11:59 PM
Okay, long day going to sessions and working on my "Selling Notes" presentation with Ed Brill in the morning. No more summary data until tomorrow, I'm afraid.
However, I will tell you that Ed and I COMPLETELY revamped the "Selling Notes" presentation from last year, so even if you've been to it in years past it's a brand new show. Come by and watch! Wednesday at 10:00 AM in Dolphin A-C.
3:22 PM
Just a quick thought (as I'm in a session) before I forget:
Social Software is the new Knowledge Management
John Roling and I discussed this last night, and I've been thinking this all day as I've been seeing the new Lotus software. Social software is the new knowledge management. And this time it works. And people are going to use it. Heck, they already are, just not in business. Not until now.
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2007
10:48 PM
So much for the grand plans of wrapping everything up before I went to sleep tonight. Luckily, so many other people have already done such a good job that I don't really have any slack to pick up. There are some excellent Flickr pictures showing up now too.
If you want my take, me and Bruce (and Devin Olsen) just did a podcast wrap-up that will be posted soon, if not already. Listen early, listen often.
Right now, I've got my balcony window open and am listening to Jamfest as I'm typing. Very nice (I'm staying in the Swan, and it's in the big tent outside -- that's a picture of my balcony view on the right, if you're interested).
Lotus Component Designer
Oh yeah, one of the sessions I went to today was on Lotus Component Designer, and it was very interesting. Looks like they put a lot of time into making sure that it's very "developer friendly" -- not in the sense that there's lots of cool code you have to write, but in that you can do a lot of things just by drag-and-drop and filling in property boxes.
For example, here's how they showed you could turn a Lotus Notes database design element (from an old database) into a component to be used with other components on a Composite Application:
And there you go. You have a composite app page. Very easy, no programming at all.
2:42 PM
BTW, here's a picture of the band that played just before the opening session:
Volker already has a video up on YouTube.
Also, Bruce hit the Publish button on our podcast with Mary Beth Raven and Jeff Eisen on the TakingNotes site, so go there and take a listen. So that's where episode 47 went...
1:42 PM
In other news, I was "live blogging" on the Lotusphere Live site during the opening session. I'll summarize later, but you can check out the comments on Ed Brill's site for some immediate reactions and links.
I also just "live blogged" (sorry, I just have to put that in quotes) the brand-new-this-year IBM blogger press conference. Again, summary later, but go to Lotusphere Live and click on the Taking Notes "room" for some immediate thoughts and whatnot.
1:30 PM
First things first, it has been suggested to me that a link I put up yesterday was not supposed to be "live" yet. It was just something I heard someone talking about in a bar, and when I came back to my room I tried it and it worked. I apologize if I got anyone in trouble.
It didn't occur to me that anyone would have a public website that they wouldn't want other people to visit.
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2007
Too tired to blog properly. Some bullet points:
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2007
Yes, it's been a crazy busy week of podcasts so far on the ol' Taking Notes Podcast site. Me and Bruce kicked it into overdrive just before Lotusphere.
But why so many all at once? Wah!
Yeah, we hear ya. That's a lot to listen to. But we also know that plenty of people will be travelling many hours to and from Orlando next week, so think of it as travel fodder. Also, it'll help get you in that happy Lotusphere mood.
Why so many vendors? What's up with that?
The simple answer there is that they're vendors with very useful products that just might help you. There's no shame in buying products, you know. Especially when they let you do your job better, or make you look good to the boss.
Plus, if you listen to this stuff before you hit the Product Showcase floor at Lotusphere and you hear something you like, you can head straight to that vendor's pedestal and ask them questions. No more wandering around just looking for the best squishy toys (you can still do that too, of course).
So, here's the lineup so far this week:
That's all for now, but we'll have plenty more next week. Chris Miller's been busy too, so Listen Up!
Here's my obligatory "How to find me at Lotusphere" post.
To the right is a beautiful picture of me that Bruce snapped last year or the year before. If that doesn't help, I've posted a few other pictures of myself on the blog in past years.
I'm intentionally leaving as much time as possible open during Lotusphere, and I won't mention the dinners and such that I'm doing, but here's a rough schedule for next week:
Saturday
Rest of the week
To be honest, I'll just be around. I haven't committed to any sessions/events other than the ones that I am personally giving, which are:
I think I'll be at the Gurupalooza thingie on Thursday too, since the session that me and Rob are doing is a Best Practice session. Otherwise, like I said, I'll be around. See you there!
I went to the dentist last week, and on the new patient application it had spaces for home phone, work phone, and car phone.
Man, a car phone? That is, like, soooo 1980...
Amazingly, within 24 hours of putting up my brand new comment system, I already had 3 comment spam attempts (UPDATE: after 48 hours the number is up to 6). I'm amazed because... well, how the heck did they find the new system so fast? Bastages.
In the wee hours of last night, I finished migrating my blog comments off of Enetation and onto my own home-grown system on my server. I got rid of one set of problems (Enetation), and I'm sure I just introduced a whole new slew of other ones (because I wrote it and have to administer it).
In any case, please feel free to test it, just be gentle. I'm still figuring things out. I kept the old layout scheme for now -- I want to change that too, but I figured I should make it work first and worry about aesthetics and proper web design later. There will likely be lots of refactoring in the future as well.
Okay, I've finally had enough of Enetation (that's the company I've been using to manage my blog comments). Over the past year or so it's become very slow, and it's also somewhat of a spam magnet with no real tools to manage the constant comment spam I get.
The past few nights have been spent importing all of my old comments, parsing them out, deleting the spam, and formatting for upload into a MySQL database on the server where I will have to write my own interface. I automated it as much as possible, but it was still a huge pain. I had to write some Java code to download each day's comments individually (many of the days kept timing out or were very slow), then I had some separate code to parse out each day's comments into name, date/time, comment text, etc. and go through to delete the obvious spam by hand. In the end I wound up with almost 2,000 individual comments, which isn't huge by some blogging standards, but it's a lot to look at all at once.
So then I wrote some more code to format all the comments for upload to MySQL and now I'm working on the interface. For now, it's read only and it's mimicking the Enetation template I used. Eventually I think I'll try to build in some of Rob's NSFToolsMonkey Script functionality in too. Anyway it's a stopgap, and something I had the poor judgement to start doing now instead of... say... after Lotusphere.
Since you can't leave me any comments on this at the moment (ah, the irony), I'll answer the obvious question that some of you might have: Why the heck aren't I using a Domino blog template to handle all this?
There are a few answers to this:
So there you go. It'll all be set up soon, and you'll get more blogging and less plumbing. At the very least, I'll be ramping up with a lot of Lotusphere coverage at the end of the month -- see my coverage for Lotusphere 2006, Lotusphere 2005, and Lotusphere 2004 for examples of what to expect.
