Bill's Blog

Whilst we're all a twitter about all the cool new (and as I found out this week - fragile) features in 8.5.0, spare a thought for those colleagues still labouring under Domino 6.5.1 or even older. These customers tend to be 'outsourced' customers where the outsourcing agreement charges extra for any upgrade work. Guess whats the first thing the beancounters cut out ?

So if your out there, strugging with a version of Notes older than iPhones, I'm really sorry. All you can do is complain, complain, and complain again. I think an honourable mention must be made (from all outsourcers) in this respect to IBM themselves, who seem to be the WORST at allowing their customers to cut costs by removing upgrade options, and then four years later, watch those customers fly away from notes, thinking that its crap.

Its not a new problem, and its not a hidden problem, but I think in terms of 'Their own worst enemy', IBM must take an award for doing most to really hack off their customers. Why dont they just take one for the team, unilaterally upgrade all customers, and keep em happy and onboard ? Why does it take someone outside of IBM to point this out ?

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 11:37:11 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Och, its hot in the City. Or rather, South Bank, and Canary Warf. I'd to take the boat to work today, which would have been utterly fantastic if the Bankside pier (beside Tate Modern) was open. Blackfriars is only 10 minutes walk away. These Thames Clipper boats are fast, and on the way back, after standing on the Thames in glorious sunshine, the on-board bar did a roaring trade.

Why oh why have I been suffering London for all these years, instead of enjoying it..

The picture is the view from the Hotel Terrace bar, across to Canary Warf. And yes, the sunlight made the Warf look like a pillar of light..

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 21:14:46 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It struck me that IBM should really enhance the Domino installer so that the correct IIS plug-ins get installed on the IIS server should you opt to go down the route of using IIS as a front-end for Domino. Instead of spending days beating yourself against a really crappy 'copy these files' install and 'plug and pray' text file editing. I mean - its 2009, for fricks sake...

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 08:42:41 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, two nights in london for £130. This hotel is accessible to me only by water, so I have a very nice 17 minute cruise along to Canary warf, then a quick pop across the thames to this very nice 4* with a pool. Quite looking forward to this one.. And from next week, its student accomodation all the way.. Yikes..

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 19:04:10 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay. This is quite bad, but I *lost* my Macbook pro 15" computer. But since London is a high-crime area, I suspect Its long gone. So this week, after a meeting with senior lotus folks (where I demonstrated the Achos 10 netbook), I ran to the Regents Street Mac Store in London, and 10 minutes before closing, in a very sweaty shirt indeed, had young Juan get me a 13" macboook pro from the back, and I (shakily) handed over my credit card for it. And then it was MINE. Yes MINE.

And then I walked it into a very high crime area (where my flat is) using it as an Apple Backpack. But yey, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. Cos I look more nutzoid than those feckers do, innit?

And so I'm home, stupid-o-clock, and my new MBP 13" is flying under my fingers. Bliss. Oh, I've missed you. Days. Indeed WEEKS without Things. Twitter a lost friend on the crackberry. iPhoto and its bizarre collection a distant memory.

In the meantime, life has changed. I have restricted my alcohol intake as one View presenter described it: Less than it would take to kill me in a night. Sad, but true. Mild Bill is getting old.. My old dad will be laughing at this...

Damn blood pressure pills..

But hey, Adobe Flex 4 beta is out and I'm a very happy bunny..

Oh. And the pub it all started:- Founders Arms - is now my 'local'. Be there tuesday night next week if anyone wants to catch up..

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 04:30:52 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Here at the Marlin Apartments in Stratford, sitting in a damp towel, waiting for the water to be switched back on so I can finish my shower, and more importantly get my underwear out of the dryer.. Sigh..

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 09:19:59 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm shopping for a new MacBook pro.. And since I think I need an external screen with the 15" one, I figure - should I consider getting the 13" one.. It might have a smaller, slower hard drive, but its cheaper and far more portable.. Whaddyathink?

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 14:14:37 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

I've almost forgotten just how bad BA can be sometimes. BA, as you all know are one of the biggest and oldest airlines working out of the UK, as evidenced by their aging fleet of stewardesses. Generally, they charge a premium rate for what they consider to be premium service - allocated seats, cooked breakfast, free drinkie on the way home, and 'slightly larger seats'. The latter is of course patently untrue. They're all tiny, unless you go down the 'I'm a VP of IBM on a fatuous business trip so I travel Business' ticket.

