For those of you who have this site in your RSS aggregator my apologies for for the deluge of (re) postings. I have just been recategorising a few posts and forgot that they would come through the RSS feed again. So I’ll stop doing that!
Lotusphere Frappr!
Vince and Chris have found the Lotusphere Frappr site. Should be quite interesting once enough people have entered their details.
Sametime installation funnies
We needed to install Sametime 6.5.1 onto our development server today which I had never done before but assumed would be pretty easy. However because of our setup there were a few issues which I thought I would record for my own benefit in future even if noone else finds it useful.
- All Sign in Form Mapping documents in your Domino Web Server Configuration database (domcfg.nsf) will be deleted and replaced by a new server wide Sametime document.
- A pile of new servlet definitions will be added to the servlets.properties file which may or may not cause problems (we have disabled them for the moment).
- The Session Authentication field in the server document is changed to "Multiple Servers (SS0)" instead of Single Server which breaks browser authentication.
Luckily one of the guys on the team has been here before and so fixed the problems in no time but it would have taken me hours to get things back to a working state. Be warned!
A couple of site changes
I have tidied things up a bit on the site this afternoon. Nothing major I just get bored with fonts and colours every few months. I have made a couple of changes to the Blogsphere template including a new page which shows a league table of the most read entries. It’s quite interesting to see what attracts the most attention – the lesson is that free code is good, lifestyle commentary is bad!
So in the spirit of this lesson, if you want a copy of the agent which generates the table (updated daily) then drop me a line!
Ever improving Name Picker
Scott has posted a very well written article about how he took my name picker and improved it to be more of a generic system tool rather than a flexible application based screen. I have to say in the context of a pure address dialog for mail etc his looks far better than mine, plus he has gone into the usability of the thing in a lot more detail that I did. Cracking job Scott!
Eating the opposition's dogfood
Three months ago I switched my company hosting agreement from Domino hosting company E-Apps to a UK based generic hosting company called Fasthosts. The reasons are too boring to go into, cost and reliability being the main factors. The new lot don’t use Domino so I had to switch away from using Notes mail. A bit of a wrench but not the end of the world. When I logged into the admin application on the website for the first time I noticed that part of the new package was an Exchange 2003 mailbox. Great I thought, over the years I have been spouting the line that Notes was a great mail client without ever having actually used Outlook / Exchange (my employers have always been rather enlightened). The idea was that I would use Outlook and get to know the opposition. Now let me say from the outset I have tried, I really have, to be as objective as possible. Obviously things were going to be a bit painful at first because I know Notes so well and there are all sorts of habits which I would need to break. But after 3 months of trying I have finally given up, Outlook is just not for me and I am genuinely confused as to why anyone would actively choose to use it over the Notes client.
Now obviously I am not an expert in Outlook so there may well be solutions to my problems but there was nothing obvious to me…
Speed. Starting Outlook when I am online takes an age, it seems that the Outlook client has to negotiate with the Exchange server for quite a while before I am prompted to log in, then after logging in and before I can do anything all of my new mail is downloaded. And people complain that the Notes client isn’t multi-threaded enough.
Security. The point about logging in when online is an important one for me, the point being that I am not prompted to log in when I start Outlook offline but I am still able to access all of the locally cached mail. So if someone stole my laptop they would have access to all of my mail with no security.
Stability. I don’t know whether I am just unlucky but Outlook would crash on me several times a week, normally when waking my laptop from standby. There didn’t seem to be a common factor other than that but it would just hang before I gave in and killed it. Now in the past Notes was not at all stable but in the last couple of releases (6 and 7) it has gotten orders of magnitude better. I can’t remember the last time I saw a RSOD.
Spam. My understanding is that Outlook 2003 is a lot better than previous versions but for the inexperienced user it would be very very easy to get caught with a dodgy file attachment or spam email. But that isn’t my biggest concern, more worrying is the spam filtering. The default filter is, in a word, rubbish. After two weeks of use it was missing 50% of the spam that I get. So I tried out Cloudmark (a third party add-in) which improved things quite dramatically. Well done guys.
Configurability. The first thing I do when I get a new Notes mail account is change the Inbox folder to show me mails which have a read receipt on. (One of my pet hates is people wanting to know when I read a mail that they sent me, so I always remove the flag so that they don’t know). A simple question – how do I do that in Outlook? to be fair this is a problem for all mail clients other than Notes as far as I am aware.
Usability. This is probably the biggest subjective issue and is more based around the way that I use software than anything else. But I just couldn’t get used to Outlook. from the way that sorting works by grouping things into categories instead of straight lists to the way that searching doesn’t seem to return the mail I am expecting. And then the biggie – why does Outlook Web Access only work in IE. I don’t use IE for anything else these days and yet I have to use it or I am reduced to the appallingly poor non-IE web mail in Firefox
The most obvious comment for the objective reader is that I am biased towards Notes, this is undoubtedly true. However let me say that if I were asked to pick a pure email client with no other considerations at all, in my experience the Mail.app client on the Mac is the best I have ever used with Thunderbird a close second. Indeed it is Thunderbird which I have now switched to even though I could have used Notes as a POP3 client. There is no point in using Notes (IMHO) unless your mailfile is on a Domino server, it’s the combination of the two which makes such a strong contender. I’m also not a raving anti-Microsoftie – I use Windows almost exclusively, MS Office not Open Office and MSN not any of the other competitors.
I would be very interested to hear from Outlook advocates to see what I am missing – there must be something which makes people get so “religious” about their choice of Outlook as email client.
All alone in the audience
It looks like I am about the only blogger who will not be presenting at Lotusphere in January, I didn’t put in a request to so no surprises there. But there are so many of the blogging community going to be presenting that I get the impression I may be the only one actually in the audience!
So far John, Rocky, Ed, Bill, Paul, Bruce, Vowe, Julian, Chris, and Jess have declared (and I am sure I have missed some).
What’s great about the guys doing sessions is that they all seem to have come up with good ideas to discuss, the problem is going to be getting round to everything I want to see.
Congratulations guys, looking forward to them all.
Update: I’ll keep adding the names as they are announced here… Warren, Devin, Carl, Stephan, Susan and Chris.
Change to adverts
My Googgle Adsense revenue has been massively iconsistent over the last few months (can’t say how much on here due to the confidentiality agreement) so I have decided to give a new ad supplier a try. they seem slightly more interesting as well as allowing me to choose more specifically what sort of adverts will get displayed. The new supplier is Chitika, I’ll post updates to let you know what I think of them.
Tradition Observed
A traditional champagne and curry night last night and everyone is paying the price. So far two people haven’t made it into the office this morning and everyone else who has is not going to be very productive today.
As a team we have now been doing these for over five years and yesterday was by far the roudiest yet, everyone seemed to be on a mission, the credit card slip that I am looking at from the champagne will attest to that at £900 although I hasten to add there were a lot of people there so it’s not as bad as it sounds.
No I just need a darkened room to hide in for the moment until I feel human again.
ID Cards are such a bad move
So, the government has got over the first hurdle of getting biometric ID cards for every person in the UK. I admit it’s rare for me to agree with anything that Tony et al get up to but normally I can at least see where they are coming from even if I think it’s wrong. This time I struggle to see anything other than sinister motives involved which really worries me.
My main objection to ID cards is one of principle – it is my belief that the government should exist because of us, the people, not the other way around.
However, even if we set that aside the purely practical and economic aspects of the planned project are so overwhelmingly bad that I just don’t understand how this is going to work.
Not a week goes by without a story in the press about some cock-up of a government IT project, we have had the Inland Revenue tax credits fiasco, the Child Support Agency, the Passport Office, Swanwick and many others too numerous to mention, cost more than estimated and not actually working properly in some cases. What makes the government think that it is capable of implementing a system which would be bigger and have more of an impact on peoples lives than anything it has tried before?
An interesting article out today addresses the argument put forward by Charles Clarke that because there will be different biometric identifies used (fingerprint, iris and facial recognition) that the reliability of the systems will be improved. In fact, rather than improving the accuracy as might be assumed, it will actually make things worse.
Assuming we have a lovely sparkly new ID card system in place which works and didn’t cost a fortune, now how do we actually identify everyone who needs an ID card? The point, presumably, is to have a reliable method of identifying everyone in the country. So I’ll have to go along to some government office with my birth certificate (very easy to get copies of), my passport (I can’t imagine it would be difficult to get one under a false name) or my driving license (again not difficult to get one under a different name). Now I have a government endorsed ID card that says who it thinks I am, but it ain’t necessarily so. As the old IT mantra goes – if you put crap in you’ll get crap out.
And finally, possibly the most important point of all. What is it that ID cards are actually meant to achieve? We have had numerous different arguments from the government, firstly it was to combat terrorism but noone could actually identify how they will help there. So we moved on to catching benefit cheats and illegal immigrants, always good ground to get the Daily Mail brigade but this assumes that every government IT system is tied into the ID Cards database which Charles Clarke has had to specifically prevent to get the bill through Parliament! So what are they for?
In the end I am left with the impression that the government just wants to take a bit more control over our lives and I, for one, am not interested. Like Boris, I will refuse to carry the card when it becomes compulsory and only use it as a very expensive passport in the way I currently do.