Ports Thoughts

New Bathroom

2009-09-16T00:08:00.011+01:00

We have a small problem with our bathroom. Her name is Lucy. When we moved into our house it didn't have a bath, just a fancy shower.

This was fine when Lucy was a baby. But she is now on the verge of being two and a half and doesn't really fit into the baby bath. So it was time for a new bathroom.

Quite aside from Lucy and the shower situation, the old bathroom was a bit crap. Pink tiles and faux marble are not a good look in 1989 never mind 2009.

First job, get rid of the awful pink tiles.

Fit a bath where the shower had been.

Now the very laborious job of putting fresh new tiles up.

Using the new bath as an impromptu work bench. Very enterprising.

Tiling round corners is a bit tricky.

All done with most of the spacers removed.

Next up is the grouting. Starts looking worse before it looks better.

In with the toilet and new sink.

Now that is starting to look better.

A shower curtain and a place to put the shampoo.

A lick of paint on the side of the bath and it is finished.

And a new mirrored cabinet and shelf finish off the sink.

Lucy loves her new bathroom but especially her new bath.

Boo Loves Smarties

2009-09-13T23:24:00.000+01:00

Cats are inscrutable

e:Mail is a part of collaboration

2009-08-21T12:01:00.005+01:00

Lotus Knows that collaboration means people working together to achieve better more productive results. Sometimes this means participating in finding expertise, sharing files, discussions, instant chats, collaborative applications, workflow, knowledge management and sometimes it means sending an email or scheduling a meeting. Lotus Notes and Domino allows all of these types of collaboration (and more) on a single platform via any client (Rich, Web or Mobile) on any O/S (Windows, Linux, Mac).

Competing solutions require multiple platforms to achieve these capabilities. Why would you want to use one solution to send an email or schedule a meeting but then require a different solution to book a holiday or participate in a collaborative team space? They are all collaboration. Email is the TCP/IP of collaboration and should not be thought of as a different product. (Remember when calendaring was separate from email (cc:Mail and Organiser vs. MS Mail and Schedule+) - would you ever want them separate again? of course not. So why do it with collaboration?

If you agree, vote for this thought on the LotusKnows Ideajam

Lotus Knows: How to integrate Notes and Connections Business cards

2009-08-11T09:31:00.004+01:00

In honour of it being Yellow Day and for those of you who missed MBR's Notes 8.5.1 update at IamLUG, here is one of my favorite forthcoming features. Lotus Connections in the Notes 8.5.1 Business Card. Nice.

And here in the integrated Sametime. It's never been easier to know who you are talking to.

Many a word spoken in jest

2009-08-10T14:47:00.005+01:00

I was chatting with my frolleague Rick Robinson a couple of days ago about Enterprise Social Networking. Specifically we were talking about how people may feel inclined to put more accurate information in internal Social networking systems such as Lotus Connections than they might do for external sites such as Facebook. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I gave the example of my own Linkedin account. In a vain attempt to divert attention from my meagre academic achievements (an O'Level in Woodwork) I invented what I thought was an amusing spoof degree, "Applied Quantum Philosophy" which I assumed anyone would see for the joke that is was meant to be.

Imagine my surprise then when Dr Rick said, "Oh yes, I studied that at University. Fascinating". Later on he followed this up with an email "PS you pulled "quantum philosophy" out of the air as an example subject when we spoke about collaboration ... I'd very much recommend the following book on the subject ;-) In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbins". That is certainly the philosophy of quantum mechanics. I think I might have to leave the "applied" part alone for the time being though. My cats are stating to look worried.

Lotus Notes on The Wire

2009-06-07T01:24:00.003+01:00

I love the TV show The Wire. My Wife and I are halfway through watching the fifth and final season on DVD. It's brilliant TV. All the better for seeing what software Bunk uses for his colloborative needs ....

Maybe that is why crime is going down in West Baltimore. (Season 5, Episode 5, 47.14). You feel me?

MS Groove - RIP

2009-05-18T21:41:00.004+01:00

So Groove is no more. Microsoft have announced that they have renamed it Sharepoint Worksplace 2010. Nice name. I wonder if Ray Ozzie was involved in it being called Workspace? It seems vaguely familiar to a Lotus Notes head like me.

