Nothing is more dramatic than the change between the cartoony world of Disney and the grey, political world of Washington DC. We are staying at the Harrington Hotel - it's kind of old and small, but it's a GREAT location. We are right in the middle of everything - the White House is four blocks aways, Mulder and Scully are working just a block away at the FBI building, and the Mall is two blocks away. Monday afternoon we just walked around the White House (and took about a hundred photos) and got acquainted with the area.

Tuesday we started our museum tours with the Natural History Museum and the National Museum of American History. The Natural History Museum was pretty good - it was pretty cool seeing some of the dinosaur skeletons, but it's always a bit weird seeing stuffed animals. The American History museum was a little disappointing, as the whole popular culture section, which is probably the most interesting to a non-American, was closed.

Tuesday night we realised we had lucked onto another event - the State of the Union. We ran out at about 8.30 and saw the Presidential motorcade go past on the way up to the Hill. It's funny - all of our political discussions over the last couple of days tend to revolve around what we have learned while watching "The West Wing" - so our excitement mostly came from that. When we thought about who was actually in the motorcade we were a little disappointed! Reality never lives up to the hype!

After spending Friday sick as a dog (the flu or hangover - you decide) we decided that a week with computer geeks wasn't enough, so we headed out to Kennedy Space Centre to spend the day with space nerds. Although we didn't plan it that we, Saturday happened to be the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and so we arrived just in time to witness the memorial service. This made the Astronaut's memorial especially touching.

After the memorial, we headed out on the Nasa Up Close tour, a special tour which takes you around the launch pads, the vehicle assembly building and the landing strip. Many of these are the same as the standard tour (which I did a few years ago), but you get much closer (hence the name). Anyway, if you are thinking of going to Kennedy, pay the extra money and do this tour - it's really cool.

Some of the stuff is pretty corny - but just cool in some geeky way. A special affinity was felt in the original control room used for the Apollo landing - IBM jackets on the back of the chairs!

We didn't get time to go to the Astronaut's Hall of Fame, or do the rides there, but it looks like there is an extra ride coming next year, which should make it all the better.

Sunday we had another quiet day, hoping to get over the flu, and spent the afternoon at Downtown Disney, just buying some soveniers and reliving our childhood looking at LegoWorld. This was our final dose of Disney before leaving for Washington.

I'm saying "final thoughts" as this is a wrap-up of my overall impression, but I will be slowly blogging about the sessions I attended over the next week, but they will be post-dated. I'm doing this as a reference for myself more than anything, so I can remember later what I learned!

Overall I thought this was an excellent conference. It lives up to my memories of my previous Lotusphere, some 9 years ago. The messages coming from Lotus/IBM were positive, and have made me feel pretty good about sticking with this technology for all these years. Although I actually didn't look too much into Workplace or Hannover, mostly because I feel like it's still at least 12-18 months away in the Australian market and I hope to be back to learn more next year, but what I saw did look very good, and an exciting proposition in the future.

In terms of what I'm taking back:
- a renewed desire to learn Java, even if it's just to do small things like those demonstrated in the Java Jumpstart
- a desire to start learning Ajax in a practical way. My major project at the moment is converting some Notes apps to browser apps, and I feel like this will make things slicker.
- Blogging is most definately alive and well, and the Domino blogging community is growing. It was great to meet some of these people, and they are very welcoming to newcomers. The real message - don't be afraid to join in, either with your own blog, or by commenting on others.
- Notes/Domino is still incredibly popular and those who are working with it are still very passionate about the product, which can only be a good thing in the long run.

Aside from the learning and technology, this is a good fun conference - worth the trip and I hope to be able to make the journey again next year.

Now I WILL finish blogging about the rest of the sessions I saw at Lotusphere this year, and will try my hardest to get them up before the end of the weekend. I did, however, want to take a few minutes to blog about last nights' antics - mostly so I can stop blogging in my head and get back to sleep (sad, I know)!.

