It would appear (from my last 21 years observation, we folks in the IT business are basically social lepers. Why ? I suspect there's a high degree of undiagnosed mental heath issues (which is serious) and of course - 'little willie syndrome' (which isnt). Sometimes its very difficult trying to deal with people suffering with these conditions, especially when they themselves feel that they're the only ones in the world who can possible be correct. I'm sure we've all experienced the '5-hour conversation' bore at the bar. So when this popped up from the rather excellent UserFriendly.org, I had a wee giggle to myself, reminding me of times past:

Update: Some people with paranoia will be wondering if this is directed at them. No. The folks this is directed at wouldnt think it was directed at them. For those of you of an anxious disposition, no it wasnt you. Schizophrenics -its the other one. Manic Depressives: Just cheer up. Anorexics: Bacon is GOOD. If your obsessive/compusive, just keep hitting REFRESH. You're advice is coming...

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:07:41 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category IT Mental Heath Clubs. Bookmark :              

David Clark invited me to join him for a quick day-trip to Aviemore to see this years 'Thunder in the Glens' - a Harley Davidson bike rally, lasting three days. We drove up on the Sunday, just as things were winding down, over some of the best biking roads in Scotland - the Cairn o'mount and the Cockbridge to Tomintoul route.
Some 1,500 bikes rode out on Saturday - the biggest ride-out yet - and bikers came from near and far. We chatted with a couple from Elgin, and then a couple from Newcastle (a good 5 hour ride each way).
The custom bikes were fantasic - click on the flickr photo to see more in the photoset. Do I want one ? Well, on hearing that most of these took 3 HOURS to clean - perhaps no. But a nice midnight v-rod might do the trick. Now where did I put that spare £20,000?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:13:01 Location Aviemore | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Motorbikes Harley Davidson Bookmark :              

UKLUG is ALMOST full. Its a FREE Two day Lotus Notes Technical conference in the heart of London. No - really. Beside the houses of parliament!

Warren Elsmore has done wonders, and has got together an amazing bunch of speakers and content. Paul Mooney - the unabashed admin king, Julian Robichaux - NSFTools himself, me, Carl Tyler (Mr Sametime), Bob Balaban, Gabriella Davis (The UK's leading Sametime, Quickplace and BES expert), Rob "130 Guinness" Novak, as well as customer studies from the likes of Cardiff University (Ever tried rolling out a 30k user Notes environment. Every year ?), Trailfinders and so on.

So get over to www.UKLug.info before its sold out!

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:15:48 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category UKLUG Lotus Notes Bookmark :              

It seems the first rule of Marketing is to make sure that folks know that your product exists, and is being actively supported.

We in Little Yellow Bubble Land (tm) know all about this. It seems that since 1993 (when I first used Notes), I've had to tell folks that Notes exists. Something that was brought home yet again last night, when in a local pub, a software engineer of some years standing said 'Whats Lotus Notes?'.

In fact, this recent UserFriendly.Org cartoon really sums up IBM's marketing of Lotus Notes. Just substitute the words 'Cloaking Material' for 'Notes Marketing', and 'Stef' (the male in the last frame) for - well - any notable, famous IBM person associated with Lotus Notes, and you get the rather funny:

I'm sure I'm off a few Christmas Card Lists for this little piece of mockery. However, since IBM went on record stating that there is 850 developers in Lotus, and they spend more on Marketing than their developers - my response would be 'Show me the Ads!'.

Microsoft does NOT have that issue with Vista. Microsoft has another problem. Vista is about as popular as Garry Glitter at a kids party. Not good. So what do Microsoft do? They splash a reported $300m USD (which is about 30 euros and small change at the current exchange rate) and hire Seinfield himself to front the new Vista ads. Incredible. I mean - would they be wiser splashing that money on actually fixing the product?. But there I go again, taking the simplistic route.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:20:46 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Lotus Microsoft Bookmark :              

Christopher Brookmyer is back (as is his chief villian - Aberdonian terrorist Simon Darcourt), and this time, Reality TV and the whole celebrity culture is itself put under the spotlight. Nice. Damn good fun, and the sequel(s) to 'A big boy did it and ran away' and 'the sacred art of stealing'.

Call me biased, but this really did press a lot of buttons for me. Celebs being executed in an appropriate way, reality TV lampooned, and a fair bit of old fashioned magic. Go buy it now.