They have also claimed that "Groove is to SharePoint like Outlook is to Exchange". What a shame that in Microsoft's world you need to install two rich clients if you wish to do both Messaging and Collaboration. After all, isn't messaging an aspect of collaboration? For a unified solution, look no further than Lotus Notes (or indeed a web browser or a Portal or a PDA).

http://blog.brothersoft.com/tag/outlook-2010/

Access to Archive from Preview Pane

2009-04-21T14:53:00.005+01:00

John Lance wrote a couple of days ago about how cool it is that in the next release of Lotus Notes (8.5.1) You will be able to access calendaring functionality from the preview pane of your mail. This is indeed a very welcome improvement and being able to accept or decline a meeting without having to open the invitation or your calendar is great and will save time.

But personally I am more pleased to see this innovation. If you have a message that has been archived (as can be seen by the little "torn paper" icon next to it) there is now a button in the preview pane to say "Open in Archive". Obviously this was always possible using the "Open Archived Document" in the Actions menu but putting it as a preview button (also there when the message is opened) is far more intuitive. It is only a little thing but these things really matter.

*As always these things are subject to change

Button injured in horrific F1 accident

2009-04-09T18:34:00.004+01:00

From my frolleague @FunkySimm. Obviously funnier if you got this through Twitter or RSS.

Pig dancing to ABBA

2009-04-03T03:36:00.002+01:00

A cute pig dancing to ABBA. My twin sister is the Svengali behind Mickey the pigs genius dance.

Lotus Notes on BBC News

2009-03-13T22:51:00.007Z

I was half watching the BBC News tonight in the middle of the Red Nose Day charity bash (do give generously). However, my attention was caught when I saw this interview with Geordie Greig the new editor of the London Evening Standard. What would he choose to have displayed on his monitor during this high profile appearance? The Standard web site perhaps? Publishing staples like Quark or Photoshop? No, he's gone with Lotus Notes mail.

I'll be honest, I don't think I'm gonna get a job as a photographer any time soon. But this is clearly a valid Lotus Notes on the TV sighting. (Looks like Notes 7 - the latest version is Notes 8.5)

A sneak peek at LinkedIn integration into Lotus Notes

2009-03-08T22:12:00.006Z

The Profiles component of Lotus Connections is a great way of finding expertise and information about people within your organisation. This has been greatly enhanced through the tight integration into Lotus Notes 8.5. So whenever I see a name in a Notes document "Live Text" recognises that it is a name and allows me to search Profiles for that user. This is great for finding out about people internally but there is also a need to be able to find information about people who are external to your organisation. So Lotus announced at Lotusphere that they are working with LinkedIn to produce similar integration and I have just installed it to see how well it works. And the answer is brilliantly. When I select a message in my inbox;

It automatically enters that name into the LinkedIn sidebar application and returns a search matching the name (I had to manually edit the "J" our of my name since it does not appear in my LinkedIn profile).

Clicking on my name in the search results brings up my profile in the sidebar. So if I receive an email from a partner or customer it is that easy to find their LinkedIn profile and understand. There is still a little bit or work to do on the installer (you can't just drag it into your widgets sidebar yet) and I'm not sure if it will be released as a standalone plugin or as part of maintenance release but it is going to be well worth the wait.

My little kid is quite cute

2009-03-05T22:53:00.002Z

This is my little kid Lucy being quite cute.

How Microsoft Outlook Ruined Her Birthday Cake

2009-02-01T00:40:00.005Z

The good thing about standards are that there are so many to chose from. But when you make up your own there are even more problems .... I think this is very funny.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/microsoft-outlook-ruins-birthday-cake/6824/

Of course it is a bit unfair since HTML statements surrounded by < !-- Blah --> tags are comments so the bakery's system should have ignored them. But it wouldn't be the first time an email client had been bad mouthed without justification would it!

