awarness. rational.

It popped into my RSS feeds, I liked and agree with the message from the video, I'm sharing:

gist.com with Lotus Notes plugin. Good, but needs improvement.

Having purchased my Android (Desire) phone, and using Ubuntu as the primary workstation, my main frustration is waiting for Android Lotus Traveler, which I've seen is work on progress.

While waiting, one of my colleagues pointed me towards gist.com, which aggregates contacts from gmail, gmail contacts, linkedin, android (my choices, there are others like facebook and twitter which I don't and will never use). So, besides that, which is looking good, back at my frustration: sync contacts and calendar from my business client to the Android phone.

On gist.com site there's a plugin which installs as a plugin into the Notes 8.5.x client. However, it wants to search my business mail to gather contacts ? WTF ? No way, this is trouble. So I did a pronto uninstall and decided to post here the use-cases I see for such plugin, maybe the dev team will listen:

1. This Notes plugin would allow me to configure a local Notes database containing contacts. Be it the default local names.nsf or another .nsf, which is my case.
2. This Notes plugin would allow me to configure a local database for calendaring information.

More comments:
- Do not scan my business mail as I will not allow it, for obvious reasons: security compliance, confidential information which goes into your site, and so on.
- Storing my personal contacts on your site is my choice. Business information is not my choice.

So towards the gist.com dev team: thanks, this is good work, please improve the Lotus Notes plugin before Lotus Traveler for Android hits the market :)

back from holidays

Two and a half weeks, approx 3.000 km by car. These are the locations we've travel:


View holidays 2010 in a larger map

What I learned is that:
- Children don't care at their age (7 and 8 years old, two girls) about bizantine, greek or roman history. But taking them at museums and archaelogical sites might encourage them to read and learn more.
- I am an ignorant.
- Tribute for this vacation goes to a good friend of ours, Calin The Guide

I found the missing part - gluebox

Since I started my Ubuntu journey, there was a missing piece. Now I'm so happy that I am sharing this with you, before I put this to work in order to find out its reliability.

It's about a note taking program to store ideas and notes I usually take during engagements or readings.
Now I found a true candidate, Gluebox

The good part is that it's Eclipse based, which makes me rather comfortable and also makes it available on linux / windows / mac

I only found it via this wikipedia page. Couldn't I have found this page a little sooner ?!

Now, spread the word within the linux community so that others like me would suffer less :)

this is what I call good advertising

longest tennis game in history. and a fun scoreboard.

If you know the score in tennis, this will interest you.

The next story happened today. These guys will start tomorrow finishing the fifth set. 2 consecutive games determines the winner. But now the score is 59-59. OMG !

Except this, the fun part is the scoreboard. Once it hit 50-50, it went baloney, starting all over from 0-0

Is this an analysis exception or some software bug ? Since the Wimbledon tournament is powered by IBM, I suspect some of my colleagues are having a tough night. If it's a software bug, then it can be solved. Or not :)

But if this an analysis exception, who in their right minds would have anticipated two players not being able to settle a set up to 50 ? As they say, never say never.

ubuntu - what I have and what I miss.

I wanted to somehow give a status as to how am I going towards my day-to-day living in Ubuntu 10.04

What I like:

- Notes 8.5.x running from the Windows partition, out-of-the-box, just by edit the /opt/lotus/notes/data/notes.ini on Ubuntu, and set

Directory=/media/win_disk/path_to_notes_data

When booting Ubuntu, after login, I need to remember to open Nautilus in order to mount the Windows partitions. I know this can be done automatically, it didn't bother me so far.

- Rational Software Architect smoothly installed.

- Rational Method Composer just fixed, see the previous post.

- Everything else just works: wireless, VPN's and so on.

What I don't like:

- There's no HTC Sync equiv. for Linux. What the heck, Android is a Linux clone. Well...
- Notes 8 has some font issues which I didn't quite overcome. But I reached a way of getting along with it. I think the next Notes 8.x versions will address that.
- I didn't find a good outliner/personal wiki/whatever in order to keep my knowledge notes. On Windows I had different options, on Linux I am still investigating. So far Basket Note Pads comes rather close, but it's not what I want: keep flat files, rich formatting, easy search

RMC 7.5.0.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid - fix the embedded browser

The past days endeavor for sure worth this post. Rational Method Composer was the "must have" software to run on my current dual-boot configuration.

I could not open any element, the backward Eclipse keep throwing errors like:

org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles (java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no swt-mozilla-gtk-3349 or swt-mozilla-gtk in swt.library.path, java.library.path or the jar file)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3589)
......

I've obviously searched for the error on the net. Seems that the embedded browser xulrunner does not get along with the Eclipse what-ever-the-version which RMC is currently using.

