I must say, I found the Turner Prize very disappointing this year. In previous years it’s been all-to-easy to poke fun at the preposterous and pretentious rubbish that these so-called artists pride themselves on… people dressed as bears, flashing lights, planks of wood on the floor, mannequins on toilets and old sheds. But this year it seems that there are a few pieces I would describe as art and actually demonstrate some artistic talent. Okay, I say this as someone who is a bit of a philistine and was utterly hopeless at art during my school years. But look at Enrico David’s Harlequin-style pictures and sculptures… I wouldn’t pay 50p to see them, but unlike laying a piece of wood or a half-eaten bowl of porridge on the floor I’d have to admit I couldn’t create anything like that.

Roger Hiorns created some sculptures (or do we call them ‘installations’?) and they look fairly boring. One is called IBM and looks like something from the inside of a futuristic toilet cistern. Another of his installations is a fire in a grate, which I’m sure is something we’ve never seen before. But Roger did see fit to encrust an abandoned London flat with liquid copper sulphate, so he’s a worthy nominee in the Turner Prize tradition. Could I have done that? I don’t know – I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to try it. Roger clearly has too much time on his hands.

Lucy Skaer created some sculptures and pictures, and quite frankly they’re not wacky or pointless enough for me to take the p*ss out of. They’re just a bit boring. Don’t feel too bad Lucy, I’m a philistine and I looked at the pictures of your works for about 2.7 seconds. My opinion is worth nothing.

Now we come to Richard Wright. Not the late Pink Floyd legend. I’m referring to the man who “combines graphic imagery and intricate patterning from sources as varied as medieval painting, graphics and typography”. And also exhibits some shelves as art. Often you place your art on shelves, but this piece of art is actually shelves. This is what most of us call ‘furniture’.

But to give Richard his dues, I actually find one of his pieces (using “gouache and enamel on paper”) quite impressive to look at. I like the shapes and the symmetry, and the way it reminds me of a pre-historic cave painting with an organic feel. No, I’m not being sarcastic, I actually genuinely do like it. Maybe it’s a bit too busy to be a Windows backdrop though. At least I now know what gouache paint is, so I’ve expanded my knowledge of the world, thanks to the Turner Prize.

So who won? It was Richard Wright, which was the right (no pun intended) decision. What is happening here? Come on artists… let’s see a ventriloquist’s doll dressed as Hitler on a unicycle carrying a bottle of bile next year please.

I have just one thought about this kerfuffle over British hacker Gary McKinnon finding his way into some (supposedly) ultra-secure US Government systems… don’t put the guy in jail. Instead the US Government should fly him over the pond first class and grill him on how he did it. That way they can learn about how to make the systems more secure. And then they should give him a job working in the UFO lab that we saw in Independence Day.

Of course, regular watchers of 1980s movies will already know how easy hacking is. Watching Beverly Hills Cop II we learn that even in the late 80s you could have accessed any computer from any other computer, as Eddie Murphy pops into Gilbert Gottfried’s office and accesses the Police HQ system. In Weird Science we learn that to hack into a secure government system all you had to do was type in ‘override’. Unfortunately that doesn’t work any more as security experts removed all override back-doors after the movie was released on VHS. The new back-door is ‘pa55w0rd’ – this is what McKinnon used, but if the US Government interview him and discover this, they’ll change it to something like ‘l4tme1n’.

Before I start talking about Lotusphere 2010 I just wanted to mention that today is the 18th anniversary of me joining what was, at the time, Lotus Development Corporation. I know what you’re thinking, I must have gone straight from junior school. I turned down an offer to join Borland and made the long journey from Shepperton to the far end of Staines, and took up a role in Customer Support. Later that week, when they found a spare computer for me, I installed Notes version 2.0a.

But that was last century, and now we’re looking forward to another decade of wonderful Lotus solutions. The perfect way to kick off a new decade is to attend Lotusphere 2010… a chance to immerse yourself in the latest technology, to find out how other business are benefiting from their investments, to meet new and existing contacts, to experience some weather that’s probably better than where you live, and to go to the mall to satisfy your wife’s shopping list (but perhaps that’s just me).

Although the details on the track sessions aren’t available yet, the main agenda is. For anyone who’s been to Lotusphere before, the agenda won’t be a huge surprise. Monday features the Opening General Session – I have no idea who the guest speaker will be, but I’m sure the William Shatner rumours will be surfacing again… and here’s a thought, the Lotusphere budget probably could accommodate Harry Hill. The rest of the week is the usual break-out sessions and labs, along with Lotusphere Idol, speed-geeking, customer panels and bird-of-a-feather sessions.

I note that this year the agenda states ‘continental breakfast’ – and I’m wondering which continent they’re referring to.