Jumping cursor when typing on Thinkpad

2009-01-22T21:00:00.002Z

I have been suffering from a most infuriating problem for the last few months. Every now and again when I'm typing my cursor will jump to the beginning of the line. Since I don't touch type I spend quite a lot of time looking at my clumsy fingers and not at the screen so when this cursor jumping happens and I don't notice it can cause carnage to my document. At other times it was causing a seemingly random word to be selected and as I continued to type would overwrite it. As you can imagine this weird behaviour started messing with my head.

Having worked in IT Support in a previous life I am well aware of the need to find a reproducible set of circumstances in order to trouble shoot a problem. Since I spend most of my life in my beloved Lotus Notes client that was where I first spotted the problem. My initial thought was that it could be a bug in the editor since there had been loads of improvements to it in recent releases (drag and drop stuff mainly). However, it didn't take long to spot the problem happening in other applications including Firefox and even Notepad. With my support head on I might have suspected "Finger Trouble" but even though my typing is not great it isn't that bad.

However, I just had a stoke of luck. For no particularly good reason whilst in an web based editor I just happened to tap my Trackpoint and witnessed my cursor moving to the beginning of the previous line! But that is dumb - since when have trackpoints behaved like mouse buttons? Well after a bit of research I found out that this behaviour is called "Press-to-Select" and can be configured in the Control Panel/Mouse. I have been using Thinkpads for 13 years and I am sure that it has never been turned on in any of my previous machines - I wonder why the default has changed to on now. Whatever, at least I understand what is happening so now I need to decide whether to turn it off or to take advantage if it.

From the Trackpoint tab in the Mouse menu you can configure your trackpoint.

Ticking enable Press-to-Select allows you to configure that particular function.

Multiple Domino instances on a single machine.

2009-01-14T15:14:00.005Z

Although it is completely unsupported, I have a requirement to have two Lotus Domino server installed on my Thinkpad at the same time. One is my super stable environment for performing standard cusotomer demonstrations which includes Domino, Quickr, Traveler, iNotes and Sametime. This is currently using Domino 8.0.2. Then I have a more experimental server which is running the latest build of the code I can get my hands on which I use for playing with the new toys like DAOS, Xpages, ID Vault, DCT etc. The problem I am having is that when I now upgrade either of the servers (they are just installed locally on my C:\ drive) it causes the other to show the following error when started:

This is a known issues and you can see the Technote here. The problem is easy enough to fix, just reinstall the code and the server is fine again. The problem is that in fixing one you have knocked out the other. This has only just started happening to me in the last month or so - prior to that I could have as many servers as I like installed and they would all work fine independently of each other. I am pretty much sure that the problem relates to how Domino reads or writes to the windows registry.

A similar scenario happens with the Notes client. IBM do not support having multiple versions installed on a machine at the same time. But clever folks in the Lotus community have found ways to get it working. The best description I have found is this one from Thomas Bahn which even allows the versions to be running simultaneously. So my question to the community is has anyone found a similar workaround for having multiple versions of Domino installed on a Windows laptop (not running simultaneously of course!).

p.s. I know I could use VMware workstation and the problem goes away but I hate using VM's for customer demos. I don't like introducing additional moving parts.

Windows 7 Beta: How well does Lotus Software work?

2009-01-13T01:05:00.007Z

When I first tried installing Windows Vista I used a Thinkpad T41. The results were very poor. Whist the operating system did install it was pretty much incapable of doing anything useful. I quickly reverted to using Windows XP again. With the launch of the Windows 7 Beta1 I thought I would try the same test again. And I am very encouraged by the results. It is clearly a step up from Vista both in terms of stability and performance.

From downloading the code (over 2GB) to burning it onto a DVD to installing it onto my venerable Thinkpad only took a few short hours. Within a couple of reboots it was recognising my Wireless Lan, Graphics Card and the other computers on my network. Impressive although nothing you wouldn't expect from a Mac or Ubuntu.

But the big question is does Lotus Software work on it? The answer is a resounding yes. The first thing I installed was Lotus Mobile Connect to get VPN access to IBM's internal systems. Then of course it was Lotus Notes. It installed a treat and after I copied my bookmarks, workspace (OK I'm occasionally old school) and ID file it was like working on my main PC. As you can see, Lotus Sametime also works brilliantly as well.

