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one of the obvious things to come out of lotusphere was that there is no choice
but to learn
websphere if i wan tto continue using ibm software. i had been putting it
off, consoling myself with picking up visual studio .net and domino 6.5, but
now i have to bite the bullet.

a problem for me is that a single license for ws costs over gbp2,500 which is,
frankly, ridiculous. a couple of years ago i had the deve
loperworks toolbox but then last year they put the price up to over
gbp2,000 for a renewal. i noticed this morning that the price has come down
again. the basic package starts at gbp360 and includes all the lotus software i
would need, but for a ws 5.1.1 server and wsad package i am looking at around
gbp1,200. still a lot of money, i am going to have to think about this for a
while.

after getting back from lotusphere, the challenge is always how to go about
getting some of the cool stuff used in real life. where i am working at the
moment is particulary restricted because we are still using 5.0.11 and there
are no plans to upgrade to 6.0 let alone 6.5.1. so i am limited to fewer
options.

one of the cooler things i saw in the ibm research lab was the donuts rss
aggregator which integrated some awareness features and logging of activity in
place of a scoring mechanism. i have a few ideas of how this sort of thing
could be implemented for a crm system to keep people up to date with happenings
in their market sector but there will not be any funding for me to do this
officially so a feel a few late nights coming on.

for the second time in a month, i have gone away and there were no major
disasters, so something must be going right.

it seems people have their passports out having travelled to lotusphere. the site that ed is using is excellent so i thought i would do my list as well
and here is the same sort of thing for us states:

well the lotusphere 2004 photos are up. not many i am afraid, i
did my usual trick of forgetting the camera at opportune moments but please
enjoy what is there.

after about 12 hours of travelling i am back at home in ipswich. the journey
was pretty easy really, i still can’t sleep on planes so i’ll just have to
tough it out for the rest of the day to try and kill the jetlag. i just
discovered that the us customs people have broken my suitcase even though i
left it unlocked deliberately… cheers guys.

i’ll write something more coherent about the ‘sphere tomorrow when i have
recovered a bit, in the meantimei will just say that it was a great week, i
always come back wanting to try out the new things i have learnt, the challenge
is always to pass that desire onto my colleagues who were not lucky enough to
attend.

i am sat at orlando airport waiting to board the plane. when i powered up it looked like there was a network but it seems to have disappeared now so this won’t get put up until i am home.

the last day has been really interesting and enjoyable. harass the developers was as entertaining as ever. ed mentioned that microsoft had infiltrated his session and it appeared that they had here to as there was one guy who appeared to be willfully obtuse. in the end he was getting booed and slow hand-clapped. i managed to get my last few questions answered by the ever helpful guys in the developers lab and also put in my two pence worth of ideas for the nd7.0 development.

i had predicted and heard other people saying that the closing session would be a comedian and we were proved right. i had never heard of him (apparently he has been in a few films but his name escapes me), anyway he was very funny. a pity that i had to leave half way through to get to the airport in time.

so i have to try and get some sleep for a few hours so that i don’t feel too bad tomorrow. that’s it, another lotusphere over, another great week had… roll on 23rd january 2005!

ok, so what seemed like a good idea last night was, looking back on it from the
cold light of day, not so sensible. the big plan was to have as big a night as
possible so that i would be tired and therefore sleep on the plane tonight. i
am, indeed, tired, but also feel like i have been kicked repeatedly in the
head.

this will not be mentioned again!

the universal party was good fun if a little cold. it got down to freezing here
last night which should just not be allowed. i also managed to forget my camera
so others will have to provide photographic evidence.

yesterday had a good few sessions, ed’s was useful as always. the web service
features in nd7.0 look superb and will really make my life easier. i have
written our own set of wrapper classes for web services but they are quite
complicated and because of the jdk we are running, a bit limited in
functionality.

the plan for today is to do the first session, then duck out and check out of
the hotel. this afternoon are the general harass the developers and closing
sessions which i think i should have time to do. then it will have to be a very
quick run over to the airport to experience the joys of the multiple security
checks. matt sent me a mail earlier saying that there is snow in ipswich,
hopefully it will not make the drive home from gatwick too bad.

it is ed’s traditional t
he boss loves microsoft, so where does that leave microsoft session in a
few minutes. it appears that it is actually going to be more of a convention of
the domino blogging community by the number of people i’ve talked to who are
going. should be fun though.

the wireless network access has been a real boon again this year, it’s great to
be able to sit in the sessions and look at the session slides on you own screen
or actually write blog entries about the session as you are there. the only
problem has been that the network guys didn’t predict the numbers correctly,
pretty much everyone has a laptop with a wireless card whereas they were only
expecting a thousand or so, there are closer to five thousand users. last year
the coverage seemed to expand as the week went on but that hasn’t happened this
year. can’t complain though, it’s still infinitely better than the snail-like
connection speeds of the cables in the dolphin rooms.

after last night’s very poor show i am on a bit of a roll this evening. we have
spent the last five hours in the espn bar over at the boardwalkand i am just
about to head back out to see what is happening in the rest of the big fish.

today has been spent more in the labs than sessions, the standout, though, has
been the nsfdb2 work. i am really looking forward to the 7.0 beta programme, it
should be interesting.

of course tomorrow is the big universal party so i might have a bit of a lie-in
so that i am ready for a big evening.

better head off now, my cell phone (what integration to the local culture!) is
ringing.

just sat in a session about one of the most exciting developments in the notes
and domino world. it is something we have been gasping for and will make life
so much easier for our integration work.

using db2 as a back-end data store instead of the flat nsf structure will give
us huge possibilities. unfortunately it appears that the integration is
happening at a very low level, so the nsf is not being modelled as a table
structure in db2 at a data level but at the much lower note level.

still, given that this is tabled for nd7.0 and will be out in beta soon it is
definitely something we need to look at.