Last night was the second meeting of the new Sydney Lotus Energizers group, and while it didn't quite reach the lofty "standing room only" heights of the first meeting (with Ed Brill), it was a decent turnout. Around 50 - 60 people came along to hear Alistair Rennie (VP, Software Services) and Doug Wilson (CTO, Lotus) give a presentation on some of the future directions for Lotus.

Jonathan Stern, from IBM Australia, first gave us another quick rundown about the current state of play for Lotus in the Australia/New Zealand markets, including the positive message that in a market only growing by 3%, Domino had grown by 21% locally. He also re-iterated the promises of increased regular events, PR, and increased advertising within this market. This included the announcement of the dates for "Lotusphere comes to Australia", starting Feb 19. While this is great, it does indicate that it will be at least 2008 before there is any chance of a Lotus Fusion style conference. Ah well, I guess we just need to keep asking.

The Alistair/Doug tag team presentation was interesting, and covered some of the key drivers in the directions taken by Lotus over the next couple of years. Although there was nothing altogether new for those following the stories out of IBM, the message is important enough to require frequent repeating so the message is clear.

A couple of points which stood out to me:

- Companies are now starting to say that cost savings are no longer enough to justify expenditure on IT - innovation is the key way in which they can differentiate themselves in the market, and products that assist innovation will win.

- In the move towards a Dynamic Workplace, many of the goals are aspirational rather than ready-right-now. The key driver in enabling the delivery of a dynamic workplace will be through the creation of software built with openness and standards.

- The move from document & process centric applications (email, workflow, forms) to people centric applications (Sametime) to community centric applications (blogs, wikis, social networking) is not a replacement proposition, but rather an additive proposition. The need to provide the newer applications will not eliminate the need for traditional apps, but rather will enhance them.

- Websphere Portal will become the web version of what Hannover will deliver. Both Hannover & Portal can deliver composite applications, but the client is the differentiator. This is not to say if you have one, you won't need the other, but the gap between them will shrink as Hannover (Notes 8) begins to provide the ability to provide enhanced development capabilities to the rich client platform.

After the presentation, most people stayed around after for a few drinks - right up until we got a "lights out, time to move", which shows that the positive buzz in the community is still there, and if we can manage to keep the momentum going, next year should be a great year.

As if it's not enough that we finally have proof that Americans killed Phar Lap, now they've gone and banned our national icon, and favourite food, Vegemite.

From a country which has no problem with selling guns at the local department store, it's hard to see what's so scary about Vegemite that would cause it to be banned. The dangerous ingredient - folate. Yes, that's the same folate that is encouraged for women, particularly pregnant women to help avoid having babies with neural tube defects. Apparently, a technicality exists that only allows folate to be added to breads and cereals, and Vegemite breaks this all-important rule.

The real problem, of course, is that this rule is now being enforced, even on unsuspecting Aussie travellers, very few of who depart our shores without a tube or jar of our beloved breakfast spread. I can safely say that over the last 12 years or so I have travelled to 15 countries across the Pacific, Asia, Europe and North America and have always carried Vegemite. Quite frankly, when I lived in the US a few years ago Vegemite and Australian chocolate was all that got me through - so my sympathies go out to the ex-pats now living in the USA.

UPDATE: Reporting a gremlin in the system. I take it back, after shutting down my PC yesterday, and coming back in today to finish testing, I find that tabbing is working fine. So, sorry for any misdirection, but there is no problem to be reported.

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While working on an old database today I came across a curious problem - it seems that if you have a form which uses fields using the display property "Native OS style", and open that form in a dialog box it is not possible to tab, or up/down arrow between fields.

Whenever the cursor is in a "Native OS style" field, pressing tab will jump the cursor directly to the OK button, skipping any other fields which may exist on the form. This is the case even if a tab key position is specified for any/all fields. The up/down arrows have no effect at all.

Fortunately, as this was found in an old database, the users are already used to this behavious, so I don't need to change it - but it sure is frustrating to test for a keyboard user like myself.

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