I just noticed that comments are broken. I'll have a look at that when I get a chance, but right now I'm incredibly busy at work (hence the need for IBM support as mentioned in my last post), and can't really say when I'll next be back here.

See you all soon, I hope!

Today I almost got fired.

Today IBM support saved my job.

We've had a serious problem at my workplace, and it's quite a tale. I'm not sure if I can ever tell it in public, to be honest. But today I put my neck on the block, and was very relieved to find that IBM did indeed stop the axe from falling.

Tomorrow could be a long day. And there are some murky political aspects to this. But suffice it to say that right now I'm very happy with IBM support. Very happy indeed.

Parody, presented without further comment:

Dan Lyons is far and away the most horrible journalist on the planet. Sure, people grumble about other journalists. But that's nothing compared to how people feel about Dan. People hate Dan. As in, they want to change planets just so they can stop reading his articles. I'm pretty sure there are shrinks who have built practices around it. I read exasperated blog entries from people whose companies have copies of Forbes in the foyer, saying that of all the bad things about having to work for their company, by far the worst is having to offer Dan's writing to guests.

1. Blogo does almost everything via the web, whereas some things in the IBM Blog template need to be done via the Notes Client
2. Blogo makes Articles easy

I'm in the process of upgrading to the IBM Domino Blog Template.

Right now, the design has been upgraded but I don't think that it's quite right. Actually, it's obvious that it's not right. Specifically, the agent seems to still be pushing out links to the old Kubrick style.

I've checked twice, and the new templates/items don't actually point to Kubrick at all. So I think that the agent results, or a portion of the script's results, is being held in a cache somewhere on the server...

(The results in the HTML source just don't match the blocks being specified in the configuration. So something odd is going on at the server...)

As the server is a hosted one, I'm now going to sleep in the hope that when I wake up this cache will have been cleared. I can't do much else.

And anyway, sleep looks like the best option right now. :-)

UPDATE: Solved. Partly caching, partly me forgetting to change the global CSS options. I've also copied and pasted the old smilies back in to this template, and I think I'm done now. Hooray!

Next on my list - put the Google Analytics and other minor changes I'd made back in to the IBM HTML blocks.

After that, I need to do some long hard thinking...

Vince Schuurman tells us of Philips' move from Notes and Domino.

I find it difficult to believe that this will save them money, and with a migration of this size tere's probably a considerable risk of the loss of data fidelity - to say nothing of functionality.

Here's the quote I found intriguing.

“We want to make our IT systems as easy for employees to operate as their home PCs.”

That's from Daniel Hatert, their Chief Information Officer.

My phone at work isn't as easy to use as my phone at home. When I want to dial someone outside this buiding, I have to put a 9 in front of the number. Unless it's someone in a building we also own, in which case I have to use a "normal" four digit number as always. I'm lucky that my direct dial number actually bears some resemblance to my internal extension number - many of the numbers assigned since don't, for reasons I don't quite understand. The voicemail system is cumbersome - I have to dial it, then give it my extension number, then give it a pin code. Then there's a big long menu system. Oh, and woe betide me if I need to call anyone in another country. That's not going to happenw ithout having to jump through hoops.

Is my employer's phone system suitable for business purposes?

Absolutely. My phone at home is simple because it assumes one user, in one fixed location. My employer's phone system has no such luxury.

Very few things in a well run organisation will ever be as simple as they are for a home. The needs are different. Anyone who doubts that should try looking around their desk at work and counting the differences each device brings.

It is, I'll admit, a laudible goal to make things easy to use. But comparing the home to the office seems crass. I would be very worried if someone told me that their large organisation could organise their documents as easily as teh average home organises its recipes or its postal mail. The scales, the purposes, the legal aspects and the governance required are just poles apart.

I note that Vince updated this entry to say that they're looking at outsourcing. It seems to me that any part of Philipsthere's which makes money - and wbuildingvoice-mailhappenwithoutlaudabletheishes to continue to do so - should probably make their own IT arrangements if they can. Whilst I'm not privy to the plans, everyting I've seen before tells me that these signs point to a plan which will see Philipseverything paying more for less service.

Ah well. At least Sony won't be alone in their shambolic loss-making position in the industry...

