… will be giving an “XPages 101” session in London. He will be “assisted” by his nefarious side-kick, the Milky Bar Kid:

And, if you’re around in the evening, drinkies at The Founders Arms. Huzzah!

Big thanks to Mr. Steve McDonagh for the Photoshopping!

There’s a great quote in there about Bill Tutte, the mathematician who famously figured out the key to cracking the Nazis’ cipher:

Said Captain Roberts: “I used to see him twiddling his pencil staring into space and I wondered a few times if he was earning his corn, but he clearly was.”

See, when we coders are arsing around on our computers, what we’re really doing is thinking, oh yes :-)

In all seriousness, sixty years on I am profoundly awe-struck by the achievements of those at Bletchley Park. Read this piece (and watch the accompanying video) for a spellbinding insight into our past.

Matt White: Just eight days to go…

I hit a personal Lotusphere 2010 record on day three, and attended not one, but two—yes, two—sessions. First up was an XPages deep-dive from Tim Tripcony and Stephan Wissel, covering server-side Javascript, the various scope objects available, and so on. Really informative, with plenty of ideas and example code to play with. I think Stephan’s jokes were even worse than mine. Good stuff.

My second session on Wednesday was actually a BOF, hosted by Warren Elsmore, and covering user groups. We had a good attendance and the discussion was fruitful I think. Plenty of ideas being thrown around, and it was grand to get more insight into the good work of Scott Treggiari (LotusUserGroup.org), Warren, Kitty, Paul, Eileen et al.

The rest of the day was taken up on the Elguji software pedestal, and I’d say that it was probably our busiest day: quite a few people came by for chats and demos. We even had an impromptu rendition of Happy Birthday for a certain Bill Buchan. He wasn’t embarrassed at all, nooooooooo…

I like talking to people, and as a long-time “yellow blogger” I suppose I have plenty of ASW-style chutzpah, but despite all that, the “hard sell” approach to manning a stand is not something I could ever do. Thankfully, this view is shared by my fellow booth babes, and so we took a deliberately low-key approach to running the Elguji stand at Lotusphere this year. On the whole, I reckon those perusing the showcase appreciated this. Rather than give away trinkets and bludgeon our visitors with hard sales talk, we discussed the ins and outs of maintaining FAQs, self-service knowledge bases, innovation management, and of course demonstrated IdeaJam and IQJam. But it was interesting to see how many booth visitors expected us to do that hard sale. Almost a “Come on, impress me” thing. I hope we didn’t disappoint too much ;-)

Day 4: Wednesday

Day four, and the showcase is done—more scope for attending presentations. Exciting! Julian Robichaux had a repeat of his iPhone session scheduled, which pleased me greatly, as that was one of the key ones I wanted to attend. So, I perambulated to that one, and was not disappointed. Splendid. Amazing content delivered by one of my favourite speakers. Julian rocked, as usual, and fared well despite losing his poor old co-speaker, Rob McDonagh (alas, poor Rob, we were all thinking of you, being called back to work).

After Julian’s presentation, a few of us stayed in the room to check out the following session, from our new Lotusphere Idol, Martin (need to check his site when I’m back on-line)! He was good, and delivered an entertaining talk about his XPages experiences.

Gurupalooza came next, which was quite entertaining in places. Far too much talk of SANs for my blood though, and not enough developer geekery! After Gurupalooza, a number of us went for lunch at The Fountain with our lovely benefactors Bruce and Gayle—thanks guys.

The final session was “Ask The Developers” which is always good value. Some cracking questions in there, and we finished on a high note, with Volker asking a great one (re high-fidelity database icons) and Maureen Leland giving Jeff Eisen what-for. Most entertaining :-)

So here I am, far too early at the gate, surrounded by MacBooks, and waiting to fly home (I hurried to the airport after seeing horrific lines in security when we flew in, but the chaos actually seems to move pretty quickly). This means I missed the closing session, which was a bit of a bummer (but then so did Matt, Warren, Julian, Alan and Paul, all heading off to Vegas for the weekend!)

So there it is. Didn’t really get to say goodbye to many people, sorry about that. But I loved my time at Lotusphere this week: roll on 2011, I wonder what it will bring?

My profound thanks to Bruce and Gayle for giving me the opportunity to come to Lotusphere this year. It was also a pleasure to work on the pedestal with such stand-up good eggs as Matt White and Julian Woodward. (Oh, and the Wookiee too).

After lunch, like a lot of others, we toddled off to go and see Matt and Tim do their show-and-tell session on XPages. It was pretty busy (apparently overflowed) and the content was, as expected, very good. I’ve done a few XPages sessions now, and I think the core principles are now starting to really sink in. Splendid.

