I went to see the movie 300 this past weekend and it was enjoyable. Pretty much what I expected after seeing the previews: it looked just like a movie version of a Frank Miller graphic novel. In a good way, of course.

Since I know essentially nothing about "real" ancient history, I decided to check out the Wikipedia entry on Sparta to get an overview and I noticed that it was locked and under dispute:

Hmm, what's that all about? So I clicked through to the Talk:Sparta page and man o' man, what a grand Edit War they've got going on there. It's absolutely hilarious to a disinterested outsider like me. At this point in time (here's the permalink to a version of the page from today, in case it goes away or gets drastically changed) the big dispute is over whether Sparta should have been called a "superpower" or not, although there seems to be a lot of personality clash going on to fuel the fire.

If you've got a whole lot of time (more time than me, because I just did a healthy skim of the page), there's a world of entertainment buried in that discussion. To an oddball sense of humor like mine, anyway. Start at the Sparta as a World Power section about 1/4 of the way down the page and keep on reading.

It's also interesting to see how disputes like this get resolved in an open forum like Wikipedia. On the one hand, there's the idealist mindset of Do Not Feed The Trolls (DNFT), hoping that trollish behavior will eventually just go away. On the other hand, this sort of thing can end up being a huge timesink for the people who are the real caretakers in such a situation, and it's not necessarily clear whether there's true trolling going on here or not. It might just be an honest-to-goodness (and very harsh) disagreement.

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Lotusphere Comes to You is a series of events that bring practical information to customers. Some of the topics you will learn more about: insight into collaboration tools and technology, how to stretch your current Lotus software investment, how IBM products provides for better collaboration and more productivity.

Next week I will be speaking in Seattle on 20th, and Portland on the 22nd. ?I hope to see some of you there, please don't be shy and say hello.

Agenda:
8:00 am – 9:00 am ? ? ? ? Registration / Partner Showcase Opportunity
9:00 am – 10:15 am ? ? ? ? Welcome / Keynote Address
10:15 am – 10:30 am ? ? ? ? Break/ Partner Showcase
10:30 am – 11:30 am ? ? ? ? IBM Notes & Domino: A Look Ahead
11:30 am – 12:30 pm ? ? ? ? Breakout Session 1
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm ? ? ? ? Lunch/ Partner Showcase Opportunity
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm ? ? ? ? Breakout Session 2 ?
2:30 pm – 2:45 pm ? ? ? ? Break/ Partner Showcase
2:45 pm – 3:45 pm ? ? ? ? Breakout Session 3
3:45 pm - 4:00 pm ? ? ? ? Closing Statements/ Adjournment

Agenda for Business Track
Session 1 Social Networking Services - Ready for Business with IBM capabilities
Session 2 The Lotus Software Strategy for Team Collaboration and Document Management
Session 3 Introducing IBM WebSphere Portal Express 6: New Portal and Collaboration for Small and Medium Business

Agenda for Technical Track
Session 1 Activity Centric Computing - Getting Work Done
Session 2 IBM WebSphere Portal 6 Technical Overview
Session 3 IBM Lotus Sametime Technical Architecture and Beyond

I haven't had any time to play with the Notes 8 beta client yet, but I was reading through the Reviewer's Guide and saw this part on web service consumers in Notes 8:

Lotus Notes and Domino 8 add Web services consumer support, allowing you to call Web services hosted elsewhere. A Web services consumer does not use a Web service design element, because these are used only for publishing Web services. Instead, a Web services consumer uses a special kind of script library (either LotusScript or Java). To call the Web service, an agent or other code must "use" that script library.

In the examples they have, it looks like you just:

• Import the WSDL of the web service you want to call into a Java or LotusScript Script Library
• The "stub" code for calling the web service will be generated for you as a class
• You can then call the class methods from anywhere you can include the script library -- agents, actions, etc.

So your call to a web service that gets a stock quote might look like this:

Use "StockQuote WebService Library"

Sub Click (Source As Button)
    Dim q As New StockQuoteClass()
    Messagebox "Current IBM stock price is: " & q.GetQuote("IBM")
End Sub

Looks nice and easy. I can't wait to try it out.

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The wait is over! ? You can now download the Notes/Domino 8 public beta and start using the amazing new Notes client (and Domino server).

Make sure to also download the Reviewer's Guide to help you get started, and please participate in the Feedback Forum.

Finally, now that you can get your hands on the code, expect me to start sharing more tips/information about Notes 8! ? (along with many other bloggers)

What are you waiting for.... go get the code!

PS3 Home. ?Wow, this looks amazing. ?While I would not put this in the same category as Second Life with respect to openness, extensibility, community, etc.. it does have AMAZING graphics. (powered by IBM's cell processor)

Update: More coverage here , here




Thank you to my friend and Domino Administration guru Art Thomas whom first made me aware of this, which he read on our IBM colleague Bob Balfe's blog, which he read about on 3pointD.com ?I think that is the correct chain of credit!

