Woop Woop, I have my first full Lotusphere session! I will be presenting a Show ‘n’ Tell entitled “Write Better Java Code: Debugging, Logging, and Unit Tests” with the great Julian Robichaux, the master of openlog (a tool I use on every Domino app I write)

Anyway, quickly onto the point of this blog entry: After every conference’s sessions are announced there is the usual “it’s only the same set of people that get them each year” grumbles. However, 4 years ago I was not part of the Lotus community at all and this year I get to present properly at IBM’s leading collaboration event and scare the living shit out of myself in front of hopefully not too many people, so how?

• I did my local LUG circuit (UKLUG & ILUG) which incuded rejections and one total cock up 🙁 .
• I did LotusIdol last year (a year in which I purchased my own ticket).
• I followed Gab Turtle’s guidelines on writing abstracts, then passed my attempts round to a couple of peers.This year I submitted 3 abstracts (2 joint) and got 1 session. Of the other 2, 1 had to be retracted due to time conflicts with my co-submitter, the other was a tad fringe and a bit of a gamble, but I may try it again on a LUG this year.

  Soooo, Lotusphere is not a closed shop, new people present each year, and I’m one of that lucky number.

Old Comments

Mark Myers(05/12/2011 23:43:48 GMT)

@joe and to a drink together after

Joe Litton(05/12/2011 23:38:36 GMT)

Your session last year (LotusIdol) was great. Looking forward to your session at LS12!!

Mark Myers(05/12/2011 23:36:29 GMT)

@David @Bruce thank you VERY much

Bruce(05/12/2011 23:34:42 GMT)

Mark – congratulations!!!!!!!! ROCK STAR

David Leedy(05/12/2011 23:22:15 GMT)

Congrats Mark! Looking forward to your session!

Mike McGarel(06/12/2011 00:43:22 GMT)

Congratulations!

Paul Withers(06/12/2011 00:11:20 GMT)

Congratulations, well deserved and a great topic. Looking forward to it

Mary Beth Raven(06/12/2011 03:44:29 GMT)

Congratulations!I volunteer to check all of your “bad grammer” 🙂 and I am sure you’ll do a great job because you’ll be speaking about a topic you know and that you feel passionate about. See you there. I volunteer to sit in first row and heckle you:)

Carl Tyler(06/12/2011 06:20:20 GMT)

Hard to believe its your first time. You’ll be great.

Mark Barton(06/12/2011 09:30:29 GMT)

Well done Mark – I know Java is a subject close to your heart.

Ben Poole(06/12/2011 08:12:29 GMT)

Congratulations old bean; LS won’t know what hit it! I wish I could be there to heckle.

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 07:50:36 GMT)

thank you every one, im sure Julian will be gentle with me

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 10:19:05 GMT)

@ben i wish you were there as well

@Mark same goes for you, it would be awesome

ChrisC(06/12/2011 13:17:27 GMT)

Congrats Mark – look forward to attending!

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 15:43:19 GMT)

thanks Chris, i better make it a good one

Its funny how history repeats its self, I was listening to the Grails Podcast 122 and listening to the netflix boys describing their working enviroment and the features they used, these include

• Rapid Application Deployment (Groovy and Grail’s)
• Everybody building apps all over the place
• Timed jobs (Quartz)
• Shared infrastructure (AWS)
• None Relational Data storage (simpleDB and Cassandra)It sounds as if they are really getting stuff done and making things work for them and growing all the time with the best they can get hold of, I have heard this before, last time was in the heyday of lotus notes.Draw you own conclusions.but mine are:
• If you think your way is the best and only way, then you have not looked around in the last 5 mins.
• Always look to grow and change, treat it as fun rather than a challenge.

Old Comments

Jerry Carter(06/04/2011 17:02:05 GDT)

+1 esp. facing change. learned just this week that crutches can be used to turn off lights, activate the power lock toggle on the car door, as a temporary door stop and to entertain children. Oh, and keep weight off a blown out hip.

More in line with this post though, some of the concepts that have come along in the past ten years really make what we already know how to use more useful if we’re willing to take the time to understand and embrace them, even if only for the duration of a single project.

Mark Myers(06/04/2011 21:45:23 GDT)

sage words Jerry sage words!!

Opps!, forgot to post this

Here it is “The horror of losing agent manager and other chilling tales”

Hope it is of some use, feel free to point out stuff i have missed or got wrong, it would be nice if it could grow

Since returning from LS11 I have been simply swamped with work, but it has been very trying work, and I have made quite a few mistakes, thankfully these have been turned into lessons, the first one is to do with Amazon Web Services.

Now AWS is a very good service, but they do assume that you are not a prat (in my case its not a valid assumption), do NOT make any assumptions with them, take everything they say at face value, so “Terminate” does not mean “force a shutdown” it means TERMINATE

The evil Ben Poole has been sending me links since I terminated LDC’s primary instance (but as he had bang up to date replicas of the Db’s we were working on, I can hardly complain), the most useful of them are this one and this one

but in summary:

1) YOU may treat an instance as mealy a virtual server, but amazon don’t, they treat it more like a temporary session on their system, and will delete it instantly on the bases of one button click (plus conformation)
3) Turn on instance protection (found under the instance management menu in the AWs web console)
4) The nice little “Volume” (or drive) that is automatically created when you make a instance, only lasts as long as the instances life, if you terminate the instance it will delete (while you watch and cry), assigned proper extra ones
5) As soon as you are happy with you instances set-ups, build AMI (templates) of it and take snap shots of your volumes (in addition to backups)

nuff said

Like most people I think a basic brain dump is the order of the day for lotusphere 2011

It was the hardest lotusphere I have been to work wise, I did not get half of what I was due to finish….er..finished.

Lotus idol, a fantastic opportunity for me and a bonus for LDC, one I was grateful to have been given, though personally I think the session proposed by Peter Presnell would have given more to the community.

Numbers up on last year, but hardly any time wasting, even at parties, there was much heads together stuff, card exchanging, serious conversation and plan making

Bill Buchan has been much maligned over the years and is a very easy room mate once you get over the fact he only needs about 2 hours sleep per night (party till 4.30am, up at about 7.00am)

I spent some time with the Nokia boys and admired both the hardware of the new phone and the idea if combining the power of C++ with what looked to me like a graphical library that feels strangely like flash animation (tweening and what not), however I found my self discarding it in the face of android and iphone, later on I expressed this opinion and the expressions of vague disgust on the faces of a couple of colleges forced me to re-evaluate the stance (yet another reason to work in a community), but is this how people think when they compare notes and other platforms? you take the shiny popular one? bearing that in mind I think the largest challenge for lotus in the future will be not technology base, but the re-branding and coping with the poor lotus brand perception without ditching what I personally have found to be the best tech community.

The LDC T-shirts went down well, will have to maintain the same standard next year

think that’s it, everything else has been said by everybody else

Old Comments

Mark Myers(06/02/2011 11:46:06 GMT)

@nathan, our pleasure, as i mentioned to a few of your colleges it was great that after GBS made such an investment in this LS that numbers were up and people were much more positive than last year, a good sign, a good omen for the future

Nathan T Freeman(06/02/2011 02:07:59 GMT)

For the record, the LDC shirts were OUTSTANDING. Thank you so much for mine!

Keith Brooks(06/02/2011 03:14:40 GMT)

Dang, I didn’t get one.
Sorry I missed your idol session, no one told me you won it.

Mark Myers(06/02/2011 11:52:53 GMT)

@keith no worries, well get you one