task runs at 100% processor until I kill both SecureClient and airport. Not ideal. The Apple help on the subject is worse than useless:

Make sure your third-party VPN client software is up-to-date. Contact your network administrator or the manufacturer of your VPN client software.

What I have found after some playing around is if either the VPN or airport are in use then the problem doesn’t occur, if neither are being used is the time when the processor ramps up. So if you remember to turn off the airport connection before you shutdown, then when you restart you don’t get the processor hogging issue. I used to just leave it on all the time so this is an annoyance but it saves having to go through the whole killing tasks process after startup each morning.

May 17, 2007 by 4

ADSL Switchover complete

My planned ADSL switch to IDNet couldn’t have gone smoother. I got an email from them at 7am yesterday morning saying it was all complete, then when I got home in the evening I just reconfigured my ADSL router to use the new connection details (including a static IP which will be very useful), two minutes later everything was up and running. And it’s already faster than my BT connection even though we’re in the “bedding down” period for the next three days.

I do like it when things work just the way they should with no hassles.

May 16, 2007 by 0

What tools do you use?

Julian’s recent post about Javascript Debugging in IE got me thinking, there are a ton of tools out there that are either free or very cheap and I’m constantly finding new ones. So in the spirit of wanting to find cool new tools to play with I thought I’d share the list of software which I use all the time and see if you have any recommendations you’d like to share…

– Firebug is without question the best web development tool around, it lets you see everything about an internet page, the speed it loads at, the files which make it up, internet headers, CSS structure and so on. It’s free, if you haven’t got it already, get it now.
– The IE Developer Toolbar is a similar tool which offers some of the same functionality, it’s not as good as Firebug but until something better comes along it’s still worth having.
– For pure CSS editing in Windows I’ve still not found anything better than Topstyle. It’s not free but has more than paid for itself over the years.
– Of course the Mac offers CSSEdit which would blow Topstyle out of the water if it were available for Windows. It allows you to edit style sheets “live” to see the impact of changes you’re making. Again it costs, but it’s a joy to use.
– For actual programming I’m a real MyEclipse addict, I use it for writing Java and Javascript, in conjunction with a simple CVS server for source control you’ve got a full, professional development environment for $50. Completely unbeatable in my opinion.
– For text editing in Windows I’ve used Textpad for years, it has all the functions I need, is stable and is cheap! For the Mac I’ve settled on SubEthaEdit, which to be frank isn’t as good as Textpad but is the closest match I’ve found.
– And then we have Altova XMLSpy. Now this is properly expensive, and I’ve never actually paid for it, but when I’ve used copies at client sites it’s hugely impressive, why can’t their pricing model match MyEclipse?

Of course we have the venerable Domino Designer client for Lotusscript etc, but again there are things which can improve your life in there…
– The TeamStudio suite of products is pricey, but worth persuading your boss to buy. If you have to get just one, I’d got with CIAO! which does a good job of version controlling your development environment so that you don’t lose changes over time which is always a risk for multi-developer projects.
– TeamStudio also give away the excellent Script Browser which is a plugin class browser for your LotusScript classes which does a nice job until we get Domino Designer in Eclipse.
– I’ve heard a lot of people swear by the Ytria tools, I’ve not used them myself (whenever I try and install them they crash my Notes client!) but they are probably worth checking out.

So this is the list of things which I use, what’s missing, what would you add or remove from the list?

May 15, 2007 by 5