New Map of the Underground

One for the music lovers here, Phil pointed me to a Guardian article about how they tried to tie each line of the classic London Tube map to a genre of music and then rename each of the stations with an appropriate artist. One of my favourite pieces of art is Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear where he does something similar (I’ve actually got a print of it  on the wall in my lounge), but this is actually more impressive as all of the intersection stations actually seem to work. You could spend hours reading this.

The last word on Lotusphere 2006

Well mine at least.

The journey home was pretty uneventful, the usual struggle to stay awake as long as possible last night seems to have knocked the jet lag on the head although we’ll see tomorrow when it’s back to the crack of sparrow’s for work. Apparently there were a few issues while I was away so that’s going to be really great fun.

Overall the sessions were great, normally I end up going to a dud or two but every single one I went to was informative and (generally) well presented. There are a few new stars who have shown their faces… Bill and Paul had possibly the most talked about session of the week, there’s no doubt that they’ll be back again next year. I didn’t see it but apparently Julian’s jumpstart session was a great success, and I’m very surprised that Mac hadn’t presented at Lotusphere before as he handled it very well.

I got the chance to meet a lot more people this year, it’s always good to finally put a face to the name (and blog in most cases). It’s always a great surprise how welcoming the Domino community is to people. I’m not aware of any other online group of people which has survived for so long and has such strength and depth in its members. There was some talk at the Blogging BOF about the community feeling a bit closed to outsiders. As I mentioned before, that’s not my experience, all you need to do is make your name known out there, either with your own blog or simply by commenting on the ones already there.

So we’ve all drunk of the Kool-Aid (as well as a few beers over the last few days), there was lots of cool stuff, but back in the cold light of your normal office what can we take away?

Well Workplace 2.6 has been released, so if you’re a BP it should be downloadable, from what we have been shown it is well worth a look, at least that’s what I’ll be doing over the next few weeks. Along with WS Portal which has obviously been out there for a while but is the way that all Lotus products are going, so there is no harm in getting a head start.

And finally, and most importantly Notes and Domino are alive and well, if there was one message that IBM wanted us to leave with it is that. The demo’s we have seen of Hannover and Domino Next look great, but surprisingly they are not as big a leap as I had been suspecting. Domino Next is a true Domino server, it just happens to have more integration with Workplace and some Portal abilities. Hannover is a leap forward in UI design, but underneath it’s still the same old Notes client that will run every Notes app out there today.

So a good Lotusphere all round, as good as last year I think which was a difficult trick to pull off. The only downside is that we have to go back to the real world now where not everyone has the same outlook.

Day 4 – The wrap up

Well that’s it, Lotusphere is over for another year.

Bruce’s OpenNTF session was well put together, hopefully it will encourage a few more people to get involved. They are always made very welcome, I know I have been all week.

The rest of the sessions today have become pretty traditional but they’re always good fun, the Beat the Developers produced the usual round of feature requests from the floor that "will be taken back" to the development labs.

The closing session was much slicker than in previous years, every time the "official" content gets less and less and the comedian gets more time, this is just what people want. That being said the slides that were running as we all filed in had quotes from the blogging community which received great reception from the rest of the room. Again there are a few photos up on Flickr.

I think I’m going to leave it there until I get home when I’ll write a proper review of the week. Everything happens so fast while we’re here that it’s often difficult to see the wood for the trees.

Until then, I look forward to seeing everyone here next year, and if you couldn’t make it for 2006, maybe you’ll be free for the week of 21st January 2007 when we’ll be back to do it all over again.

Wednesday Night Party – Seaworld

About 5,000 of us headed on down to Seaworld last night. It’s a bit of a strange park with only a couple of rides (I just stood with beer in hand chatting with a few of the other non-riders). The rest of the park is devoted to penguins (don’t trust them as Paul says) and of course Shamu. I’ve uploaded all of my LS photos so far, with a few of the killer whale show. I’m glad we got there late and so couldn’t sit at the front, those guys get very wet and it was beginning to get a bit chilly.

So we’re into the last day, but there are still some good sessions to get to including the annual Guru-paloozer and Harass the Developers. But before that everyone has to get to Bruce’s OpenNTF session (of course wearing your spangly new OpenNTF t-shirts).

Day 3 – OO Lotus script

The second Bill Buchan session of the day, he’s always an entertaining speaker. I would say this is not an area is spend a lot of time in, frankly if you’re wanting to get into OO then you may as well go the whole hog and learn Java, which was designed for this from the ground up. I know that LotusScript can do it, but just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should. Maybe a little controversial, but there you go, an opinion none the less.

That being said I went to the session because I still derive some dirty pleasure from jumping into LS every so often and bashing out some code in two minutes flat, and Bill as a real script guru always has some great tips to take away.

Day 3 – Rich Sites with DXL and XSLT

Mac put together a really neat overview of the most acronym heavy area of develpment – AJAX, XSLT, XML, DXL, DTD etc etc. He explained the background and history really well and gave a really cool demo of a notes.net search tool which I guess pretty much everyone is going to download from his site when he puts it up (thanks to Julian for bullying him there!).

Generallyt this is a real area of growth, sometimes when these flvours of the month come along they disappear just as quickly as the arrive, but I don’t think this will be the case here. If you’re a developer (doesn’t matter if you’re into Domino or not) you owe it to yourself to get into this stuff. And even better it’s great fun because you’re seeing visual results almost immediately.

Day 3 – The Boss Loves Microsoft…

As ever Ed was on good combative form. The emphasis of the presentation has changed over recent years, in the past there have been hints of slight exasperation creeping in that not everyone agreed with Big Blue, but this year (and in the whole conference mood in general) everyone seems to be really happy with the way things are moving forward. Of course there are areas where there is slight confusion, there can’t not be with such a vast array of products on offer, but in the past where aggression was used to maybe try and cover up the confusion, now the message is in line with the offerings and the aggression is just good honest competitiveness.

If I were in Microsoft’s shoes I would be worried about how I was going to try and win new customers in the corporate space, let alone dislodge existing IBM houses.

Day 3 – Worst Practices in Domino

Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney put together a really excellent presentation of 12 of the wors things that you can do in Domino admin and development using real world examples. It struck just the right note of humour and useful commentary. It’s always stunning the number of places which don’t have dev and test environments set up, for such little outlay of a standalone box it just makes sense to do.

Anyway, I would guess that from the reviews it will not be last time that they’ll be invited back to give sessions at Lotusphere as they seemed to think.

Day 2 / 3: BOFs

Two BOFs which are always repeated and good for a laugh are the Blogging Community and the OpenNTF sessions. I only ojust made it to the OpenNTF session as it was a late night and it started at the inhuman hour of 7am. Even so the attendance was excellent, if a little quiet. Once again, if you use Notes or Domino in any way you have got to go over to the site and have a look at what’s on offer. Hell this site is even making use of the Blogsphere template from Declan.

The most interesting question last night in the Blogging BOF was whether the blogging community is too insular and inward looking, we do tend to link to each other in ever decreasing circles. All I can say is that if you’re out there lurking and wondering whether to start your own blog, or even whether just to post a comment here or one of the bigger blogs like Ed or Rocky, just go for it. Even though it can seem clique-y it’s really not, noone will bite (unless you ask them too). Hell anyone who knows me, knows I am not the most outgoing guy in the world and if I can be accepted into the fold then so can anyone.