Being a geek, I've always wanted home automation. You know - house says 'hello', lights go on and off, etc. However, this has always required running a shonky windows-based PC, and the obvious disaster when it crashes. So I was pleasantly surprised to see Indigo for the mac.. Mmm.. I think a nice summer project based on this might happen..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:25:29 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Many thanks to those folks who attended my Object Orientated sessions at Developer 2008 in Boston. However, a delegate has approached me and pointed out that the database copy on the CD is actually locally encrypted. Much as I'd love to give you all my ID file in order to open this database, my co-directors would probably kill me, so instead here's a new copy of the database to download from here...

Posted by Bill Buchan At 11:48:16 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Developer 2008 Boston Lotus Notes Bookmark :              

Ballmer has pulled back from buying Yahoo. What does this say?

• Ballmer is an idiot
• Microsoft as a whole are idiots
• Yahoo are idiots
• All of the above.

Get more information, and quite a bit of swearing from The Secret diary of Steve Jobs

Honestly. MS have zero credibility right now and still failing badly. Want to stake your career on them?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 22:01:34 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Phew. Finally recovering, catching up on sleep and frantically packing my room. The View Developer 2008 as always was both hard work and fun - lots of new folks, lots of interesting content. Last night, Roy and I were just too tired to go barhopping in Boston, and just sat in the hotel bar, chatting. Should you think this is wasted time, important HADSL stuff got resolved and computing infrastructure was sorted out. Okay, so we did a *little* bit of work, whilst sipping beer and watching the folks head to the MIT graduation ball in the hotel. Scary. Sort of 'Nerd Herd' in Tuxedos.

A very nice thing happened last night. Some of you may be familiar with 'The Jacket' - this is a very old, very battered thin leather jacket that I wear whilst on adventures. Its been around the world with me, and sometimes gets bored of my tasteless banter and heads off to do stuff by itself. When I met The Turtle in Vegas, for instance, it went backstage for a behind the scenes look at the Mirage casino. When I interviewed for Standard Life, it had a wee stay in the Apex hotel in Edinburgh. And on Friday, when we went to the Cactus club, it absconded again. (Confusion reigned, as I lent 'The Jacket' to Susan to keep her warm, and forgot about it in my 'tired and emotional' state).

Enquiries lasted all day Saturday, but no - I couldnt find it in the normal places. Hotel lost propery, the bar, down the side of the road between the Cactus club and the Sheraton. In any of my presentation rooms. I was resigned to it finally leaving me forever. Sigh.

But no, another attendee for The View conference bumped into me last night and filled me in on some of the stuff that I was up to on Friday night, and (after apologising to the poor lady), I established that my jacket had actually been lost in the Hotel Bar! One phone call later (and a bizarre Russian security guard and his russian/irish girlfriend story - god, can I pick em!), Jacket and I were reunited. Awww. A nice happy ending.. And even better (after checking the pockets), nothing nasty or illegal in there.

Bouyed by my Homing Jacket success, I went to the room and selected an in-room movie. No, dear reader - nothing seedy. But the rather blacker-than-black comedy - 'In Bruges'. Hilarious. The younger of two irish gangsters (Colin Farrel - left) somewhat resembled Mr Mooney (On the right), and the older one somewhat resembled me in a few years time. And the accents all resembled Father Ted. One line:

"This is what its came to - two Manky Whores and a Racist Dwarf. I'll be off!"

will stay with me for some time..

And finally. You all expected it, I expected it - so here it is. Was I able to use the KLM internet check-in today ? Ah. No.

• After much scambling around, I managed to point an Internet Expoder 7 on XP client at the KLM website. I'm still stung that Neil thinks that anything other than XP and Internet Exploder deserves to fail.
• Rummaged around, got my flight information, plugged it in... And..
• A new check-in screen! 'Please go to partner site'.. Okay.. Encouraging..
• A Northwest check-in screen appears, PRE-POPULATED with my CORRECT information!. My Expectations, like the national debt, is rising..
• Clicked on the 'Check-in' button and........
• Like a exploding zepplin, my hope and dreams lay scattered across the hotel room floor (rather like my underwear). No. 'Reservation Cannot be found'.

