A friend of mine who lives in the sticks out near Glen Innes, (yes, I do know people in the country), reports that Cabbie's have been making alot of fares between 10PM and 6am on Fri/Sat nights. How ? There is virtually nothing out there between those times, there are a lack of rave parties and clubs in that area. There is the Imperial hotel but they close around 11.

Well, the Glen Innes Examiner reports that the recently opened McDonalds in Glen Innes has a 24 hour operating license, but between the hours of 10pm and 6am only operates via a drive thru. So, if you want to order anything you need a car, you can't just walk in. Thus the Taxi becomes an important instrument needed to take orders from the Glen Innes Macca's after 10pm.. Well I gotta hand it to them for ingenuity.

Last year IBM attempted an Lotus Collaboration conference (university) for about $3000 in Sydney which never eventuated because of the cost and a dismal attempt at an agenda that didn't tell you jack.Well, IBM are having another go but in Melbourne. It's still a wallet bleeding $3000, or $2500 for early bird rego, and only $2300 for BP's. However, IBM is doing a much better effort this time with a detailed agenda to sell it, and by the looks of it, may get off the ground this time but the wallet will need to be put into ICU for the folllowing month.

To compare, Microsoft are running their teched on the Gold Coast for $2000 or $1700 for early bird rego, it even get's down to $1600 if you're an MS BP or have premium support arrangements with MS. Around $800-$900 less based on the early bird fees, and it runs 1 day longer than IBM's. Format appears to be similar, with deep-dive sessions and discounted certification exams available.

However, as a real sweetner, Microsoft are giving away HP Mini Netbooks with Windows 7 preloaded.

"To celebrate the launch of Windows 7, on arrival at Tech•Ed eligible delegates will receive a complimentary HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC pre-loaded with Windows 7*."

The fine print does not make it available to staff, exhibitors, free-ticket holders, blah, blah.. but you get the idea. The little NetBook is worth around $600+. Hmm... Mikkel's echoing the global feeling about a lack of support for the IBM user/developer community, let alone the BP's, and the discouraging costs of these events really speaks louder than any "smarter planet" advertising campaign IBM could run right now. Is it really that hard/expensive to give us some "conference love".

Ed recently blogged about some work by IBM research, "Sametime 3D". Well it's cute, it will make a press release or two, be of interest for about a week then what ?

Remember IBM's "Forbiden City" ? There was a twitter hash tag "#ibmvfc" which seems to be defunct now. So it appears interest is waning. Well, this looks like the same thing again but with a different flavour. Sorry to be so brutal, but technology without a demonstable need is still pointless. How many people are gonna use Sametime AND Second-life to conduct meetings in the business world ? Alot of the business world barely uses email competently and Uni's aren't really a cash cow now are they ? This sort of stuff is strictly experimental for Universities. I'm all for exploring potential of technology, but it's a typical mistake by technologists to design solutions that are perpetually on a quest for a problem to fulfil...

One of the most perplexing questions in modern times has been answered as Top Gear reveal the Stig's identity.

Find out more here here and here

Sigh! Further confirmation of a flat email market in Australia for IBM, as Queensland Govt re-affirms it's major IT projects which includes a migration program, that started in July last year, to migrate 80,000 email accounts from Novell/Lotus Notes to Exchange. The numbers seem to have inflated now with talk of even bigger numbers like around 200,000 accounts which is impressive'n all but no one has mentioned progress, or specified an expected completion since announcing it last year.

Does anyone else know more about this enterprise move ? On the topic of acquisitions, I know we are only next to the ar$e end of the planet, but is it too much to ask if we could see some press about Lotus acquisitions in Australasia ? Before someone reading this blog chime in, (and I'm talking to both of you!), I know that IBM can't talk about stuff under-way, secret squirrel and so forth...

The plethora of creative activity for new gadgets that has been happening over the last few years is amazing. No end to miniaturisation and improved fidelity of technology for feature rich experiences.

But what has left me despondent is the relevance of it all. The iPhone is one great example, the most popular applications on that are not business apps but games or juvenile applications involving bodily functions/fluids or a fascination with alcohol.

An Australian company is employing Microsoft surface. Microsoft surface is another brilliant piece of conceptualisation and engineering, but all I ever see are finger drawings, someone moving a bunch of photos, supporting bored DJ's, gambling apps, or digital enhancement to primitive mating rituals... ..

 So whenever someone comes up with an interesting technology, the business criticality of it recently seems to be a very distant second. I think the last useful technology of recent times is the blackberry. Otherwise they're no more than over-priced entertainment devices. So, then do gadgets really matter ? (Email me as I have to now go and get changed into my cardigan and fuddy-duddy pants)

Ahh, the joy of web development! This link documents rather well the trick about a supposedly simple function, isNaN, ("is not a number"). After applying first-aid to my bleeding knuckles and reading this, you would think that isNaN should be renamed "isNotANumberOrBlankOrEmpty( )"... The solution is to run parseInt to get a true result for isNaN when you use the ol double quotes or empty values.