Sunday continued with chats and happy meetings (I even got photographed as a “tall person”), and then later the Elguji booth team got together. The usual Sunday evening pool party kicked off in the early evening, and degenerated into a booze-laden chat-fest in Kimono’s. Hope I didn’t talk Mr. Castledine’s ear off.

Monday started pretty early again. We got in line for the OGS, and then chuckled as die-hard Lotus geeks ran for the good seats. Crikey.

Plenty of others have blogged their thoughts on the OGS. I won’t add (much) to the noise except to say that yes it was a little “light” but then on the other hand IBM can’t be making grand new techology announcements every year. I appreciated the Star Trek theme with Shatner! and the whole Project Vulcan thing. Suitably cool and geeky name .

IBM gave us the Lotus strategy low-down, and that was good to hear. The customer stories were a nice touch, if a little stilted, and the panel which was hosted by incoming GM Mr. Rennie was good fun. Messrs Picciano and Rennie both came over really well; Bob’s been good for Lotus, and Alistair looks set to continue his good work. In more fits of optimism, I also have high hopes for Project Vulcan. The current proofs of concept look good. All I can say is that I hope they don’t let the Big Clients brow-beat them into destroying beautiful slick interfaces, adding oodles of “features” at the expense of usability. But hey, it’s all just smoke and mirrors for now, we must wait and see.

Anyway, back to the stand: we were pretty busy after the OGS, and then had peaks and troughs in visitor numbers for the rest of Monday. It’s great to work the stand, talking with the people who come by. The LDC t-shirts are also proving very popular! A few of us slipped in and out of the product showcase to check out sessions. I did just the one, Ed and Kevin’s keynote, which was pretty useful.

Gab reported back to me on the Mutant Mountain Goat. He attended Tim’s mobile development session, and amused the hosts by raising his arm to ask questions, like a wee school boy (he does that in the office too). The seven-foot tall ginger loon then made a trademark subtle exit after he’d heard all about Blackberry coding, as he is allergic to anything Apple-related.

Monday night saw reams of parties after the product showcase reception, including our very own UK night at Shula’s.

So that was a busy Monday, great fun. Looking forward to what Tuesday, day 3, will bring…

Anyway, I flew in with the Wookiee yesterday, and all in all it was a pretty good trip (despite a very early start). Gatwick security was surprisingly bearable considering we’d steeled ourselves for the worst, and in a flash of extravagance, we opted for a cheap(ish) upgrade to Premier on Virgin flying over. That was a damn good decision. Whilst I am average of stature, the furry loon is lofty, and the upgraded seats (in groups of two with plenty of room for star-jumps in the aisle) were a blessing.

So the flight proceeded without incident, and we were pulling up to the Dolphin just after 5pm. After honing the double act with our lovely hotel receptionist (got a great room overlooking the pool and volleyball area), we registered, abluted, and hied our sorry arses to the boardwalk. The Wookiee wussed out somewhat early, but he has been a tad ill, so fair enough (probably distemper). I made it til around half past midnight, thus completing a nice round twenty-five hours awake. Woof! It’s great to be out of the grey cold wet misery of the UK at the moment.

We managed to see and chat with a number of people last night, but there are very many more I want to catch up. Come and talk! Bruce, Mark, Julian, Matt and myself will all be on the Elguji Software stand (#622) in between sessions and so forth, and would love to see you.

(I suspect we may be out for the odd beer most nights too (cough), especially Monday!)

Great news from m’chums and colleagues over at Elguji Software:

Since its release in November 2009, the sales of our IQJam product are exceeding our pre-launch forecasts. Customers have been quick to deploy IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1 servers and, with those deployments we are seeing our existing customer base, as well as many new customers purchasing and deploying IQJam.

elguji.com: Absolutely exceeding our expectations.

I’ve started to visit IQJam quite a lot, and it’s an eminently usable, beautiful web application. I’d love to see it become the “go-to place” for Domino-related queries. I think it’s fair to say that conventional forums for this sort of thing have really had their day. “Karma-based” systems just work so well.

Anyway, all that said, those who do visit the site will see a lot of Xpages-related content. Don’t be put off! As much as IBM would like you to think otherwise, a lot of organisations aren’t at version 8.5x yet, so XPages often tend toward nice-to-have R&D for these places. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer your answers and ask your questions: go for it.

Of course, another fine differentiator for IQJam is its API, in both traditional web service and flexible JSON flavours. This means IQJam cries out for lots of lovely integration, and you can expect to see some very cool stuff in this regard in the not too distant future (cough—Lotusphere—cough).

(I should state, in the interests of full disclosure, that I will be helping on stand 622 at Lotusphere next week )

So, be sure to come and see all the sponsors / UKLUGers, and grab your gold stickers!

Full details can be found on Warren’s weblog.

The hard reality of the corporate coding way of life is that various people always want to know what you’re doing, what you’ve fixed, what changes are in what release, and so on and so forth. When it comes to Domino development, this is where a tool like Teamstudio’s CIAO! comes in to play. If you’re diligent about providing check-out comments, and you tag up a version within CIAO! every time you do a build for your deployment / admin. team, you already have the wherewithal to produce complete change logs, with next to no effort. How? Simply make use of this menu option:

Smashing stuff; can’t recommend CIAO! highly enough, even just for this sort of thing, never mind all the versioning / team development splendour.

But what about non-NSF code? What about all the stuff that you may ram into different version control systems? Well, I’m living in Eclipse at the moment, and as the project utilises the skills of a whole panoply of developers, CVS is a must for us. Every time we do a significant release of a component (our project encompasses two different—but related—modules in CVS), we have to provide some form of change log. And casting your mind back to the exact change you made to fix some bug, three weeks previous is tricky to say the least. What you need is some kind of tool for producing your change logs.

I have found such a thing. Moreover, it is really simple to use, is open-source, and it’s free. Allow me to introduce you to CVS Log Change Builder. CVS Log Change Builder is a simple soul in that it just comprises a single Perl script.

That’s it, no executables or other bits of nonsense, just a beautifully simple tool (assuming you have a CVS client on your path).

OK, how do you use it? Well, first up you need to edit it to point at your CVS server like so:

my $CvsRoot=':pserver:USERNAME@CVS_SERVER_NAME:/CVS';

Once that’s done, copy the Perl script to the check-out root of the module you wish to report upon, and run the script. Here’s one typical use for it:

perl cvschangelogbuilder.pl -output=buildhtmlreport

… note that the script can take a wee while to run (and may prompt to save your CVS password in a .cvspass file the first time round also), but once it’s finished, you should have a lovely shiny report. In the example command above, we’re electing to output as a manager-friendly HTML file. Everything’s there: who checked in what and when, how many lines of code you got (always an important metric, right?), pretty colours, the lot.

Job’s a good ’un!

I’m deliberately ignoring all talk of recession by the way. 2009 was the year that I truly learned to detest the mainstream media, and its hysterical reaction to, well, just about everything. This is so unhealthy; best not to focus on that!

Professionally, things have been good. The London Developer Co-op has really started to take off: we’re sharing work (which was always the primary intention), supporting each others clients and playing to our strengths. We’ve also landed our first clients for the Co-op in its own right, which is exciting.

As an aside, the Co-op is made up of a number of reprobates who enjoy the odd pint, so socialising was never going to be on the back-burner now was it? There have been a fair few LotusBeers this year—Herr Weber was able to join us for one particularly memorable one in October!—and the Co-op has also played co-host to two parties, one in the summer, and one this festive season. Great fun! Look out for more socialising when we hit Orlando next month.

Returning to the (vaguely) professional theme, of note is the fact that the Wookiee and I have spent the past five months at our main client writing nothing but Java day-in, day-out. The project is a killer, but we have some code and tips ready to spring on you in 2010—you have been warned! Eee, we’ve upped the ante when it comes to acronyms and Java-based technologies: Ant, JPA, Hibernate, Quartz, Flex, you name it, we’ve buggered it up and then fixed it again—and not a Domino agent in sight.

I could not perform a review of 2009 without mentioning UKLUG in Edinburgh. A fantastic event put on by fantastic people. Mark and I presented once again, and even garnered some pretty decent feedback (wonders will never cease). If you attended our session, you also saw my MacBook Pro crash! Yes! An Apple crash! As it turns out, this very public freeze was early warning that some of my RAM was on its way out—oh now, that was a fun Friday when it finally failed good and proper.

I digress.

Other highlights of the year included StackOverflow's inaugural DevDays session in London and a shhhhhhhhplendid tootle around the Yorkshire Dales in September. Also on the walking front (!), in late May / June, the Poole family hit Florida for a very welcome (if exhausting) holiday. Theme park-mungous it was.

Talking of StackOverflow, that site has become a great resource for me, and I’m even answering the odd question over there now (got my first negative vote this week, woo hoo).

And so to 2010. What gives? Well, this site is getting a make-over. More code will be forthcoming. The Co-op will be doing lots, and hopefully we will all hang on to our collective sanity for another year.

Happy new year one and all.