I've tried several trial-and-error solutions:
- set the environment variable with the command "export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.3/", would actually crash the entire RMC Eclipse, with bad bad coredumps :)
- reboot the damn thing after adding more environment variables in the .profile of the current user.
- read the forums and try not to waste precious time mocking with a pretty controllable Eclipse environment on Windows :)

The big thing which fixed it:
1. Make sure you install the xulrunner package using Synaptic. My version is 1.9.2
2. edit the eclipse.ini of the RMC software. In my environment, the command was:

sudo gedit /opt/ibm/rmc75/eclipse.ini

Add the following line:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.3


Final note: if you reached this point, you must already know that RMC is by default started as a product with a command such as:
/opt/ibm/rmc75/rmc/rmc
Near the executable you have a rmc.ini file which supports the same fix as above.

Running Method Composer within the Eclipse environment allows me to use multiple workspaces, but this is another story.

Ubuntu conversion. First impressions.

I'm on the road of becoming another linux convert. For the moment I'm on dual boot with Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid and the old (3 years old) XP partition. So far so good, I'm expecting some glitches but hopefully none of them blocking.

I managed to configure the Notes 8.5 client with the embedded Sametime to use the data folder mounted on the XP partition, so from the business communication point of view I'm set. Small issues with the fonts of the Notes client, due to fonts not being the same.

However, huge improvements for the Notes client into the Linux world.

I also have a handful of useful Windows apps which I'm using on a daily basis (Xmind, Keepass, you know, free stuff) which just works on Ubuntu, and several others which can have replacements. For instance, having the customer's SSH hosts handy can be accomplished with a little package called sshmenu. Similar to putty clones on Windows, of which I think I've tested about 10 of them :)

Today was the first day 95% working under Ubuntu. This was a good day.

new happy htc desire user

This is the best phone I've had so far. It sets the standard so high that I think it will pass a couple of years before thinking of changing it. Well worth the money spend. I will not go into the details of reviewing it because I don't have the skills to do it, I'm just a happy user of a brand new HTC Desire

nightloosers

is one of my favorite bands. Good music, smart and talented people.

I've activated comment moderation on this blog

since I've seen several comments with Chinese characters (so it seems, at least). I also cannot delete them from my posts, I am pissed.

I'll be notified by mail of any comment dropped here, and I'll approve, provided it's not coming from spammers.

we were not born in the right place

I do have my personal history in the communist era. I was 15 years old in '89, so I lived my childhood on those times. 20 years later, check out the embedded video, I so much find myself in this. You might not understand the lyrics, what the chap is saying is that we're not born in the right place. So many talents we have as people, so screwed we are as nation.



Ask around, you'll most likely find someone from Romania who you do actually appreciate and respect. If you do, leave a comment, let's see if I'm right.

youtube disco

This link worth every minute of your time. I discovered it through my RSS feeds (via lifehacker.com) this morning and past three hours I've been looking to videos of Pink Floyd, Led Zep, AC/DC, Linkin Park, Rammstein, Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen.

This is today, as I think I'll be spending more on this, discovering good music, some of it being created around and beyond the year I was born, '74. Oh boy, I absolutely love this project.

IT Architecture: my understanding

All I can say is that IT Architecture is an interesting job. It is a rather new profession, I think started to be defined in 2003, http://www.opengroup.org/itac/faq.html).

It should be the ultimate level of technical excellence one could achieve, understanding technology, systems, processes and businesses. On the other hand, the IT Architect should embrace skills from different areas, not only technical.

An IT Architect performs consulting, PR, marketing and so on, depending on whom he needs to convince or what tasks he has to perform in order to demonstrate business value of its proposed IT architecture.

And, finally, the primary task of an IT Architect is to know how to work with the PM and customer in order to organize the project, once it's sold. Tasks,roles,skills first, then help PM to define the project plan and so on.

But, I've developed a more simple vision, in practice. For me, IT Architects belongs to one of two categories:

1. IT Architect. A professional as described above. Rare species, you won't find many. This is the ultimate fellow which knows what is speaking about because he/she was there, first of all. In development, solving problems with technology. Drawing use-cases, modeling, working with systems, whatever. He/she was there more than writing lines of codes or modeling. Gradually the understanding of the domain grew more than sometimes performing boring tasks (refactoring for example, or adjusting requirement documents).

2. PowerPoint IT Architect. This is a more common individual, which draws slides fast and talk too much without actually getting something done in practice. Everything is simple in front of the customer, in order to sell an idea which might prove a nightmare when delivery approaches.

back on blog

I'm back from a longer than wanted absence on this blog. 2009 has been a busy year for me. I won't go into the professional details except for saying that I learned a lot during this absence. And this is what keeps me going into the profession, the ability to learn new things every day. So should you.

I'm amazed when looking at younger professionals these days and see the lack of passion and the lack of learning skills. What on earth are they learning at their universities ? When I graduated, the only thing I took with me was to know that all my life I need to learn, and the only skill I formed during those five years was to know how to do it. Read fast, connect things and issues, search for info.