So I'm working (bloody hard, actually) in London, doing work for someone who shall remain nameless. And as part of this, I fly from Aberdeen, Dundee or Edinburgh (55, 35, and 90 miles respectively from my house), to one of the five big London Airports. These are:

• Gatwick. Its like an ageing aunt. You once had good memories there, but now it smells of pee, and nothing works. You feel extremely let down by every experience you ever had there, and the journey to and from there is like being packed in a japanese train (50 minutes). Very unpleasant, and as a bonus, very unreliable. Avoid at all costs. Civilisations have risen and fallen the time it takes to queue through security.
• London Luton Airport. Home of SleasyJet, the second biggest budjet carrier. Its brutally efficient here, except when its not. They now sell 'I can jump the queues' tickets for £3, and everyone travelling through there has to either wear a shell suit or be on a stag/hen weekend. The travel to and fron Luton (75 mins door to door) is like taking the bus to another country. Chickens, goats, people making love in the back seat, and the trains only stop at the most foul of stations. Aside from St Pancras, which has been laminated. Luton, you get what you pay for. A stabbing.
• London Stanstead. The newest, and chavviest airport. Apalling queues, only one toilet in the entire airport, always constantly busy, no power points (aside from one set-aside area - the 'business creche' - full of insecure suits all trying to look self important. Yeah. Right. The good news is that the train takes less than an hour, and comes straight into Liverpool Street, in the City of London. 50 or so minutes.
• London Heathrow, and especially Terminal 5. Home of British Bloody Airways. The best, newest, most expensive, and disasterously opened terminal in the World. After a YEAR of fixing things, I thought I'd give it a whirl. So on Friday, I left the office around 2PM, and got there at 3.36pm. The Tube - yes a tube all the way from City to the airport - took 30 minutes longer than usual. Tried to go through security. 'Bleep'. Rejected. Go back to that checkin desk. At the checkin desk (3.37pm), I was informed I should have been through security at 3.30pm, for my 3.45 gate close. No-one in security. I have hand baggage. No, she says, my seat has been given away ALREADY. WHAT? So, I have to PAY them another £130 to get on a flight in another FOUR hours. Oh, thank you very much, British Bloody Airways. You scum. This is premium service, is it ?
  And once through to T5 airside, what do you have? Two enormous expanses of SHOPS, with tiny little gates bolted onto the outside of the building. The shops are - of course - exactly the same damn shops selling exactly the same damn stuff as everywhere else. The food is the same, the goods are the same, the experience is just slightly more wearing as the distances are greater. And - the high point. The visible electrical plugs you can see everywhere in the central areas - are deliberately switched off.
  So to do any reasonable work at this airport, you have to be in a lounge, which means paying 50% more for your economy tickets to rack up the points, or to pay for lounge access. Thank you very much.
• London City airport. About 40 minutes down the DLR (robot controlled, very frequent tube trains) from the City, and you can get through to your flight 10 minutes before the gate closes - unlike everywhere else, where its 30-60 minutes. And you do get through in under 5 minutes. You can find a seat at the cafe which has wifi, power sockets, and decent food. And since the planes are really small, you get on and off of them quickly.

(Dundee Airport, by the way, is so small two chaps - two extremely drunk chaps - people who could barely WALK - managed to scale the fence, and broke into a number of aircraft, trying to hotwire them. They got caught on their 4th attempt. This rather beats Aberdeen Airports 'Drunk Stripper scales fence and walks across runway' from a few years ago. Class.)

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 14:37:34 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

To help me travel, I've just bought a Netbook - an Archos 10. About £240 in the Dixons at Heathrow on Friday. Its small, black, has 1gb ram, 160gb hard drive, a webcam, mike and speakers. Its as easy to use Skype on this as it is on the macbook.

Operating system wise, it came with XP. No worries. And at the airport (having some four hours to kill - but that is most definately another story - I loaded it up. It even had a 'Download Symphony' icon on the desktop when I booted it up, which was cool. I stuck Notes 8.5 on there, and thought to myself - why not. I stuck the full blown overweight hog that is 8.5 standard on the thing. And you know, it works really well. In fact, its as fast as it is on my MacBook Pro - which gives you a clue how slow Notes 8.5 on the Mac is. And its a guilty pleasure not having to run vmware to design a damn agent again. Still, I can imagine that the folks over in Lotus will probably do designer for Linux first, just to piss off us mac fanboys..

