08/29/2008

Thank you, and no comment(s)!

Category
Apparently cocomment has been eating the comments on this blog, so I've now disabled it: perhaps it should be renamed as 'nocomments'?

Which makes me wonder ... what do you think of cocomment? Personally I've really never found it to be of much use, other than as a way to slow down and occasionally (e.g. now) just plain old break blog sites. But maybe you feel differently?

Anyway, Vitor kindly forwarded me the comments you've made on my news of twins which did end up in cocomment's database but went missing on the blog post itself, so thank you all!

08/28/2008

My new pair-programming proteges

Category personal
On 5th August, at around 6:45am, I became the father to Oliver (6lbs10.5) and Arthur (6lbs10):

Oliver and Arthur

All are doing well, and we were home after 3 days which is pretty good all things considered.

Family

Abnormal blogging service will be resumed shortly, once I destroy the email mountain...

08/13/2008

In-depth and insightful coverage

Category iphone lotusnotes
Glad to see that the UK press is upholding its time-honoured high standards of journalistic integrity and insightful reporting. Not.

08/06/2008

Living in cloud cuckoo land

Category lotus
Just in case, in the face of the recent aggressive press release from IBM/Lotus, the Lotus community forgets just how far we've come in the last three years, let's remind ourselves:
Mills: After this year's R6 deliverable, the next version will be a WebSphere-based version. Notes is 80 percent middleware today. It already has some WebSphere and pieces of DB2 embedded in it today. But it's fundamentally built on the Notes file system, which is a late '80s design point.

Tech Update: So you're replacing the whole underlying data store?

Mills: Throwing out the whole infrastructure and revamping the data storage. We have flexible schema-mapping capability in DB2 today, so we can map the Notes file systems and we can map XML natively. You can use alternative syntax like XML to actually access the data that sits in DB2 today. So that capability in DB2 now is allowing us to pull out the old Notes file structure and insert the DB2 infrastructure.

(From ZDNet on 04-Mar-02)

Next time somebody tries to sell you a grand architectural vision that stinks, just stand up and say that it stinks. I mean, who amongst us was actually convinced that this was the right way for IBM to be going? Four wasted years, many wasted man-years, a lot of grey hairs, a lot of lost/disillusioned/disgruntled/confused customers. A terrible shame.

But, Lotus Notes/Domino are still here, they're still being used, we're still in business, and it even looks as though IBM might be beginning to realise that a similar level of change in the marketing program to that which has already occurred to the technology program is required. Let's hope, eh?

08/04/2008

Washington Post

Category lotus
The Washington Post has picked up on last week's Lotus press release from IBM: "IBM Counters Microsoft's Software Seat-stealing Boast". The subtitle is "Microsoft may be targeting Notes users, but they won't be switching without a fight from IBM."

It's good that the press is sensing this change of mood. I see IBM climbing back into the ring for a fight. But Microsoft is going to fight hard and dirty, and they've had a lot more practice, and they have a lot more fans to cheer them on. It might not be pretty ...