I also checked out the Lotus Symphony editors and they all worked faultlessly.

All in all you would have to conclude that Windows 7 is a massive improvement on Vista. I happen to know that IBM Lotus Quality Engineering always test out latest software on older hardware. Specifically, they have used a Thinkpad T30 which is over 5 years old to ensure that performance would be fine. Despite a slow start with Notes 8.0 the performance optimisation in 8.0.2 and 8.5 is really impressive.

It is a shame that the same cannot be said for Windows 7, because so far I have had complete lockups trying to use Windows Media Centre, Windows Media Player and - *ahem* - Solitaire! I guess Microsoft's QE team must still be using those Cray Supercomputers to do their testing!

So in conclusion, Lotus Notes 8.5, Sametime, Symphony, Quickr and Portal all work fine on Windows 7 Beta 1 on a three year old computer. But beware if you want to edit a picture, watch a video or play a simple card game!

Of course the funny thing is that I was running Solitaire perfectly well on a 286 with 8MB of Ram nearly 20 years ago on Window 3.0. And now a PC with around 30,000 times the processing power that put a man on the moon can't run it. Progress!

Reply to All and Message Recall cause massive Mail FAIL

2009-01-11T21:14:00.000Z

There is an interesting story reported on Slashdot about a mail storm debacle that brought the US State Departments MS Exchange infrastructure (branded OpenNet eMail) to it's knees. The problem was not simply by sending the message to many thousands of people - any mail system could handle that. The problem was that a significant minority of the recipients chose to "Reply to all" requesting their name be removed from the mailing list. This exponentially increases the number of messages flowing through the system which is further exacerbated by having "receipt request" specified. If that weren't bad enough some of the users then started trying to recall their message.

What many folks don't realise is that Message Recall is actually rather inaccurately named as a message is not recalled, it is deleted from the recipients mail file. And how does it know to delete the message? Well another message is sent to all the recipients with that instruction! Further doubling the workload. In Lotus Domino these recall messages are processed by the mail router so it is very efficient. However, in an Exchange environment the requests are processed by the Outlook mail client - so the request will obviously fail if you are using another mail client or an old version of Outlook. This is compounded by the fact that the recall request gets delivered to the users highlighting that the sender is trying to recall the message (which will of course draw additional interest to the original message).

Here is an example I received a few weeks ago.

My surprise about this issue is not that a load of under trained users/politicians caused the problem by the inappropriate use of "Reply to All". It is that the US State Department doesn't have a more efficient method of making an announcement to all it's staff than a blunderbuss mailing. Of course there are many ways to mitigate the problems that "Reply to All" can potentially cause. Putting the mailing list in the BCC rather than the CC field will help a lot (and be more discrete). Alternatively you can restrict access to mail groups, create a maximum number of recipients allowed or cause users to be prompted/warned if they try to send to too many users. But these are really attempts to fix technology when the fault lies in the culture.

This is made all the more ironic because the blanket email sent round to everyone was apparently a warning about using "Reply to All".

So what is the alternative?

Well firstly we need to move away from the 1980's notion that eMail is the only way to collaborate and communicate with people. It would be far more efficient to post the communication on their corporate intranet as a news story. If you required the ability for users to be able to comment on the communication then it might be more appropriate to post it on a corporate blog. If your organisation doesn't have a single blog that all users access regularly then it might be appropriate to email the communication to business unit leaders and ask them to post in in their local Team Rooms/Quickr Places/Sharepoint Sites/Public Folders etc. If you need to ensure that users are informed about the policy change immediately then it would be better to send a broadcast message using realtime collaboration tools such as Sametime. Better still, a combination of these capabilities to ensure that users get to view the communication using their preferred client, for example an RSS feed or a News Reader.

As my frolleague John Wylie points out we should not blame the users. That is the typical IT department response ("The system would work fine if it weren't for the users"). Users should not be put in a position where their actions can cause such a catastrophe. And the way to do that is to collaborate with them more intelligently.