In honour of Australia Day, there was an Australia party at Jellyrolls last night hosted by Brent Lello of Australia IBM (turns out they do still exist). What a great night. There's really nothing funnier than watching two guys on a piano trying to do "Land Down Under" while being drowned out by 30 drunk Australians! Makes a person proud! There were also some honourary Australians there later in the night - Surjit Chana (see below), and Ben Poole and Declan Lynch were there representing the "Mother Land".

Aside from the drinking and singing and general partying what was really great in context of this week, was how many people we spoke to who were keen to go back home and start trying to raise the profile of Domino in Australia again. In fact, Surjit turned up and the party, and I know a couple of different groups, Tim & I included, actually made a point of interrupting his celebrating to say that it was time for him to "get his ass down to Australia" to help the Notes/Domino (NOT WORKPLACE) message get out there again. He did volunteer that he would be down as soon as we asked - although our reply of "next week" probably won't be met. However, the offer is there from him, and we Aussies now need to push the message to get him down to Australia as soon as possible. There was some discussion about reinstating Lotus Fusion (the Australian mini-Lotusphere which used to be held) and how great that would be. This is a true mini-conference, not the marketing hype of "Lotusphere comes to you" which sounds quite disappointing.

We met quite a few people who were really keen to start up the APAC Notes community again - maybe restarting up some Walnut or other user group meetings, perhaps an Australian discussion or bulletin board for people who want to get help in a reasonable time frame (see Ed's blog about my thoughts on the trouble with timezone difficulties for blogging and Notes.net), and definately raising the profile of Australian & New Zealand bloggers, which I hope to do through www.dominoblogs.com (more to come in the next few days - there's nothing there yet!).

So, hopefully you will start to hear more (both from Tim and myself, and others) about how these things are going over the next weeks and months.

A special shout out to Brent to say thanks for hosting such a great party.

And just as a reminder, repeat after me:
If you drink 10 vodkas on an empty stomach you WILL get sick.
If you drink 10 vodkas on an empty stomach you WILL get sick.
If you drink 10 vodkas on an empty stomach you WILL get sick.

OK - got it!

The Closing Session was a nice bookend to the Opening Session - a light positive message which seemed to catch onto the general feeling of the conference. Surjit Chana, VP of Lotus Marketing, gave a great speech, which generated alot more spontaneous applause from the crowd than the opening session. This is probably just as much a result of people feeling more positive, as it was the positive messages coming from the speech - "Yellow is the new black", a committment to openness, and a committment to fighting the FUD - "the gloves are off".

Probably most of note to the blogging community was the inclusion of some quotes from bloggers - nice to see that Lotus are paying attention to what is being said out there in the world, rather than just relying of press.

Following Surjit was comedian Jim Gaffigan, of Letterman fame was quite funny. He started off with a little, um shall we say "politically incorrect" humour, and some comments about gay porn and Surjit which had people a bit worried I think, but I thought he was really quite hilarious, but I'm not really sure why! I do know that now Tim & I keep wispering "He's/She's/It's weird" whenever we see something a little strange...

Well, although I had a great time at the Seaworld party, I am glad that this was included in the Lotusphere conference as it stopped us from having to pay for tickets - we were planning to go here on the weekend. Glad mostly because it was actually much smaller than I expected, and I would have been disappointed if we had paid $US60 to go.

Tim & I went on the "Journey to Atlantis" ride, which was kind of fun, and then braved the Kracken, which was not nearly as scary as it looked. By the time we finished this we had missed most of the shows, so just grabbed some food and drinks and prepared for the Shamu show. We skipped out of the Shark Encounter in the middle of the line, as we had seen nothing that we don't have bigger and better in our numerous aquariums back home. I guess this comes from living in a land of coral reefs and sharks - we see them so often.