In yesterday's blog entry I mentioned that the Linux crowd had kind of taken over the Dell IdeaStorm site. Stephen Hood left a comment that:

Dell would have been better off not doing this if they aren't going to listen. Their excuse about having to pick one Linux distro... just damages their credibility further -- the opposite goal of this initiative... And then to just ignore the #2 request of installing openoffice was even worse.

So, does that make this a failed opportunity? Does that make IdeaStorm a bad idea, unless Dell chooses to follow all of the top requests on the list? (EDITOR'S NOTE: I know that's not exactly what Stephen was saying in his comment, but I'm making a point here)

No, absolutely not. This gives Dell an opportunity, and as I said in my previous post: don't fight the users, adapt the system. Here are some of the things that Dell can do in this situation:

• Clarify their marketing message (especially regarding Desktop Linux and OpenOffice)
• Post some of their own ideas (on this or another medium) about business-saavy things they can do in response to this demand
• Restructure the IdeaStorm site to bring the categories or the newest ideas more front-and-center, so that a single special-interest group can't take over the voting (because people are only going to vote for what's in front of them, and right now what's in front of them on the home page is the ideas with the top votes). At the very least, add a Linux category...
• Add a blog to publicly react to some of the "hot" ideas

If the site remains stale, it will fail (sorry for the rhyme there). Any site that allows that much user interaction will be used in unexpected ways, and if it doesn't grow and adapt it will become useless.

That's another lesson to learn when implementing all this social software stuff, I suppose: half the problem is getting people to use it, the other half is making sure it can evolve when people DO start using it. Evolve or die, and all that.

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For those of you that are Domino developers, here is a new blog you should add to your list...

Andre Guirard - Best Practice Makes Perfect
A collaboration with Domino developers about how to do it and how to get it right in Domino

At Lotusphere 2007, Lotus made big announcements around Unified Communications, setting a stake in the ground to go far beyond what most people think of in the space, which is usually just chat, email, and voicemail integration. ?Together Lotus Sametime, Lotus Expediter, and solutions from our Partners form the foundation for an entirely new type of platform, which Lotus is refering to as UC^2.

Today at Voicecon, Lotus and Cisco made further announcements in this space. ? If you don't already have it bookmarked alongside your other Lotus web sites, I suggest you surf over to Lotus's Unified Communications and Collaboration home page and join the UC² revolution.

Here are a few interesting examples of "corporate" social software usage:

• Dell + Digg = IdeaStorm. The Dell IdeaStorm site allows customers/random people to suggest and vote for product and service ideas. It seems like the Linux crowd have kind of taken over the voting there, but that should represent an opportunity, not a problem (i.e. -- don't fight the users, adapt the system). And there are several ideas that could be promising for everyone, like a No Extra Software Option and a CD Image Download with All Current Drivers.

• SocialText recently did a case study on internal Wiki usage at an investment bank that had a few interesting use cases: developing meeting agendas, publishing commonly used and often changing information like cost center codes, and brainstorming on brochures and presentations. (via James Governor's del.icio.us links)

The Wikipatterns site has some good links on its Resources page too.

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In a great showing of vendor/customer collaboration, the Lotus User Experience team is looking for your feedback on the Lotus Web sites' product pages. ? Speak now, or never let me hear you complaining!

Today's tip comes from one of my friends here at IBM, Susanna Doyle. ?She mentioned the following technique for sorting lists...

If you have a list of items, and you would like to have Notes automatically sort them, you can place the data in the members field of a new Group document and sort the list there.

Here is how you do it.

- Create a new Group in your Personal Address Book. (Contacts)
- Place the data you want to sort into the Members field. ? You can either paste it in from the clipboard, or type the text in directly.
- Click the "Sort Members List" action. ?Notes may warn you that the Group needs a name, but don't worry, you are not saving the document so you can ignore this message.
- Select all the text in the Members field (CTRL+A) and copy it to your clipboard (CTRL+C).
- Press the Cancel action to close the group document without saving.
- Return to the document you want the list in, and paste. ?(CTRL+V)

Here are the before and after images:

DANGER: The programming geekery below may cause drowsiness. Please do not read while operating heavy machinery. Thank you.

I got a question last week about setting SOAP Headers when making web service calls from Lotus Notes using Stubby: the Web Services Slayer (a.k.a. -- the Lotus Notes Axis Stub Generator). I figured I should go ahead and document it here, if for no other reason than the fact that I can link back to it from the OpenNTF project site.

