Don’t worry, this won’t take long. I’ve seen a lot of links for ’10 things’ today, either for the year or the decade, and I really can’t be bothered to do my own. Anyway, most people will be out boozing tonight and nursing a hangover tomorrow, so there’s no point, no-one will be reading this.

I started the decade (i.e. January 2000) in my first management role, heading up a team within the larger Lotus Technical Sales team… the Technology Advocates were specialists (experts you could say). What a line-up… Rob ‘Choddo’ Hayden, Tony ‘Woody’ Cocks, Andrew ‘Thommo’ Thomas, Ed ‘Tedwardo’ Hollands and Mike (he didn’t have a nickname) Hayward. My c.v. says I had a team of eight, so if anyone could remind me of who the other three were I’d be grateful. I think the overall structure of Technical Sales was quite fluid in those days. Three of that original team eventually went to Microsoft, although only one remains there.

Sixteen months later, after watching my manager deal with the biggest pile of expenses I’d ever seen and then promptly leave (for Microsoft), I took over as Lotus Technical Sales Manager for North Region – which consisted of the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and, of course, South Africa. Don’t even try to understand it. I got the news of my promotion while I was in Prague for Choddo’s stag weekend. Blah blah blah, a couple of other things, current role.

dadams.co.uk started in 1999 so it was around for the whole of the decade, albeit not in it’s current form running on WordPress. There was a time when it boasted a synopsis of all South Park episodes from the first three seasons – I remain a huge fan and was glad that it got back on track following poor 4th and 5th seasons. My first post of the decade on dadams.co.uk discussed ‘The Millennium Bug’. Since then, the web site has undergone a series of face-lifts and a major upheaval in April 2007 when it was moved to WordPress rather than hand-written HTML using Dreamweaver.

On the personal side… the saddest event of the decade was the death of my dad (September 2006), and never being one to do things by halves he died less than a week before we moved house. I flew out to Florida on a Monday morning, attended his funeral the next day, arrived back home on Wednesday morning and we moved on the Thursday. Three years later I’ve painted every square inch of wall and ceiling (not including the bathrooms) and lived through a major kitchen re-fit.

Travel-wise, we made two trips to New York (we had to cancel the first one planned – September 2001), we went to Chicago for the first time ever, and I made four trips to Orlando for Lotusphere. The Adams clan went to Menorca every year of the decade, I went to South Africa a few times, and made debut trips to Denmark and Norway.

So that’s about it. Achievements? I’ve managed to keep us solvent despite Mrs A’s best attempt to spend every penny I’ve earned (only joking dearest… put that rolling pin down). And I’ve watched my lovely daughter Lauren (a.k.a. Lolli) grow from a cute toddler to a wonderful beautiful (not to mention clever and humorous) girl who plays the flute, has a huge array of gymnastic medals and an eye for fashion (that’ll cost me too), and regularly baffles her mother with her grasp of technology.

And finally, a new year resolution? Yes… 1920 x 1200.

Here’s a very handy Notes side-bar plug-in which has been knocking around since the middle of 2009 but has really come into it’s own with the latest release. The File Navigator plug-in does what it’s name suggests… it allows you to access your file system from the Notes side-bar, perform a set of actions on the files and folders, and drag and drop files to and from Notes documents and e-mails (not that I’m condoning sending file attachments in e-mails of course – there are other ways to share files).

The plug-in also has a number of other useful features – adding favourite folders to the top-level navigation, adding shared network drives, and converting e-mails to EML files.

The File Navigator plug-in is available from OpenNTF.org (if you’ve registered and logged in), and can be installed from a local update folder or from the Notes widget catalog (it’s easy, but the instructions are included). Congratulations to the guys for creating this, a fantastic piece of work.

On Christmas Eve I announced via Twitter the sad passing of Mrs A’s laptop. I was on the phone and from behind me I could hear the unmistakable sound of a hard disk in the throes of death. By the time the conference call had finished, the Windows desktop had disappeared and had been replaced by a black screen with the words ‘disk error’ (or something to that effect). Attempts to bring the old beast back to life failed. And it was an old beast – a single core processor of dubious ability, half a gigabyte of RAM and a hard disk which constantly struggled for space. For the best part of a year I’d been telling Mrs A we should replace it, usually in response to a complaint about it’s speed or the fact that it would give up it’s wi-fi connection at regular intervals.

The hard disk failure has now forced the issue, even if it might be possible to retrieve some of the data (most importantly the contents of Mrs A’s Thunderbird e-mail account which apparently contains items of incredible importance). Thus I started to think about a suitable replacement. Mrs A’s computer usage doesn’t demand a high-spec laptop – it’s mainly e-mail and Internet shopping – so a Macbook would seem to be an expensive option. Something around the £350 mark, with a dual-core processor and 2 gb of RAM is more than enough. I’m not being a skin-flint, Mrs A will testify to my Christmas generosity, but the cheapest option is a netbook. Would it be too small though? Would the portability be a worthless factor given that it would rarely, if ever, leave the house? So here I am considering the technical and logistical issues of a laptop versus a netbook.

