Lotusphere: Sunday morning

After sleeping in (9am) to recover from the travel and last night, I got up and walked over to the Boardwalk Bakery for a quick breakfast and then off to the Swan for Duffbert and Julian's session on Java Jumpstart for the Domino Developer. Now, I'm an administrator by trade, but dabble in development for different needs, but I also try to be a "solution provider" at my company to help promote Domino as a more strategic application.

Sadly, my name didn't get drawn for a book, but the content and delivery of both Tom and Julian was excellent. I'm thinking about ways to use Java for some of the things I do. But the charts agent really caught my eye. Excellent job, and the light saber pointer was too cool!

Unfortunately, I tried to go to John Head's MS Office integration session, but it was full. I'll try later for the repeat if I'm not watching the games.

Forgot to pack a camera, so just check out Flickr for the Lotusphere2006 photos

I am here

Well, I got up at 4am and got my tired rear-end to the airport and got to the gate in time for boarding, after grabbing a coffee and danish at the $tarbucks...never have cut it that close. The flight, once they fixed a couple of seats in first class, was nice. Two decent movies, Just Like Heaven and The Incredibles. I flew American, and this is the first time I've encountered the $3 snack box and $5 breakfast sandwich. They don't even give out peanuts/snack mix with the beverage service! I wish JetBlue flew from LA to Orlando....oh well.

Checked into the Dolphin (yeah!) and then headed over to dinner at The Flying Fish with the CertFX crew and friends. What a nice place. Had some really good appetizers, and spinach and frisee' salad and a excellent seared ahi and couscous. So I blew 2 days food stipend, it was worth it.

After we headed to the ESPN club for Turtle's Gonzo party and I stayed til 1am meeting many new people whose blogs I read. So starts off one of my goals the year, meet and get to know more of my fellow Domino geeks! (Thanks Chris for that nice pic! No I really didn't spend the whole night drinking ;-)).

eWeek Review: Nice, but a little off

OK, so eWeek does a very nice review of Notes/Domino 7. It's a very positive article that highlights many of the improvements in the product. But reading through the section on DB2 integration, the author shows he's not a Domino expert:

DB2 support will allow companies to build more scalable and robust applications than they would ordinarily be able to by storing data in Notes' native NFS (Network File System) data structure. The use of DB2 won't eliminate the need for Notes-specific development expertise, however, as developers will still need to work within the Domino Designer 7 client to create views and forms.

During the initial read, I thought it was a typo, but he then goes to spell out what "NSF" is, and then continues to repeat it in another paragraph. Hopefully, this author will be in Orlando next week and will get to learn what the NSF (Notes Storage Facility) is all about.

I emailed the author and sent him a link to the Inside Notes document on the Lotus site. I also commented that I thought the Good rating for Interoperability was low since ND7 supports multiple platforms, multiple development languages, multiple clients, and now multiple data stores. How well, it was a positive review!

Ocean water a therapy for Cystic Fibrosis?

My son, Andrew, has Cystic Fibrosis and has been seeing a decrease in his lung function that his doctor's don't understand. He's a very active kid, either playing outside with his friends, playing Little League, or school sports (flag football and now lacrosse?!). His activity level, and lack of bretahing problems don't support the lung function test results he's getting. My wife and I think he's figured out how to make the "nice loop" for the PFT test and stopping, and his smirk a couple nights ago may confirm that. His doctor's are concerned it's something more serious and want to possibly put him on IV therapy that would require him having an IV port put in him - something we would like to avoid if not necessary.

This morning's check of CNN found the announcement of a therapy that may increase his lung function with just an inhaled therapy of sterile ocean water called hypertonic saline. The story of it's discovery is interesting, but the bottom line of the possibility of drug companies not making it for lack of a profit is disturbing to say the least.

Strangeness with Bloglines

I use Bloglines as my RSS reader, and I really like it. This morning as I'm reading, I saw that Richard Schwartz's entry has "Von Richard Schwartz op None" and didn't think much of it. I hit Rob Novak's and saw the same thing and then looking around I started noticing that all the labels on the website are in Dutch. I know I haven't been in my preferences or account settings, and when I did go to look, English was showing as my language. A simple save set everything back....strange.

Lotusphere Online logins sent

Just got me Lotusphere Online login information, and we're not all numbers any more!!! For the first time ever, I can use my email address as my login. What a leap in progress. First, Lotusphere.com gets pointed to the right place, and now this?!?! I don't know if I can handle all this change! ;-)