Gah.

I was off ill yesterday. Today, I went in to work early. (Seven-thirty early.) At eleven, I found myself unexpectedly in a meeting.

Unexpected meetings almost always bring unexpected work. My day turned into a twelve-hour one to accommodate this.

And I have to be in to work at seven thirty again tomorrow, as work has been done on the firewall server that the BES system sits behind - should there be a problem, my delicate steel-toe-capped touch may be required.

This is why I am rudely ignoring four people's kind, generous comments.

I'm going to get some sleep now. Until tomorrow, folks!

And sorry for the delays. Expect something early tomorrow...

Domino and Notes are moving faster than I can keep up, it seems.

I'm still running DominoBlog, and haven't upgraded to IBM's blogging template yet. And because my employer is stuck on R6.5.3, I'm not likely to anytime soon.

IBM's embracing of DominoBlog is great, but leaves me somewhat wondering what to do next. I like DominoBlog, but I'm currently wondering whether or not I should upgrade to 7.0.2 or just switch to some other blogging software.

(And I don't want to move to 7.02 unless I have to - the ability to edit work templates on my home machines in an emergency without worrying about recompiled LotusScript causing problems is worth a lot to me!)

Currently way ahead of the pack is Blogo. I've got a test blog running here, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up and how functional it is. It's not perfect - ratings seem to be linked to commenting, which is a little odd. That's about it, though. On the plus side, its handling of tagging, new article creation and so forth is very good.

Later this week, I'll tinker with customising the look and feel and see how far I can get there. But later this month, I could well be archiving this blog and moving to a whole new set of URLs. Consider yourselves warned...

Vista's out.

I have no new laptop. Nobody has asked me to edit a Wikipedia page for them. I owe nobody anything.

So I suppose I can say what the heck I like...

Anti-climactic seems to sum up my feelings towards Vista. I was promised the greatest film ever made; I turned up to the cinema to see two episodes of Mr. Magoo spliced together. Just the first half of each episode, too. So it made very little sense.

And that, I'm afraid, is the best analogy I can find.

Vista is an incredibly impressive piece of engineering. I just cannot, for the life of me, figure out why I'd want to upgrade to it. And therein lies the problem...

Go and read the reviews out there. Even the tech cheerleaders, the gaming/hardware sites that worship the latest and greatest of anything, and which excommunicate readers that are found to have hardware older than six months - even those sites have reviews which can be summed up as "meh".

I should feel excited. Or revolted. Surely I should have some feelings?

Something?

Anything?

Well, there is one thing I'll say about Vista.

This is not the end of Windows.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

(Enough with the Churchill - Ed.)

Windows' monopoly will last for as long as people believe they can only open their documents with Microsoft Office on a Windows PC.

And even then, it will still be there. Because even if you kill the Office monopoly, you have to have a better commodity OS to move to. One that runs on any hardware. Apple, are you freakin' listening?

Wow. Emotion. At last. Pity it wasn't for Vista, but it was nice to see some kind of connection to the world.

Anyway, this is the internet. So I suppose we have to sum this up in an appropriate internet style...

Worst. Product. Release. Ever.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and slam my hand in a drawer, just so I can remember what it's like to feel something.

I picked this one up from Rob Weir - Adobe is submitting PDF 1.7 to a standards body, with the ultimate aim of it being an ISO standard. Well, Rob and just about every news site on my feeds list...

I pick Rob's post to link to because he makes the most pertinent point - that subsets of PDF are already a standard. Adobe are almost certainly submitting PDF to try and head Microsoft off at the pass, and even without this it would have been difficult for Microsoft's XPS technology to gain traction, just because there are so many PDFs out there.

I know that Adobe Acrobat Reader is an application that we consider "highly important" on our desktop builds at my workplace, for instance - its absence is easily enough to bounce a new desktop build back from QA, because people WILL call the helpdesk to get Acrobat Reader installed at a later date...

Given how I've lambasted Adobe's handling of their DNG format - which they've said they would submit for standardisation if there was demand - I thought it was only right that I should note the submission of PDF here.

I should also note that I'm now somewhat eager to see what might come of this. One of the things I dislike about PDFs on the web is that the experience is slightly jarring - the loading of the Acrobat reader, even as a plugin, is a delay too much. And Acrobat Reader often picks the dumbest default view modes for a PDF file. Actually, that's not true - it does exactly what it was told to by the PDF author, but the effect for the end user is the same.

I don't want to see your PDF at 200% zoom and have to change that. Nor do I want the file to open and to be confronted with a full-page view of a large sales brochure - could you not have used fit-to-width, so that I could at least make some of the text out without having to zoom?

The very first application of such a standard that sprang to mind was putting PDF rendering into the engine of a browser such as Opera or Firefox, so that the browser could make more intelligent decisions about display. I also think that Opera's significantly superior re-flow and graphics scaling engine, which allows it to zoom pages and keep the structure, would be a great boon here.

Let alone the idea that PDF, with its inherent ability to link within itself, could be used as a global replacement for MHT files. That would be super-nifty - offline copies of (collections of?) web pages that are already optimised for print! (Because let's face it, if you're offline then you may well want a printed copy anyway...)

I'm just dreaming, of course. But once we have a standard, these things become that much more possible.

So, LotusSphere is bringing us many goodies. Activities, Connections, Quickr, and more.

At the moment, everyone is all loved-up on the LotusSphere high. We've got shiny tech demos, we've got good feelings, we've got everyone (except me) in one place having a great time.

This is cool.

However...

(You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

Late last year something happened which rather annoyed me. And I get the feeling it's going to happen again after LotusSphere. At the time, I mentioned to someone that I was going to blog about it - but eventually, I decided to wait until now. It seems far more appropriate now.

In the past, the Lotus community online has thrown little spats about new technologies coming along but not using Domino as the platform. (SIP Gateways, Activities, etc.)

That's got to stop.

I understand why people do it. I'm very attached to Domino myself. It's a great product. It rocks. There's nothing quite like it. But it's not good at some things. It's never going to compete with DB2 for some kinds of data storage/retrieval, for example. And it's not a great servlet server. (Actually, it's not a servlet server at all.)

We can have the shiny new functionality now, built on existing stable technologies from elsewhere in IBM's portfolio. Licensed for use in that specific purpose, supported by IBM in case we have any questions or issues, and allowing us new opportunities and capabilities.

Or we can twiddle our thumbs whilst IBM busts a gut trying to shoehorn functionality into Domino, and get the same things much later and probably way behind the market trends.

I know which one I'd prefer.

When we finally get these great bits of software into our grubby little mitts, can we please concentrate on:

• How it's integrated
• How it's licensed
• How it's supported
• How we can hack it seven ways to Sunday, increasing our knowledge and doing really cool things in the process

Some of these things won't be Domino as we know it. Some of them may require an additional non-Domino server. And on one level, that sucks, But on another, we're so far away from the Microsoft-style licensing/product SNAFU stack that it's laughable. IBM knows that a stack like that isn't good for them. Heck, it's half their counter-FUD argument!

IBM are giving us great things. They might not be perfect first time out of the gate, but if we can keep our conversations out of platform prejudice and in terms of integration, licensing and education/support resources, we're far more likely to keep this great momentum we're acquiring.

Sorry to be such a downer whilst everyone else is on a high at the 'Sphere.

That's it. I'm done. Back to the partying, the learning, the mooching and the smooching! Go 'Sphere!

I'm not really one for prognostications. I am rarely found in amongst the crystal balls, the runes and the pigeon entrails.

But I am willing to make one very important prediction.

Notes 8.0 will be the most important software release this year. It may even be the most important software release of this decade.

"What the heck is Phil smoking?", you're thinking. But I'm not smoking anything, and I am deadly serious about this.

And the reason is simple - Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office is at a dangerous crossroads. It's just changed its interface for its core programs. That means more training, more helpdesk calls, and ultimately more costs. I doubt it will be picked up as quickly in corporates as Microsoft would like.

And at the same time, Microsoft is changing the default file formats. Oh dear. Remember Office 97? A decade later, we're in for the same "could you please resend that?" chaos as we had last time around.

In short, Microsoft has made a huge gamble with Office.

And that's where Notes steps in. If you're going to change the UI and the file format, why stick with Office at all? Notes 8.0 includes the IBM Productivity Tools - a word processor, spreadsheet and presentations package that read/write ODF and run within the Notes 8.0 client. Not to mention that the old idea that the Notes client looks ugly has been thrown out of the window - look at the screenshots of the productivity tools. They're running in Notes. Gorgeous, isn't it?

Yeah. It even surprised me.

If Notes 8.0's productivity tools handle legacy Microsoft Office formats well , then this is a serious threat to Microsoft. Frankly, it's turned up at EXACTLY the wrong time for them, and demonstrates to the whole IT industry - no, wait, the whole world! - that you now have credible alternatives to Office.

On that level, it doesn't matter how successful Notes 8.0 is. Simply by setting the example, it will become the most important piece of software of the year, and quite possibly the decade. The changes that Notes 8.0 signifies with this simple move are immense.

I've not yet seen Notes 8.0. A quick note to IBM - this needs to have excellent filters to/from the legacy Microsoft Office formats. Just ODF alone isn't enough. And thank you. Thank you, oh thank you, thank you.  Notes 8.0 looks the part, and has the tools people need. In ten year's time, 2007 could be looked back on as the year that the Microsoft Office monopoly was shattered.

Notes 8.0 won't do that by itself. The excellent work being done on ODF will help, the large changes to Microsoft Office will help, and the continued work of Sun, OpenOffice.org and others will help.

But Notes 8.0 is the right product, in the right place, at the right time.

If I were Microsoft, I'd be needing new underwear right now...

So, everyone in LotusLand is at the 'Sphere, except for me. (Or at least it feels that way.)

And as is traditional, Microsoft have tried to issue a spoiler. Surprise surprise, it's another unfinished product beta that just happens to have bolted through the stable doors at this time of year.

But do my eyes deceive me? Can it really be true?

Have Microsoft actually used the word "coexistence" in their description of the product?

Crikey. They must be getting desperate. The word migration is played down significantly - it's a "transport", not a migration these days it seems. And they even managed to put the word coexistence in there. Wow!

And here's why I think this is: For the past two or three years, IBM has been giving a straight line of "migrations are expensive, time consuming and rarely satisfactory - especially when done for just email". Not that they wouldn't like you to move to Notes, nor that they don't think it can be a compelling option - especially if you want more than just email. But migrations aren't the kind of thing you bandy around for fun.

And I think that Microsoft's text reflects that this message is getting through - no longer is it acceptable for them to simply say "move to Exchange, then move everything to SharePoint afterwards". Too many of their customers were stung by that one, or are still being stung by that one. The message lacks credibility, and the coverage in the press in the last year has been reflecting a lack of perceived value in that strategy.

This subtle shift in language tells me that they're really having to take IBM seriously. Far more seriously than the want to have to. And specifically, it's the rebounding of the Lotus business unit that's got 'em scared.

Go 'Sphere!

(This is more a mental note to myself, than anything else.)

Ages ago, I posted about what was keeping me on Windows. The presumption was very much that I'd be switching to a Linux distro.

That list is much the same right now. Nothing major has changed, with the following exceptions:

• I could migrate away from my development tools, just running a copy of Windows XP in a VM of some kind to maintain programs. It's high time I learnt Java, Python and Ruby anyway.
• I could migrate from my mail client to Thunderbird, just about, if I really had to.
• I can ditch Paint Shop Pro in favour of Adobe's Photoshop Elements, I suppose.
• The Lotus clients - I still need the Administrator and Designer.

One of the USB ports on my thinkpad laptop has started acting up. It supplies power, but data transfers drop out suddenly and unexpectedly. Not a problem, as I can just use the other port. But still, it reminds me that this machine will not last forever.

Why not get a MacBook? Why not run Windows XP in a copy of Parallels for those holdout apps, until I can get replacements on the Mac?

If nothing else, I suspect that more vendors are likely to say "OK, we'll consider that" when you say you're leaving Windows and would like to buy their program if they ever ported it.

It's a thought. That's all. Nothing will happen about it just now, but perhaps later in the year I might want to recall this...

