I don’t have a ship date yet for IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5.1, but (no surprise) I’m already using it. A couple of weeks ago I installed the Sametime Connect 8.5.1 client on Ubuntu 10.04, and this week (while enjoying some conference calls) I installed the ‘embedded’ version of Sametime 8.5.1 into Lotus Notes 8.5.1.

As always with a point release there’s a few enhancements and a few bug fixes. But the really important thing about Sametime 8.5.1 in my humble opinion is that it supports all of  Sametime’s extra trimmings – so now in one client you can enjoy the Advanced features (chat rooms, the broadcast suite), Sametime 8.5 meeting rooms, and Sametime Unified Telephony.

Click on the small image to see the entire Sametime family installed into the Notes side-bar.

It’s a busy week for announcements in Lotus-land, but that tends to happen around the time of DNUG (which is this week, so there you go). Already this week Stuart McIntyre blogged about the new version of Lotus Quickr 8.5, which we have available internally with IBM and is a major upgrade (and a great product). More about that another time.

The other big announcement this week is the support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler on the iPad. This momentarily had me scratching my head, because I set up Traveler on an iPad a couple of weeks ago – it’s a great e-mail, calendar and contacts experience, and simple to get running. So what’s the announcement? It’s official support for Traveler on the iPad, and also for the Traveler Companion which manages encrypted e-mail.

In time other applications will be supported… LotusLive Meetings and SnappFiles for Quickr. Both of these work fine on an iPad today, they’re just not supported yet. And I’m sure there’ll be more iPad applications to come.

Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus  webcasts during June…

• A deep-dive on building Lotus Domino applications with XPages (17th)
• Drive growth and deliver outstanding business results through exceptional web experiences (22nd)
• Harness a changing workforce and drive growth with social software (23rd)
• Collaboration in the cloud: grow your business and reduce costs (24th)

To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.

Ooops, IBM Lotus Symphony 3, to give it its correct branding. Anyway, you all know the story with Symphony… spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, compatible with Microsoft Office and the Open Document Formats, it comes with IBM Lotus Notes 8.x (free support for maintained users) and Symphony can be downloaded separately and used free-of-charge.

I’ve been using Symphony 3 on Windows and Mac since the release of beta 2 back in February. It’s a huge improvement over version 1.x – but beta 3 is another leap forward. The Symphony web site lists a few things new to beta 3… ability to customise the toolbars, instant export to PDF, and a new plug-in to make your LotusLive files directly available.

But there’s something else that I love about Symphony, and it’s improved in beta 3. In all aspects Symphony shows a panel on the right-hand side which gives quick and easy context-sensitive access to properties for whatever you’ve selected. It’s an approach that’s so much better than endlessly going in and out of dialog boxes, and makes Symphony very easy to use.

The Apple iPad… it’ll never catch on. But we (i.e. the IBM Lotus team in the UK) decided to see what all the fuss is about – and kudos to my manager Sian, she set out to acquire one for demos and succeeded. Today Sian handed me the box and gave me the honour of opening it, setting it up and looking after it until someone came on bended knees with a good-enough reason to borrow it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d handled an iPad – my frolleague Lewis (he of the disposable income) already had one, and my first impression was that it was much lighter than I expected. The user experience was very familiar… after all, it’s just a big iPod touch, right?

One of the reasons for getting it out of the box today is that I’ll be demonstrating it at Polymorph’s Lotusphere Comes To You event tomorrow. So this morning I set up Lotus Traveler. As I don’t have an iPhone (I have a BlackBerry and Traveler on the Nokia E72) I hadn’t been through the Apple-based Travleler set-up before. Talk about easy – I connected to the IBM wi-fi network (more on that later), installed the VPN client, and then browsed to an internal web page. I clicked on the install option, entered my user-name and password, and it was done.

Obviously the iPad has a bigger screen than the iPhone, so the e-mail experience is much better. Simple but very effective. But the killer improvement is the calendar – great layout for all of the day / week / month options. I also tried LotusLive Meetings – apparently not supported on the iPad yet, but it worked and the presentation content scaled up perfectly.

The web browsing experience, with the bigger screen, is very good – but it’s applications like TweetDeck and Maps that really benefit.

Looking at the screen now, I’m glad my Archos 605 is operated with a stylus – after a day being passed around eager geeks in the office the iPad’s screen sports enough dabs and DNA to keep a forensic team busy for a year.