Of course, I got my copy signed by the man himself last week at the book festival. So you can prize that one out of my cold, dead fingers..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:28:40 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Outside this placid and pretty place we call The Little Yellow Bubble (tm), developers use tools such as eclipse (which we're finally getting - yay! - in a few months ot years time - boo!). And in the Real World, developers have to use change control subsystems.

Change control, as you know, is the art of going 'woops - damn - let me reverse out that change' without losing ones career. Which is nice. Little Yellow Bubble land of course, has its own change control system - the rather excellent and spiffy TeamStudio Ciao. If you've not tried it yet - go and check it out. It'll save your ass career one day. Anywhoo.

In my rather mid-life-crisis attempt to actually get back to The Real World, I installed Eclipse (again, very cool), and Flex. Which is actually sub-zero cool. But thats another article.

Despite Casa Buchan having some 14+ server style machines of various operating system hanging around (everything bar iSeries and zSeries), I really didnt want to host my own change control server. Honestly. It'd probably break, and I'd lose everything, and then I'd cry. Which isnt good. So, I found this rather spiffy article on using Subversion with Flex (on Eclipse) with all sounded rather straightforward. It even recommended a free service from Assembla, which I signed up for. Using a on-line source control/change control repository also meant that the other members of my team - yes, I do work in a team - can participate, and help develop/debug this new cool Flex stuff.

Last but not least, we have a variety of platforms - XP, Mac Leopard, and (spit!) Vista.

Thanks to this article, I learnt that actually, subversion support wasnt actually built into Eclipse in a meaningful way. Some spanners and bolts had been dropped in there, but hadnt actually been joined to anything meaningful. So after a day or so of 'Captain Click' (Paul Mooneys excellent description of 'frantically hitting everything till it works'), it does, actually work. Even on Vista. Hurrah!

Which kinda leads me to the moral of the day. Why bother spending all your hard earned money on Microsoft/IBM development tools, just to find they dont work. You can download eclipse for FREE and find out that it doesnt work! See. Open Source - Saves you money.

Okay. Kidding. It does hang together, and sometimes you just have to spend a bit of time getting your brain bent around it. Especially if you (like me) have spent the last 10 years in the Little Yellow Bubble, and are used to stuff just working (most of the time). And does a subversion user become a subversive?

Now, I cant wait till Research in Motion finally release their JDK and MDS kits for Eclipse (so they can play too). I also would say that I'm desperately awaiting 8.5 and its LotusScript editor, but being a design partner, I cant offically comment on any of that stuff. Which is a shame. Still, not long now.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 15:50:57 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Britains' performance at the Bejing Olympics is astounding. If you look at current geographic boundaries and gold medals, then the UK is in third place. Absolutely awesome, given that the average briton weighs 200kg and gets out of breath waiting in the McDonalds queue. Most schools have sold off their sports fields, and (thankfully), most sports teachers have been laid off. Given this background, its amazing that we excel at anything other than Sumo.

Now, since the US seems to want to spin its results to show that its in the lead (total medal count vs Gold Medals), then why not do some more statistical spinning. For instance, if you count the EU as a single superstate, analagous to the US Federation of States, we win.

Or even better, if you look at the British Empire at its peak.

Excellent stuff, and can be found here

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:18:35 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

This does rather underline the issues:

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:15:40 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

The worst thing about being on holiday is when it comes to an end. An excellent few weeks off, bumbling around the house, burying cherry-pickers and drinking far too much with excellent friends. The rest of the week involves the Edinburgh Book Festival - we're seeing Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyer and Terry Pratchett, as well as going to laugh at Ed Byrne. Excellent.

When I restart officially next week, I think I'll finally publish some technical articles I've had kicking around for a while (Ajax, BlackBerry, iPhone) and start on my next set of 'The View' articles. Well, you know you have to sometimes just pucker up and kiss ass to get back on someones blogroll, right ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 10:31:38 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Today is Yellow Day!
Imagine, if you will, a software product:

• Which runs on a bunch of different computers. Macs, Linux, AIX, Solaris, AS/400, zSeries - and even on Windows (both 32-bit and 64-bit)
• It stores data in a highly efficient, robust database - and I mean robust. Like 250gb+, millions of records, transaction logging, etc..
• It has awesome public/private key security and a secure directory built right in. And we're talking industry standard RSA stuff
• Its an application development platform with a Visual Basic style language, Java, Javascript built right in. And if you want to get down and dirty, C and C++ interfaces.
• It bolts right into Eclipse for a really cool, extensible client experience.
• It can run Google Widgets right out of the box. So you can wire your applications together.
• The Data Store can be replicated. So you can have multiple replicas on separate servers. Servers on Linxux, clients on Mac, All running the same replica of the same data. Disaster recovery ? No worries. Offline copies ? Easy.
• Applications are created within the data store. So they replicate too. No distribution issues. No DLL's to send out, no 'latest version of application xyz..'
• Web Client enabled too, so you can run with any shonky old browser you want.
• Its supported, and licensed by a HUGE company that isnt going to disappear overnight. A company, in fact, that created most of the IT business.
• Its standards driven. LDAP, SMTP mail, the whole 9 yards.
• Its standard applications are open-source, so you can take what ships, and start adding to it. Immediately.
• The data store can sit on top of DB2 - the market leading SQL database.
• Ajax ? Check. Web Services ? Check.
• 130m customers already? Banks? Governments? Film Companies?

Happy Yellow Day!

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:46:29 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Last Friday, my lovely niece got married to Michael, and currently they're touring Australia on honeymoon. Interestingly my neice and nephew in law are quite interested in migrating there - he's an IT service desk manager and she's a business degree type person. Anyone got any pointers on who and what they should do ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 14:50:29 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Australia Migration Bookmark :              

After the family wedding at the weekend, I needed to do some height work around Casa Buchan. Specifically remove some trees from my phone cable, paint my house and trim a hedge. Of course, I didnt want a health and safety disaster such as the photo.. So I hired a cherry picker - a mobile, self powered platform on a stick - to get my hairy arse up in the air. Far far far up in the air. About 3 hours work. I guess. So how did that go ?

Firstly, the thing weighs about six tonnes. Its got HUGE batteries and runs off them for DAYS. So you can imagine you really dont want this running over your foot. The trees I had to clear were a good 40 feet up, so I thought a picker with a 60 feet span would do the trick. I dont know if you've been up at 60 feet, on a platform that - well - sways - before. There's NO WAY that this thing is going to topple over, but of course, try telling the lizard part of your brain that this is the case. I think this video sums it up:

Finally, the trees were cut, and we managed to get the cherry picker out of the muddy track area. It took a push from the guys relaying the road beside the pub (Thanks!), two broken nylon 5-tonne webbings (When they break, by god they break!), and I still have to repair the neighbours fence. Still.

I then inched the thing back to the front of the house - somewhere where I had take it before, and somewhere that USED to be a major road, capable of taking 40-tonne lorries. No worries..

Ah. No. Bogged down. Right to the axle. So basically, it was resting on its chassis, wheels merrily spinning. Sigh. I managed to paint 70% of the front of the house, and cut 40% of the hedge. And then started digging, jacking, digging.

After all the excitement, and the physical effort of digging the dammed thing out, I just went back to working from home:

Oh. Two of my long-suffering mates - Ralf and Derek - both said 'Oh, we have ladders to do this. You should have said..'. Sigh. Next time, I'll avoid DIY..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 11:02:56 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category DIY fear Heights Digging out Bookmark :              

The Buchan family have congregated in Scotland - they're all moving to the east coast today for a family wedding on Friday. My Niece - god I feel old.

Anywhoo, work-wise, its all very exciting. I may have mentioned Flex a few times. Nearing the end of a large piece of work, making a nice easy-to-use Flex Web UI for our product - FirM. And you know - Flex (and its programming language - actionscript 3) - is very very nice. More event-driven than procedural. Tight binding and object hierarchy, but with Javascript-like monkey-coding features. Soon, I'm writing another pair of articles for The View on Flex programming - so I'll start dropping snippets. I'm coming to the end of four separate articles there on BlackBerry programming, and another two articles will mean I have six consecutive magazines. I'm not sure if this is any kind of record, but does give me that warm glow.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 10:56:21 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

A big family gathering - Big Sis is in from San Antonio, Brother is in from Hua Hin - all for my neices' wedding next friday in Aberdeen. Frightening thought - all the men from the family in Kilts. Three generations of hairy knees on show.

The usual five hour drive from the east coast, punctuated by a quick shopping frenzy in Perth. Yes. I got an iPhone.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 15:40:03 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:59:24 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :