Declan Lynch, the very father of Blogsphere has come up with a great idea out of the Bloggers BOF at Lotusphere last week. Go and check it out and if you like it make sure you post this Friday to kick things off in a good way.
Back to the real world
After such a great week in Florida it would have been nice to ease back into the real world gently, but of course that was never going to happen.
At the moment I have Idea Jam plus two other large projects to work on, ILUG 2008 planning is well underway which will also generate it’s own work and I really need to update Defectr to use Dojo 1.x rather than 0.4 as it currently is.
Pah, who needs sleep anyway?
New Headphones
Somehow last week I managed to lose my headphones, either I left them somewhere in the hotel room or on the plane on the way out. Either way I was more than a tad annoyed with myself when I realised the blunder at the airport yesterday. Luckily an airport is welll equipped to deal with the problem and I decided to treat myself to a pair of Sure SE110 sound isolating headphones. I thought my old Sennheiser ones were good but the new Sure set just blows them out of the water. The sound quality is superb and the noise cancellation, even though it is passive, is amazingly good. In fact I left them in while trying to sleep on the plane last night as good ear plugs!
So consider this a Matt White approved product 🙂
Safely home
Yesterday was uneventful, I rented a car for the day and did the various shopping tasks that I commit to but it was nice to just potter around with no general plan. The flight itself was easy and I was home within 90 minutes of touching down despite the joys of the Gatwick baggage handlers.
Now the challenge for today is to stay awake until this evening. At least there is a lot of reading to catch up on.
Day 3 – Afternoon and Day 4
The content this year has been incredibly good, as an example yesterday afternoon we had two wonderful sessions.
Firstly Julian Robichaux and Rob McDonagh presented about reports, charts and graphs in Notes and Domino, this is stuff that you can use from the moment you get home, so you really owe it to yourself to get the slides and the sample database as soon as it’s released. Julian and Rob have a great presenting style, and really play off each other well.
And then an old dependable session by Rob Novak and Viktor Krantz, the Great Code Giveaway. This year was a real stormer which demo’d some Dojo Dijits that Viktor has spent the last couple of months writing. Again the code is ready for use in the real world, I can think of at least a couple of places I’ll be going home and using this next week. And it’s really this sort of content that makes Lotusphere worthwhile, seriously, these two sessions are worth the admission fee alone, there is no way I could get that code done in less time than the conference fee costs.
The bloggers BOF was as entertaining as ever. It’s hard to know how such a group of shy, retiring individuals manage to keep talking for an hour but somehow it was managed.
And then onto Islands of Adventure. This year there was a group of six of us doing the rounds with plenty of beers, a few rides and even a burger along the way. The park closed at 10:30 so we headed to Kimono’s, just for a change where there was more beer, no sake this time which can only be a good thing. Then and 2:00 Kimono’s closed so it was on to someone’s room for cocktails and Devin’s homebrew beer. Now Devin is a true geek but his beer is something to behold, I just drank that for the rest of the evening, absolutely stunning, thanks Spanky.
I gave up at about 4 I think, but apparently others carried on until later, but surprisingly this morning people didn’t seem to be in too bad a state.
No sessions this morning as I was in bed until Gurupalooza but it was worth getting out for with some good questions and a classic line from Bill. “These guys may bleed yellow but at the moment I am sweating whiskey”.
Beat the Developers followed. In both Gurupalooza and Beat the Developers there was a shout out for idea jam with big rounds of applause. This is about the coolest thing, for me, to have happened at Lotusphere. The number of IBM-ers who said that they are watching the site and actually taking the ideas to put into upcoming products is simply amazing.
The closing general session was, like previous years, superb. This year we got a TV chef which didn’t sound too promising but he was hugely funny and had the audience laughing hard for almost an hour. At the end the bloggers were kindly allowed onto the main stage again for photos, so expect to see them floating around the Flickr Lotusphere2008 tag group shortly.
I’ll do a full wrap up post shortly but for now, that is Lotusphere 2008 over with and it has been yet another classic. We can start counting the days until January 18th 2009.
This morning was dedicated to the big crowd pleaser sessions. Firstly Duffbert and Warren did the developers are from Mars, admins are from Venus for the first time. It was hilarious, especially the videos which they have been filming all week. And then for the last time (at least for the moment) Paul and Bill performed Worst Practices. It was as good as ever but what really made it this year was Duffberts last fifteen minutes where he exposed just how the ILUG conference is run behind the scenes. Truly some of the funniest stuff I have ever seen at Lotusphere.
All week Paul has been doing a wonderful job of pimping idea jam for us, to the point today where he didn’t even need to mention it, instead the audience all chanted “post it on ideajam.net” and we are really seeing the effect with a whole slew of new posts this week.
It’s the bloggers bof this evening followed by the party at universal so expect a little more radio silence from me.
OK so I have been most remiss in my blogging, the only excuse is that there is just too much going on. Tuesday is always the deep dive day so the couple of sessions that I managed to get to were excellent.
I am so excited about the changes to the Domino server coming in 8.5. We will basically be getting ten years of improvements in one go, including but not limited to…
– full gzip compression
– JSF support built into Domino
– completely rewritten HTML rendering engine with properly formed XHTML
– new design elements to separate design from data
– new URL commands
– server side javascript
– stateful sessions
and the list goes on. I can’t overstate how good all of this is. The future looks incredibly bright for the Domino developer.
Yesterday just went by in a flash. Some really good sessions including those by Julian, Bruce and Kevin. And then following those I was lucky enough to be invited to a bloggers “press” conference along with about 15 other bloggers and Mike Rhodin. I was one of the lucky ones to get to ask a question, so of course I asked about Designer on the Mac. The answer was, how shall I put it, non specific but very promising. The way that Lotus has helped the blogging community is superb, I can’t imagine that many other companies would be confident enough to allow such a group the same access as we have had this year.
The rest of the evening was taken up with the usual round of parties, just a little lower key than normal as this week is a marathon not a sprint 😉
It seems for ever since this new platform for Domino was announced but now it is finally ready for prime time. Lance Spellman did a great job introducing how to set it up and create basic views. A hell of a lot was covered in just an hour so this is definitely something I need to spend more time on when I get home. But for the moment I’m trying not to get too excited about it as we run an old version I db2 which won’t run it 🙁