TexasSwede

My seven year old son yesterday evening, after I changed into jeans and my BleedYellow t-shirt with claw marks:

"Nobody bleeds yellow"

I tried to explain it, but I am not sure if he understood... :-)

My son at my sister's place in Sweden last Christmas Eve.

I just read a blog entry by Dave Hay called "Geek is Cool". He talk about how he now is proud to be a geek, after he realized he is one:

I realised that I am a geek, I've always been a geek and I may well be a geek forever.

I have been a geek since 7th grade, back in the early 1980's. That's when the computer club in my school started. I spent many hours, both during the breaks/recess and after school, in the computer room, learning to program and use the computers. My parents were not too happy... "You need to do your homework, so you get good grades and get a good job after you graduate." Little did they knew that what I learned on my own would be much more valuable than most of the other things I learned in school. :-)

Back then, geeks were not popular. All the girls were into the jocks and "normal" guys. Someone like me, member of the computer club and the role playing game club (yes, we even had that!) were considered very weird.

I graduated, started working, first at Microsoft and then (after my military service in the Swedish Airforce) at a company developing IVR applications. That company went bankrupt, and I got a job as a journalist at a computer publication. I was still the resident geek, all other writers had a journalistic background and learned about technology, while I was brought in as a technical person they could teach to write. I developed some internal systems while I was there, initially just to help myself in my daily work, but soon they were used by the whole staff.

I then met my wife-to-be (now ex-wife) online. This was in 1996, she did not even tell her dad until after we were married how we met. :-) That's how many people looked at technology then. It is just a little over 10 years ago...

Today I meet girls who like geeks and even look to date geeks specifically. We are now more popular, and when most people have computers, I think they appreciate the geekyness more. So it has never been a better time to be a geek. :-) I am a geek, and I am proud of it!

Lately I been feeling more restless than usual. I work very close to the DFW airport, and every time I drive by and see the planes take off or come in for landing, I want to be on that plane. I went to Sweden both last summer (I also visisted my aunt and cousin in Germany) and for Christmas. Of course I went to Orlando for Lotusphere in January, and in the beginning of February I went on a 5 day cruise to Mexico. And I already want to go away again...

...in a country far far away, there were a class of six graders. Their teacher was married to a theater actor, and the class set up a play pretty much every semester. One time the teacher came up with the idea of making movies instead. The class was divided into 6 groups of 4-5 students each. One of the children in the class had a father who was a documentary film maker/director, and he came in and explained a little bit about film making basics.

Most groups opted for the easy route, using one of the fairly new camcorders. This was back in 1982 or 83, so they were big and heavy, but the advantage was instant results. One group, however, were the overachivers. :-)
They decided to make an animated (stop motion) movie about toys coming alive at night. To do that, they used Super 8 cameras so they could take one picture, move the toys, take another picture, etc. The group (or at least the three core members) spent several days and a couple of weekends making the movie, which was later shown to the parents.

I was one of the members of this group, and I got a copy of the movie transferred to VCD a couple of years ago. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the movie into Sony Vegas, removed the old handprinted titles and replaced them with new computer generated titles, as well as adding a soundtrack and a sound effect. A couple of animated sequences were slowed down a little, and a couple of live-action sequences were speeded up slightly.

Here is the result.

Update: The titles are in Swedish, just like the original. I will create a version in English. You are not missing much, it is basically some thnaks to parents and teachers, and a list of who made the movie. The text in the end of the movie says: "Hmm, I thought I picked those up last night." (select hidden text to read).

What's your take on certifications?

It took me over 10 years before I took my first certifications (last year at Lotusphere, crammed in 3 tests between the sessions). I never believed in certifications, I can tell some horror stories about "certified" developers that could not code very good at all. All I say is "GetNthDocument"... 

At this years Lotusphere, I wanted to upgrade my Certified Application Developer to the Advanced level for 6.0/6.5, and also try to upgrade to Notes/Domino 7.0. The advanced upgrade (exam 273) was no problem, but I failed the 7 upgrade. Since I am still on R5 at work (some clients are on 7.0.2, but development has to be done for 5.0.12), I did not have that much experience of creating web services or using DB2 in Notes, which were what most of the test was about.

But what really made me wonder were all the questions about the new user interface. Is the biggest and most important thing for a developer to know that if you click "do not show this dialog again" when you get the prompt to close Designer, the prompt will also go away in the Notes client?

What about having a couple of questions about something that is really useful for a developer to know? Like how to work with lists, for example.

On the bus to the Lotusphere Wednesday party at Islands of Adventure, I was sitting next to André Guirard, and we talked about the tests. He said he did review the tests a while back, and they were thinking about revising them. But I did not get any word on what the current plan is.

Well, plenty of things going on since I got back from Lotusphere and not much time (or energy) for blogging....
Part of the office moved to a different location a few miles away, about 100 users were moved to Citrix and Notes 7.0.2 as a result of this, and several servers were upgraded to Domino 7.0.2.

I got an upper respiratory infection after Lotusphere, took me about 2 weeks to get well. Went on a cruise to Mexico the week before the move (was planned way before the dates of the move was set), so that added to the stress... Felt like I was deserting the rest of the team, even if I was not that involved in teh actual move as a developer. And finally I finished an article for The View.

Well, things are slowing down. Some personal issues still have to be solved, that will take some time. But now I should have time for some more blogging.

Back from Lotusphere with a bunch of new knowledge and new contacts. Back to the regular routine with development and support.

Well, not exactly. We ran into an interesting problem this week, affecting application performance.

We currently mostly run Notes 5.0.12 clients, but have a handful users that are on 7.0.2.

Our Domino servers run a couple of different versions. 5.0.8, 5.0.12, one 6.0 and (since a few weeks) one 7.0.2 server. The new 7.0.2 server is on a faster/newer box, so we can now run the full database, not a filtered replica.

So here is the layout:

* DomApp1 is running 5.0.12, having a full replica of the database.

* Dallas is running 7.0.2, having a filtered replica containing Dallas and Little Rock documents.

What we then found was that certain operations were much slower when performed by a Notes 7 client against the Notes 5 server DomApp1 than if a Notes 5.0.12 client is being used agianst the same server. If we use a 7.0.2 client or a 5.0.12 client against the 7.0.2 server, there is no problem.

I was running TeamStudio profiler, and the calls that took much longer were:

Call templatedoc.ComputeWithForm(False,True)
and

success = templatedoc.RenderToRTitem(rtitem)

What the code does is looping through a collection of documents, building a template document for each processed document and populating fields in it, then rendering it into a "container" document with just one rich text field. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/texasswede/2235410624/sizes/o/ for an example.

Anyone seen this behaviour before? Network compression is not turned on, as far as I know.

Of course, Lotus does not support Notes/Domino 5 anymore. Management at my current workplace does not believe in upgrading, for some reason...