So whilst KLM possibly didnt actually screw up this time, the process as a whole was broken. So in effect, defeat was snatched from the jaws of Victory. I'm not that fussed, as I normally sleep on the overnight flights. Just as long as I dont have my overdue appointment with the Sumo Wrestling Team ADD sufferers Childrens Outing I missed last time..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:59:24 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Ive now done six hours of presentatons, with only (!!) another three today. And thanks to my new '10 hours sleep a night' rule, feeling relatively human (even if I dont look it!). The undoubted hit of the show has been Zoe - Matt and Jess Strattons angelic 8-month old baby. I can just *see* everyone getting 'broody' around about her.

On the stand with the Old Git yesterday inbetween torturing delegates with bad jokes - lots of fun. We somehow got a stand next to a bar - dunno how that happened - and our stand giveaways - Fazermints and whisky - seems to be unusual enough to draw a crowd. So lots of fun.

Jamie and the guys ran their annual room party last night - half of the conference were jammed into a suite drinking beer and smearing food into the carpet. Goood party, and I'm sorry about the 'silence of the lambs' gag.

Paul Mooney flies back tomorrow night, so I suspect tonight might be 'party night' which is quite terrifying. However, I do have a secret weapon - the name and location of a decent, old fashioned 'dive' bar around the corner from the hotel..

Oh. And as an incentive to get presentations in on time (I failed miserably in this regard), the speaker who got all his presentations finished first got the presidential suite. Awesome. I mean, one of the beds was big enough to accomodate half a dozen speakers bouncing on it. And Julian - I'm sorry if your alarm went off at 6.30am this morning.. Or your rooms were heated to ninety degrees..

Appestore news. The new 'Green Monster' applestore is on the street beside the hotel, taunting me. The construction staff mentioned (*cough*) in passing that its opening on the 16th of May. Pity, as I'll be back in rural scotland by then.. Sigh..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:21:46 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Boston Lotus Notes Bookmark :              

Phew. Did a 3 hour jumpstart on LotusScript - and overran by 40 minutes.. Sorry folks..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:13:05 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Someone asked why I was so chirpy. So I explained that i was of to present at a computer conference, etc. "Oh, what in", they said, trying to sound interested.

"Enterprise collaboative application development best practices" I said. Avoiding the use of the phrase "Lotus Notes".

Am I a bad person for this ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 08:06:56 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

A friend of SWMBO's took round her parents ancient eMac - a single monitor mac from the early 90's. They'd tried to install Leopard on it (even though it was not supported) and borked it. So, my services were 'offered'.

The nice thing about Macs is that you can hold down the 'T' key when it starts up, and it'll act as an exernal firewire disk. A really handy way of getting user data off the machine should the O/S be screwed (as this one was). So once that's been copied onto a memory stick, its a case of seeing if I can recover the machine (but they're not that fussed, they're buying a new macbook in any case)..

One invaluable resource is the Mac bootup key reference here

Posted by Bill Buchan At 20:04:00 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Mac Option keys Boot Bookmark :              

Off to Boston on Monday, to do four 90 minute and one afternoon long presentation at Lotus Developer 2008, at the Sheraton Boston in Dalton Street. Sweet.

This involves divuling my itinerary to the US authorities via the KLM internet check-in process. So far, so very boring and predictable. But - KLM to the rescue. Unaware that internet checkin facilities are now ten-a-penny with other carriers, offering such boring facilites as say reliability - KLM snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by:

• Offering a site that just doesnt work in Safari. Harumph.
• That fails in Firefox. What are these bozo's testing on, given that IE doesnt actually have any testing tools?
• That fails in Internet Exploder v6- which as MS love to remind us, still represents the bulk of the internet users out there, certainly in corporate-land.
• It fails in Opera, but Opera is the only browser to actually provoke an error message. Clearly, something is amiss at one of the THREE KLM data centers, and it being a Sunday, no-one has noticed.

I Could actually call them up, but I'm sure to be jammed in a middle aisle seat, between members of the local Sumo wresting ADD sufferers temperance society childrens annual holiday - somewhat akin to sitting next to the Microsoft Guy at Lotusphere. What is a poor chap to do ?

(I have to say that I had the opportunity to fly via BA/BAA's flagship new terminal - Terminal 5 at Heathrow, but since I dont share the same travel karma as Francie (who's hitting it four times in the next six weeks!), I would only be sadly disappointed as the baggage handlers loot my luggage (as they did last year at LGW). So I'm going via Schipol in Amsterdam, on the grounds that its clean, efficient, and has the more than evens probability of delivering me and my baggage to the place I want to go. )

Airline travel sucks. I think I'll do the US by Boat next time.

