Not content with this blog, I’m also now a contributor to the UK Lotusphere Comes To You blog. Not much to tell you other than we’re using the blog to keep the punters updated on what’s going on with the LCTY preparations… and it’ll be useful to get feedback from those visiting the site to register and view the agenda.
For someone who rarely visits the cinema, I am madly interested in movies and movie news. Instead of going to the cinema, I buy DVDs which I never get a chance to watch… although actually I do copy them onto the Archos and watch them on the Camberley Express into London.
I quite liked the recent ‘Hulk’ movie directed by Ang Lee and starring Eric Bana - some of it was a bit slow-going but there’s a glorious segment about two-thirds of the way through where the US armed forces chase the big green fella across the desert, and fun ensues as he throws tanks and helicopters around.
An even newer Hulk adaptation starring Edward Norton is one the cinematic highlights I probably won’t get to see this year, along with ‘Iron Man’, ‘The Dark Knight’ (the latest Batman flick) and ‘Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Zimmer Frame’. Nevertheless, I was excited (possibly the wrong word… interested, maybe) to see the news of the Hulk trailer on Comingsoon.Net. So I clicked on the link and made ready with the headphones… but in the embedded movie player I saw the message pictured here.
I can understand being asked to leave a room while someone explains US encryption export policy to some US citizens (yes, it did happen), but this is a bit stupid. What’s the point? Spoilsports.
The family tree project is going well, but there are still a few gaps to be filled in for the mid and late-19th century. I received an incredible amount of detail from a distant cousin from my grandfather’s side of the family, including details of where my great-grandfather was born, where his father died just a year later, and where my great-great-grandfather was married. However, I decided that I didn’t just want too much information handed to me on a plate, so I will do my own research on that side of the family.
Over at my grandmother’s side of the family, the Clinch dynasty, there have been a few walls to knock down. Still the most pressing is the identity of my great-grandmother, Alice West. This was not an uncommon name in 19th century London, so some clues were required. I decided to cough up for my grandmother’s birth certificate, even though I supposed I had all the info that it would contain. However, it arrived yesterday and it revealed one crucial piece of information… a middle name, Maud. This meant that I could discount any candidate who wasn’t shown as Alice, Alice M or Alice Maud… and that narrows it down significantly.
There was one other interesting piece of info… my grandmother (also Alice) was born at the family’s home, 32 Wood Street. Yet in the 1901 census, ten years earlier, the family lived at 30 Wood Street, and my great-grandfather’s older brother lived at number 32. Stranger than truth, except it’s true (or it could have been an error on the part of the census taker).
The next obvious step in revealing more details of Alice Maud West would be to obtain her marriage certificate. This should be found by cross-referencing marriages of Henry Clinch to Alice West in a time period and in London. I’ve used this method successfully for other ancestors, but on this occasion it drew a blank. Despite an exhaustive search, one that I’ve repeated several times, with variations on names, I’ve failed to find any record of their marriage. Perhaps they didn’t get married. There’s a thought…
But then I hit on something. Normally if you search a marriage register and view an index number in a given district it will display an even number of men and women, signifying that these men married these women, although you won’t be sure who married who (in 1911 they changed the marriage register to show who married who without the need of the actual certificate). However for the 2nd quarter of 1898, in the London district of St Saviour (Southwark) there are five names… three women and two men. So, a fair guess that one of the men’s names is missing. The trouble is, the Alice West listed could have married one of the other two men, that I can’t tell from the marriage register.
I then looked at the birth register and discovered that in 1879 (the right year) an Alice Maud West was born in St Saviour. Okay, this could all be highly coincidental. There is only one way to find out, and that’s to obtain the 1898 marriage certificate for Alice West of St Saviour and see what it says. It could be £7 down the drain, but it could be one of the most important pieces of the jigsaw. If she does turn out to be my great-grandmother, I already know the names of her parents and her grandmother (courtesy of the 1881 census). Mind you, I’ve been sure of details before, only to have found they were wrong later. It’s worth a £7 gamble, so here goes…
While we at IBM Lotus have yellow as our brand colour, it seems that Microsoft are aiming for green. At CeBIT last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (yes, the guy who did the whooping monkey dance) claimed that Microsoft are at the forefront of environmentally-sound computing. Ballmer’s claims included the fact that Windows Vista’s idle mode consumes 33 times less power than that of Windows XP, and Windows Server 2008 consumes up to 40% less power than the 2003 version. Notice the mixing of measurements here, one being a factor and one being a percentage, making the second measurement seem more impressive than the first at a first glance… but when you think about it, it’s not.