Further reading for Domino message recall here
Further reading for Exchange/Outlook message recall here
Mail Fail Image from Crunchgear

Did you know?

2008-12-11T13:46:00.005Z

A really insightful video celebrating the exponential progress of Information Technology researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman. It also contains some interesting metrics comparing the United States with some large emerging nations such as China and India. I don't know if all the statistics are accurate but it all seems very credible.

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

Does everyone love Outlook?

2008-11-17T16:14:00.004Z

I had a meeting today with a company from the finance sector. I was there to show them our team collaboration solution Quickr. I knew they used Outlook/Exchange so had no intention of talking about email since Quickr works great with Outlook as well as with Notes.

So I was rather surprised when in his introduction one of the chaps volunteered the following; "The previous company I worked for used Lotus Notes. Since I moved to xxxxxxx it has taken me 2 years to figure out how to work as efficiently in Microsoft Outlook". Crikey! Two years seems like rather a long time to get used to a mail client. On hearing this one of his colleagues said that she has to find and print out any emails that will be useful in advance of a meeting because "it is almost impossible to find anything quickly in Outlook".

It was especially interesting since these were line of business users and not administrators or developers. It is an example of how not all users love Outlook. They were very interested in Quickr and moving to a mode of work that took them out of their inbox and into easily searched and organised team spaces.

Lotus iNotes on the Nintendo Wii

2008-09-24T23:09:00.000+01:00

There have been a few people talking about the new Lotus iNotes Ultralite and specifically how well it works on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Less comment has been made about the fact that iNotes Ultralite works very well in a browser on a PC. What I haven't seen mentioned so far was if iNotes Ultralite works on a Nintendo Wii. So I thought I would give it a go.

First I type in the URL and see if the Wii version of Opera will be able to handle it.

Not surprisingly iNotes brings up a dialog saying that it is not certified to use this browser. But offers a link to use Ultralite mode.

And it works perfectly. It looks pretty stunning on my 40 inch Sony LCD TV.

As you see, here is my Inbox.

Even complicated emails (this is a calender invite) all render perfectly, Obviously IBM will most likely not be certifying iNotes for the Wii any time soon, but so far I have yet to find any functionality that works on the iPhone that doesn't work on the Wii. So if you want to check your email between rounds of Mario Kart Wii you now have an excellent solution.

Double Click attachments in Lotus Notes

2008-09-22T15:57:00.002+01:00

Receiving attachments via email is a bit of a two edged sword. On the one hand it is quite an easy way to get stuff, but on the other hand you don't necessarily know if the attachment contains wondrous information which will transform your life or viruses and other malware which will destroy your computer.

In order to help users, when they double clicked on an attachment Lotus Notes would bring up a dialog box warning the user of the possible perils and offering some alternatives including "viewing" the attachment to check that it was safe before launching it. But these days most computers and particularly those ones that are used for business have Anti Virus software installed to watch your back. In which case if you add AttachmentActionDefault=1 to your notes.ini file then double clicking an attachment will launch it in the native application with no dialog box.

More details are here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21292126

F5 Refresh in Lotus Notes 8.5

2008-09-21T14:48:00.004+01:00

There are some debates about IT products which are far more like religious arguments rather than technical discussions because there really are no right or wrong answers, just opinions.

Obvious examples are the two button "PC Mouse" vs. the single button "Mac Mouse", coding using "Multi Threading" vs "Multi Process" techniques, using images in GIF, JPG or PNG format or perhaps the ultimate in cosmetic comparisons, the Black Thinkpad vs the White Macbook

One such debate has revolved around what key should be used to refresh a view or page or in the case of a mail client, check for new mail. As with most things in the PC Software world, there has never been a standard for such things. Each developer does what they think best. However, over time "De facto" standards sometimes emerge. In the case of the refresh key, it became the key F9 since this was what was used by Lotus 123, the dominant application at the beginning of the PC age. As 123 was gradually overtaken by Microsoft Excel it also used F9 for refreshing. Lotus Notes has followed this convention and has used F9 for refresh for nearly 20 years.