Mrs A’s response… “hey, I could buy a Juicy Couture bag for it to fit in”. I rest my case.

There’s good spam and there’s bad spam… bad spam offers me a dangerous array of dubious prescription drugs and the chance to receive money from some extremely generous Nigerian bankers. Good spam is harmless but unwanted… and sometimes it’s received because at some point in the past I purchased something or maybe even submitted my own e-mail address. I’m talking about the offer of an array of Christmas gifts from a company which offers acres of land situated on other places in the solar system, the chance to become a Scottish laird or lady, and even an opportunity to adopt a grape vine.

It probably won’t surprise you that I already own an acre of the Moon – it was a gift a few years ago. The package contains a certificate (the lunar deed) and a map of the Moon – X marking the spot of my acre, a nice plot North-East of the Oceanus Procellarum – both of which take pride of place on the wall of my home office. I do realise that I’ll probably never visit the plot in person, and will probably never get rich if NASA discover a rich vein of minerals running through it, but I do get the telescope out occasionally to make sure no-one is trespassing. I have briefly considered how much rights as a land-owner I would have should the Moon ever be colonised, but it’s filed under ‘unlikely’. Nevertheless, an acre on the Moon does constitute something tangible, and as for an acre of Mars… well, maybe one day mankind will step foot on the red planet. But an acre of Venus…?

This strikes me as a bum deal. Within seconds of setting foot on Venus you would resemble a hamburger. The atmospheric pressure, over 90 times that of Earth’s, would squash you flat. And then the 470 °C temperatures would have a cooking effect on your flesh and organs. The sulphuric acid rain would also add to the general unpleasantness of your visit. With 60% of sunlight bouncing back off Venus’ thick atmosphere, the view of the dried and crusty volcanic landscape will be terrible.

Venus is nearly the same size as Earth, so it’s much bigger than Mars or the Moon – and that means there’s more one-acre plots to sell. So bearing in mind there’s no shortage of Venusian land and it’s overall lack of attraction, why does the land there cost the same as Mars and the Moon? It’s a bit daft if you ask me.

On the day that news broke about a mobile version of Firefox (initially for the Nokia N900, with support for other devices to follow), I also spotted a ZDNet article stating that Firefox 3.5 is now the world’s most popular browser. Great news, but a bit of a surprise as not two months ago I reported that Firefox had gained market share but still had less than a third of the market share owned by Internet Explorer. Could Firefox really have accelerated in adoption so much in the space of a couple of months? The answer: unfortunately not.

As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. Note that the title specifically states Firefox 3.5, and it’s compared against Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8. Firefox (according to the StatCounter survey) has 21.93% of the market, followed by Internet Explorer 7 with 21.2% and then Internet Explorer 8 with 20.33%. So, with Internet Explorer 6 holding 14.12%, the total Internet Explorer share is 55.65%. This compares to 32.42% for all versions of Firefox.

However, this does show growth for Firefox and shrinkage for Internet Explorer since September, although the fact that the figures come from two different sources make that statistic a little unreliable.

Ah, Swindon, that jewel of middle England. Home-town of the great British band XTC, the Great Western Railway and, errr, hmmm… a cheap designer outlet centre.

Swindon doesn’t need to be put on the map, because there it is, next to the M4. But today Swindon has attracted attention because a new technological marvel… being able to access the Internet without a network cable. Actually I’m being facetious because many of us can do that already (you probably are reading this with no ethernet involved). The big news about Swindon is that it’s the location for a new free public wi-fi service, aptly named Signal – I wonder if that name will bite them on the backside when Swindonites can’t get a signal. Anyway, the BBC news article provides us with an explanation…

Wireless internet allows computer users to access the internet without the need for wired connection to phone lines.

Well, thank goodness they cleared up that mystery. Signal will work like this… you can sign up and then roam around the supported areas of town maintaining your Internet connection. To start with it’ll be a small area of coverage (in Highworth) but eventually they’ll deploy 1,400 access points around the city. The service will be free for registered users, although they’ll have to pay for upgrades to higher speeds.

This is a great idea – we’re living in a world of wi-fi enabled iPods, Internet tablets (like the Archos 5, and even my older 605) and netbooks. People just need fairly basic access when they’re out and about in a town centre – it doesn’t need to be high-speed, that type of Internet interaction can be done at home. Mrs A has just given a nod of approval to the idea, frustrated as she is that she can only use the wi-fi on her iPod touch inside Castle Adams (don’t comment saying “buy her an iPhone”, we’ve had that conversation).

