As for Code Year, what a great initiative!

If you are not a programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.

Douglas Rushkoff says it best.

To their credit, Netgear had beta firmware releases out in no time, which addressed this issue. However, one side effect seemed to be that for those of us who also use the ReadyNAS as a print server (it’s a Linux box basically, so you get CUPS for free), printing was b0rked. Bonjour detection of the printer was still OK, one could send print jobs to it, but something went awry along the way and OS X reported Unable to get printer status. Hmm.

A very helpful chap by the name of Dr. Christian Fries posted some steps on the official ReadyNAS forums to address this printing issue. I can report that whilst this tip did not work for me with the beta firmware releases, bizarrely it does now that the firmware is production-ready (I’m using the newly-released 4.1.8 for my SPARC-based NV+).

Here I reproduce Dr. Fries’ tip with some notes of my own, and I’ve also added a screenshot of the end result in CUPS (this is all assuming you’re on OS X BTW!)

1. Set up the printer as you would normally (it should just appear when you add a printer in system preferences (assuming you advertise ReadyNAS print queues over Bonjour). My device is a Canon PIXMA iP4500. It comes with reasonable drivers, but they won’t work if you use the printer on the network via a NAS. Instead, once you’ve opted to add your printer, choose the drop-down option to “Select Printer Software…” thus: … and then select the relevant Gutenberg driver for your printer (they cover pretty much everything out there). You should have Gutenberg drivers installed already, but you can always grab the latest versions at the Gutenberg site.
2. Open http://127.0.0.1:631 in your web browser. This is the CUPS page, the printing subsystem of OS X (you may need to alter the IP address or host, depending on your set-up).
3. Select “Administration” and then “Manage Printers”. Select the non-functioning ReadyNAS print queue.
4. Now choose “Modify Printer” from the “Administration” drop-down that appears below the print queue name.
5. On the resulting screen, look for the heading “Other Network Printers” and click the “Windows printer via spoolss” radio button. Click “Continue” and you should then see a screen requesting a connection string…
6. … this connection string should be in this format: smb://YOUR_NAS/YOUR_QUEUE, where YOUR_NAS is either the host name or private IP address of your ReadyNAS as it appears in the Finder (e.g. readynas.local or 192.168.1.1) and YOUR_QUEUE is the name of your printer as it appears in the ReadyNAS FrontView screen (note that you don’t need to include port numbers or extra bits like IPP as you might expect; just use the path as expressed here).
7. Done!

OK, so this is how my printer looks in CUPS (where iP4500_serie is the name of the queue in FrontView):

Read the original post - ReadyNAS forums: Re: Problems printing with 4.1.18

This is pretty handy if, like me, you use multiple addresses. OK, so here’s how to set that up in Mail.app’s preferences: go to the “Account Information” tab in the “Accounts” pane, and edit the “Email Address” field thus:

Just separate the addresses you want to use with commas: easy! Now, where things become a little trickier is in the realm of iOS. The lack of apparent multiple email address support in the iOS mail client was a bit of a bug-bear to me last week especially, whilst on holiday. Yes, you can set up multiple email accounts, one for each address you want to use, but that’s nasty—especially when it comes to downloading your mail (multiple copies ahoy).

In a moment of quiet contemplation I figured that perhaps the comma trick would work in iOS too, but you hit an apparent impasse as the mail client set-up precludes the use of commas in the “Address” field. Hmm. Ah, but a bit of lateral thinking suggests that if perhaps one has a comma secreted about one’s person (OK, in one’s clipboard), the lack of comma in the relevant on-screen keyboard becomes moot. Aha!

Well what do you know, it worked. When checking this wee tip out I found an excellent post which summarises what is required, step-by-step, with screenshots to boot. Take a gander:

Nick Cernis: Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses (the link is Google-specific, but I see no reason why the tips contained therein can’t work for your provider of choice).

Splendid.

You see, I tried NNW on the iPhone (it was OK but didn’t really “stick” for me). I “upgraded” to NNW 4 (the app store-friendly iteration) but that has some annoying deficiencies and shows no sign of ever being updated, and I was somewhat frustrated with my news feeds as a result.

But I’d heard good things about Reeder, and after a straw poll on twitter, decided to get it. Well, it sure is purty, so having made the purchase I fired it up and imported my news feeds. Splendid! I used it happily for a couple of weeks, and then opted to grab the iOS version too. Even better! It’s good to be keeping up with news again now. First of all, Reeder chucks content to whatever service you care to mention (I use delicious and Instapaper mainly, but the Evernote integration is cool too), and what’s more, the iOS / Mac OS versions sync nicely via Google Reader.

Recommended.

Indeed, designing for a mobile experience is actually a great exercise for enterprise software vendors. It puts the focus on simplicity and the most commonly used functions. It’s also a chance to re-imagine the UX of the software. It wouldn’t surprise me if elements the mobile optimized HTML [a strange sentence, but I’m sure you get his point - BP] find their way back to the main web experience.

Hutch Carpenter: Four reasons enterprise software should skip native mobile apps.

There’s a parallel here; look at where Apple are going with iOS, OSX (and the respective app stores) with noticeable feature and paradigm exchanges between the Mac and its iBrethren. The interplay between iOS and OSX has come to the point that the forthcoming release of the Mac’s operating system (“Lion”) will include a number of innovations originally seen in iOS. It’s clear that this is happening in the mobile space too. Constraints in screen real estate, functionality and memory have all led to some real innovation. The provision of decent mobile browsers (mainly courtesy of WebKit) now means that we have some amazing frameworks for all major devices. And what technologies do some of these frameworks base themselves on? Why, good old HTML and Javascript! Look at the aforementioned Appcelerator and PhoneGap, or the web frameworks jQuery Mobile and Sencha if you don’t believe me (heck, look at the demonstration of Windows 8 that’s out there).