A typical SOAP envelope looks something like this:

  
    
      FOO
    
  

If you use Stubby to generate the Axis client code for you to use in Lotus Notes, this SOAP envelope will be generated by code similar to the following:

import StockInfoNamespace.*;

StockInfoServiceLocator locator = new StockInfoServiceLocator();
StockInfoService service = locator.getDomino();
service.GetStockInfo("FOO"); 

Sometimes a web service will also require you to include SOAP Header information, usually for login purposes. In the case of explicit headers (that are defined in the WSDL), the SOAP Header information is supposed to be writable directly from the Axis client code. However, if the headers are implicit (not defined in the WSDL), you will have to generate them manually.

There are two kinds of header elements you may have to generate. The first are elements that are simply child nodes of the

element, like so:

  
    
      John Doe
    
  
  
    
      FOO
    
  

This type of envelope can be created with Stubby code similar to this:

import StockInfoNamespace.*;
import lotus.domino.axis.client.Stub;

StockInfoServiceLocator locator = new StockInfoServiceLocator();
StockInfoService service = locator.getDomino();
((Stub) service).setHeader(
    "urn:thisNamespace", "UserName", "John Doe");
service.GetStockInfo("FOO"); 

You can also end up with header elements that are nested, such that there are nodes with subnodes within the

element, like so:

  
    
      John Doe
    
  
  
    
      FOO
    
  

In this case, the node is within an node within the SOAP Header. This type of envelope can be created with Stubby code similar to this:

import StockInfoNamespace.*;
import lotus.domino.axis.client.Stub;
import lotus.domino.axis.message.SOAPHeaderElement;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPElement;

StockInfoServiceLocator locator = new StockInfoServiceLocator();
StockInfoService service = locator.getDomino();
SOAPHeaderElement headerElement = new SOAPHeaderElement(
    "urn:thisNamespace", "AuthenticationInfo");
SOAPElement node = headerElement.addChildElement("UserName");
node.addTextNode("John Doe");
((Stub) service).setHeader(headerElement);
service.GetStockInfo("FOO"); 

Note that we're talking about SOAP Envelope Headers here, not HTTP headers. You can set HTTP headers too if you'd like. The normal reason is to set a session cookie or to use basic authentication. Here is some sample code for that situation:

import StockInfoNamespace.*;
import lotus.domino.axis.transport.http.HTTPConstants;
import lotus.domino.axis.client.Call;

StockInfoServiceLocator locator = new StockInfoServiceLocator();
StockInfoService service = locator.getDomino();
// to set a cookie:
service._setProperty(
    HTTPConstants.HEADER_COOKIE, "AuthToken=abc123");
// to use Basic HTTP Authentication:
service._setProperty(
    Call.USERNAME_PROPERTY, "user name");
service._setProperty(
    Call.PASSWORD_PROPERTY, "password");
service.GetStockInfo("FOO"); 

Speaking of HTTP headers, if a SOAPAction Header was specified in the WSDL file, it will be generated automatically by the client code. No need to worry about that.

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I've had a few people ask me about this one, so here you go...

If you are using Notes 6.5 or above, you now have Sametime Instant Messaging integration included right inside of Notes. ?While this is great, there are times you may not want the client to try and connect to your Sametime server, for example when you are disconnected or at a customer site without access back to your company's intranet.

To prevent Notes from trying to connect to Sametime automatically, you simply need to edit your current location document. ? You can do this by clicking the bottom right corner of Notes, and choose "Edit Current..."


Next switch to the Instant Messaging tab, and change value of the field labelled "Connect" to "Manually".


Finally save and close the location document.

Now when you start Notes, you will be able to manually connect to Sametime, the client will not try to log on automatically.

I've noticed for the past few months that my laptop battery doesn't hold nearly as much charge as it used to. I can only get about an hour of use (or less) out of it anymore.

The Thinkpad Power Manager has a battery maintenance utility that performs a "Reset" on the battery -- charging it fully and then discharging it fully -- that's supposed to help, but it wasn't helping.

Yesterday I noticed that my battery light was flashing amber even though I was plugged in. I checked the Power Manager display, and it told me this:

Yikes! Irreparable damage? That can't be good...

Although there have been a couple of Lenovo battery recalls recently, mine wasn't one of them.

Thank goodness for my awesome Thinkpad maintenance plan though. The battery is still under warranty, and all I had to do was tell them what was going on and they said they'd ship out a new one as soon as it's in stock at the warehouse. No weird diagnostic programs to run, and no dropping off my laptop at a service center and having to wait for someone to assess the problem -- just a new battery and that's that.

That's the kind of service I was hoping to get when I paid a little extra for the Thinkpad brand in the first place.

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Via Dave Campbell (one of the funniest bloggers on my OPML), a guy named Eric Poulton is doing a mini-art series with a theme of Steampunk Star Wars.

