Sametime 8 has been released and I have to say it seems to be a big improvement over 7.5. Firstly it actually works on OS X Leopard which 7.5 didn’t. And in my brief usage so far it loads a lot faster and takes less memory once it is up and going. More to come once I’ve used it in anger over the coming weeks.
Post Release Party
A system that I’ve been working on since March went live over last weekend, hence things being so quiet around here at the moment. Last night the development team had an impromptu post release party last night. I guess I should know this by now but beer, champagne, wine and tequila mixed with Thai food don’t lead to a good night’s sleep or a clear head the next morning.
That is all.
London Domino Meetup
Well it’s been a while since our last meetup in London, so at the behest of Mr Buchan it’s about time we organised another one. So, for the moment keep the evening of Thursday 20th December free. We’ll work out a venue over the next couple of weeks.
Blog my Idea
Now that the Idea Jam has come out of beta we are going to keep the new features coming as fast as we can.
So in that vein, Bruce spent yesterday getting the embed function working. Basically this allows you to display an idea, with its current vote count etc on a blog or other website. Check it out:
Weekend in York
Well with the release of the Idea Jam and another large project that I’ve been working on for the last eight months imminent the obvious thing to do was to take then entire weekend off to go to York in the north of England. Actually it was a really needed break just catching up with family and relaxing. It’s only when I stop my normal life that I realise I’ve not had any time off since May. But even just a couple of days can make a huge difference with a quick recharge of the batteries we can push on to the Christmas break before the build up to Lotusphere in January.
So when I got home last night I pushed out a bug fix release of Idea Jam, and today have a couple more issues to sort out. It’s back to the real world again.
Latest Version of Idea Jam released
Well we’re getting close to the official release date of 20th November so this weekend we’ve released the latest round of changes and bug fixes to the Idea Jam. Hopefully you can see that your feedback is showing up in the changes, with new features like the ability to express no opinion from views, changing date formats to dd-mmm-yyyy, making it clearer that you’ve just voted on an idea and so on. Hopefully this week we are just going to deal with bug fixes, then have a period of stability on the live site before pushing on with 1.1 change requests.
The content on the site is continuing to be of a high quality, I was going through some of my Unvoted list this morning and really enjoyed some of the great ideas that people have submitted over the last couple of weeks.
Barclays Pinsentry madness
Because I run a small business I have multiple bank accounts with Barclays, one of the “big four” banks here in the UK. As banks go they aren’t too bad (although that is like saying that as diseases go Malaria isn’t too bad, don’t think I actually like these guys). So at the weekend a package arrived containing my new Pinsentry card reader that I have to use to get into online banking. In the past I needed to know two user IDs, some personal information and a password to log into each of my accounts. Now, in addition to that I have to put my bank card into this card reader, enter the PIN for the card and then type another 8 digit number to log in. It’s classic dual factor authentication, and it’s absolutely crazy.
Frankly the old system was more than secure enough. All that the new system will achieve is to make me log in to the site less frequently as it is such a palaver. I genuinely can’t think of a reason why they have gone this far with the security, if someone is foolish enough to give out their personal details, two secret (and hard to guess) user IDs and their password then frankly they deserve what they get.
Setting aside the absurdness of the over-security, when I tried to log in yesterday (taxes to pay, thanks Gordon) I couldn’t actually get in at all any more. The reason which was discovered after nearly an hour on the phone was that my personal bank card has now been tied to my business account. So to log in to my business bank account I have to partially use business details and partially personal details. Their response when I asked how it was going to be fixed… “Well you have both sets of details so you can just live with it”! This from a company which last year made over seven billion punds profit. That’s more than fourteen billion dollars. And the worst thing is that moving banks is not really an option, they are all as bad as each other.
Jailbroken iPod Touch
I thought I’d have a play with Jailbreak on my iPod Touch. And boy am I glad I did. The iPod is good out of the box but now that it’s been jailbroken it’s become a truly great piece of kit, with the full email and calendar clients from the iPhone, Google Maps and various other toys to play with.
With the launch of the iPhone here in the UK today this has made me even less likely to get the iPhone at least for another year or so. Once the iPhone gets up to 16gb and 3g then it might become a more attractive proposition, but until then the Touch will do me nicely.
Leopard Lessons
So the first thing I discovered coming into the office this morning is that NetInfo Manager is no more in Leopard. Once I had gotten used to it, it turned out to be a really good way of managing hosts file entries, but for some reason it has been dumped in favour of going back to the old Windows way of managing hosts files. The problem then comes in location the file to edit. So for my own benefit, and that of anyone else who has similar problems, you go to Finder, open the Go menu, select Go to Folder… and type /etc in the search box. This takes you to a hidden folder which contains the hosts file. Before editing it the first time you’ll need to give yourself rights to the file by right clicking, selecting Get Info and granting yourself read and write access. After that the file seems to work just the same as its Windows equivalent. This is progress I guess.
Upgraded to Leopard
Well I couldn’t hold out any longer so this morning I spent a few hours upgrading my laptop to run OS X 10.5, better know in this incarnation as Leopard.
It wasn’t entirely painless but that was more because I decided that rather than do a straight upgrade I’d do a clean install and move software across. I’m running out of disk space so it provided a good opportunity to clear out some rubbish at the same time. I do have some non standard settings though to support my Java development. So in the end it took around four hours but all seems to be up and going again.
It’s also worht mentioning the superb backup software called Super Duper! which gives a great feeling of security. It allows you to take a complete, bootable image of your disk, so even if everything goes wrong I know I can restore my old setup within an hour. Even better than that it’s free for the basic version. If you run a Mac you owe it to yourself to check out (forget all this namby pamby Time Machine rubbish!).