Here at Adams Tower we love Christmas, and every year I have to persuade Mrs A to hold back on playing the Christmas music until a reasonable date. 1st November is too early, even though the Harrods Christmas department opens in August. As we get to late November, and the sound of Bing Crosby’s crooning and whistling wafts out from the iPod speakers, I consider how ridiculous the lyrics of White Christmas are… for traditionally Christmas in the South East of England is a rather grey affair. Tree tops seldom glisten, and the only sound children listen for is their parents telling them it’s stopped raining so they can go outside on their new bikes.

What a shame, I’ve always thought, that Christmas doesn’t live up to that romantic image conjured up by the songs of Bing, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Perry Como and, of course, Shakin’ Stevens… until now.

According to the Met Office…

…the definition of an official white Christmas used most widely, notably by those placing and taking bets, is for a single snow flake (perhaps amongst a shower of rain and snow mixed) to be observed falling in the 24 hours of 25 December.

That’s a bit of a swizz really, because a single snow flake (or even a few) isn’t going to make the tree tops glisten or children listen to… okay, you get the point. We did get a fair amount of snow on 17th December, so much in fact that I didn’t drive my car again until Christmas Day itself when there was still an extensive covering around Adams Towers, making the landscape rather white. But I don’t think any snow fell on that day… so officially it wasn’t a white Christmas. And that’s a bit daft.

So, do I want a white Christmas for 2010? Right now I’d have to say “not really”. As you’re probably aware, Britain is in the grip of the coldest Winter for many years. It may be my fault actually, because while in Finland a couple of months ago I remember saying to someone “we rarely get snow”. Irony, we are told, is a fickle mistress. The “cold snap” has dominated the news and caused chaos for millions, thus leading to the perennial debate about Britain being generally crap as a nation in dealing with the white stuff. While some people are wondering what the fuss is about, spare a thought for us.

Two days after the main fall of snow we’re still stranded up here in the heights of Camberley. To get to Adams Towers we go up our avenue (and I do mean ‘up’ because it slopes upwards), and then up a narrow lane (again, up) and then our drive slopes down. So typically I have to reverse up the drive to get out – and because of my BMW being rear-wheel drive (I think) that doesn’t work very well in snow. The narrow lane, because of the lack of traffic, tends to stay snowy for a long time – and that makes it very difficult to get back up.

Mrs A’s Mini is far better at dealing with these conditions, but even this brave little vehicle has it’s limits. The snow on our drive was (is, still) eleven inches deep. Okay, I know we can clear that in a few hours and throw down some grit from the dwindling supply. Mrs A’s idea was to clear two tracks (one for each path of the wheels) to get up and down the lane. However, the snow was so deep that it would have piled up as the car pushed it… so she spent around five hours clearing the entire lane (using hitherto unknown muscles and crippling herself in the process). However, the avenue is covered with six inches of snow which has been compacted by numerous vehicles. That in itself is very difficult to negotiate.

So how can we get better with tackling the snow-related problems. I know some things now… don’t step on the snow you intend to clear, stay off it so that it doesn’t get compacted. Buy yourself a big shovel and have your own personal supply of salty grit (don’t rely on the grit bunkers in the avenue, it’s all gone). What else could I do? Buy one of those much-maligned four-wheel drive juggernauts? Oh yes, the owners of those gas-guzzlers are looking a bit smug right now.

Bing, me old mate… White Christmas… nice idea and provides some good photo opportunities but, to be honest, it’s a pain in the backside. I think I’d rather stick with the grey ones, just like I’ve always known.

A couple things to add to this ongoing saga. Clearly we’re on the threshold of an apocalypse, because the supermarket (name withheld for legal reasons) in Camberley town centre had run out of milk. Later in the day, as if to illustrate the British approach to managing life in the snow, a removal van attempted to get up around the bend on the avenue and failed miserably. It reversed and tried again. And then again. The smell of it’s burning clutch permeated my nostrils, despite having just got over a life-threatening cold. An hour later, it was joined by another removal van… 18:15 in the evening, and the new residents were still waiting for their furniture. I don’t know the final outcome, but it wasn’t looking promising.

Then Mrs A asked why, if global warming is taking hold, are we having such a cold Winter. I explained… as the polar ice caps melt they dump lots of fresh water into the Atlantic. This has an effect on the cycle of salt water which brings warmth from the South West regions of the ocean, thus causing temperatures to drop in our neck of the woods. And then I realised that was the basis of the plot for ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and therefore may not be totally true (even if it does sound feasible).

I’ve already blogged about IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 but IT Jungle have posted a good overview of all that’s new in this recently-released version. And actually, reading through the article, you realise just how much new stuff has been packed into this release.

If you want to take a look at Sametime 8.5 you can find some videos on YouTube, narrated by John Del Pizzo and presented in fabulous high definition.

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.

Like most people of the Lotus persuasion, I remember the days when advocates of Microsoft Exchange were very fond of stating that Domino was very wasteful of disk space because of it’s architecture – everyone has their own mail box and each e-mail (and it’s attachments) would be stored separately per mail box. So if I e-mailed 20 mb of file attachments to 10 users I’d be creating 200 mb of allotted disk space on the server(s). I’d also deserve to have my knee-caps broken.

Exchange on the other hand would save the file attachments once per server, resulting in much less space taken up… although the reality, so I understand it, was that the attachments would be saved once per storage group. Domino’s counter-argument was always that it’s architecture made it much more robust… problems to my mail box (which I’ve never had in 18 years) would not affect your mail box. But many are the stories of entire Exchange object stores suffering problems that take down mail access for all users for hours at a time. Domino advocates made statements long the lines of “disk space is cheap, down-time isn’t” – this is true, but there are cost of ownership aspects associated with large quantities of data (e.g. doing a back-up).

For Domino customers the big news of version 8.5 was the Domino Attachment and Object Service, otherwise known as DAOS. I’m sure that most of my potential audience know what DAOS is and does – it stores attachments once per server, therefore cutting down disk usage and also bandwidth usage. It also has performance benefits… if that large file is being written once to the disk rather than multiple times, the I/O will be reduced. Customers have been reporting reductions in disk space of up to 60%. All good stuff.

So what about Exchange? Well, while we’ve been moving in the direction of reducing the disk usage, it seems that Microsoft are pushing their customers in the other direction by removing single instance storage. An article on The Register references another article which states that the “change also reduces the overall size of Exchange databases”… but The Register conclude that “across a large enterprise with tens of thousands of Exchange users, there must be the potential for multiple tens of gigabytes of wasted storage space – if not terabytes”. Whatever, the overall theme seems to be more changes to the Exchange architecture, so no wonder in place upgrades aren’t possible. Meanwhile DAOS is something that’s optional and evolutionary to an existing and consistent Domino architecture.