Playing the tourist

It’s great when people come to stay with me because then I can legitimately play the tourist!

After a lazy Friday, on Saturday we headed up the river to the London Acquarium which is right next to the London Eye. Even at 10 in the morning it was hugely busy round there, so a tip, make sure you book in advance and book to go early. Luckily we got in before the queue had built up for the acquarium though. By the time we came out it looked like you’d need to wait for an hour or so just to buy your ticket. I guess with the lovely weather people had decided to come out in force. It felt like a spring day rather than the middle of February as we walked down the south bank of the Thames back towards the Tate Modern. It was all very leisurely but by the end of the afternoon we had walked 3 or 4 miles. My little neice dealt with it all really well, she was loving running up and down the river bank.

Luckily I’ve got lots of visitors over the next few months so I get to go to all of the places that “proper” Londoners never get around to seeing. I just have to persuade my guests to do something new for me each time, otherwise I’m going to know the inside of the Tate better than the staff!

An interesting few days

It’s been a busy but less than great week. Work has been spent dealing with idiotic and spiteful users. A user had a problem with one of our sites so we were trying to help as much as possible, even though I suspect it is a local issue. I had asked for some screen shots of the problem to try and diagnose it but instead the user refused to provide those and complain to our senior management that we weren’t solving the problem. A strange strategy, as I feel somewhat less inclined to help now that I did before!

Then of course yesterday my Windows installation on the Macbook Pro decided to go belly up, blue screening every time I booted it. Luckily I had a recent back up of the data so nothing lost except the four hours required to rebuild it last night.

And then this morning, I am working at home. I was beavering away on some very funky javascript when the person who lives below my flat knocked on the door to say she thought I had a water leak. It actually appears that it’s the flat above me with the problem and the water is running down the outside of a pipe through my flat with no real damage and into the flat below where it is beginning to form a puddle. Luckily the building handy man is around today so he’s straight onto the problem. This, I guess is the downside of living in a block. To be honest, everything else about the place is spot on for me so I’m not too worried.

And on the upside today, my brother and his family are coming to stay for the weekend. They are seeing the place for the first time, so tomorrow we’ll be heading out on the river taxi to see London as it should be done, from the water.

Now if I could only get rid of this bloody cold and cough I’ve had all week.

Road Pricing in the UK

This is massively off topic for me, but this article about road pricing in the UK is a good, if long, read about the way that we are going towards a 24*7 surveillance society. Scary in many ways, but especially the part about enforcing speed limits using satellite surveillance and speed limiters built into new cars.

CSS Editor for the Mac

I’ve been looking for a CSS Editor for the Mac which can match Topstyle for features and ease of use. Well I think the search is finally over… enter CSSEdit a very cool little bit of software and the best bit is that it only costs $29.95. Well worth a look if you do any browser design work at all.

Thing learned for the day

So it’s not even 10am and I’ve learned my thing for the day. It’s amazing that there are these little nuggets of information which have passed me by all these years.

I was trying to delete a document from a web database this morning. I had accessed the document via the “0” view so the URL looked like http://myserver/mydb.nsf/0/[unid]?opendocument which of course worked fine. So what I told my user to do was just replace “opendocument” with “deletedocument” but he kept on getting an error. “Stupid bloody users” thought I, “Can’t even type a simple URL parameter”. But then I tried it and, shock, horror I got an “Invalid URL Exception” error returned as well. To be honest I was a little stumped but of course notes.net put me straight with the answer. You cannot use the “deletedocument” command against an unsorted view and it appears that the “0” view is indeed unsorted.

It’s good that there’s still stuff out there to learn, even if I should have known that a long time ago.

ILUG

Paul has started to organise the Irish Lotus User Group (ILUG) for 2007. It’s becoming a mini-Lotusphere with pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the Lotus community showing their face. Have a look at the people confirmed so far here. If you at all interested in the Lotus community and based in Europe then I think it would be a trip well worth making.

A great weekend

After a hugely hectic January I’ve just had the most relaxing weekend. Yesterday England won the rugby for a change and it was a good game. My parents have been down to see me and have just headed down to the airport to go to Madeira for a well deserved holiday. But not before we managed to squeeze in a meal at Simpsons, the bonus’ of living in London is that you can get to the best restaurants for Sunday lunch. So some great food and a couple of nice bottles of wine later and we caught the boat home back down the Thames in lovely winter sunshine.

Life is good!

Blogsphere Skins

I’ve been having a closer look at Blogsphere V3 over the last couple of days. It really is a well put together database design. The thing which has impressed me most is the Movable Type skin support. You can just go and download any Movable Type skin (a good place to start is here), copy the css files into a skin document and save it. Or if you want to make your own style, then go here and play around to your heart’s content. This is going to keep me entertained for months to come!

A good welcome back

So it was back to the office this morning and the expected pile of things to sort out. What was nice though is that my PM decided it would be good to run a mini “Lotusphere Come To You” at the pub at lunchtime. So I got together a few bits and pieces and off we all headed. A couple of pints and a good chat later we’re back in the office but everything seems a little better overall!

Leaving for home

Well that, as they say, is it. I stayed on for an extra couple of days mainly because I couldn’t get a flight organised for earlier, but it’s been good to wind down slowly. Yesterday was supremely lazy, I went out to run a few shopping errands for people back home, mooched around Downtown Disney, got some dinner. In short I didn’t walk a lot or drink heavily which is a welcome change from the last few days.

It really has been a great week, catching up with old friends, making new ones and getting really hyped up for Notes 8. The concensus is that we should be seeing the public beta in the next month or two which will be great on two fronts, to get my greedy little hands on it for myself but also to start the build up with colleagues, we need to get the message out to our users and, more importantly, IT management that Notes is back in a big way.

The challenge normally after Lotusphere is to get myself back into the real world, it’s always a little depressing going home and finding that the cool new stuff you’ve just spent a week looking at is unlikely to be seen in the wild for a long time yet but this year the aim will be to get it out there as quickly as possible.

I have managed to spend a little time thinking about the big announcements of the week and where they leave us. Of course this is all personal opinion, I have nothing to base this on other than my own experience. Of the two new products I think Quickr is the most likely to succeed. My reasoning comes from two directions, firstly it’s free and presumably will be available at the user’s desktop rather than requiring central IT departments to do anything to roll it out. I would imagine it will take some time to filter out into the general population but the benefit to users is going to be so obvious that I can’t see why it wouldn’t be used. My suspicion is that actually it won’t be used by teams to start with but by individuals as an electronic briefcase, but as it grows the paid-for version will be used for more formal teamwork. The thought of being able to ditch shared network drives alone should be enough to convince people.

Connections future I think is less certain. The IBM W3 site looks great, as does the Lotusphere Connections site which was put up mid-week and the concept of social software is great when there is a large ecosystem to support it. On the web, del.icio.us and Digg work because there are millions of users. Even on W3, IBM has hundreds of thousands of employees who, by their nature are going to be interested in this sort of thing. Even so, in both cases the actual percentage of the audience who use the sites is tiny, I may be wrong but I think I heard in a session this week that less than 10% of IBM people use Dogear and this in a dedicated high tech company. The whole point of these sites is that they reach a critical mass but if you scale down the user base I’m not sure that point can be reached. I’d love to be proved wrong because I think that sort of interactive intranet would be hugely beneficial to many companies, I just can’t see there being enough of an initial push to get them going.

So another Lotusphere bites the dust. Of course Lotusphere 2008 is only 51 weeks away, it’s running from January 20-24, I’m starting to save for my ticket right away!