It would seem that truth is stranger than fiction and the truth is that I have been made an IBM champion

Now as I understand that you only get to be an IBM champion when you are recommended by people who can provide good reasons for you being one, I reckon I know who sponsored me for it and I would like to thank the 4 criminals that I believe are responsible…. its your fault

So this means a number of things

1. I will be more respectful on my blog …… hahahahahaha!
2. I will have to post more articles…. Groan
3. I will have to post more USEFUL articles…. Groan x 2
4. I have access to the rest of the IBM champions who turn out to be smart arses †

Ignoring that stuff it does mean that if I am luckily enough to work with the turtles again this year, there will be 3 IBM champions on the team ( Gab Davis , Mike Smith and me) which will really rock hard for clients.

† Here is an example of the IBM Champions solving a problem quickly

Mark Myers: here is an oldschool challange for IBM champions: where do you find a complete listing of the notes exceptions, and I don’t just mean the 3XXX and 4XXX ones, I need the 5XXX and 6XXX as well (in particular I want to confirm 6408 and find out what 5631 means)

Julian Robichaux: Mark, are the numbers you’re looking for in decimal or hex format?

Julian Robichaux: if they’re LotusScript, try running this agent and checking the codes in the resultant CSV file: http://www.nsftools.com/tips/ApiErrList.htm

Julian Robichaux: that’ll give you up to 3FFF in hex. In the API headers, that used to be the highest valid return code.

Mark Myers: not sure, just returned as an int, but that is a good point

Julian Robichaux: iirc (and it’s been a while), numbers higher than 3FFF were just bitmasked to indicate where the error came from (client or server, or something like that)

Mark Myers: ok

benedek.menesi: Well 5631 would be 15FF in Hex which is a valid error code and stands for “Cannot handle the import file. Check file name and file password”

Mark Myers: Oooooooooooooooo that would match the problem

Julian Robichaux: and 6408 is Wrong Password

As I said smart arses, shame they are nice as well

Shameless Repost

Mr White has rustled up a nice little bit of code to show you how to integrate Xpages with LDC via

find it on the LDCvia blog –> Integrating LDC Via with XPages

Excerpt from some thoughts on LDC Via, See the full post is here

Alongside this gradual shift in focus away from Domino, has been a recent and fairly rapid rise in “NoSQL” databases. The irony, of course, is that Domino’s NSF data structure is itself a NoSQL database. But it’s an ageing one, with undoubted issues of performance and scalability when compared to some of the younger contenders. And with the rise of these databases has been a parallel rise in acceptance of new development architectures to make the most of them, most notably the “MEAN stack”. Here at LDC Via we opted to develop first against the MongoDb back-end, as that is arguably the most accepted and widespread of these modern NoSQL databases.

Where the Domino NSF database has always been a market-leader is in its security structures. Readers fields, Authors fields, encryption keys, database encryption, etc. There just isn’t anything else like it. Except, well, now there is: LDC Via.

So what was UK LUG has risen from the grave at the hands of ‘Tim Clark’, and this year was a one day event hosted at IBM South bank.

The location was cool as it not only added an air of authority to the conference its self but cut down on the costs as food/booze and venue are the chief expenses on such a conference (so thanks to IBM for that)

What I don’t know is how Tim managed to get IBM to let him have such a diverse set of session that talked not only about IBM technologies but NON IBM technologies, it made for a conference where there was at least 2 sessions I wanted to go to in every slot and a lot of stunned looking but happy conference attendees.

One of the golden rules of a conference is to have it out the way somewhere where the attendees can’t escape so they can be sold stuff, breaking this rule means you stand a large chance of attendees disappearing during the day as they bugger off to do something more interesting, the fact that the closing session was as full as the opening one at a conference held in the middle of London’s south bank on a sunny Friday says everything that needs to be said about the quality of the conference

Two thumbs up and a lot of thanks to Tim

Speaking of content, here is my short session, there was not a huge number of people (there never is on my fringe tech sessions) but it was the best and most responsive crowd I have ever presented to, most enjoyable.

P.S.

thanks to theo for making me look fat and pissed off during my session Album

Day 2 of the jQuery UK conference was the formal conference day with about 700 people in attendance.

It felt quite strange going to an open source conference for a none fringe project, particularly one that is treated as a product and used by many thousands of websites

On one side they do formal updates as you would expect from a corporation but as no one can fire them and they have no shareholders or such they can also tackle tricky subjects head on as well as take insults personally, which is a lovely change (although prone to a bit of ranting)

Much of conference context was very different to traditional corporate conferences due to the age of the attendees ( or rather the time they have been in IT) so they don’t have the history and background that many old farts have, as a presenter I am used to trying to pull people into this year (or even decade) while on the other hand dealing with people who have been programming computers since I was in nappies, in contrast this audience had a lot of people who are totally cutting edge but has only been in the business for a a few years (God I feel old).

The Good

• Excellent Content, bloody hell I don’t think there was a single time slot that I did not want to be in 2 places at once, it was also placed well (the hardware hacking session at the end was the best finale)
• Slide decks, I felt quite ashamed of my own slide decks in comparison to the ones used here and mine are a long way from being the worst I have seen, all of the side decks were interactive, responsive and browsers based, asking around came up with 3 possible candidates for the software doing the magic Slides, Proxi and reveal-js although my vote goes on reveal-js as that runs on node.js and I saw a lot of URLs that matched its pattern, anyway its time to buck up my ideas on that score.
• Organisation and refreshments for the conference was organised by White October who kept everything ticking over just nicely with unlimited red bull and water, yahhhh

The Less Good

• The were 3 tracks and basically only the main track had enough room in it, the other 2 tracks did not have enough capacity, I did not manage to get into any of them and neither did a lot of other people
• Not really for beginners, I know that sounds stupid but it was generally taken as a given that you knew jQuery and used it on a daily basis, this was not a conference if you were new to jQuery and wanted to know what it was about and how to use it best.

⇓ Even though the actual conference was on an industrial estate, it was a very pretty industrial estate

⇑ Coo a full conference, not seen that in a while

⇑ The hardware hacking session was roll around on the floor funny, very well done and opened up lot of avenues that you can put your javascript knowledge to work with

⇑ The goodie bag was excellent, no waste and thankfully in a carrier bag so there was no need to chuck out another useless and crummy backpack, I even kept some of the bits of paper as they were informative not just shinny things for directors to read, the freebies offered by the vendors obviously did not come from marketing as they were actually useful,