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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this recently but I am starting get what seems to be known as “referrer spam”. I won’t publicise them by providing a link but “devaddict” and “webdevboard” both seem to be offenders.

The sort of people who send spam have now progressed to writing web crawlers which leave their trail in peoples referers lists (like mine at the bottom left of the page). I only display the list of referers because I find it interesting to see where people are coming to me from but if it’s going to be abused I’ll simply remove it or write a quick “black-list” function.

Once again the mentality of these people astounds me. Yes, they might get an initial hit rate increase on their sites but as soon as people realise what has happened, do you think that they’ll continue to visit the site? I certainly wouldn’t and I don’t think many others would. Maybe they operate on the same margins as span and only need that one person in a thousand to survive.

It’s bloody annoying though.

Via Phil I got sent this link to paraskevidekatriaphobia or an irrational fear of Friday 13th.

You go into your hotel room and find yourself with two directions to turn, towards the bedroom or the living room! After a bit of a falling out last week I think they are trying to make it up to me this week and so I ended up in a “suite”. Very nice too.

I am working at home again today so didn’t have any worries about getting up this morning, but it was a very hot and sticky night and by 04:00 I couldn’t sleep any more. I decided to get up and start doing some work. It really is a great time of the day, no noise and you feel as though you’re almost alone in the world.

I have managed to get quite a lot done so far and not a moment too soon. The thing I have learnt over the last few days is that I do not have the temperament to be a tester. Due to some resourcing issues a couple of us are working on writing regression test scripts for a couple of applications and I am finding it really hard going. The estimates which I gave have proven to be massively insufficient so a few extra hours over the weekend have been called for to try and catch up, hopefully the early drop on the day has broken the back of the work.

It was Ed’s birthday yesterday, hope you had a good one Ed.

And there is also mention of a story on CNET about the ND7 Beta. In it it mentions that Microsoft are trying to poach “…Notes developers alienated by Lotus’ increasing centralization on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition language”.

This sort of thing annoys me, I have yet to meet a Notes developer who is alienated by the move to more open standards. Everyone I talk to decided long ago that the opportunities afforded by learning Java / J2EE are much more appealing than learning yet another MS development platform, and should make life more interesting and challenging anyway.

That’s not to say that Notes developers haven’t been alienated but I think that was because they (an I include myself in this) had not understood the marketing message for the future of Notes and Domino. But that was back at the start of 2003, since then Ed and his team have done rather a good job at outlining the road map for the next few years.

Good developers, in my experience, are characterised by a curiosity about new technology and a desire to learn the latest ways of writing cool apps. Any assumption that life begins and ends with LotusScript is just too short-sighted.

I for one can’t wait for more integration with J2EE, it will make the battles we have to fight to keep Domino alive easier and it will make my life more interesting. I don’t see the problem.

Not sure what to make of this, but never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I have been offered a 6 month extension to my contract in the City so I am (relatively) secure until February next year.

What it does mean is that I can safely buy my ticket for Lotusphere in January (that’s two mentions in two days, much to early for that and I apologise)and also get a room in the Dolphin again.

In terms of the work, I realise I moan a lot but, quite surprisingly, there is some rather interesting work coming up from September onwards (once we have finished our ND6 upgrades) to do with web service integration with .Net and also implementing a Crystal Reports solution on top of a large Domino app.

I was looking around for something I need in work at the moment and didn’t have any luck. However I did stumble across the MSN Sandbox. In it, among other things, is quite a cool aerial photograph website which covers the US. It’s aasy to navigate around, to the point that I found a photo of the Swan and Dolphin Hotels in Disney World where we all head off to for Lotusphere each year.

I ended up in the office until 7ish last night and was chatting to the only other person left, a swift half seemed like the sensible thing to do. A few hours and beers later a pizza and bottle of wine seemed an equally good thing. It’s amazing how little it takes to give me a headache the next morning these days.

It was a good night overall and better than the evening I had planned of catching up on some work that has fallen behind schedule. I just need to work out when I can do that.

Friday and the weekend have been so relaxing, a great way to round off the holiday. The weather in the UK is finally good so everyone has been making the most of it with barbeques aplenty. Last night there was a huge firework display in one of the parks so I was just sat in the back garden with a beer watching that and listening to music. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Today didn’t look too promising to start with but Sunday lunch (another barbeque) turned into another scorcher. With some really interesting visitors and some nice wine I have just been chilling out again.

What a great way to end the holiday, wonder if I’ll be this relaxed next week? I’m staying down in London for the next couple of nights so I’ll have to make some plans down there.

Well I managed to get back home by 9:30pm which isn’t bad going. The journey was as easy as it was uneventful, this is the way travelling is meant to work. I can get to bed now, try and get to sleep and hopefully kill the jetlag and be back to normal tomorrow.