Anyway, I hope to see you there – I’ll be the guy with the black and yellow rucksack.

Have you ever wondered about how much rain runs off your roof, into the gutter and down the pipe? Your answer is probably “no”. I don’t spend my days considering it either. But heavy downpours used to worry me – the guttering at the front of our house didn’t seem to be able to cope well with torrential rain and the result was that a small area near our front door used to fill up. The soil there is so clay-like that you could probably grab a bucket-full, put it straight on a potter’s wheel and knock up a vase. Even digging two big holes and filling them with gravel didn’t really help. On a couple of occasions I’ve worked for an hour scooping up water, fearful that the level could rise above the damp course (usually at night, in the rain). The solution was quite simple in the end – clear out the gutter, remove the clog of leaves and mud from the down-pipe and fix the leaking joint.

Regular dadams.co.uk readers will remember that last year we had our kitchen renovated. One of the major changes was to remove a window and install french doors, and as a result of this change Mrs A wanted the 50 gallon water butt re-positioned. So I emptied it, did some restructuring of the down pipes, and placed the water butt at the other end of the garden. However, after a wet Summer, followed by a wet Autumn, a wet mild Winter, a quite pleasant Spring and another wet Summer, it became apparent that the water butt wasn’t actually collecting any water. My father-in-law concluded that the gutter was sloping slightly so that water was draining to where the water butt used to be.

Now add in to the story three new fir trees which Mrs A wanted in order to add some privacy to the garden. Our neighbour’s gardener got them at trade price and myself and my friend Derek spent a day planting them (and yes, it rained all day). The gardener advised a lot of watering, every day, even if it rains. It was at this point that Mrs A decided that the water butt would be useful in it’s original position, so once again I restructured the down pipes and moved the water butt.

So here’s the question again… how much rain runs off your roof, into the gutter and down the pipe in a day? When attaching the overflow into the drain I said something to the effect of “it doesn’t matter, it won’t get that full”. It did… less than a day later, after some steady but not catastrophic rain, the 50 gallon container was full and the surplus was draining out. Thinking of the price of water, I rigged up a hose attachment, opened the tap and let the trees have the full 50 gallons (which took over an hour).

Finally, you’ve probably seen the news coverage of the effects of the rain on the unfortunate inhabitants of Cockermouth in Cumbria. Living half-way up a hill I hope that the worst we’ll ever get is a flooded flowerbed. But it’s a sobering thought that this type of flooding can happen close to home, as these pictures of Lotus Park, Staines (2003) on the old dadams.co.uk site demonstrate.

Standard Life have spoken at Lotus and BlackBerry events in the past couple of years, but here’s an excellent write-up of how they use BlackBerry devices to extend the value of their Domino infrastructure and how they have provided BlackBerry-based access to their many TeamRooms.

A few days ago I read that there was an update coming to the Xbox 360. This isn’t unusual, sometimes it seems like every time I turn the bloody thing on it ties itself up for an hour while it downloads something… but it is a Microsoft product, so this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. But this particular update, rather than fixing a problem I didn’t know existed, promised some new goodies… Facebook and Twitter. Me being me, I started to ponder this. Okay, so here’s a good use for that keyboard attachment for the Xbox controller… because typing 140 characters (for Twitter) would be painful using the Xbox’s on-screen character entry system (and thus making the lead developer of the Wii’s on-screen keyboard feel terribly smug).

But here’s the bigger issue… why would I want to use the Xbox for Facebook or Twitter? I have a 24 inch iMac sitting here permanently on, and it has a keyboard. I rarely get time to sit in front of the Xbox, and when I do I want to shoot people, play football (proper football, not that game involving carrying an egg-shaped ball while wearing body armour) or drive around recklessly in a car. So if I’m honest, my first Twitter from the Xbox will probably be my last. And that’s a shame because it was hopelessly unoriginal…

Twitter on the Xbox – can’t see me using it much.

Then I had a quick go on Facebook. My initial reaction was the same, that I’d rather be playing Grand Theft Auto IV than checking up on where Lewis Turek is going on holiday next or in which pub Wild Bill left his laptop after one pint too many (just two random examples). But actually, Facebook on the Xbox has one major appeal… photos. There’s my photo albums, and I could browse through them on the big plasma screen. It has a very nice user interface (as does Twitter), I don’t think I’ll use it much, but photos is probably the killer application (and doesn’t require the keyboard attachment). Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wipe out a bunch of rival gangsters with a bazooka.

Ah, Denmark. They have holes in some their coins, you know. Think how much metal that must save.