Now, don’t get me wrong, making computers more energy-efficient is a wonderful thing and I applaud Microsoft for putting this into their strategy. However, let’s think about this in more detail. I can see that making desktop computers and laptops more energy-efficient while in idle mode will reap benefits, since people leave their workstations on when they go for lunch, go for a meeting, go to the toilet, go for a ciggie break, or (if you work from home) go for a quick game of Wii tennis. But Softchoice refute this claim, stating that Vista’s CPU requirements are 243% greater than that of XP, and this alone will knock out any idle time savings.
So how about the servers? Well, if it’s down to idle time the big question would be “why would your servers be idle?”… or “when would your servers be idle?”. And another thought springs to mind… if you servers are idle, is your server strategy wrong?
Taking this further, my thoughts go down two paths. The first is one that I do come back to quite often, the ol’ Domino versus Exchange argument. As I often say, I’m no Exchange expert, so by all means go and ask an Exchange expert about this. My understanding is that Exchange 2007 no longer supports active / active clustering… Exchange 2003 did, but not 2007. Why Microsoft decided to take it out of the product is a mystery to me - I’ve heard it said that no-one used it anyway, but that sounds like a reason to improve it, not yank it out. Domino does support active / active clustering (most Domino customers use this model), meaning that all the servers in a cluster are working and thus they need fewer servers to achieve 24 x 7 operation than an Exchange customer would. Fewer servers is a more green approach, whether they be working their chips off or sitting idle.
The second path is a continuum of the first (are you following this?) and comes back to the ‘fewer servers’ issue. Microsoft solutions run on Windows. That’s it, end of story. IBM solutions run on Windows, but also System i, System p and System z (and Linux, and a few other platforms such as Sun Solaris). Let’s take System i for example - anyone who wants to argue that System i doesn’t scale well beyond the capabilities of Windows either doesn’t know anything about the subject or needs their head tested. We have a Domino customer running 24,000 users’ mail boxes on two clustered System i servers. If they were to move that deployment to Windows servers, I’d say they’d need somewhere between eight and twelve servers (and if, to throw the thought in, they were running Exchange that would mean even more servers because of the clustering requirements).
Okay, it’s not as simple as saying it’s two servers versus eight (or ten, or twelve) because clearly the System i server is a different beast to a Windows server, in terms of both operating system and hardware. But System i servers are no longer the size of an American-style fridge-freezer so the difference in power consumption is not what you’d think. Server consolidation from many small-scale servers to fewer large-scale servers does add up, especially when you start to consider the whole ecosystem of a data centre in terms of cooling and peripheral devices. About a year ago one of my colleagues conducted a cost of ownership study for an Exchange-using customer with around 150 servers, and calculated that they could save about £300,000 per annum in electricity consumption by switching to fewer consolidated large-scale Domino servers.
And this isn’t just about Domino… take WebSphere Application Server - the same applies, you will have the potential to run many more transactions on one System p server than on a group of Windows servers.
IBM’s colour is blue, Lotus’ is yellow… mix them together and what do you get?
In the run-up to the release of IBM Lotus Notes 8 I put together a presentation about the client’s top ten features (going up to eleven, Spinal Tap-style). I even included a picture of Nigel Tufnel. Some members of the audience got it, some… had never seen the movie.
So, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is put together a page on that top ten (eleven). The list has changed a bit since some new features have come in with 8.0.1 (most notably widgets and live text). You can access the page here.
If anyone disagrees with my list, or has an idea for something else to be included, let me know with a comment.
Yancy Lent set up a web site named Planet Lotus which aggregates the feeds of various Lotus-related web sites into a single feed served up into the site’s home page - very cool. This isn’t new news to many people within the Lotus community, it’s just that my blog landed on Planet Lotus today.
The background is that we tried to add this site’s feed to Planet Lotus a few months ago but it didn’t work. This was very strange - not a WordPress problem as several WordPress-based sites worked. Yesterday Yancy had the idea of me registering dadams.co.uk on FeedBurner to pick up the RSS feed, and then Planet Lotus automatically picks up the feed from FeedBurner. And ‘hey presto’… I’m there.
It must be lovely being a Microsoft Exchange customer. All your users are happy because they have a nice shiny Outlook client and don’t know any better. However, you have to wonder if the boys in the back-room view it the same way.
I get a lot of mileage out of Exchange’s roadmap (or lack of it). I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject - why should I be, I don’t work for Microsoft, do I? No, I just tell customers to go and ask Microsoft the right questions.
Over the years we’ve been told that we have a slim window of opportunity to tackle Exchange customers. Exchange 5.5 upgrades (upgrades?) to Exchange 2000 for example - the absolute requirement of Active Directory and an upgrade that was really a migration made a lot of customers stop and think. Although there are still a few Exchange 5.5 customers around, that window of opportunity has all but closed, but Microsoft kindly open another. An ‘upgrade’ from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 cannot be carried out in-place… mail boxes have to be physically moved from one server to another. And the server hardware has to be 64-bit-compliant (maybe no biggie these days) and the Windows operating system also has to be 64-bit. All this hassle and then you find out they removed active / active clustering. No wonder Dell where pushing migrations to Exchange - they knew they’d shift more hardware.
Here’s the latest - Ed Brill, as usual, beat me to it. According to Network World and based on advice from Microsoft themselves, “it is impossible to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2008 on a server running Exchange 2007 SP1″. Hang on, haven’t these people just moved big chunks of data from one server to another? Or many servers to many other servers? Now they have to do it again?
Microsoft also has said “rolling upgrades” of failover clusters for Exchange are impossible.
Ed noted that Microsoft say “in-place upgrades are not considered a best practice and that most large IT shops do thorough testing before deployment”. Yes, most IT shops (large or small) do carry out thorough testing before deployment. That’s almost a “duh!” moment. However, I’m sure many thousands of Domino customers would disagree on the other point. While it’s true that many customers would take an upgrade as an opportunity to look at the server estate and potential for consolidation, if you told a Domino customer that they had a mandate to move server code and data from one box to another they’d want to know what the f*** was going on. Exchange customers may accept that kind of stuff as business as usual, but Domino customers don’t.
If all this sounds like great fun, you might do well to consider two things. One is an article on eWeek, Exchange Equals Profit, which discusses the fact that services organisations are going to make a lot of money out of Exchange customers because of all of the above. And it contains one of my favourite quotes from 2007…
“Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations.”
Secondly, what about the future of Exchange? As yet they have no published roadmap beyond Exchange 2007 (other than spending time and money on a Windows 2008 upgrade). The smart money is on a version of Exchange which utilises SQL Server under the hood. This raises all kinds of questions… like what’s the matter with the current architecture, does this mean the architecture Microsoft want me to upgrade to is already dead, and (here’s the biggie) is this going to be a simple in-place upgrade or a migration? We’re talking about Exchange’s current object store (which is a bit like the Access database format) versus SQL Server - do you think that’s going to be straightfoward?
But like I said… don’t listen to me, I’m no expert on Exchange. These are just my observations. Yes, I’d prefer to spend time talking about Notes / Domino and how great they are… there will be blog posts on those topics in the coming weeks. I believe that it actually shouldn’t matter what Microsoft are doing, we at Lotus have better solutions for e-mail and collaboration. Period. In the meantime, make sure you understand the implications of the Exchange roadmap - talk to your Microsoft rep and demand answers.
Actually, not a good week. Arsenal were very poor against ManYoo, suffering a 4-0 defeat in the F A Cup. It was a busy night on the M6 as a few thousand dejected Arsenal fans headed back South, and tens of thousands of happy ManUre fans headed back South (or headed to Manchester airport to catch flights to Belfast, Dublin, Oslo, etc). Bacary Sagna missed the game after the sudden death of his 28 year old brother Omar.
The mid-week 0-0 draw against AC Milan wasn’t a disaster but certainly makes the away tie difficult. Mind you, a 1-1 draw would be enough to go through.
So, today it was back to the league, with Arsenal hoping to at least maintain a five point lead. Things couldn’t have started in worse fashion with Eduardo suffering a horrific broken leg in the second minute. The injury was so bad that Sky declined to show a replay - but later Match of the Day did (after issuing a warning), and now I wished I’d looked away. No wonder the Arsenal players looked so distraught. That’s Eduardo out for a year. I am glad that Arsene Wenger retracted and apologised for his earlier comments about Martin Taylor, the unfortunate perpetrator of the tackle - I was planning a post to say that I thought Wenger was wrong to make the comments, and ‘excessive’ was exactly the word I would have used.
However…
Wenger has a right to feel aggrieved about other incidents in the game. Birmingham scored from a free kick which was dubious in it’s award to say the least. Later, 2-1 up, Arsenal had a clear penalty claim ignored when Adebayor was held back. But worst of all was Birmingham’s awarded penalty - Gael Clichy was judged to have brought down Stuart Parnaby. But replays clearly showed that Clichy reached the ball first, thus making it a legal tackle. Well done the ref… a closet ManYoo fan perhaps?
Still there was always the hope that Newcastle could get a draw or even a win against ManUre, and surely Newcastle couldn’t suffer a defeat as bad as the last time they met the South East’s favourites (6-0). It certainly wasn’t as bad… but 5-1 was bad enough. What happened to that team who stuffed ManYoo 5-0 in October 1996? David Ginola, Les Ferdinand, Alan Shearer, Philippe Albert… even Darren Peacock… come back, your former club needs you.
I hope Arsenal take the Premier League title, but much more so I hope Eduardo makes a full recovery and is playing again as soon as possible. To me it’s only a game, but to that unfortunate 24 year-old it’s a career and a way of life.
Despite the small version number increment, there’s a heap of new stuff in Notes / Domino version 8.0.1 (made available this week). There’s some new compression technology which can see your mail box and other valuable Notes application shrink in size by around 35%. There’s some new stuff in the calendar form, like a dedicated place for conference call information rather than putting it in the subject field… get the picture? You know who you are. Sametime 8 is integrated throughout the client, the Symphony editors are mail-enabled, and there’s the Quickr side-shelf (once Quickr 8.1 is made available later this quarter). On the Domino server there’s free in-the-box mobile e-mail in the form of Traveler.
However, the big new feature is ‘My Widgets’ - but I should say “features” as My Widgets is a set of capabilities. Here’s what you can do:
My frolleague and long-time Lotus stalwart Alan Lepofsky posted (internally to IBM) some examples of widgetising your Notes client, and I only had to look at one before getting the idea. The first thing I did was followed Alan’s example of performing a Wikipedia search on highlighted text from an e-mail. Easy. And following the same process I then created another action for finding a person in IBM’s corporate directory BluePages. And then a highlighted word in dictionary.com - this was all too easy. How about a bit more of a challenge?
So, wouldn’t it be cool if you saw a postcode in an e-mail or calendar appointment, and that postcode was ‘live’ so that clicking on it plotted the location on a Google map? Answer: yes.
Okay, the first thing Notes had to do was recognise the text. UK postcodes (usually) have a format like TW18 3AG. A bit of hunting in Dogear (part of Lotus Connections) produced some info on recogniser formats, and thus a UK postcode requires the following format:
[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}[ ]{1}[0-9]{1}[A-Z]{2}
Once this recogniser has been created, Notes will put a green dotted line (default option) under postcodes and any other text it recognises. But now you need an action to go with the recognised postcode. The key to doing this is to grab the format of the URL that Google Maps (UK) will use - so for Lotus Park in Staines it will be:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=TW18+3AG
You then create the widget via the ‘Getting started with widget’s toolbar button and select ‘Web Page’ from the list. Hit ‘Next’ and then select ‘Web page by URL’ and paste in that URL. Hit ‘Next’ again and then select ‘This Web Page’. Hit ‘Next’ again, the web page will display, but carry onto the next stage. Edit the component name, and then you see that one of the input field contains TW18 3AG. Turn on this field with the check box, but remove the postcode from the right-hand side to leave the field blank. At the bottom select ‘ Wire as an action’ and hit ‘Next’. In the next stage you utilise your recogniser by selecting ‘Recognised content’ and then ‘Postcode’ from the drop-down list (you can create a new recogniser at this point). Select where you want to see the results - sidebar panel, new window, floating window or new tab, that’s up to you. Hit ‘Next’ and you’re finished.
Now you can go find a postcode somewhere and try it out. The picture above shows a right-click, but you can set the action going with a single left-click.
Addendum: some UK postcodes have only digit in the first set (e.g. SE1 9PZ), so the recogniser expression needs an ‘or’ operator (|) followed by the other possible expression, as follows:
[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}[ ]{1}[0-9]{1}[A-Z]{2}|[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1}[ ]{1}[0-9]{1}[A-Z]{2}
A quick synopsis. First of all, two well-deserved awards for the Foo Fighters (best international group and album) - anyone else winning those would have been a travesty in my humble opinion.
Best live band - Take That? Well, their New Year’s Even gig shown on t.v. was actually quite good, but you could imagine Muse feeling a bit hard done by. Mark Ronson won the best male artist - despite the fact that I thought his set at the Electric Proms was excellent, you have to consider that this is an award won by a man who has essentially produced an album of covers. What does that say about the range of options?
Amy Winehouse stayed sober and upright long enough to sing twice, but during her second performance she jigged and squirmed and clutched at her dress like someone needing the toilet. Or perhaps in need of something else.
Now here comes my gripe. What do people see in the Arctic Monkeys? I just don’t get it. Best album and best group. Huh? I’m in my, errr, early forties, perhaps I’m not supposed to get it. Mind you, I like the Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Incubus, Muse, The Flaming Lips, Manic Street Preachers, Supergrass - my point is I’m not a Val Doonican fan in a rocking chair (yet). I just don’t get what people see in the Arctic Monkeys.
And finally, an outstanding contribution to music award for Sir Paul. About time too. Other than that the whole thing was rather forgettable.
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