Update: The KLM telephone number in the UK for check in is 02 0736 50752. Much faster than the web site.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:10:34 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category KLM Bookmark :              

CES services are hosting the Scottish Leg of Lotusphere Comes to you, on Thursday May 29th at the Menzies Belford Hotel, 69 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DG.

To register, go here. Remember, CES ran the extremely successful event last year at Dynamic Earth. I hope to see you there!

Posted by Bill Buchan At 16:26:01 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Lotus Notes Scotland Edinburgh Lotusphere Comes to You Bookmark :              

Here in Scotland, half of the UK North Sea output - some 770,000 barrels of OIL per DAY flow past my house (the pipe is less than five miles away). It heads off down to Grangemouth, where its refined and turned from sludge (North Sea crude oil is really thick..) into things like Petrol and Diesel fuel. Now, since we've had a new Prime Minister imposed on us, more and more folks want to go on strike. 1,200 workers at Grangemouth are going on strike this weekend, and the refinery is in the process of being shut down.

So. The increasingly-inept government are shouting at us to not panic buy fuel. However, there's already some shortages, and its only going to get worse.

It really underlines this 'just in time' culture we've now completely dependant on, and shows just what little resilience is built into our distribution systems. If the threat of a two day strike (causing a four day shutdown, and a loss to the UK government of £50m a DAY) by 1,200 people at a single refinery can bring a third (geographically speaking) of the UK to a standstill, imagine if we had a serious problem?

(The picture is from my local filling station this morning - I took the bike to the Bank and had to fill her up..)

UpdateDrove past the same filling station at 5pm, and they had completely ran out of fuel, as had the other filling station in town. The only fuel for 25 miles is now a service station, which is charging an extra 15p per LITER. And on the radio, the government ministers are saying there's no fuel crisis..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 15:58:31 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Bookmark :              

My mate Ralph just moved into a new house - one that he built (almost) himself, and it was going to take a few months for BT to get the phone line and broadband installed. Screams of discontent from the teenage daughter, etc. So I pitched in and said - "Yeah, we can run a Wifi link from the Farm office over there", vaguely waving about a kilometre or so in the distance.. Well.. This is the story..

First things first. Lets get a Wifi device at the right side of the farm office buildings. Being a farm building, over 50 years old and in Scotland, the walls are about 1m thick. Really. Wifi wasn't even getting between rooms, so first thing was to get 100m of ethernet cable, some sockets (all from B&Q), and Ralph (being a builder) slung the cabling through the roof.

Then I took my aging LinkSys WAP54 Wireless Access point, parked it on the windowsill, optimistically pointed the stubby antennae through the window (and a hedge, some bins and a field full of cows) and at Ralph's house. Absolutely no joy. The signal went about 100m (10%..) and faded. Why?

Standard Wifi devices in this country I believe are limited to 0.3w of power. And they ship with Omni-directional antennae, so you don't have to point something. But that means we end up with a rather small circle of coverage. Soooo. Off to eBay, and got myself a parabolic wire wifi antenna. About £25 each (and another tenner in postage). And they're big. Here's one mounted below Ralph's TV aerial.

Okay, so what I needed was a cable that went from the back of the Linksys WAP54g device to the antenna. It was supplied with a 30cm flylead - just about enough to get to the pole the thing was mounted in. And I couldnt put the wifi-device on the pole (it was an indoor device, not an outdoor one). Sooo. I ordered 20m of HD400 cable, and what I thought were the relevant connectors. Another £90 in parts and postage.. I receved them, tried to put them together and found that what I thought was a male connector was actually a female connector and so forth. How many dammed connectors did I end up with? The photo shows:

• The N-Type Male connector at the end of the parabolic antennae cable.
• The N-Type Female converter to TNC Female converter. The other end is sitting in position three.
• The more observant will have noticed that its 'threads' are wrong. That is, the screw in part of the connector is wrong - it should have threads on the outside, not the inside. Well, thats because some idiot in a standards committe decided that (1) Its a good idea to have all these connectors and (2) lets use the suffix 'RP' to denote that were going to mess around with how the threads work. So much for standardisation, right?
• So in the end I had to basically rip the N-Type connector from the antenna, and replace it with a RP TNC 'Male' (next one along). Male in the sense that the internal connector has a socket (eh?) but the outer threads are on the outside (eh?). Oh. Its reversed.
• There's an example 'cheap' antenna from the WAP54
• The Back of the WAP54g has a RP TNC 'female'. So thread on the outside, and a pin in the middle.
• And just in case this all makes sense and your understanding this so far, at the bottom is a NetGear 834G router. As you can see, its a completely different connector again. Sigh.

