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Category Friends

It was my pleasure getting to know Rocky better and to work with him

So it is not good-bye, just catch you later.  In the time that Rocky was here at Teamstudio, I had the pleasure of working with him on several projects.  And even though I have been working with Notes since release 2, I learned some new things from Rocky about old stuff (we are always learning about the new stuff).  And I was able to teach Rocky a few things.  Okay, it was only mnemonic to remember the 9 most used letters in the alphabet, but in true Rocky fashion, he took it and came up with his own mnemonic.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to poke Rocky about his complete silence on season 8 of American Idol.  I mean, more people voted in the finals than voted in the last presidential election (since I said it on the internet, it must be true).  I was calling for a final between Adam and Allison, so I got that half right.  No matter what, I am sure we will hear from many of these contestants in the future.  

Anyway, if you see Rocky at a conference, you should ask him the most commonly used letters in the alphabet.

Posted by John Kingsley At 7:28 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Hobbies Personal

Hello again, I figured you may like to know a little about how I got into Triathlon.

Early this year I decided to get back into getting fit properly in my spare time. Like many of you out there, I got to the point where I could feel myself getting slower and fatter and I wasn't going to sit back and become a couch potato. So this is where the story began.

I joined a local running club called the BRJ Road Runners http://www.brjroadrunners.org.uk/ and joined a running league for fun http://www.frostbiteleague.org.uk/ with four of my friends. The first race was a disappointing eye opener for me.  I sprinted off in 1st place but my eagerness and lack of stamina got the better of me and I trudged over the line in 60th place.  Needless to say my expectations were different to the reality.  Back in the day (armed forces), I could run a mile (1.6km) in 6 minutes, with boots on and a bergan. But now I am no longer working for Her Majesty The Queen and I had to accept that a desk job does not help fitness levels.

I have met a guy called Tony Daniels, he has coached his son to a level to be now competing for the UK national team in a junior league. He has been an amazing resource for me. I have learnt how to Road Bike properly for the first time and Swim. He has also made me join a local Triathlon club called PACTRAC http://www.pactrac.co.uk/ which should have a positive impact.  

I will have my first triathlon soon, so wish me luck.  It is a middle distance between sprint and Olympic so will be a good benchmark for my progress.  In my next blog episode I will let you know my result and do my best to tell you everything I learn from it.  I hope someone reading this can learn from my mistakes and will take me on, either at a triathlon event, or even at Lotusphere or a user group.

Posted by Michael Wenn At 8:22 AM | Location Huntingdon, England | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category General
Yes We have released edition 24b. All customers with active maintenance can download it here

Posted by John Coolidge At 9:22 AM | Location Beverly Ma USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Hiring

We are seeking top-notch senior software engineers to work at our corporate headquarters. Every time we've tried to do this in the past, we get deluged with hundreds of resumes, the vast majority of which are completely worthless. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff? When you think about it, resumes are largely useless. It's too easy to lie, and it's way too easy to email a resume to hundreds of jobs just to see what sticks.

So this time, we decided to take a different approach. We don't want people to send resumes. We decided to ask people to complete a programming task - something that is hard enough to be able to tell whether they are any good, but interesting enough that they will have fun doing it. At least it should be a lot more fun than writing a resume with a covering letter. Plus, the responses will tell us all we need to know about whether this person can do the job or not. The task is detailed below. Interested?

The job:

Languages: C++ and Java on Windows with some Objective C.
Hardware: a range of devices from iPhone to iSeries.
Things you'll be with working on/with: Eclipse plugins, iPhone/Blackberry development, Lotus Notes API, compilers/parsers/interpreters, cross-platform (Win32/64/iSeries/AIX/Solaris/Linux/OS X), build and release automation, unit testing.

The environment:

Our offices are based in the Cummings Center, Beverly, MA. Ideally, we would like you to be office based, but if you live too far away to commute every day, one day a week in the office is OK. Software engineers here at Teamstudio get private offices and a range of great benefits. But the main reason they work here is that they love what they do.

How to apply:

DO NOT SEND A RESUME. Instead, we would like you to complete the task below. Submissions should include your code and any related files, along with any details you would like to provide about the tools and development environment you used, and should be emailed to sserecruit@teamstudio.com. You can use a language of your choice, but keep in mind that most of the code written at Teamstudio is in C++ or Java. This is the only way to apply for this position. We will not accept resumes. If you have technical questions directly related to the task, you can send them to sserecruit@teamstudio.com.

The task:

Write a program that will read a source file written in the LOLCODE programming language and execute it.

Posted by Nigel Cheshire At 11:56 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Best Practices
I think the most overlooked phase of application development, especially for Notes based applications, is the design phase. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for this, but one that I will discuss here is the timing of choosing the technology to be used for the application. I think most of you would agree that some technologies are better at some things than others. I think a lot of you would say that a good technology can be made to do almost anything you need it to do. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Regardless of where a new application idea comes from, the availability of a team to develop the application tends to garner the attention. In most cases, this occurs before the requirements are defined in enough detail to make a decision about the most appropriate technology to use for that application.

For example, I’ve seen cases where the next application in the development queue was assigned to the Notes development team for no other reason than they were the group that was free. Any thought beyond that probably focused on the group’s ability to perform the business analysis or on their reputation, or both. Not that those are bad things to focus on, but shouldn’t the technology choice receive at least some of that attention?

At the highest level, this might mean you should question whether a new application was best delivered as a Lotus Notes/Domino application, or possibly C++, Java or so on. Granted, multiple technologies can and probably will be used, but the primary development environment should be decided. At a lower level, you might look at the components of the environment you are using. For example, you might find that Lotus Notes/Domino is fine with a combination of Lotus iNotes, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr. You might even decide Teamstudio CIAO! should be part of this environment.

There are certain realities that do get in the way of making sure the technology choice is made first. For example, in smaller development environments (like Teamstudio), we have a small number of very good developers. But their skills are not infinite. We cannot expect them to learn a new technology because it fits an application better. We don’t have the time or the money to train everyone on new technology, acquire the appropriate supporting tools, etc. Nor does it make any sense to replace the existing team with a new team.

Instead, we take what we have and force an application to fit within that environment. We’ve created some excellent good practices for Design Specification as part of the Teamstudio Policy Guides. I encourage you to take a look at this document to get some tips for the next time around.

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 2:13 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Best Practices
This morning I was reviewing a data breach study done by Verizon Business. There is a lot of excellent data there, and I would encourage all of you to check it out when you have a chance.

There were many interesting statistics reported, but a couple of the more interesting to me were:

42% of data breaches occur from either the database server (30%) or application server (12%). However 94% of data records breached are from these sources (75% and 19% respectively)

67% of records compromised was data companies didn’t know they had. They didn’t even know they had it!

According to Verizon Business, “unknown unknowns” are any of the following:

A system unknown to the organization (or business group affected)

A system storing data that the organization did not know existed on that system

A system that had unknown network connections or accessibility

·A system that had unknown accounts or privileges

The timing is interesting, because Teamstudio has a webinar this week (Wednesday, 2:00 pm ET) called Streching Your Domino Dollars. Although the primary focus of this webinar is to help you identify ways you can reduce IT costs, many of these tactics also serve to reduce company risks, especially as they relate to unknown unknowns. Of course if you cannot make the live event, the webinar will be available on demand. Just check out the events page on our website for availability.

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 10:06 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Open Source
I read an interesting report from Gartner this morning that says 85% of 274 end-user organizations surveyed are currently using Open Source Software (OSS) in their enterprises today, and the remaining 15% expect to in the next 12 months. I was very surprised by this high percentage. I was even more surprised when I realized this study was done in May and June of 2008.

Companies in the survey were from various countries and markets in Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America. Respondents were evenly distributed across manufacturing, education, financial services and services companies and included a cross section of small, medium and large organizations. They also excluded software vendors (sorry Teamstudio) and external service providers (ESPs).

Now for the shocker: 69% of these companies surveyed said that they have no formal policy for evaluating and cataloguing OSS usage in their enterprise. 69%! What kind of exposure do you think they have with intellectual-property violations alone? What kind of risks are they taking by adopting software without a support commitment from IT?

Given that one of the top reasons given for using OSS was the lower cost of ownership (TCO), I have to wonder what would happen to the TCO if they were sued for intellectual-property violations? The respondents did acknowledge that governance, or lack of it, was the number 1 challenge for them. This sounds like an area Teamstudio needs to address in the next round of Policy Guide edits.

You can see the full report here. But I warn you, it’s not cheap!

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 3:34 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Hobbies Personal

Hi my name is Michael Wenn I’m 25 and married to my wonderful wife Jo and have a beautiful boy called Aston. This blog is about my journey into Triathlons and eventually IRONMAN. I hope you enjoy the read about my story and please feel free to laugh at my expense, and comment, along the way.

For those of you not sure what a Triathlon consists of, here goes my shot at explaining it. The event is a mixture of three sports.

Notoriously swimming...


followed by biking...


lastly running.

You switch from one to another in what is called a transition and you try your best to do all three as fast as you can. There are many variations of Triathlon around the world, both in distance covered and how, or where, you do the different stages. There are three distances I am interested in:

• Sprint = 400 meters swimming 20 km Biking 5 km running
• Olympic = 800 meters swimming 40 km Biking 10 km running
• Ironman = 3.8 km swimming 180 km Biking 42.2km running

I want to do the Ironman but I have never done any sort of triathlon before! I know you probably think I am insane…….and if you don’t, then probably you are insane yourself and I expect to see you at the start line. I want to turn my dream to reality so welcome to my very painful and long journey. I hope you will be able to enjoy my discomfort and blisters as much as I will. I’ll post next time about how I started on the training road. Please give me any tips, as I will need all the help I can get!

--Michael

Posted by Michael Wenn At 12:15 PM | Location Huntingdon, England | Permalink | Comments (8) |