Joel Spolsky wrote about how Microsoft uses source control and how a product from Accurev does this complex branching and merging. I can say Lotus, specifically Notes and Domino, has been doing this for years with IBM’s Rational ClearCase. The screen shot Joel shows for Accurev is almost identical to what has been in ClearCase for a long time. The best thing I like about ClearCase is the fact you can have as many levels as you want. Each team or sub-team can independently coordinate when they area gets merged into the overall product mainline. For a large company I can not see how you could do large systems without this ability.

I bought this remote last night and I am amazed I did not have this little gadget early. You can do a lot of different setups with the remote (activities to be more exact) and each activity can do any number of commands and configurations. For instance I click the “Watch TV” activity and it:

Product information here.

Expeditor 6.1 has been announced!

I particularly like the section on the Composite Desktop:

Lotus Expeditor is an SOA-based server managed client platform that helps improve responsiveness and increase productivity by extending composite applications to laptops, desktops, kiosks, and mobile devices. It is the IBM open standards-based competitor to the .NET client. It is both used by and integrates with key IBM products such as WebSphere Portal, Lotus Sametime, Workplace Forms, and next version of Lotus Domino^® and also sold as a stand-alone offering.

Tags: lotus IBM Composite Applications

I was doing my usual browsing of books at my favorite store – Barnes and Noble – and noticed a “cool” looking book that had what looked like a Samurai on it. I picked it up and was immediately intrigued with the content. The book attempts to attract the “would be hacker” by using suggestive phrases on how one could use each of the technical bits in writing viruses. Outside of that, the book is a pretty good introduction to the way Windows (and many operating systems) work under the covers and how software interacts with hardware. It does an excellent job in describing paging, process communication, driver creation and how rings 0 through 3 work.

The book is not for the casual programmer. If you do not care for C or low level system programming then you probably will not find the book very interesting. If you want to know how viruses, virus scanners and system level “application control” works then it is a good read.

I highly recommend this. I bought it tonight and I have flashbacks of my youth. Outside of the nostalgia they do a pretty good job with the songs – if you like the Twisted Sister sound…

Buy it now here.

I pulled these specific sessions out if you want to understand the Expeditor and Composite Application story for Notes 8. I am mostly focused on application development and Notes integration with Expeditor/Eclipse. Lastly, I also mention several sessions on Portal because that is an entire area of composite applications that is very important to understand.

Jump Start sessions:

A great way to start off the week. Get to know and hear the guys that will be presenting throughout the week and get a quick introductory to the technology:

JMP202 “It Takes Two to Tango” – Learning Java Using the Eclipse Development Platform
JMP401 Introduction to Composite Applications for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and IBM WebSphere Portal

Hands On Sessions:
Great way to learn by doing:

HND102 Building Composite Applications for IBM Lotus Notes 8
HND103 Developing and Integrating a Custom Eclipse RCP Application into IBM Lotus Notes 8

Futures:
Even those this is stuff for the “future” it is good to know the directions we are taking both Expeditor and Notes.

INV102 Web 2.0 Trends and Technologies
INV107 IBM Lotus Notes and Domino: A Look Ahead
INV108 IBM WebSphere Portal Strategy: Platform for Business Innovation

Application Development

AD101 Lotus Software Development Tools Strategy and Roadmap
AD105 IBM Lotus Component Designer’s Dynamite for IBM Lotus Domino Developers
AD201 Introduction to IBM Lotus Expeditor 6.1 — the Core of Lotus Rich Clients
AD202 Developing with the IBM Lotus Expeditor Toolkit for IBM Lotus Expeditor and IBM Lotus Notes 8

Tags: lotus IBM Composite Applications

I think Lotus Expeditor 6.1 was a pretty big undertaking and as usual it takes its toll on the many involved in getting it out the door. We are now designing and approving requirements, line items and deferred problems for 6.1.1. This is called our “Hannover” or Notes 8 version because anything new is most likely related to late coming Hannover requirements and many of the bugs being fixed are high priority ones from Sametime and Hannover. While there is a lot of work ahead of us and preparation for Lotusphere is well on its way the last 5 days off and a break from school was extremely refreshing. I am pumped up, rejuvenated and excited to take on Expeditor 6.1.1 and 6.2. I want to get the word out on the platform under Notes 8. I will be following up with some sessions and BOFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions you should attend if you want to understand the Expeditor, Composite App and Eclipse story that will be shipping with Notes 8. The sessions are going to show you how you can use the existing Notes architecture and components in a whole new way. Integrating new Eclipse, Web, SWT and other technology with your existing Notes applications.

Get your Lotusphere ticket and stay tuned!

One of the top searches that brings people to this blog is the following phrase:

“the number one smartest animal in the world“

Search results here.

Very cool.

From Barry’s blog:

This week, in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) booth at SC06, IBM will demonstrate newly developed interactive ray-tracing technology. The iRT will be running on a hybrid system consisting of four IBM QS20 Cell blades and an AMD Opteron based client. By dynamically balancing work across the four Cell blade’s 1.6 Tflops, the iRT renders high definition images at interactive frame rates using advanced techniques such as BRDF shaders, and ambient occlusion. This mini-Roadrunner is approximately 1/2000^th of LANL’s monster 1.6 petaflop system. I hope they invite me back to run the iRT on their finished system.

Click here for a movie of the real-time animation.

I have come to realize that I could have an entire blog associated with bad travel problems. This is my last posting complaining about the travel nightmares I have endured. So now what, you ask? Well, my flight Thursday night was completely canceled – after I tried to get on an earlier flight (3 to be exact) and didn’t make any of them. I then had to reschedule for the next day, the only problem is there weren’t any hotels in the immediate area! I ended up getting a room for $250 a night. It came with a beautiful living room, two televisions, etc. My flight was very late and it looks like many people had to reschedule for the next day.

The next day was even worse. My flight to JFK at 8:30am went off fine. Then we circled NYC for an extra 25 minutes – missing my connection. After receiving a free ticket in the U.S. I finally arrived home at 6:30pm. Nice…real nice…