This wee netbook runs on its tiny little battery for 4+ hours, and can be opened on that tiniest of things - a British Airways seat. So for the first time in a long time - certainly since BA started listening to its accountants rather than its customers - I could do stuff. Nice.

I also feel that this is the sort of thing that I can leave in a bar in London, and not have to hire security to prevent my death by SWMBO afterwards.

All I have to do is guarantee a nice internet connection wherever I am - not difficult these days - and use cloud-based collaboration. Even the mega-corporate current-customer is migrating all users from physical machines to virtual machines, and just providing thin clients on each desk. Which is cool.

Times are a changing, it would appear. We're now retreating from a 'fat, independent client' landscape, and heading back to a 'thin, centralised IT' one. Difference is that the infrastructure is no longer provided or maintained in-house (unless you are huge or rich or secure). Interesting times for all of us, transitioning from these customer installed services to cloud-based services.

Interesting for the folks over at IBM. Their cloud offering is marketed so badly, it actually causes a black-hole. And of course their customer hosted infrastructure collaboration software hasnt been marketed in 10 years (and will probably never be marketed)., leading customers to conclude that its legacy. Harsh, but I cant change that. God knows I've tried.

So who's going to lead the market in two years ? MS have the market sentiment right now with Sharepoint, despite its universal mauling as technically difficult (but then so was Notes 3.x, right ?). Google Wave is looking very interesting indeed. And I see our friends over at Adobe have just released Flex 4 beta. VMWare have just released v4 of their ESX products - including an updated version of the free tooling - ESX. Go check this stuff out.

An easily provisioned server mesh delivered in-house on ESX, proving google Wave style services, to clients running Adobe Flex, is an interesting, relatively open and quickly deployed solution. Interesting times indeed.

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 00:31:09 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a very quick follow up to the previous entry. Range of motion - Paul Bendix's account of his wheelchair bound life and the loss of his partner Marlou - really helped me. Its powerful stuff, very well written. Go back a while and catch up...

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 00:27:13 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of years ago, Cancer took my mother. Quickly too - about seven weeks from diagnosis to death. Mum, being an old nurse and in her seventies, really appreciated the care and help given to her by the staff in Broadford, Fort William (and Mr Sedgewick), and finally from her local nurse, who lives next door.

Its difficult to describe seeing your old mum - someone who seemed unstoppable and full of live, literally deteriorate before your eyes. In the end, she passed away 'peacefully', which is survivors code for 'dosed out of her eyeballs on opates'. Death is death, its not pretty, and I can only publically state my thanks again to everyone who helped. This is why I put a Macmillans badge on my blog.

It hit us as a family hard. My father is now in his mid-seventies, and lives alone in the family house, surrounded by memories. Thankfully, his hobby - ceilidh fiddling - keeps him (very) socially active, and the lovely folks in Dunvegan do their best to curb his enthusiasm for speed, diesel engines and high-speed grass cutting. He's also cut back on his firestarting, much to everyone's relief.

So why mention this now, after a few years ? Well, firstly, its the first time I've felt able to talk about this in the past tense without actually sobbing. I may have got to the stage of grief where I can cope. And because two folks who I deeply respect, like and admire are raising money for charity. Cancer charities

Firstly, Kitty Elsmore - the power behind Warrens drive to run UKLUG, and an amazing person, commemorates her father, and is walking 26 miles. 26 miles. On the 20th of June. You can sponsor her (and Warren - who *has* to wear a Bra - here). Please go there. They visited on the same day that they walked 14 miles, and poor Kitty was crippled. This means a lot to Kitty - she's prepared to walk her feet into broken bits for this. Go sponsor her here.

And Frank. Everyone in the Notes in Scotland knows Frank Docherty. Not only a very smart man, one of the nicest ones too. And Cancer took his wife, and mother of his child recently. Frank has been fed through the meat-grinder of life in the most awful way, and this charity fundraising for 'Team Docherty' not only helps others, it helps his family to cope and to find something positive out of this awful event.

Dont feel you have to donate because of me - I'm not asking you to do that. I'm asking you to donate to these two amazing individuals because it might help someone else.

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 21:11:57 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a few ways to achieve SSO between Domino and AD, but the least painful (its still painful) way is to set up the Lotus Domino 'Websphere' plug-in for IIS. This means that Lotus Notes runs on a windows 2003 or 2008 server, and uses Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services- their web server) to serve up Domino Content. A number of folks have excellent write ups on this - I used Warren Elsmore's one, because I know he's a genius at this.