Anyway, on with the story. Back in September I was invited to speak at DanNotes, the Danish Notes User Group event – not about Notes, but about Lotus Connections. Of course I accepted, and wasn’t put off in the least when I discovered that the event was taking place in a town called Korsør (pronounced ‘Korsur’ because of that ‘ø’ character) which is half-way across Denmark from Copenhagen. I also discovered that my good friend and God-like genius Paul Mooney was also on the agenda, so it was shaping up to be an excellent prospect of a trip. But how does one get from Copenhagen to the far and distant Korsør? By train of course.

My first experience of Danish trains was pretty good. In August I made my first ever trip to Denmark and had to make my way to Lyngby, which is north of Copenhagen… a very easy journey thanks to a short train ride to Copenhagen Central and then another fairly quick hop to Lyngby. As I said at the time it was efficient, on-time, clean and reasonably good value. So without much fuss I discovered that a train went directly from Copenhagen lufthaven (sorry, airport) directly to Korsør in eighty-eight minutes. I arrived in Copenhagen, I purchased my return ticket, the train turned up and left on time, and even arrived at Korsør a few minutes early. I had a comfortable seat and there was even a power socket above my head. On arriving at the Grand Park Hotel I had no hesitation in telling people that I was impressed by the Danish train service. When they scoffed at this notion, I assumed it was merely because they’d never encountered the English trains and were therefore a little spoilt.

Whoever said that irony is a fickle mistress was more correct than they’ll ever know.

The delegates and speakers enjoyed an excellent dinner. I found Mr Mooney and we chewed the fat and laughed until tiredness caught up with me and I caved in for the evening. The next morning I did my talk on Connections, and also a half-hour slot on composite applications which was a late addition to the agenda. Paul was on his way home, and already Google Latitude was showing me that he was in the bar at Copenhagen airport. After lunch I ordered a taxi, leaving plenty of time to catch the train back to Copenhagen, my plans leaving me lots of time to check in at the airport before continuing on to Stockholm. Mrs A is reading this over my shoulder and said “that’s where it started to go wrong”. And she’s right.

According to the train timetable on the Interweb, my train back to Copenhagen airport was supposed to depart at 14:50. But arriving at the station at 14:20 I found that the next train direct (I mean with no changes) to the airport was at 15:14. This wasn’t a big problem as there was a train to Copenhagen Central at 14:43, and I could change there and continue to the airport with enough time to check in for the 18:10 flight.

However, a couple of stations from Copenhagen Central the train stopped for nearly half an hour. Someone was kind enough to translate the announcement which said that the train would terminate at the next station and then we’d have to change over to a local line (with more stops) to continue the journey. So I got off at Høje Taastrup station and waited seven minutes for the next B line train. Time was now becoming rather tight.

A number of stops later, things took a turn for the worse. At Danshøj the train stopped and minutes ticked away until an announcement told the passengers that the train was terminating and they should get off. Someone told me that a person had been hit by a train at Copenhagen Central and there were going to be delays reaching the station. By now it was 16:45, and I had half an hour left to check in. After getting off, another train came to the platform quickly. But two stops later, at Enghave, the train stopped again, and the ticket lady on the train said that we were stopping and they had no idea for how long. It was now 16:57. A train from Copenhagen Central to the airport takes around fifteen minutes, and I could wait up to twenty minutes for that train. I wasn’t even at Copenhagen Central yet. At this point I realised that if I stayed on the train I would miss the flight and the implications started whirring through my head and stomach.

Maybe fortune does favour the brave – I left the train, ran up the steps, and was just in time to see a taxi about to leave after dropping someone off. I banged on the window, the driver stopped and beckoned me in. It was 17:00. I asked how long it would take to get to the airport and the words were music to my ears… “it’s rush hour, so maybe fifteen minutes”. And he was spot on, the cab stopped outside Copenhagen airport Terminal 3 at 17:15. During the journey he said there’s nowhere for taxis to wait at Enghave station so I was lucky to catch him.

The fun wasn’t over yet – inside Terminal 3 I looked at the check-in board and the instructions for SAS flight 1426 were… wait for it… go to Terminal 2. You’re kidding me. So I ran to Terminal 2, where the check-in board said – I’m not making this up – go to Terminal 3. I grabbed someone who looked like they worked there and they said yes, check-in for my flight was at Terminal 2. So at 17:23 I was at the check-in desk where a lovely young lady calmly told me there was no hurry because they hadn’t even assigned a gate yet.

And then I picked the slowest-moving queue for security. But by then I was serenely calm. Maybe even delirious.

Fact #1 – I never read manuals or instructions. So I merrily downloaded the Ubuntu 9.10 installation ISO, created a CD and then set about upgrading my 9.04 installation. And then I got to the options… install as a separate partition or erase the current installation and install the new version? Neither thanks, I want to upgrade. It was then I checked the Ubuntu site and realised that the upgrade option was a separate download.