The Shamu Show, however was quite different. We don't really have the whales in parks or aquariums back home, so it was really quite something to see Shamu & family up close. We sat right at the very front, so had a great close-up view, but were lucky enough to avoid getting wet - a remarkable feat! These animals are truly magnificant - so graceful and majestic - just thrilling to watch. In fact, the best thing of the entire night was in the 20 minutes or so after the show when the stadium was empty and the lights out, and we stood and watched the whales just swimming and playing on their own. This was really special, as they just seemed so peaceful, and were even "talking", which was just breathtaking to hear. Unfortunately, this was also the saddest for me, as I always feel a touch of saddness at animals in captivity. I understand that zoos and parks like this can do a lot of good, and often save animals which would not otherwise have survived, but I do get sad that such wonderful creatures are trapped for our amusement. I can only hope that these animals are well treated, and don't know what they are missing.

Unfortunately, this was a session where it seemed the speakers got messed around at the last minute, as they found out that this session clashed with another session on content. How this didn't happen weeks ago I'm not sure, but anyway, this effectively meant that it went from an advanced session to a beginner session, which was a little disappointing. Again, this was not the speakers fault (although the fact they were a little dry didn't do them any favours), but it was one of those sessions where I was really just getting through it as most of the content was pretty familiar to me.

Scott Wenzel, the (in)famous "Turtle" of the Unofficial Lotusphere Gonzo site, gave this session, which was a basic runthrough of exactly what can be done to improve Domino web sites using Ajax technologies. I was quite engaged, and in a week where I'm jetlagged and overloaded with information, this is a credit both to the presenter and the content. This is definately a session to download and get the info.

This session, run by Dwight Willbanks and Lance Spellman, was actually a bit of a demonstration of a set of widgets they had put together rather than an actual discussion on how to learn or implement Ajax or DXL. Now, this is probably a "my bad", as re-reading the session description afterward made this a bit clearer. (As a side note, it would have been good to note in the agenda outlines that this was linked to the Hands-on session held.)

That said, I did pick up a couple of good ideas. The date picker is nothing new, as I've spent hours looking for nice date pickers while building web apps, but the rich text editor (fck editor) was good, and the ajax views were nice too.

As a "newbie" to the world of Ajax and someone just starting to investigate what it can do for me, the most noticeable point for me was an almost throw-away comment that Ajax doesn't work if ActiveX is disabled. May not be a huge point for me, but I will certainly have to check out the default installation in my work environment before spending too much time trying to play with this stuff (I work on mostly internal apps).

One final point, as raised by Tim - why is there an acceptance that it's ok for demo database to look ugly? It takes 10 minutes to put a simple interface - outline, nice actions, nice fonts & colours, and just makes things look so much more professional.

It's tough - there's so much I want to say right now, mostly because I want to record my thoughts while they are fresh regarding the sessions, but as Tim & I are travelling around the US for another 3 weeks, we made the decision to bring only one laptop. For two people who are used to spending many nights at home both working separately on laptops (yes, we're geeky!), it's incredibly difficult to be the one sitting and waiting to use the laptop. We have been taking turns, and getting (un)healthy doses of US television while we are waiting.

So, be patient, and don't be surprised if some of the session reviews turn up a few days late!

Now, last time I came to Lotusphere was just when R5 was being released so there were bigger crowds and a lot of buzz around Notes. My clearest memory of Lotusphere then was the Opening Session. Most specifically I can remember clapping and cheering over new features in Notes as they were shown. This session, although an excellent example of the quality of American public speaking, lacked a certain buzz for me.

It seemed to me that there were very slight pauses at some moments where it seemed as those applause was expected, but there was very little spontaneous applause, and no cheering at all. Even the countdown on the session pre-show didn't rate a count from the crowd - maybe everyone was too stunned from the glaring lights blinding them for 20 minutes.

Jason Alexander, of Seinfeld fame, was excellent - funny and engaging - and a great choice of speaker. His interesting anecdotes about new entertainers trying to break into the scene were relevant and interesting. Most of the other speakers were excellent, although I did think Michael Rhodin was a little wooden. Also a special mention should go to Rob ? who ran most of the initial demos - what a great job in a high pressure situation - live demos are never fun, and fraught with danger (as Maureen? can testify). Generally, it was a well put-together session.