It should come as no surprise that a messaging administrator is dependent on email to some extent. But even I was surprised at how many things fell apart when I found myself without email due to 1&1's recent problems.

I missed an opportunity to drink with a friend from New York whilst he was in London. I missed comments coming into my blog, because I stopped reading my RSS feeds on the grounds that email would inform me anyway... I missed an email about a Burns' Night supper. I missed several replies and events on my LiveJournal. I missed about a hundred emails carrying a new virus, I missed several hundred opportunities for bargain pharmaceuticals, I missed some exciting opportunities to become a home-working regional representative for a growing foreign company, I missed helping a some remarkably pious people who wanted to spirit money out of their country of residence, and I missed a truly noteworthy number of sluts doing quite wild things.

Hmmm. Not totally without its downsides, then. But I still could have done with going for that drink on Friday night...

I've been hosting with 1&1 for about four years now, and this is the first major cockup that they've had which has affected me. I think I'll let them off this once, but I don't expect to have it happen again...

I bumped into an old friend the other day. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years - last I'd heard, he was an IT manager.

Now he's a SharePoint Consultant.

As we chatted, the conversation turned geeky. He said Notes was dead and that Exchange had millions more seats, I asked him to point to his data. We changed subject. I said that SharePoint scales badly, he said to point to my data. (Fair point, I haven't tried running it on a zSeries yet...)

But I had to ask him one business question - licensing costs. If his solution requires SQL Server for data storage, Exchange for email, Office for data input - how do the customers react to that?

"Oh, that's great for us. The licensing costs make our development costs look better. If it's £20,000 of licenses, another £40,000 for development looks reasonable."

The blasé way in which he said it shocked me, I must admit.

I can't begrudge him a living - he's an old friend, and has a baby due in March. (It was a most informative conversation, as last time I saw him he was newly single and having to sell a joint-owned flat...)

But it did make me wonder. Although he talked about the cool stuff he can do with the next version of SharePoint, we didn't get round to discussing how clients took to having to upgrade (Office|Exchange|SQL Server) to use them - both of us realised, suddenly, that we were standing in the middle of the pavement on a dark, windy and wet night and that we had people to go home and see.

Exchange didn't kill Notes. SharePoint never seemed likely to, as far as I was concerned - it had too high a set of costs surrounding it. Perhaps I was wrong on that front?

It' s the third anniversary of Personal Firewall Day.

As with last year, this day is passing without any mention anywhere. (Well, except here, obviously.)

Are we more lax with our security, or just more secure?

I'm not sure that it's new users that we need to target. I'm detecting a constant increase in the number of self-appointed experts who are too damned masculine to require sensible protection.

Oh, they all have a firewall of course. But to run an antivirus scan? Pah. Foolish weak mortals run an antivirus scan...

I can't help but feel that this is damned stupid. Even if my network server is a PowerPC-based Debian box - an unlikely target for a virus - I should still run scans, in case someone stores a virus on it.

But then, I've ranted about this before. Here first, and then again here when Microsoft Watch asked for opinions... The other comments on the Microsoft opinion are what worry me. Just see those egos get in the way of common sense. ClamAV is free, available on many systems, and would be easy to schedule.

I think I'll stop targeting those new to computers. The real danger seems to be from those that are inured to the danger, and too stupid to realise what they're doing.

I'm late to the party with a response to Ed Brill's Do we care about spam? question.

Yes, I care about spam. Mostly because I just almost lost some mail to it...

I check my spam folder far more frequently these days, because all the bayes-poisoning text in spams is causing more false positives. Not many more, but still more.

However, it looks like I almost lost a mail from Bill Buchan to this, which was distressing. (Sorry Bill!)

A long time ago, I had complete faith in my anti-spam filters. These days, I think I expect a certain percentage to be mis-filtered. And that's annoying.

A world without spam would be a wonderful thing. To not be offered dodgy floppies (software), dubious stiffies (drugs), downers (drugs again) and uppers (more drugs) would be lovely. To say nothing of all this free money I keep being offered. Even having to glance down a list of filtered emails to check that there's nothing that shouldn't be there is a hassle.

Yes, I expect them to have my email address. And I expect to get spam. But I'd like to not get it, and to have those few seconds it steals from me back so that I can do something else...