So as you can see, you need to order the right connectors for your antenna, and your wifi-router. DONT do as I do, try and use logic to figure this out. Use suppliers who provide pictures of the damn things, and if in doubt, call em. I found Wifi-Antennas to be very good in this respect. I should have just ordered everything from them in the first place, and saved a fortune in postage by carpet-bombing eBay.

So far, so good. As I said, I used a LinkSys WAP54G, primarily because I already had one. I got another from eBay for another £25 or so. I then found that setting up these bloody devices to be a nightmare. The manual is here and is about as good as a chocolate teapot. There's a far better cheat-sheet here. The setup boils down to:

• Set up the one in the office (wired to the existing network) as an Access Point
• Set up the second one as a wireless repeater, and plug in the MAC address of the other router
• Switch off Antenna Diversity. The cheat sheet makes the excellent point that if the two antenna are different (and these certainly were - one was the huge parabolic, and one was the stubby standard one!), then the amplifier has a hard time. Switch off the cheap nasty antenna.

And basically, it should work. I've missed out the 'crawling along the loft', 'being lifted by a forklift whilst on a wooden pallet up to the TV mast', 'construct a wall mounting bracket', 'recabling the farm office', etc.

Why are the WAP54G's a nightmare ? It either works, or doesnt. The WAP54g doesnt give a signal strength, so its a real hit and miss. In this case, we had line-of-sight, and both dishes were above the height of the intervening vegetation, cars, and the field full of cows. If it was a longer distance, then we'd have real difficulty setting this up. Perhaps using laserpointers at night would have done the trick.

Some tips if you want to do this better:

• Find a cheap access point thats easier to set up. I have no recommendations at this point.
• Outdoor antenna get further. Although you have to mount them to a wall, etc, and use outdoor cable, its worth the effort.
• Get the Access points configured and up-and-running whilst at your desk. Not, as I did, by driving back and forth a lot.
• Get the right connectors first time, and if you can, get the shop to make up the leads for you. The more expensive the leads, the thicker the cable and less loss. I tried to do it all myself, and ended up ordering the wrong connectors a few times.
• I might be wrong, but I suspect a 'standard' access point/router only pumps out 0.3w of energy. I also suspect that there might be a maximum you can push out before the authorities in your country get a little upset. But if its distance your after, then adding a 1w amplifier to either end might easily increase the distance by four or five times..

So there you have it. Standard antenna, home-made brackets (in one case), some cable and connectors, and off-the-shelf/eBay Access points. And at least a 1km link.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 08:46:22 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Wifi Antenna WAP54g parabolic Wifi Bookmark :              

Many thanks to John Mill for this link.. Cool motivational posters (though Golfers might not approve..)

Posted by Bill Buchan At 08:20:10 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Motorbikes Bookmark :              

Remember when Microsoft forced through its own ISO standard for the office 2007 file format, despite huge protests and some very dubious voting practices. Well, it transpires that someone actually tested Word 2007 against the ISO standard, and found it wasnt complant.

Let me just pause there whilst we all ponder the significance of this. Microsoft pushed this standard through ISO, strongarming and politicking as much as it could, in order to say that its office suite was 'standards compliant'. Everyone else who saw this ungodly mess basically pointed out that the file format itself could only ever be implemented by Microsoft, so badly was the standard and the file format written. And now, Microsoft cant even comply with the standard which they steamrollered through!

Which part of this whole fiasco erodes your confidence in Microsoft management the most? Forcing through the standard? Failing to ensure that it could be broadly implemented? Failing to actually adhere to it? Or just plain and simple General Stupidity?

I wouldnt place much long-term faith in Microsoft as an organisation capable of delivering. Not if I wanted a long-term career.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 18:00:46 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Microsoft ISO Bookmark :              

Jessica Rabbit has a special place in my heart. After all, what other character said 'I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way'. And now she's one step closer to reality.. Mmm.. Another tattoo?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 08:47:26 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :