benpoole.com

Feeling old(ish)

My eldest turned ten yesterday. My how time flies. I well recall the night he was born!

But enough of this chatter with you whipper-snappers. I think I’d better take my creaking bones and balding pate off to bed now

After all, I need my rest.

Posted 14:00 PDT on 29 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    6 comments

More on Salesforce.com the Notes killer

Since posting about that Salesforce.com story the other day, a little bit of discussion kicked-off on The Register site. In amongst the predictable UI stuff (although in fairness, the comments are less inflammatory than usual), there’s a gem from “Rob”:

we hear about some great new thing that’s going to replace Notes. It’s usually by people who don’t really know what Lotus Notes/Domino can really do. I’ve been developing web applications using Notes/Domino for about twelve years now. I’d like to replace it too but whenever I look for something to take it’s place I never find a system that even comes close.

Notes has a rich set of security permissions unmatched in any other system I’ve ever used, read about or heard about. I’ve been looking at the Google offerings but they have poor security granularity. The expect the programmers to implement it all from scratch in Python. That feels like having to go back and program in assembly language to me.

And that’s just one feature. There are about five more that are killer that I’m not ready to give up. On the other hand if IBM doesn’t bring the dynamic web code generation into the 20th century, I may be forced to move to new tools (and it won’t be Websphere).

In a nutshell! Read….

Posted 02:30 PDT on 29 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    salesforce.com lotusnotesdomino   |    6 comments

IBM must be really cheesed-off with Apple

Just saw this on Ed’s site:

Read more: Re Update on Notes 8.0.2 performance improvements.

Update looks like this is joke by someone purporting to be Ed on his site.

Posted 02:52 PDT on 28 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    No comments yet

Do you want to get things done?

My good friend, some-time employer and mentor, Eric Mack has got something good going on: eProductivity. Interested? You should be. In just a few conference calls, Eric really switched me on to key elements of the Getting Things Done methodology, and they’ve paid dividends. He has a most excellent project aimed at Lotus Notes users seeking to Get Things Done.

If you fancy a piece of the action, I suggest you go to it!

Posted 16:18 PDT on 27 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    eproductivity gtd   |    No comments yet

Dev. environment envy

Anyway, enough of that political crap. I studied politics for years, and after careful consideration have come to the conclusion that politicians are scum. The End. So now, now on to something more exciting and fruitful: I am suffering development environment envy…

The 100% Mac is the development environment used by all the engineers (i.e. desktops and laptops). A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro. The down side of the whole deal is that you have to choose between two 23” or one 30” Apple Cinema display. Life is tough and you just can’t have it all. ;-)

Read more: LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac.

Posted 13:20 PDT on 26 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    linkedin osx   |    9 comments

It’s official: the UK government is nuts

Not that there was really any doubt:

Harriet Harman has defended plans to make it legal for firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates.

Tinker, tinker, tinker. And so we are left with ridiculous policies and unworkable laws. I think the UK has bigger issues to resolve than perceived inequalities in the workplace.

Read more: BBC news - Harman pushes discrimination plan.

Posted 04:13 PDT on 26 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    4 comments

Salesforce.com has Notes in its sights

This is an interesting one. It would appear that salesforce.com are now gunning for Lotus Notes shops, and plan on offering migration tools. As with red bull, there’s no actual detail as to how they propose to move content out of Notes apps into their own system, but we shall see…

Salesforce.com chairman Marc Benioff, meanwhile, told The Register Notes is losing favor with CIOs after years of IBM pitching itself as a provider of e-services and not meeting expectations. According to Benioff, CIOs are turning to the combo of Google on email and collaboration with Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs, and Salesforce.com for applications.

Read more: The Register - Salesforce.com marches on IBM’s Notes business.

Posted 01:21 PDT on 24 Jun 2008   |   Categories:    |    salesforce.com lotusnotesdomino   |    6 comments