So, what’s the verdict? It’s a beautifully-crafted device, it’s a good size – light but big enough to ensure things like e-mail aren’t a chore as they sometimes are on smaller devices – and it’s easy to use. But I have to admit, it doesn’t fill me with a burning desire to own one personally. If I had a lot more disposable income (these days I have even less thanks to the taxman) I’d buy one tomorrow, but right now I can think of many better uses of £500. However, I can see the attraction of being out and about with a 3G iPad, so maybe in the future…

As a footnote, while in the Staines office today I connected to the IBM wireless network using the iPad, the MacBook Pro and the ThinkPad W500 with a Ubuntu Linux 10.04 install. All of these connected without complaint or coercing. But there was one operating system which refused… Windows XP (also on the W500 after I swapped hard disks). Is the wireless networking improved in Windows 7?

One other thing I noticed… on my iPod touch I access music by pressing the ‘music’ button. Pretty obvious. On the iPad, music is accessed by pressing the ‘iPod’ button. If there’s some cunning reason behind that, I don’t get it.

LotusLive Meetings is now available for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch… click here to visit iTunes and download. The application is free, so for LotusLive Meetings there’s no charge to be a meeting delegate whether you’re using a web browser, an iPhone or a supported BlackBerry device (client still in beta).

This iPhone application is incredibly easy to use – simply add the details of meetings you want to join (those details consist of your user name and the meeting ID). Then just click on the meeting name and you’re in. During the web conference you’ll see the shared presentation content and screen-sharing, and you’ll be able to view the participant list and take part in an instant messaging conversation. Of course I’ve already tried it this evening, the updates to the device are very quick, and it’s just a great application.

In the past I’ve blogged a few times about Firefox’s continued rise in market share, and this week it was announced that the trend continues. I immediately compared the new statistics to previous blog posts and came to the conclusion that the information doesn’t always come from the same source, as the figures jump about a bit. The latest information shows that Internet Explorer has fallen to 59.9% while Firefox now boasts 24.5%. So this doesn’t tally with data from StatCounter but does follow the trend reported by NetApplications.

However, that’s a less than 1% rise for Firefox since October 2009, but a 5.8% decrease for Internet Explorer. So where has the market share gone? One would assume it’s gone to Google’s Chrome, but could it have jumped 5%?

From now on I’m just going to look in one place, and that’s here.  The figures tell us that since June 2009 Internet Explorer lost 8.37%, while Firefox gained 2.16%, Chrome gained 4.33% and Safari gained 0.93%.

What I find interesting is that both Microsoft and Google have thrown money at advertising their browsers, both free products. A few months ago there were some big Chrome posters in key positions in London – for Google it has to be about mind-share. At the moment, Microsoft are running adverts for Internet Explorer on television – is this to try to stem the market share leak? One of the adverts shows a generous man shopping on-line for gifts for his missus, and extols the benefits of private browsing. That’s something that Internet Explorer’s three big rivals can do too, so if they were trying to differentiate themselves Microsoft wasted a big pile of money on that one.

Let’s start with a quote from Mrs A…

How much trouble can a dog that small be?

It was fifteen weeks ago that we picked our new pup Missie. At the time I promised lots more photos, but unless you’re one of my Facebook friends you’ll still be waiting. So here’s one (click on it to see the full picture) that comes from a set of photos taken during an unusually warm spell of April weather and is affectionately known as ‘the swamp creature’.

Missie has changed a lot since those early day – her fur is longer and has changed from all-black (apart from the white tuft on her chest) to mostly-black with hints of gold on her legs, ears and face. She now weighs a whopping 1.8 kilograms, which is amazing considering that she rarely finishes her daily food allowance. She now fits into the coat donated by Wally, another Yorkipoo, which is just as well as she’s grown out of her first ‘coat’ (a British Airways sock with two leg holes).

Toilet training has been the biggest challenge. You often find out things after you’ve made your purchase – apparently small dogs, Yorkshire Terriers in particular, are slower to pick it up. I blame the bad Winter weather to a certain extent, and the fact that until a couple of weeks ago we didn’t have a secure area to easily let her out without being on a lead. I erected a fence around the patio, and then had to further secure it with wire mesh after she discovered she could slip through the tiny gap. For a long time she wouldn’t do her business outside – we’d spend ages in the garden or on a long walk, but she’d hold it in until she got home to the newspaper. Not the idea. The toilet training is improving, but she still has to learn to ask to go out.

Last week saw the start of training classes – after the initial excitement overload of being in a room full of other dogs she got on very well and was the best in the class for fetch and recall. Walking to heel needs some work. This week I’ve been working with her on ‘sit’ – the only progress is that now she’s okay with me pressing her backside down on the floor, but she won’t sit to order.

On the whole she’s been a very good girl – there’s been no damage to the house (touch wood) apart from the odd wet patch. Occasionally a slipper or Croc goes missing, and the ends of some of my shoe-laces look like they’ve been chewed… both Mrs A and Lolli deny responsibility, so I have a feeling I know who the culprit is.

If you weren’t aware, let me inform you that there was a general election in the UK yesterday. I kid ye not. After weeks of tedious bickering, debates which didn’t include a single punch, one hurled egg, insulting of bigoted pensioners and kissing of babies, it all culminated in a result which wasn’t really a proper result. Yes, we now have a hung parliament. What’s a hung parliament? Let me explain… no, actually, just read this. Or if this is already too boring, here’s some funny pictures of cute animals.

Okay, so the Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, gained the most votes and (more importantly) the most seats of elected Members of Parliament (306, which will most likely rise to 307 once the delayed election in Thirsk & Malton goes ahead). However, because there are 650 seats in the House of Commons, Dashing Dave Cameron and his cronies were 20 (soon to be 19) seats shy of a majority… hence the hung parliament situation. A government likes to think it can vote on a bill and win, which is a bit tricky when the combined force of the other major parties and minnow contingents outnumber you.

Here in Surrey Heath we sit among the Tory heartland. Our local MP, Michael Gove, was re-elected without breaking into a sweat and increased his share of the votes from 51.5% to 57.6% – not bad for someone who didn’t even turn up to a local debate (because he was bag-carrying for Mr Cameron that evening). And not bad for someone who trousered £7,000 of tax payers’ money to furnish his Kensington home, even if he did pay it back after the finger of suspicion pointed in his direction. To be honest, here in the sprawling metropolis of Camberley I didn’t see much (or any) campaigning… just a few signs. I presume the Tories didn’t think they needed to bother, assuming themselves to be a shoo-in on election night. As for the rest, they probably thought it wasn’t even worth the effort of trying to win. And looking at the results, it wasn’t.

Let’s spare a thought or two for Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Nick’s ratings soared during the live television debates, and it seemed that after years of distant third places and a risk of being beaten by the Loonies that the Lib Dems may have been getting closer to the big two. Even the embarrassment of claiming £2.49 for cake tin wasn’t going to dent Nick’s confidence. But then we discovered why for so many years the Lib Dems have been advocates of proportional representation. The basic premise of proportional representation is that the elected government seats should closely correlate with the number of votes received. So why are the Lib Dems so keen on this? It’s best illustrated with two graphs based on the 2010 results:

On the left, we see the number of votes received in millions (Liberal Democrat = yellow, Labour = red, Conservative = blue). On the right we seat the number of seats in the House of Commons taken up by the three parties. While Labour and Conservative have a fairly consistent ratio between votes and seats, the Lib Dems don’t. Some basic maths tells us that for every seat won, the Conservatives received just under 35,000 votes… for Labour it was around 33,300 votes. But for the Lib Dems it was a ratio of just under 120,000 votes per seat. Why the big difference?

This has nothing to do with the Lib Dems winning seats in the most populous constituencies… quite the opposite actually. It was all about coming second in too many places. And what do you get for coming second in a contest for one MP seat? Nothing. Look at Surrey Heath… the Lib Dems were a clear second with 14,037 votes to Labour’s 5,552. Then look at Guildford where the Lib Dems netted 19,000 more votes than Labour. It’s a similar story almost everywhere the Conservatives won a seat… the Lib Dems came second with no reward.

Proportional representation would help the Lib Dems gain a greater standing in our democracy, but wouldn’t it also make a hung parliament more likely?

