PLFNEBGT : Pre Lotusphere Friday Night Early Bird Get Together

The journey was easy but long yesterday, I got into the hotel at about 7:30. Just in time to head down to Tubbys for a burger before Declans PLFNEGBT gathering. Within 5 minutes I had bumped into Kevin and his family. And that really set the tone for the evening, meeting up with old friends and meeting some new faces. It’s going to be a good week if the volume of laughter at the bar was anything to go by.

Of course the night was stolen by Bill who’s amazing new hairstyle may not catch on but will certainly get him noticed!

There were a lot of Brits having a beer and desperately trying to stay awake, I lasted until about 11 and, I think, wisely decided to go and get some sleep.

Of course today is more of the same with Bruce’s BALD gathering on the Boardwalk followed by the Turtle’s annual get together at the ESPN bar. And this is all before Bill’s 40th tomorrow which looks like it’ll be in Jelly Rolls rather than the ESPN as previously advertised.

Right off to get some breakfast now.

January 20, 2007 by 0

And we're off

I’m just sat in the Virgin Clubhouse at Gatwick airport having some breakfast and waiting for my plane. One of the bonus’ of the move down to London is that the journey to the airport is much less fraught, just an hour in a cab door to door.

This is the first time I’ve flown for a while so I was expecting the worst at the security checks but they were’nt too bad, about a 20 minute queue I guess.

The rest of the day shouldn’t be too bad, just sit and catch up with reading on the plane and then the plan is to meet up with a few people at the pool bar at the Dolphin. It’ll bee a much needed break after a crazy couple of weeks. For some reason January is always very busy, on the drive down here I was just listing in my head all of the different technologies I’ve written code for in the last 10 days…

  • Lotusscript

  • Javascript (Prototype, script.aculo.us and Dojo)

  • Java agents

  • Java servlets (on Domino and Apache Tomcat)

  • JDBC connection to Oracle

  • FOP PDF generation

  • Written one Web Service

  • And consumed another (although that was easy using Stubby).

    • So now I’m fully acronym’d up for the week ahead bring it on!

    January 19, 2007 by 0

    Parallels running BootCamp and Coherence Mode

    My Macbook Pro is now running the latest release candidate for the next version of Parallels. It looks like it’s going to be the version that will move me away from BootCamp and onto Parallels full time. You can see the full release notes at the Parallels site but the two killer features for me are the ability to run Parallels using your BootCamp partition, and the new coherence mode.

    The reason I haven’t been keen to move into Parallels full time is that for some tasks in Windows it just isn’t fast enough so the thought of runing two seperate installations of Windows, one as a virtual machine and the other in a standalone partition just put me off completely. But now I can do most of my tasks running Parallels in OS X and then, when necessary, switch over to BootCamp but still have all of the same files and settings without maintaining them all twice.

    Coherence mode is the new ability to run Windows applications but outside of the Windows desktop, the benefit of this is that the distinction between OS X and Windows has become very blurred allowing you to pretty seamlessly work in different applications on different operating systems and not really notice the difference.

    Even though the version I’m running is only a release candidate it feels pretty much there, the upgrade was painless and I’ve yet to see any bugs at all. When VMWare finally bring out there virtualisation tool for OS X it’s going to have to do something really special to catch up.

    January 13, 2007 by 0

    Lotusphere Build-up Begins

    It’s only a week now until I leave for Orlando and another Lotusphere. The general buzz about the conference is of a similar level to last year which can only be a good thing. So I thought I’d leave a little information for people wanting to get hold of me and some other bits gleaned from around the blogosphere…

  • I’ll be staying in the Dolphin, Ben’s annual wiki has a page for room numbers which will be the place for more information when people have checked in.
  • I’m arriving on Friday afternoon and as yet have no plans for the evening so if anyone fancies a trip over to Downtown Disney or the Boardwalk drop me a line will be joining Declan et al down at the pool bar of the Dolphin from 8-ish onwards.
  • My mobile (cell) number is +44 7767 384970
  • The Wednesday night party is at Animal Kingdom. I think once I’ve been there it leaves just MGM as the only park I’ve not been to.
  • The first semi-official gathering of the week is Bruce’s Blogger’s Annual Lotusphere Dinner (check the acronym to see why the event is especially well titled for me ;o)

    Can’t wait to catch up with everyone over the next couple of weeks.

    • January 12, 2007 by 0

    Upgraded to Blogsphere V3 Beta

    I have just spent an hour upgrading the blog to use Declan’s new Blogsphere V3 Beta. It really couldn’t be a simpler process, replace the design, run the upgrade agent, pick a template and off we go. Please drop me a line if you spot any problems.

    A big thanks to Declan and all of the team behind this superb template.

    January 11, 2007 by 3

    Oops

    Apologies for the downtime over the last day or so (depending upon your DNS server mileage may vary) I’ve managed to completely forget about renewing my dynamic DNS provider for this site. Hopefully all should be up and running again now (well, I guess it is if you are reading this!).

    January 10, 2007 by 1

    iPhone looks good

    I’ve just spent a couple of hours watching the live commentary of Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld. Of course the main news is the new iPhone (finally!) and it certainly sounds like it will be worth the wait. Just got to count the days until a Q4 release in Europe now, at least it gives time to save up to buy one as they are going to be pretty pricey.

    January 9, 2007 by 0

    How to return an array of complex types in a web service

    Going for the full geek posting here, as I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m doing a lot of web services work at the moment. One of the requirements of one of the services is to return an array of complex objects (as opposed to an array of strings for example). The objects get described by the WSDL for serialization but it took me a little while to work out how to actually write the code to return the array…

    public class MyService{
      public ComplexType[] getList(String in){
        ArrayList retList = new ArrayList();
        //…
        //Build ArrayList Here
        //…
        return (ComplexType[])retList.toArray(new ComplexType[retList.size()]);
      }
    }

    I’m sure it’s pretty obvious to most people, but the fact that you have to convert the ArrayList to an array and then also cast it to an array of the correct type was what had confused me. Anyway it’s all working now, which is nice!

    January 5, 2007 by 1

    Five Things You May Not Know About Me

    I suppose it had to happen eventually and we’re running out of bloggers to tag, but Chris has finally got me.

    1. I studied Geography at University in London where I spent a large portion of my time working on satellite image analysis, my first contact with "real" computing.

    2. A notes.net director’s chair which I won in a raffle at a DevCon has pride of place in my lounge!

    3. I used to play (field) hockey to quite a high level until a completely knackered shoulder put me out of the game.

    4. While at uni, I used to help run the bar in the hall of residence where I lived. A great year of organising parties and rarely paying for a drink :o)

    5. I, as well as a lot of people it seems, have collected the boarding card of every flight I’ve been on since 1996, no idea why but everyone has their odd habits.
     
    So now the challenge is to find untagged people so let’s see… Ben, Kevin, Adeleida, Philip and Carl sorry about that all!

    January 4, 2007 by 5

    lotus.domino.types Jar file

    I’m writing some web services for Domino at the moment and the thought of trying to write Java code in the Domino Designer is just too much, so I’m coding in Eclipse and then importing the code back into Designer when I’m done.

    Normally you just need to add notes.jar to the build path to import all of the lotus.domino.* classes but with web services you also need lotus.domino.types.*. For my own future reference, the extra jar you need to include is C:\lotus\notes\jvm\lib\ext\websvc.jar.

    January 4, 2007 by 4