However, in more recent years Microsoft started using the F5 key for refresh in some (but by no means all) applications, most notably Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. Confusingly Microsoft Outlook 2003 uses F5 to refresh the view but F9 to check for new mail.

So what to do with Lotus Notes? Clearly it wouldn't be fair on our current customers to change the behaviour of F9, but on the other hand many new Lotus Notes users expect refresh to be F5 because of their experience with Microsoft Windows. So in version 8.5 of Lotus Notes either F5 or F9 can be used to refresh a view and check for new mail. It also means that F5 can be used in Symphony Presentations to start a slide show. A very pragmatic solution I think.

Honda Whites

2008-09-18T22:50:00.007+01:00

I had the pleasure of visiting a Lotus Notes customer today and briefing them on what is coming up in the forthcoming Notes/Domino 8.5 as well as Quickr, Sametime and Connections. That isn't particularly unusual, I spend a lot of my time ensuring that our customers are aware of upcoming features in new versions of our software and indeed our new collaborative and social offerings.

But what I really enjoy is finding out about our customers. They are all unique and vary from International Airlines to 5 people Internet start ups, film makers to police forces, Universities to chocolate makers. Today I was at a manufacturing plant of a well known worldwide car maker based in Swindon. The main thing that struck me was that all the employees were wearing identical white uniforms.

This would not normally be worthy of comment. Many manufacturing sites mandate that their staff wear protective uniforms. What was unusual here was that everyone from engineers, secretary's to Senior Management all wear the same white uniforms. So in my meeting today all the IT staff were wearing the same white uniform with their name on the left and the company name on the right. It made it very easy to be able to identify the IBMers from the Customers :-)

It was really interesting to walk down a corridor and see some folks who were clearly very hands on in the manufacturing process wearing the same clothes as some executive carrying a laptop and a briefcase. Apparently the uniform is referred to as Honda Whites. And before you think that this uniformity stifles individually I can tell you that the folks I met were full of character, and also one of the guys name badge read "Gadget". "Funny name" I said. "It's my nic name" he replied. "I like Gadgets".

Cloud Burst

2008-08-19T18:05:00.008+01:00

A few days ago my friend Ed Brill was writing about the suitability of services such as Gmail in the Enterprise. Despite the vogue for services such as Google Apps and other "Software as a Service" and "Cloud" computing, he points out that they simply aren't as reliable as on premises solutions (or hosted ones for that matter). However, one of the biggest challenges with these solutions is "who you gonna call" when there is a problem. If you can't access Gmail you won't get very far phoning Google. However, these free services are normally deemed to be fine for consumer use.

Well I have just had a personal experience that even makes me question that. Since around 2000 I have been maintaining a web site for the band that I'm in. Being a cheap skate I just grabbed a free site at Tripod. It was a bit spoiled by the adverts but it worked fine. Tripod was subsequently purchased by Lycos but it didn't seem to change anything. It only got a thousand or so hits per year and I didn't update it particularly frequently but it was a nice place to keep all the band related stuff together and to inform our vanishingly small fan base about gigs and such.

A little while ago I made a music video of one of our songs and so I popped over to the site to provide a link. To my surprise all the content had vanished. When I tried to log in to my account I got an error message stating that my account had been suspended because of suspected abuse! It directed me to a Lycos troubleshooting and reporting site where it asked me to create a problem report promising a response within 72 hours. Several weeks later and despite me repeatedly emailing they have stubbornly refused to contact me other than an automated confirmation that they had received my report.

My account has subsequently been re enabled but all the content on the site is gone for good. Now being a paranoid sort of chap I have always saved copies of everything I uploaded to the site - but I would imagine many people are not so careful. Interestingly I have never bothered to save the contents of this blog. What could I do if I came here and found it blank? Even worse would be if I found the Blog that I write for my daughter was gone. Who would I ring? When I restart my bands page it will not be on a free service but rather with a host who provides a support number so I can talk to someone if problems occur. Not a vast anonymous blob.

As we sometimes say, free software is worth every penny! Incidentally, remember that nothing is ever really deleted from the internet. The Internet Archive still has a copy of my site.