So developers, if you’re looking for some new stuff to learn, by all means roll with Ruby, partake of some Python, simper with Scala… but don’t neglect trusty mark-up and its pal Javascript—in case it’s not become clear yet, you will need your web skills more and more.

Shameless plug: if you need some mobile web development for your organisation, get in touch. We fellows at the London Developer Co-op are doing more and more in this space).

Certain of the comments on Hansson’s post remind me of this quote from Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

:-) Anyway, back to Heinemeier Hansson:

At the same time, IT job security is often dependent on making things hard, slow, and complex. If the Exchange Server didn’t require two people to babysit it at all times, that would mean two friends out of work. Of course using hosted Gmail is a bad idea! It’s the same forces and mechanics that slowly turned unions from a force of progress (proper working conditions for all!) to a force of stagnation (only Jack can move the conference chairs, Joe is the only guy who can fix the microphone).

It’s a compelling argument: the traditional IT department is frequently derided for being a “blocker”, and in my experience that’s often fair. At the same time, typical corporate IT cost centres are split between a multitude of competing interests, and suffer at the hands of empire-builders, architecture astronauts, bungling change and communication policies, pointy-haired bosses, disgruntled end-users and disenfranchised staff. So if we are indeed in the midst of a cycle which heralds the passing of the traditional IT department, is that really such a bad thing for all concerned?

Update: I’m re-building server re-directs and DNS is still propagating, so inward-bound links may be a little off-colour today.

Some of us have been clamouring for Domino Designer back on the Mac since it was pulled in release five. The Mac OS landscape (and mindshare of course) has changed dramatically since the R5 days, and then IBM came along and added fuel to the fire by using Eclipse as the base for new versions of Designer.

Fire? How so? I hear you ask… Well, inadvertently or not, in using Eclipse for your IDE you’re screaming that your environment will work on more than a Windows box. In the heady days of dreamy possibility represented by Hannover, one of the vaunted plus points for using Eclipse was its expandability, but also the fact that Eclipse is cross-platform.

Sooner or later, if Notes apps are to continue, the aged Windows-based C code underlying the standard Notes client has to be re-written, and then DDE has the wherewithal to become a true cross-platform Eclipse-based IDE of some heft.

But that won’t happen. Why? XPages. Drop the Notes cruft, go with the JSF-based XPages platform. If you have that, and only that, for your Domino apps, you stand a fighting chance of getting a cross-platform IDE^*. Until then, you’re pissing in the wind.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean this as a criticism (which may surprise some readers given my long-standing fondness for Macs). IBM have to pick their battles, and funds have to be apportioned: they’re not going to spend $$$ making layout regions work in Designer on Ubuntu.

^* that said, I still wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. The Rational / Websphere tooling doesn’t have all this cruft, and that doesn’t work on OS X either.

Together as Couchbase, we’ll have the fastest, most scalable (both scale up and scale down) NoSQL solution. We will become the standard storage for mobile devices, and the standard server technology for syncing them all together. Our unified solution will dramatically simplify your technology stack and maintenance for building fast responsive apps that scale to millions of users, and also scaling down to phones so people can work and play even when not connected to the network.

Now that’s a vision / mission statement / objective / call-it-what-you-will. CouchDb has always offered a replicating, mobile-friendly document-based data store, and Membase is one of those ridiculously scalable, high-availability databases. So combining the two to come up with the best of breed NoSQL solution is most definitely going to garner the new company some attention; I wish Damien and the team the very best of British!

(Couchbase also has a great tag-line: Is it us, or did databases just get a lot more awesome?)

Jeepers. Still let’s move on. What insight does Mr. Bowden have for us now that we’re well into the 21st century?

I predict that in 2011 most businesses will start running the whole gamut of modern online web marketing activities by utilizing new tools and services made available by a variety of companies worldwide.

OK. Well that was a sentence entirely devoid of meaning. Let’s try again:

Take personal to a whole new level
Welcome the customer and make it personal by offering products and services so specialized that they can’t say “no.” One way to personalize is based on customer attitude, tastes, opinions, preferences, and desires. Use analytics tools…

Ah yes, analytics, IBM’s current “thing”. We call it “reporting” round our way, and we’ve had it since, well, since we’ve had websites. Still, there it is.

Mr. Bowden goes on to talk about personalisation, and how that is crucial for a successful business site. Indulge me as I tell a tale that is all too familiar to many IBM Business Partners out there: Big Blue make it personal for me by (a) getting my company name wrong on every page (despite my telling them the correct name in about sixteen different profile screens) and (b) by insisting that I use a defunct email address from my previous employer as my ibm.com log-in. Hmm. OK, I suspect we’ve said all that needs saying… Next!

If your marketing team is not discussing ways to add more rich media to your website, I recommend it start now. According to the information technology encyclopedia website WhatIsThis.com, rich media is…

Enough. NEXT!

Make it go
If you can’t check out all the sections of your website with a smartphone or an iPad then forget about gaining and retaining new customers.

Wise words. It makes sense to have your site accessible from mobile devices, especially when you consult with partners and customers about “exceptional web experiences.” So let’s take a look at ibm.com, first with the ready.mobi validator:

Hmm, not so good. But take it with a pinch of salt: they’re not testing with smartphones in mind, and they have stuff to sell. What about the W3C’s mobile checker?

Better.

I think I’m done. Thanks for hanging in there, I am off for a lie down in a dark room.

(If you want some help with your website, have a chat with your friendly local web developer or IBM Business Partner. They will help you, and on their behalf I promise they won’t use the words “analytics” or “exceptional”).