I had heard javascript was conceived over a weekend between geeks with too much pizza and coke. Probably not, but with functional behaviour like that demonstrated in isNaN, one would think otherwise....

Trawling the blogs I came across this entry from Daniele Grillo who managed to see some rather interesting Java UI Classes in the install. A big "happy star" for Daniele who has been paying attention unlike the rest of us.. ;) .

Also, the upcoming improvements for DDE in 8.5.1 now start pull the ol Domino Designer into this millenium...

I had a look at the epic 1 hour and 20 minute google wave video on YouTube. I had to skip lots of "cutsie" bits but I think I got the idea. Well.. I am not really blown away by the concepts. Why ? well, it's just Lotus Collaboration suite totally webified and tweaked for consumer use, not strictly the corporate environment. Watching people applaud what is effectively "sametime" chat is not really ground breaking stuff. I can remember using the "phone" command on the ol Vax/VMS systems at university in the early 90's. But this is not meant to trivialise the effort Lars and team over the last 2 years, but rather how the audience seem to be a bit drunk on the kool-aid. But you get that at all the geek-fests in their respective technologies.

What is interesting is how Lars has managed to encapsulate what IBM has been slugging away at for the last few years (but are still not quite there yet). What is even more interesting is how the google code suite, in particular GWT, should allow developers to integrates wave into custom solutions. This is one of things I notice from Google. Some really worldy thinking that looks outward at current trends and projects them forward.

Lars attributes alot of his accomplishments to date to GWT, (which he pronounced GWiT) which has enabled the tremendous amount of integration to date. Google wave is still under development but it's well on the way. To sum up google wave, it's like a mashup-on-steroids, or moving towards an uber-collaboration platform. Mike Rhodin started this journey with IBM way back in 2005 ? Or was it Ambuj Goyal before him ? Anyway it was eons ago.

One observation I have noticed is how fast you can produce something without the handicap of legacy support. What makes so many developers, and CIO's, happy with not having to rip and replace, in fact only slows the evolution of the product when the rest of the world is evolving rapidly without this encumberance. But Google haven't really moved into this corporate territory currently dominated by IBM and Microsoft. They still move in the consumer sector with all this stuff. Another observation is that if you showed Lotus Notes 8.5 to the same audience would you get the same reaction from them ? There are alot of similarities...

Should Google decide to apply their significant capital into the corporate collaboration area, it would be a fresh injection of innovation and competition into the sector. At the end of the day, Google are rapidly evolving existing ideas to build a better solution, but are only moving in the same direction that Lotus has been for some years. So, Lotus you better get a move on!

For those of you who are not local there is a tv show that pushes, (and regularly over-steps), the boundaries of good taste. It's called the chasers war on everything. Now, they managed to create some recent notoriety in 2006 with their APEC Security breach stunt which almost landed them in jail.

They took a season or two off til the legal dust had settled, but then they came back in 2009. Nothing is sacred, and sometimes they are not making any point at all, they are just having a go at someone. The most recent target that has fractured the peace is their "sick kids stunt" which really to me IMHO is just an assault on our civilities whilst attempting to get us to giggle.

It has rasied the ire of the entire community and they have now apologised and removed the content from their show. A stupendous failure in estimating what the community finds entertaining. But how do you get something like that so wrong ? These guys aren't dummies, they sit around in creative meetings dreaming and conceiving this stuff. Or was it a joke they told each other during a tea break, and it didn't translate into the skit they had expected ?

Now the question I ask is, when are comedians funny or when are they just becoming a social pest ?

This site has been up for a little while now and I find it totally engaging. Andreas and Matthias have been plugging away for a while now and are getting some interesting demos going with links to the source code. It's a nice implementation of Flex with Domino in the back end. A great effort in getting to where it is now. Jake Howlett has also been having a good go at it too, and I like the way the solutions come out.. Clean, simple, robust, and modern.

It might fly a little in the face of Xpages, but I see it also as an excellent addition complementing your choices of implementation. I haven't really played around with it yet, but it also seems to provide a painless (?) interface solutions with Domino. I think some of the main strengths Flex offers is eliminating collateral damage in the browser wars with compatibility issues you will be subject to, you just need a flash player/plug in, and the range of reporting/charting solutions available.

It also provides a means to integrate with widgets provided by BP's who have created their own great widgets like the ones from iLog. Anyway I recommend you have a look and consider the possibilities in your own operation to implement potential solutions...

Ssshhh! Don't tell anyone Vista SP2 has been released.

I haven't been really active in watching the tech media recently, but when my Windoze update chimed in and said that I could download Vista SP2, (About 337MB's!), I was surprised that there wasn't much chatter. Apparently, even Microsoft wants businesses to just start testing Windows 7 RC, and scrap plans for any Vista conversion.