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While I do love that there is wireless access everywhere, and I initially loved walking into a session and seeing all the laptops open and ready to blog, but then I started to change my mind... It started to remind me of parents watching their kids soccer match through a video camera instead of actually watching and experiencing what is going on right in front of them.

I know blogging can become quite obsessive at times (I'm almost always now walking around seeing things thinking "I should blog about that"), but I started blogging as a way to try to improve my writing and critical analysis skills - which have slipped out of use since my uni days. So I'm trying to make my blog more of a opinion blog than a straight reporting blog. Sure, this will mean I'm only blogging about yesterdays' sessions today, but hopefully they will be able to provide a clearer review of my thoughts than just a record of what was said.

I'm not dissing those who do follow a reporting style - it's just a genuine as opinion, but I just hope the "reporters" aren't so busy reporting that they forget to experience...

Ok, I know I'm a couple of days behind, but I wanted to make sure I covered everything... The Welcome Reception was, I have to say, a little disappointing. I came to Lotusphere 97, when the party was a Superbowl party (good timing, I guess), but I remember a much livelier party. The cowboy theme was a little hokey, the bands, although good, were clearly not everybody's taste, and the gambling tables, although a good idea on paper, just seemed to make sure people didn't mingle.

Most people I observed seemed to be having the same experience as Tim & I - just hanging out on there own watching. We were actually on the verge of leaving early until we found the group of Aussies (not easy to find anyone over such a spreadout area), and then we at least stayed until the 9.30 end.

The food was great, but it sure was the great kick-off party I expected.

This session was a little disappointing, as it was mostly technical marketing rather than actual information. I would like to see actual examples - this app is good for Notes, this is good for Workplace. I still have yet to have a clear convincing argument about why I would want to know about Workplace yet, and I'm still a touch skeptical about the future plans.

It kind of seems to me that IBM is trying to transition people from simple, easy Domino to a multiple product, multiple server, way more expensive series of products to do fundamentally the same thing.

I am hoping that I'm wrong, and that this week will convince me otherwise.

This was a great session - fun to actually see people who's blogs I've been reading for a while in person. Tom Duff and Julian Robichaux did an excellent job - both informative and entertaining - which for someone operating on about 2 hours sleep is quite important.

From a technical perspective, the first thing I can note is that Java is not nearly as scary as it initially seems. I was impressed that the syntax was very familar for a some-what JavaScript developer (semi-colons, double equals etc) which straight away eases my nerves. The eclipse stuff was what I was probably least impressed with - I guess it's just not quite "there" yet - a cut&paste scenario just seems to clunky, but I guess if I ever actually start Java development, then it will become clearer.

Most impressive for me was the demo's - although they were very simple, they were clear, consise and useful examples of why I would learn Java - the status non-modal dialog was particularly impressive, and the charting is way better than launching Excel - so the sample database has already been downloaded and will be looked at on my return to Aus.

Also, the free books were a nice touch - Tim & I were lucky enough to get one each - which will certainly add to the weight of our bags for the next 3 1/2 weeks!

The only minor point I have, and this was the case with all sessions today - two hours is almost too long to sit still and listen...

1. Watching bad American tv at 4:30AM feeling like it's 6:00PM - which, of course, it is.
2. Waking up at 9:30 AM and feeling like it's the middle of the night, even though it's actually either 9:30AM or 5:30PM.
3. Skipping out of a session at 2:00PM because you can no longer keep your eyes open.

Hopefully I'll get over it by tonight otherwise it's going to be an interesting week.

EDIT:
4. Realising at 4:30AM that 9:30AM is actually 1:30AM, so not an unreasonable time to feel like it's the middle of the night!

Today, after a sleep-in we went for a walk around the resort, which is fantastic. Somethings came back to me from my last trip (like the fact that Disney obviously don't know what a dolphin looks like) but alot of it is still new to me. We have a great room which looks out of the lake to the Swan, and the beds are really comfortable. We walked down to the boardwalk and had a nice lunch at the ESPN club, and then a walk around the area. We registered and picked up our backpacks - which were better than expected and are looking forward to getting into things tomorrow.

Tonight we're going to head down to the ESPN party - a bit nervous because we don't know anyone and as I'm a bit shy, I'm not very good at meeting people, but it seems like a Lotusphere-must, so we will head there and check it out.

Well, after a mind-numbing 24 hours we have finally made it to DisneyWorld. We got into Orlando around 10pm, and already lost my bet that we wouldn't know anyone here. We ran into some of Tim's old colleagues at the airport - they had caught the same flight over from LA as we did (via St Louis - which I want to call St Louie French pronunciation). It was lucky we did, as I had forgotten to print the Mears discount voucher and we jumped onto their voucher to get the discounted rate.

Every time I come to America (this is my 4th trip to the US) I am always surprised at how different things are here. In Australia there is a growing concern that our culture is become "Americanised". Sure, we get the American movies, tv shows, music, clothing, even ads, but day to day life here seems very different.

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Well, I am about to embark on the least fun part of travelling - getting there! First is the packing - how on earth do you pack for 4 weeks with a weather variance of -10 to 25 degrees (celcius). Remembering of course that you have to carry everything you take. Remember also that we are talking about two - dare I say it - geeks. Not hard core geeks, but geeky enough to be travelling with half a suitcase full of gadgets - laptop, two phones, two mp3 players, a pda, two digital cameras - and the assortment of cords which go along with this. Also add to this the food issue - we are, after all, going to America...so I have to take some "real" chocolate, along with vegemite (every aussie traveller's staple diet!). So that's 3/4 of a bag without factoring in the fact that I am, after all, a girl, who needs clothes, shoes, bags and makeup!

So, once we've stayed up arguing about what to take until 3 in the morning, we then have to get up to face a 22 hour ordeal! That's right - 3 flights, going across about 15 time zones to arrive only 6 hours after we leave!

Thank goodness there's DisneyWorld at the end of it all!

Stay posted for highlights of the trip - next posting with probably be while suffering extreme jetlag from Orlando!

In a triumph of common sense and the courts, Australian manufacturers are now allowed to continue to call ugg boots by their rightful name. As a child who grew up wearing ugg boots (yes I'll admit it!) I'm glad to see that the Aussie courts have decided not to succumb to the power of an overseas conglomerate and have removed any trademark protection of the terms ugg, ugh or ug boots.

more here > Aussies reclaim the ugg boot

From Quotes of the Day

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
Rich Cook

Well, over the course of the last couple of days I've been going through the Lotusphere Sessions database. I realised pretty quickly that I was going to need a game plan, as even with both Tim & I at Lotusphere it seems impossible to me that I'll be able to get all the information I'm interested in. My problem at the moment is trying to decide whether I want to get a taste of things I know very little about (like Workplace), whether I want to get really technical on things I want to learn but haven't a chance (like Ajax), extend my knowledge on things (web dev - CSS, XML), get high level information (hannover) or just try to hang out in the product showcase and get free stuff!!

I'm hoping to go for a mix of all, but unfortunately it seems that these are almost completely conflicting purposes and many of the sessions clash with each other. I think I'm mostly going for learning and extending knowledge on web dev (ajax, xml, web services) as this is most directly related to my day-to-day job, and will probably be the most directly beneficial. Hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the others in some gaps, and still have enough time left over to see some of the labs and showcases!

I'm also hoping that I my brain doesn't explode from all the information-intake!

After two years working in a company doing predominantly Notes client development, I'm now working for a company where I'm back doing predominantly Domino development. Although I had tried hard to keep my pure-web skills - HTML, CSS, JavaScript - active, I did get a bit rustly on the Domino side of things - the little tricks required to make Domino do what I want.

So, while I've been getting my head back into WebQuerySaves and $$Return fields, I've come across a couple of things which have had me scratching my head and wondering if things have always been "that way" or if it's something I'm doing wrong. Any insight into these things would be great...

1. A $$ViewBody field in a $$ViewTemplate will return "No Documents" while running on Local, when moved to a server, the field shows the view correctly.

2. Date fields on local default to US date format (mm/dd/yy) regardless of the PC or Notes client settings.

3. It doesn't seem possible to catch data type validation issues with server-side validation. I'm trying to avoid using Javascript for field validation as I want to share my (lotusscript) validation function between the Notes client and the browser client. I have this process working fine, except for when I try to use fields with a data type of other than text. For example, if I have a number field on a web form, and put a text value in that field, I get an Error 500 - Cannot convert text to a number (on a new browser page). This occurs even if I catch this error in a webquerysave agent, or for that matter anywhere else I tried. Is it just not possible to have friendly error handling for data type validation? So far, I've resorted to having all my fields as text fields, which to me, is not a great solution.

That's all I can think of at the moment, most other things I've been able to figure out, usually with the help of some searching on the net (blogs and the forums), but the answers to these ones have eluded me.

Any ideas?

In order to have our arguments ready for the Lotusphere Best & Worst practices sessions, Tim has prepared his (our!) list of do's and don'ts for Notes Development

The "do" list
The "don't " list

Now we're all ready to cause trouble...or at least to compare lists!

I can't really say it's for Christmas, but this is a new pressie I got for myself in anticipation of a few very long flights while travelling from Sydney to Orlando for Lotusphere. It's my first mp3 player, after coming from using a combination of my phone for radio, pc hard disk and a Sony mini-disc for non-radio. So far, I'm loving it. I don't really have anything to compare it to, other than what I've tried in stores, but it's fairly small & light for 6GB, it's got great sound, and great earphones and most importantly has allowed me to stop swapping between different media all the time as it has the radio (and a radio & voice recorder) all built in.

Now the fun part has started - looking at my old cd's and building my playlists - 3,000 songs is quite a lot!

It seems to me that every few years someone suggests the idea of re-introducing compulsary service for young people. The latest comes from the Young ALP. While at least this is tempered by proposing compulsary military or community service, the underlying premise is the same - today's young people are completely without respect and need to be taught how to be part of society. As always, this proposal, which will never seriously be presented as a policy option by either party, produced typically rabid responses, both in support, and against - most of which miss the point.

Are todays' young people lacking in respect and a sense of community? In general, yes. Has this always been the case? Yes. Let's face it, yesterday's hippies are today's over-consumers. Generally, time with take care of youth just as it always has!

'Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.'
-Socrates 469 BC - 399 BC

That said - we can do something about their spelling, right?!

As already reported by Tim, we have been working for the better part of a year on putting an open source interface on our shared Notes development utilities. The result is a new open source product called openslice. openslice is designed be the foundation layer of any Notes application, and allows you to start building an application with most standard stuff already included - keywords, audit logging, form configuration, error management and much more. It also includes over 300 functions which can be used either to help make your coding easier. We have been using it for a few months now, at a couple of different client sites, and have used it as a base for several production applications, so we decided it was time to release it to the broader Notes community.

As I mentioned, we are providing it as open source, so it's free to download, but we are asking people to register, so we know how many people might be using it. Feel free to give us feedback through the forum on the openslice site (visible through the lhs menu when you log in) and let us know what you think. Please remember, this is still in beta form, so be kind!

Enjoy...

Wow, the holiday period came and went awfully quickly! I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year's celebration. As for myself, Tim & I had a fairly quiet new year's eve, staying at home and watching the Sydney fireworks, both on tv and from our windows & balcony. We did, however, put away our laptops for a couple of days (well, maybe one day!) and just spent some time relaxing.

And now, we are onto the new year - looking forward to Lotusphere in a few weeks....