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Warren Elsmore has announced that the UKLUG meeting will take place on the 18th and 19th of September 2008 in London. This follows directly on from Collaboration University (which you’d be mad to miss) so a busy week for those who follow the divine Lotus path.

The UKLUG 2007 meeting was a great success, although the free venue very generously donated by ComputaCenter had a limit of one hundred attendees. This meant a large waiting list and a great many disappointed people. But buoyed by the interest and the turnout, not to mention the number of customers prepared to stand up and talk, Warren is planning two days this time round, and a venue that can accommodate at least two hundred people and possibly two tracks.

Like the SNUG (Scottish Notes User Group) and ILUG (Irish Lotus User Group) events, UKLUG will be free (and by the way, is not an IBM event). To cover the costs we’ll be looking for sponsors - this is a big ask given that many of the usual suspects will already be funding ILUG, which this year is a whopping three-day event on the 4th to 6th of June (in Dublin, of course).

As for SNUG (you’ll appreciate we couldn’t call it SLUG), planning gets under way this week, and I think we’ll be looking at a Spring event.

A big thank you to the passion of everyone who makes these events possible… Warren and Kitty, Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Matt White, Julian Woodward, Tom Duff, Mike Smith, and apologies to anyone I’ve missed. Not to mention Graeme Clark and all the guys from Standard Life, Mark Calleran from the Salvation Army (a big hit last year and a huge appreciation of the work that his wonderful organisation does worldwide), Brian Ford from HSBC, Neil and Darren from Prudential, Steven Haugen from Scottish & Newcastle, all of the other customer speakers, and last but not least, the very generous sponsors.

A few evenings spent digging through census records have revealed quite a lot. Getting hold of my grandparents’ birth certificates will make some of my findings certain, but I’m 99% sure that I’ve identified one branch of the clan going back to my great great great grandfather Henry Clinch (and we’ll call him Henry Clinch Senior as my great grandfather was also Henry Clinch).

Henry Clinch Senior was born in 1820 and his profession was listed as cheese monger and also ‘butter man’ (so clearly in the diary produce game), but then later (in the 1871 census) he was a poulterer. So far this is scuppering my hopes of turning up a long-lost wealthy relative from which I can inherit some unclaimed fortune. And funnily enough Florida Steve was hoping the same.

It’s possible I can go further back to my great great great great grandfather on the current evidence, but the past starts to get murky. Henry Clinch Senior has no wife listed on any census until 1871. Up until then it’s just him, the offspring and a servant. The offspring included my great great grandfather James Clinch. Then in 1871 Henry Senior’s wife is listed as Ellen (aged 38 to his 51). However, in the 1881 census, Ellen appears in James’ household, but has the surname Manning. So, the question is, was she James’ mother or did she meet and marry Henry Senior sometime between 1861 and 1871? To be sure I’d need James’ birth certificate.

I do hope Ellen was the mother of James, because she was fairly easy to trace on the 1841 census, and this reveals the possible identity of my great great great great (there has to be easier way of writing that) grandfather - David Manning, a labourer (sadly, not a duke) born in 1791. This is getting exciting, getting back to the 18th century, but unfortunately I will then exhaust the census information as a source as 1841 was the first (as far as I know).

This is just one branch of the family. At the moment I know little about my great grandmother Alice West (Henry Junior’s wife), or Mary Ann (James’ wife)… I don’t even know her surname.

More soon, I know you’re all riveted…

Poor old Microsoft. In their defence, I sometimes think they get a raw deal - they’re like the first men on the moon, no-one has ever been in the position they’re in with Windows. Who can say how they should proceed? If they stagnate, people will condemn them. If they go too far and push Windows beyond the reach of the common man, people will condemn them. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Then consider this quote from Linux head-honcho Linus Torvalds…

“An operating system should be completely invisible”

Linus actually started off the discussion having a pop at Apple’s OS X Leopard - as the article says “he poured scorn on the modern trend to treat a new version or update of an operating system as a cause for major celebration and marketing.”

And I suppose he’s correct - an operating system is just plumbing, albeit complex and requiring careful handling. This started me looking for an analogy - you wouldn’t have the water pipes in your house on display and so richly decorated, they’re just doing a job and shouldn’t be noticed. Pete Hampton then chimed in with the prospect of Microsoft Pipes needing patching twice a month, and the fact that Apple iPipes would look great but would only connect to an iRadiator and an iTap. Most amusing.

With this in mind, it seems that the knives are still out for Vista (or Vaster as Pete calls it). Ten months ago Dell reconsidered it’s policy of Vista-only on new computers and re-instated XP as an option. All these months later things don’t seem to have changed much. Today it’s 143 days until Microsoft stop selling XP, and it comes to something when someone launches a petition to keep the operating system in the market. That’s what InfoWorld have done.