There’s nothing I like better after a hard day of doing IBM’s and Mrs A’s bidding than sitting down to a spot of FIFA 10 on the Xbox 360. With great graphics and excellent game-play it’s a must-have for anyone who owns an Xbox and likes football (note, ‘football’, a game played with a ball and the feet… not played with an egg-shaped thing while wearing body armour). Plonk me down in front of the big plasma screen with a snoozing puppy on my lap and I’m happy. But there’s trouble brewing in the games room at Adams Towers…

FIFA 10 has ‘manager mode’ – you pick a team and manage them for fifteen seasons, during which you buy and sell players and (if you choose to) play the matches. If you win you earn money, which allows you to improve your squad, your staff and your stadium. Starting off with a Premier League team isn’t much of a challenge… so I started off with the local team of my childhood, Brentford. If you don’t know, Brentford are in the third tier of English football, otherwise known as League One (yes, I know that doesn’t really make any sense). I inherited a fairly average squad, and after four seasons they’d conquered the Premier League, won the F A Cup, the League Cup and the Champions League. And despite having a pretty awesome squad I was looking forward to bringing in some even bigger names when the transfer window opened. However…

To cut a long story short, the game started locking up after the matches had been played. In fact the whole console locked up so I’d have to power it down and then turn it on again. The game hadn’t saved the progress, so I’d have to play it again… it would lock up again, so I’d have to play the match again… and again… and again. Sometimes I could play three matches without a problem (and progress a bit) and then it would lock up continually and I’d play the same match six or seven times over. Fed up with this, I searched on the FIFA 10 forums – several people had reported this, but there was no resolution (remember that, several people had reported this problem). I’d turned auto-save off just in case it was having an issue at the point of a game-save, but to no avail. So I contacted the support team at Electronic Arts…

During a live chat their support specialist told me to delete the saved games… but that means I’ll lose all my progress, right? No, because I should back them up onto a USB drive, and then copy them back over. So, back-up the files, delete them, and then re-instate them? Yes. Hmmm. He also told me to clear the Xbox’s cache. I did all of this and it made absolutely no difference.

Maybe my Brentford career had some sort of corruption – I saved the career as a new saved game… that didn’t work. I bit the bullet and started a new career, this time with nearby team Reading. Season one went smoothly, I won the Championship, the F A Cup and the League Cup. At the start of season two the problems started again. I contacted EA support again, not as a live chat but as a discussion-style support incident. I explained the problem, and received exactly the same copy-and-paste answer as last time (even though I’d explained that I’d already tried their original suggestions which they had a record of). I explained that I’d already been through these suggestions, and asked for them to be honest… was there a fault in FIFA 10? Remember, it’s not just me seeing this.

A few hours later I received an update, and it was another copy-and-paste answer, this time suggesting that there was either a problem with my game disk or my Xbox. First the game disk – it’s in pristine condition, there’s no smudges or scratches. Oh, and the game itself is installed to the hard disk which means that during game play the game disk isn’t used. Problem with the Xbox? Let’s look at the evidence – no other game has a problem, it’s just FIFA 10 and the problem always occurs at a precise moment (after a match has been played, just before the man-of-the-match screen is displayed). If there was a problem with the console wouldn’t game problems be more random? I put these thoughts into my next reply, and this time added fifteen links to pages and forums where other people are having the same problem. It’s now twenty-four hours since EA’s last response – maybe they’re looking into it, or maybe they’re just hoping I’ll go away.

Electronic Arts… there’s clearly a problem with FIFA 10, so have the guts to admit it. Even if in admitting it you tell you that it’s not going to be fixed, then at least I’ll know not to waste any more time on the game. Maybe the problem will be fixed in FIFA 11, but if they think I’m going to cough up £40 for another FIFA game they are seriously misguided.

Update:

Here’s some news… I’ve isolated what causes the lock-up problem after a match. FIFA 10 has a bug, and I can now reproduce it… and avoid it.

It’s caused by the man-of-the-match. If the player who is man-of-the-match is one of the eleven on-field players when the match ends, the game doesn’t lock up. If the player who is highest-rated (and destined to be man-of-the-match) is substituted, then the game freezes just before the man-of-the-match is shown. You can check the player ratings during the course of the game so it’s fairly easy to isolate two or three players likely to be man-of-the-match.

I’ve tested this theory in eight matches played this evening, and correctly predicted whether the game would progress or lock each time.

So, it’s not corrupted saved games, nor is it a game disk or Xbox problem… FIFA 10 has a bug which is reproducible.

Update to the update:

EA support told me (eventually) that they’ve escalated the issue to a higher level and “hopefully a patch to fix this will be out soon”. Hopefully. I been saying “hopefully I’ll win the lottery soon” for a few years, but it hasn’t happened yet.