I'm not even a Star Wars geek, and I find this to be seriously cool on some level I don't consciously grasp. Victorian-era Star Wars tomfoolery.

I honestly didn't know what the hell steampunk was before I saw these, although I've certainly seen/read the genre before. Yet more evidence of how unhip I am (in fact, my very use of the word "unhip" is probably some circular indication of unhipness -- surely there is some much newer, hipper word for that these days -- crap, I said "hip" again...).

Anyway, a little Friday fun fer ya.

?

?

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Here are some of my photos from the GAP Adventure tour I went on called Costa Rica Quest. ?The trip took us to San Jose, La Fortuna/Arenal, Monteverde Cloud Forest, and Manuel Antonio National Park in Quepos. ?There were some great adventures including: repelling off 70m waterfalls, sitting in volcano heated hot springs, horse back riding, zip-lining over the rain forest, snorkeling, as well as just relaxing on the beach! ? And of course... lots of monkeys!

Here is a very cool story that is being picked up by press all over the world...
? ? ? ? ?
IBM WebSphere Portal Is First to Make Google Gadgets Available to Millions of Corporate Portal Users

"IBM announced that it is the first vendor to bring Google Gadgets™ -- or consumer-style web utilities -- into commercial portal software. ?Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal"

May 24-25 I will be attending the Irish Lotus User Group Conference. ?



This event is actually MUCH MORE than the name implies. ?It is more like a "mini-Lotusphere". ?The list of speakers for the two days is incredible. ?I'll be presenting the opening keynote, where I will talk about the Lotus Strategy. ?If you were unable to attend Lotusphere (or even if you did), I highly recommend you try and make this event. ?Please see the web site for details, and an example of a nice Domino based web site!

I like Ghostscript (the PostScript to PDF converter). Part of it is because I have an innate affection towards command-line tools. And part of it is because GhostScript has an extremely impressive amount of features and options (I'm guessing around 200,000 features, although that could be a little high ;-).

A couple years ago, I wrote about how you can use GhostScript to convert PDFs to image files, which is handy if you want to create a thumbnail of a PDF for a webpage, or archive a PDF as a multi-page TIFF or something.

I also used it recently to dramatically shrink down the file size of a PDF I had generated with the CutePDF Writer PDF printer driver. The PDF I "printed" with CutePDF ended up being over 2 MB in size, which was way too big for me.

I did a little searching on the web and found that GhostScript (of course) can reduce the file size for me. Here's the command line:

gswin32c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -sOutputFile=C:newFile.pdf C:originalFile.pdf

That knocked the size down from about 2.5 MB to about 600 KB. Much better. Using "-dPDFSETTINGS=/screen" actually made the file a little smaller, but the graphics were noticibly fuzzier with "/screen" instead of "/ebook".

I'm not entirely sure where the size savings came from. There were several graphics in the PDF, so it might have just been an overall lowering of graphic resolution. In any case, it worked for me but your mileage may vary.

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Michael Sampson recently linked to an interesting site: the Atlassian Wikipatterns wiki. Interestingly, the word "Wikipatterns" is NOT in CamelCase.
;-)

Atlassian certainly knows a thing or two about wikis, so I'm looking forward to reading the different patterns on the site to see what their experience has been. So far, there are four categories of patterns:

• People Patterns
• People Anti-Patterns
• Adoption Patterns
• Adoption Anti-Patterns

It's also nice the way they have the comment system set up on the different pages, so people can discuss the topics (the "Using CamelCase" anti-pattern looks to be a potentially good discussion).

This also made me think of a blog entry that Luis Suarez linked to a few months ago: Management can kill a community of practice. It relates a story of how a grassroots knowledge management team at a company was nearly destroyed when the PHB's decided that they needed to "manage" the team to make sure it had proper structure and oversight.

That entry makes reference to an 2001 APQC report titled Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice that came to the same conclusion: "management can hamper or kill a community, but it cannot make it thrive”. I'm not interested in paying the $450 to read the report itself, but the Key Findings list (from the previous link to the report) and the Executive Summary provide some good insight into what the APQC people found.

Fast-forward from 2001 to 2007, and we can guess that we'll have similar issues pushing social software like blogs, wikis, and aggregators in corporate environments. As I've said before, Social Software is the new Knowledge Management. There are challenges involved with putting tools for user-driven content out on an intranet and then mandating that people use those tools. People don't work that way. They'll use the tools if they think they're interesting and useful (and maybe even fun), but not because their boss is breathing down their neck telling them to add content to this wiki or else.

In the end, the approach that companies take will make a huge difference in how these technologies are adopted. Top-down directives may not work so well, and upper management is going to have to make sure that people aren't punished for "playing around" with the new tools that they are given. Playing with the technology is ultimately what will make people realize that they can do something useful with it.

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