So far so fairly indifferent. Domino rich content, Microsoft IIS. One thing hinted at in Warrens article was SSL. That is, you can install an SSL certificate on the Microsoft IIS server (and its a PITA to create a 'self-authenticated' test SSL certificate, believe me), you can have IIS do all the complex and time-consuming SSL stuff. Okay, the same machine is still doing the same work, but different process threads are responsible for different things. Nice.

Of course, Domino web isnt intelligent about caching things like pictures (or other static content), so have a good google for web rules to use with your domino site. You should be able to get to the stage that your entire site is cached on the client, with the exception of dynamic content. At this point, your site should be loading in sub one second, and your users will love you.

One often requested but not yet delivered feature is GZIP compression. Unless you're actually using the original Mozilla client (circa 1989), all your web clients will support the content being GZIPped before download. The file size of a complex domino page - perhaps 180k - will GZip down to under 20k. A huge saving both in terms of bandwidth, as well as latency. In other words - as I have seen - your page load time goes from 0.8 of a second to 0.2 of a second.

This feature is extensively used within iNotes, but not available to us mere app programmers (yet). There are ways of switching it on, but it crashes your server. So dont switch it on, m'kay ? (This feature has been promised for a while. When its actually delivered, I dont know)

But as I found. the MS IIS server does support GZip compression. Just right click on 'Web sites', properties, and enable page compression. Simple, eh

Now, some caveats. This only works on Windows servers, unsurprisingly. There's a huge push to get Linux as our default operating system, but lets face it: over 80% of the domino servers out here are probably running windows. All BES servers are running windows. And if this helps you, then why not ?

Of course, what I really really want (to quote the spice girls) is an open source VMWAre appliance that does SSL, load balancing and GZIP compression for free. Until then, I may just use this IIS malarkey.

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 06:04:23 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Last weekend, I was kept rather busy by the Marykirk Raft Race. Warren had kindly offered to come up and fix a radio mike and/or a PA system. Saturday, lots of stuff being organised - the bar and Marquee put up, signs plastered everywhere, etc. Warren and Kitty appeared, and we dragged them to Roos Leap in Montrose and fed them outrageous amounts of food. And then Sunday...

At about 9.30, I was aware of the doorbell going off, and Kay (the local Licencee and therefore the last person to annoy in the village) wondering where the hell I was. Walkie talkies were set up, more signs plastered everywhere, and Warren set up the PA. Meanwhile, I worried about my job that afernoon - being the compere. Thankfully, Joe appeared in the worlds loudest shirt, and did a far far better job than I.

Meanwhile, down at the river, the winning boat - RumRig (No, thats not a typo) won again. Especially impressive as the crews training appeared to be bar-orientated, and had started on the friday. No danger of being done for drunken rafting however, as the four local community policemen followed them down. All in all, 15 rafts started, and 15 rafts finished.

A special mention must go to the Smurfs. Their raft was designed and built by the local woodwork teacher, and as soon as they put it in the water - it flipped over and sank. Most spectacularly. However, undaunted, though cold and wet - they actually carried their raft - when it wasnt bumping along the bottom - 1.8 miles down the course, in the slowest ever time of one hour, twelve minutes. These kids didnt give up.

Later in the park, Echo 7 provided a lot of the entertainment, along with Joe, and of course the bar. A good day was had by all, I think.

Check out the raft race website here

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 22:00:35 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How the Americans see the MP Expenses scandal:

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 13:26:25 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)




Phew. Came home from London on Thursday night, packed the bike and fitted the back box on Friday morning and discovered that the battery - okay last weekend - was dead. Buried. Damn. So I called the ferry company, and managed to squeeze the car onto the ferry. Phew. And thank god I did - the weather was horrendous - gales, storms, fog, the lot. Nasty. I sat in the car and listened to the iPod, as hundreds of bikers froze.

Made it to Casa DomiNoYesMaybe and caught up with Steve and Coatsie, and had some Guinness.. Nice.. And off to bed around 3am. Up bright and early next morning, and Mrs McDonagh drove us to Portstewart, where we admired the hundreds of bikes, and wanderd to the start/finish line. The rain came on hard, and hats and jackets were purchased. Breakfast at Youngs. We finally managed to squeeze to a barrier.. Later, moved onto the start/finish straight.. And then between races, headed to the IceHouse for a warm up and a small libation.. Or two..

Much banter, much discussion. some new converts to Barocca. Damn, its been a while.

Posted by Bill S Buchan At 00:37:16 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)