Okay gang, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for… you can now register for the UK Lotusphere Comes To You 2008 events. We’ll be back at the wonderful Radisson Hotel at Manchester Airport on the 3rd of April, but the London event sees a new venue this year… none other than Wembley Stadium. Yes, they’ve finished building the function rooms, so join us on the 1st of April. I was there late last year for an event with the Portal Partnership, and it’s a fantastic venue. A word of warning though, if you go on the stadium tour, keep off the grass… they have snipers on the roof.

This year we’ll be doing things in the sessions slightly differently - stayed tuned for more details on that. Who knows, you could even be taking to the stage yourself.

Also out of the bag are the names of the guest speakers… crikey, Alan Hansen. Not bad eh? Six hundred and twenty-one appearances for Liverpool, and fourteen goals. Well, he was a defender.

The night before Lotusphere Comes To You 2007 (Manchester edition) I sat next to Diane from our Marketing team at dinner, and was absolutely enthralled by her account of tracing her family tree. She’s gone back as far as the 17th century (that’s the 1600’s), and said that some of the ancestors were quite difficult to pin down.

My frolleague Cali Clarke has also done some detective work and has traced her ancestors back to the 18th century. Coincidentally, among the wonderful treasures that the previous owners of Adams Towers left for us before they hoofed it to Spain (that reminds me, I must hire a skip soon) was a CD of a genealogy program. It’s imaginatively named ‘Family Tree’. To give you an idea of how hi-tech it is, the system requirements demanded a 486 processor (hmmm, should be okay with this Pentium), Windows 95 or 98 (XP will have to suffice) and a whopping 8 mb of RAM (yep, I think I can spare that). It looks like it was designed in the Windows 95 era, but Cali confirmed the all-important feature - it supports the open standard for family tree files (GED).

Plotting my past could be a tad tricky on my dad’s side. One limiting factor is that he passed away (and is sorely missed) and is therefore not around to fill in any details. The other factor is that he was adopted, and all we really know is that he was born in Ardrossan (West Scotland) in November 1940. Therefore, it makes more sense to start on my mother’s side. I already knew the details of my maternal grandparents (they died well into my adulthood), and I also knew my grandmother’s maiden name. But that was all. My mum didn’t know much else apart from my great-grandfather’s Christian name.

Fortunately, there are some on-line resources that allow you to search birth, marriage and death records. Unfortunately they only give you so much information, and some sites demand payment for the info. However, there is one site that lets you view the registers for free. The registers only give so much info, but provide the base to then get the certificates which will uncover further details.

So, my next step is to ask my mum and uncle if they have my grandparents’ birth certificates… and if not I can get them from the General Register Office. Then I can get the details on my great-grandparents and start to dig further.

Quite frankly, we of the Lotus Notes religion are fed up with the great uneducated having a pop at the product. Okay, in past versions there should have been a bit more time spent on the user interface and usability (as opposed to unimportant things like security, business applications, mobile working, backwards compatibility, ease-of-management… all that stuff no-one cares about). The answer to those who bad-mouth Notes is “take a look at Notes 8, and don’t make any more comments until you have”. I know of some people in the media who should take note of that.

Then there’s Microsoft Outlook… everyone loves it, everyone uses it at home (so I’ve been told, although the evidence is strangely elusive when I ask for proof). Outlook is gorgeous and easy to use. It’s slick and secure. Okay, I was taking the piss on that last point. So, given Outlook’s obvious greatness, why would Stan James publish a blog entry covering ‘67 reasons that Outlook sucks‘? I’m sure he’s doing something wrong. 67 things wrong to be precise.

#14 is my favourite, and #22 reminded of a recent blog entry here on dadams.co.uk which in turn talked about Outlook’s “ultimate inbox“. And I’ll trot out my fairly witless comment once again… copying all your sent e-mail into your inbox? I’d call that the “ultimate nightmare”.

Thanks to Ed Brill for passing on this info. Okay, final point, there may be a few things in here which Notes is guilty of too. Stan talks about Outlook taking up 162 mb of RAM. Notes 8 can swallow up a bit more than that… but then Notes 8 does a hell of a lot more than Outlook does. Just enjoy the list.

1. Go to Ikea.

That’s all for now folks, but don’t forget to check back here during half-term week for more good advice.

I rather like the idea of SlideShare.net - being able to upload an Open Document Format presentation (or PowerPoint, if you must) and sharing it with the world in a slideshow format. However, until tonight I hadn’t got round to uploading anything. Last year I was going to share my ‘Notes 8 Top Ten’ presentation (in Spinal Tap-style, it has eleven features listed) but it never hit the top of the to-do list… it may do soon. Numerous Lotus Notes alumni (Ed Brill included, of course) have shared their content so there’s no shortage of slides.

As we’re having some success against Microsoft Exchange at the moment, I thought I’d post some of the slides I’m using. The basic premise is that Lotus Notes / Domino have been subject to a consistent upgrade-able architecture (with continuous improvements) throughout their history, whereas with Microsoft Exchange… well, it’s not my place to tell you about the Exchange roadmap, so go and ask Microsoft.

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