ESCAPE VELOCITY

IBM in the cloud: extst.ibm.com

I renamed that server community to 'Pit of Despair' in my Sametime client. True story.

I know that there are a lot of hard-working smart people at IBM, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Sametime is a rock solid product, especially on Domino 8. So the fact that anyone trying to do business with IBM through IM ever sees this message is an embarrassment. Seriously, if you guys can't fix this, why would I ever trust you to run any cloud service?

Nobody ever gets that message on the Bleedyellow IM server, do they?

IBM, here's all you have to do: pick up a phone, dial 770 720 1300 and say "yes we can." Lotus 911 will give you a Sametime server for external communication within 72 hours. All you have to do is give us an LDAP binding and change a DNS entry.

I'll leave comments open in case anyone wants to share stories about that wretched server.

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How to win my vote in 2008

My vote goes to the candidate who pledges to end Daylight Saving Time.

That is all.

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Breaking blog silence for a special announcement...

No, I'm not going to post the ultrasound pic that PROVES it. Sickos.

click through for more...

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Signing Off

I was hesitant to post something about this, but ultimately based my decision on how much I hate it when someone just stops writing without explanation. I've thrown out too much grief to others to do the same thing myself.

As of today, Lotusphere is 4 months away. Last night, I was tasked by Lotus 911 with managing a huge project to debut in Orlando. The amount of work between now and then is staggering. Although the Lotus community has obviously been very important to me over the last 16 years I've been a part of it, I cannot afford to lose focus between now and then. So I'll be bowing out of online activities, including this blog, for at least the next 120 days. By the time we return, I'll very nearly be a daddy, so I have no idea how this kind of social interaction will fit into my priorities at that time.

Be seeing you.

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Busting an Xpages Myth: Performance (includes video)

If you think that Xpages are big and cumbersome and would be slow because they're all in Java, think again. Watch this video for proof.

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Okay, I'll Bite: If I were GM

An excellent question at Volker's site -- one worthy of deliberate response. And since my afternoon is shot while I recover from a root canal, I'll take a stab.

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The People's Front of Lotus Notes

The only people we hate more than IBM are the f***ing Lotus Notes People's Front. Splitters.

Paul Mooney proposes an excellent idea for the People's Front of Lotus Notes. Here's my proposed logo. I definitely want that T-shirt.

I'd love to attend the secret meeting where the People's Front plots their commando missions.

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The Truth as I See It: Part 4

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about why maintainable code was important, and how it compares to other priorities in the software development cycle. In Part 2, we talked about the concept of code decay, not as an effect of bad coding practices, but as an effect of changing environments. In Part 3, we talked about the concept of how user expectations can affect the phenomenon of decay.

In Part 4, I want to start looking at measures you can take to fight decay.

If decay is created by changes in context, one way to fight decay is to never change your context. If you're still running Notes v3, for instance, then your v3 apps probably have not been eclipsed by the underlying platform. You still don't have Lotusscript or Java available to you to address new problems.

That might sound like a ridiculous example, but I guarantee you that you know organizations that do this. They're the shops that are still running Notes 5 because "it's too expensive to upgrade because we'd have to retest all our apps." What they're really concerned with isn't the expense of testing -- it's the risk factor of NOT testing combined with the difficulty in addressing problems that might arise in the new context. They fight decay by not moving.

Of course, we know the consequence of this. Users don't live in a vacuum. They see Apple and Cisco ads on TV, or look at stuff on the web, or read a magazine and go "wow, look at all these cool things that other people are doing with computers. Why don't we have this?" And if that user happens to be a C-level executive, then the migrations begin.

So if standing still is a losing strategy, what's the alternative?

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Business Partnerships for Engineers

As a software engineer, I sometimes have to remember that the best way to explain something is to break it down into individual logical steps, so that there's no misunderstanding what's being said. Computers, after all, are just really fast tools that need things described to them very specifically and very exactly so they know what to do.

The single most powerful construct in software languages is the conditional. If/then is the centerpoint of every program. After all, without it, we couldn't even end the program, because we wouldn't know that we'd reached the end of what we were doing. So it's reasonable, I think, to expect software engineers to understand how to compare conditional statements, and values that can result from them.

What's also necessary is to understand initial run conditions. In logical proofs, these are called "premises." So let's start by defining some initial assumptions about our theoretical program...

CONST_0) We Lotus professionals would like to be more successful.

CONST_1) CONST_0 is enabled by a vibrant market in Lotus products. That is, lots of customer demand and profitable implementations.

CONST_2) CONST_1 usually (but not always) comes from having products that offer greater value to customers. This could be achieved by having a better product, or by making it available for less cost -- both achieving a higher ROI.

CONST_3) Delivering CONST_2 doesn't do any good unless the customers know that there's greater value to be had, so they must be informed.

CONST_4) IBM controls in large part how CONST_2 and CONST_3 happen.

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Sorry about the links...

I couldn't bring myself to try to make him naked.

As Rich and Vitor point out, referrers from my blog to Vowez Hilton are redirected to the homepage, so I can't link directly to individual posts there. You'll have to copy the link targets and paste them into your address bar or something.

I keep forgetting that I've officially been banished.

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