So, Surrey Heath Borough Council… you take £260 from me ten months of the year, when is free wi-fi coming to the sprawling metropolis of Camberley?

‘The View from Forrester Research’ hosted on ZDNet has some very positive things to say about the forthcoming 8.5 release of Lotus Sametime. The new release has a host of new capabilities – iPhone support, improved video, new web APIs, an updated rich client and a new zero-download web client – but the big improvements are in the web conferencing capabilities. So why does the Forrester blog like Sametime 8.5?

Because it’s got the core elements of click-to-conference — not just instant messaging and presence — baked into it. And for ad-hoc collaboration, click-to-conference is a much richer and easier thing to do than loading up separate applications for instant messaging, video conferencing, and web conferencing.

Sametime 8.5 introduces new modes for meetings – it allows a user to create a new room on-the-fly for an instantaneous meeting, provides permanently open rooms, and also rooms which can be aligned to projects and business activities. Another great feature is the calendar integration which warns you of an upcoming meeting and provides an option for one-click access (see below).

The meeting room experience has been improved, the load time is mega-fast, and offers both rich client and browser access – the rich meeting client can be launched from both Lotus Notes and the Sametime client. To access from a browser, the meeting host can issue a URL or the delegate can navigate through the new Sametime 8.5 meeting centre.

So, Sametime Standard (and Sametime Advanced, recently mentioned on dadams.co.uk) offer a lot more value than the capabilities provided by the Sametime Entry entitlement that users get with Lotus Notes. With that in mind, over at the Sametime Blog, John Del Pizzo today announced that with the release of Sametime 8.5 we’ll be providing trade-ups from Sametime Entry to the Standard and Advanced offerings. That’s a great way to convert the superb entry-level functionality to the richer experience of ‘full Sametime’.

Sametime 8.5 will be available on 22nd December.

Back at the Forrester / ZDNet blog they haven’t finished with the compliments…

In case you haven’t noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn’t go away, it’s here with a vengeance. LotusLive.com claims 18 million users, the 8.5 release of Notes / Domino is a winner in storage savings, Lotus Connections beats other social software platforms on many dimensions, and Sametime’s pushing the envelope on real-time collaboration at global scale.

If you came here expecting to read something about that single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft that Alan Tracy used to pilot up to Thunderbird 5, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m talking about the new version of Mozilla’s e-mail client.

I use Thunderbird as my personal e-mail client attached to my dadams.co.uk mail account, and therefore the function I use most of all is ‘Delete’ as I clean up the stuff that isn’t spam but I really can’t be bothered to read (thank you Apple, for all those lovely-looking iPod and Mac adverts). However, I think that some of the new (or improved) features will prove quite useful…

• Searching – an improvement… the thing I search for most often is my British Airways Executive Club membership number. The improved search feature provides a page of results, which means I can easily navigate through them. Nice.
• Tabbed e-mail – if you open an e-mail it becomes a tab within Thunderbird. Lotus Notes does that too, so it feels more familiar.
• Better address book integration – a yellow star by a name in an e-mail shows if they’re in your address book, and you can quickly click on the name to edit the contact details or reply to them.
• Smart folders – I actually have a few private e-mail accounts… smart folders combine some of the standard folders (inbox, sent, archive) into one, which makes monitoring multiple e-mail accounts much easier.
• Attachment reminder – rather limited but quite cool… if you type the word ‘attachment’ into an e-mail Thunderbird will remind you that you may want to attach an attachment.
• Archiving – you can archive e-mails. I doubt if I’ll use this, I just delete stuff.

So there you have it… it’s not a tremendously exciting release, but there’s some nice touches. And hopefully the guy who created the Azerty theme will update it soon so I can get the look and feel I liked in Thunderbird version 2.

Here we are in the most exciting (or should I say “busiest”?) part of our 4th quarter, and the IBM Lotus team in Sweden have found a great use for some of the capabilities of IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced.

They’ve created a broadcast community and a chat room so that they can broadcast announcements of software transactions being booked and provide some further details.

Obviously I’m not going to share the full details of the conversations going on, but here’s a screenshot of the interface in IBM Lotus Sametime 8 – click on it for an expanded view.

This hit the Twittersphere yesterday and was also blogged about by Stuart McIntyre on his LotusLive blog… the combined services of LotusLive have now attracted 18 million paying subscribers. Since we started the year with zero paying subscribers that’s pretty good growth. The story is then picked up by ZDNet who theorise that the annual revenue from those subscribers could be $648 million, thus justifying IBM’s acquisitions and development efforts… and indeed the overall decision to throw their hat into the market.

ZDNet also mention the fact that IBM LotusLive offers an extensive range of services, and I go would as far it say it’s one of the most extensive ranges in the whole software-as-a-service / cloud-based market – a choice of e-mail, integrated collaborative services and web meetings.