But actually there was an easier option… just go to the Update Manager in the Ubuntu System Administration, check for updates and then let it do it’s thing. And that’s what I did. It took a couple of hours, but only because I was doing other things (it was a day off work) and there were some OK buttons that were required to be pressed. The process said the final part would take about four hours but actually completed in about fifteen minutes… not a terribly good estimation, but better than estimating fifteen minutes and taking four hours I guess.

Overall impressions… excellent, a big improvement on version 9.04. It doesn’t really look any different, but the performance is much better, especially things like the screen redraw which were awful with 9.04 because of the display drivers for the ThinkPad W500. Now the display performance is great (better than Windows XP on the same laptop) and I can use the advanced wobbling screen effects. Suspend and resume (always previously unreliable) seem to work fine. Overall 9.10 feels much more polished.

So what about the Canonical claim that configuring via the command prompt is a thing of the past? I think if you properly understand the Synaptic Package Manager then you are very likely to avoid the dreaded Terminal. Although I did resort to the command prompt to upgrade Notes to version 8.5.1 I could actually have avoided it. My Linux knowledge let me down, but doesn’t that tell us that it’s still not as user-friendly as it could be? I never had any such issues with the Apple Mac which I felt at home with instantaneously.

The other negative is that the ThinkPad’s trackpad is permanently on (aarrrggh, I hate the thing) and there’s no way in Ubuntu to turn it off. I tried creating a configuration file (following advice from a tip on the Interweb), but that didn’t work. So I’ll have to turn the trackpad off at the BIOS level.

On the positive side Ubuntu 9.10 is packed with great utilities, the WiFi is a doddle to configure, and time from cold boot to ready is extremely quick. Both navigation and the customisation to get your own comfortable look and feel are very easy. It seems like a very viable client platform growing in maturity, and I hope it gets some serious consideration from companies who are looking at the costs of upgrading to Windows 7.

Back in January I blogged about the rise of Firefox coupled with the fall of Internet Explorer. At the time Firefox had risen to a very precise 21.34% while Internet Explorer continued to lead the ‘market’ with 68.15% (but was on the way down).

Ten months later the two haven’t waved at each other as they passed in opposite vertical directions, but the gap has closed a bit. According to The Register, Firefox now claims 23.75% while Internet Explorer has lost more ground and sits at 65.71%. Those of you who boast impressive mental arithmetic will see that Internet Explorer’s fall is only 0.03% larger than Firefox’s gain. Where that missing 0.03% went is anyone’s guess, but I’d put my money on Apple’s Safari. Or maybe Google’s Chrome.

To add to Mozilla’s chest-beating, their CEO John Lilly claimed that Firefox gained over 30 million unique users in a recent eight weeks period. Since then (if you haven’t heard), Windows 7 has been released – so it’ll be interesting to see whether the glacial-like erosion of Internet Explorer’s share continues to take place.

Karmic Koala? No, I haven’t been smoking something grown in a hippy’s window box. Like many, I’m a) fed up with hearing about Windows 7 and b) looking forward to the release of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (otherwise known as Karmic Koala) later this week. It seems that Microsoft’s unofficial PR machine in the UK (BBC News) has taken ten minutes off from fawning over the new Windows version to recognise that technology companies other than Microsoft, Google and Apple do actually exist… and also name some of the companies who have freed themselves from the Microsoft shackles. I knew the French Police had gone down the Ubuntu route, but didn’t know that San Francisco Airport had taken the leap. You can view the article here.

Being a BBC reporter, Gary Parkinson does of course take the opportunity to see everything from a Windows point of view, but I suppose this is understandable. He homes in on the fact that iTunes isn’t available on Linux operating systems, and then discusses the fact that Linux (even Ubuntu) hasn’t always been seen as user-friendly. Windows, irrespective of what you think of it, has been honed to be pretty user-friendly over the years… rarely (if ever) do home users have to go to a command prompt to configure things. Thankfully Canonical’s Chris Kenyon says the new release puts a stop to all of that (I’ll tell you later in the week if it really is true).

Parkinson talks about recommending Linux to older family members or friends, but is that really where Ubuntu wants to sit, with the home user? Certainly I’d have no bones about recommending Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice to home users, and indeed I have. But I see Linux as something that needs to be properly rolled out, supported and maintained within organisations, like those named in the Beeb’s article. A lack of support for iTunes isn’t really going to matter there. Home users (in my humble opinion) should buy an Apple Mac… it’s businesses that have the potential to decrease costs through properly maintained open-source software. Whatever your opinion, it’s very important that Microsoft have competitors in this space, and thus improvements to Ubuntu can only be a good thing.