Wie verblödet sind diese GEZ Typen eigentlich?

Gerade kam ein Brief der GEZ gerichtet an meine Frau.

“Wir konnten Sie unter obiger Anschrift nicht in unserem Adressbestand finden …”

Na und, was schert es micht? Immerhin wohnen meine Frau und ich seit 14 Jahren dort und zahlen pünktlich unsere GEZ Gebühren.

Und wenn ich mir diese Schreiben der Inkasso Truppe aus Köln anschaue, könnte ich KOTZEN. §§ an jeder Stelle und ständige Hinweise auf PLICHTEN. Sogar in welcher Farbe ich den Zettel für die Rückantwort ausfüllen MUSS wird vorgeschrieben.

Und soweit ich informiert bin, muss man einen Brief, der ausdrücklich als ANTWORT gekennzeichnet ist NICHT frankieren.

Warum macht ihr bei der Wuchertruppe überhaupt noch den untauglichen Versuch, eure Daten in den Griff zu bekommen? Hat sich doch eh erledigt, wenn jeder Haushalt gleichermaßen zur Kasse gebeten wird.

Also verpisst euch aus meinem Leben und verschont mich und meine Familie mit euren idiotischen Briefen.

 

Entwicklercamp 2011 – Wrapup

Last week was packed with conference and 2 LCTY. Iwrote about the LCTY in another article earlier today.

Entwicklercamp 2011 was just great. The team around Rudi once again setup a great 3 days conference. The team acts very professional, either in setting up all the technical stuff that is needed to run a conference of this size ( appr. 190 attendees ) , helping newbies to find the right room, putting together the daily campnews and taking photos during the sessions and the social events. There is also a lot of work that remains invisible but has to be done before the first speaker enters the stage for the keynote.

Maureen Leland did the keynote and talked about Domino Appication Development Directions.

Lot of talk about XPages in the breakout sessions. No surprise is that. But there was also other interesting stuff to listen to. Look at the agenda to get an impression of the the variety of topics.

Before the conference, Rudi did a survey to get an impression of how many people would want to see which session. This was great because the rooms in the conference area are of very different size. So there was no need to change a room shortly before the session starts because the room was overcrowded. We have seen this in the past.

I myself delivered 3 sessions and according what I could see from the evaluations, the attendees enjoyed it.

There are a few other things to mention.

Thanks to Ellice Uffer, Manager IBM Press for shipping 4 FREE copies of “Mastering XPages”. Well, not really shipping. Maureen Leland had to carry the books in her luggage. So some pair of shoes had to stay at home for sure. Thank you Ellice and Maureen.

Thanks to Joyce Davies and David Leedy for providing 250 copies of “XPages Cheat Sheet”. Sorry, Joyce for the extra gray hair you got by trying to get the copies delivered in time.

And also a big thank you to Manfred Dillmann (madicon.de) and Juergen Gabel (sdd.de). Both gave me coupons for free licenses of their products as a giveaway. An overall value of € 4.000,- !!

And last but not least, Teamstudio gave me T-Shirts for the attendees of my session. On tuesday evening you could see shiny blue Teamstudio shirts all over the conference.

If you have never been to Entwicklercamp before, consider attending next year. If you are more like an Admin there is also Admincamp.

 

I’ll be speaking at BLUG

The next pre-Lotusphere event will be BLUG. The Belux Lotus User Group is proud to deliver a 2 days event on March 31st and April 1st in Antwerp, Belgium.

The speaker list is impressive and so is the agenda.

If you not have registered yet, do it right NOW –> register here

I will also do a talk about the History of Lotus Notes. Hope the IBM inquisition will not punish me for saying LOTUS 🙂

Here is the session abstract.

When Plato Left The Cave – A brief history of Lotus Notes

Jump back in time to 1974. In a Harvard dormitory, Bill Gates, future cofounder of Microsoft, is goofing off playing poker and pinball. Over in India, Steve Jobs, future cofounder of Apple, has shaved his head and is wandering around seeking enlightenment. Out in Hawaii, Steve Case, future cofounder and head of AOL Time Warner, is busy writing album reviews for his Honolulu high school newspaper. While these future billionaire CEOs of Internet-industry behemoths are busy enjoying their last teenage years, at a university town in Illinois the ‘Net’ has already arrived. Indeed: it’s in full swing!
In the following years the germ cell of Lotus Notes began to grow and to evolve to the world’s leading groupware application.
Follow the timeline from the past to present in the history of Lotus Notes / Domino.

Hope to see you there. Did I mention that this is a FREE event?

LCTY 2011 – Duesseldorf

I had the chance and pleasure to attend LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese last thursday. LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese is the small brother / sister of the edcom LS review in Munic earlier this week.

Small only regarding the timeframe. LCTY Rheinland attempts to put all the great content into one single day while edcom is a two day event. This might give you a bit of the feeling you have at Lotusphere, because you have to decide which session you attend and depending on your decision, you maybe missing some other great content that is is presented at the same time.

Every year, timetoact has an impressive lineup of speakers.

Ed Brill, Ron Sebastian, Angela Blasberg, Daniel Nashed, Stephan Wissel just to name a few.

After a short introduction by Otto Förg and Felix Binsack where they showed some tweets that popped up on Twitter during LS 11 OGS shouting for “DEMO, DEMO, DEMO!!! “, Ron Sebastian took the stage for the keynote. His presentation skills are tremendous. I love to listen to him and watch him doing demoes of all the new stuff. Everything works smoothly from my point of view. If this had been the OGS at LS, it would have been less boring.

After the keynote, the audience had the choice to attend sessions in different tracks ( administration, development, vendors … ).

I decided to spend most of my time in the development track. Stephan Wisssel, who came all the way from Singapore, presented an excellent session on how to enhance XPages to deal with CSV files and to get content out of a RDBMS and display the data on an XPage.

Another session, also by Stephan Wisssel, was about how to combine the best of two worlds, Domino and Sharepoint.

Both session were at an advanced level regarding your skills as a developer. Again, as an advice. If you have not started to look into XPages ( and Java ), do it NOW!!

Angela Blasberg presented on Extensibility API and the Extension Library ( available on OpenNTF ).

I missed the “Hacking the Designer” session while hanging around in the vendors area talking to Daniel Nashed and Stephan Wissel.

After a long day and a view on IBM’s future Software strategy, all attendees were invited for a dinner.

The Maritim Hotel at Duesseldorf International Airport was a great place for this conference. Last year the Swissotel in Neuss was the venue. I cannot see any big difference between these locations, so it is not easy to answer the question in the final evaluation, which venue was better.

During the final speech, Felix Binsack asked the audience if LCTY should be a two days event the next year. There were only a few handsigns for this option.

If you not have the chance to attend Lotusphere, you should attend the LCTY 2012 either in Munic or in Duesseldorf depending on your location.Expect a great line-up of speakers presenting excellent content in an appropriate location.

 

LCTY 2011 – Cologne

On Friday, 25-Feb-2011, I attended LCTY 2011 at ebf.de in Cologne. ebf is an IBM Premium Partner for many years and they also work together with RIM. So it is no surprise that they offer solutions for the Blackberry and other mobile devices.

The venue was the IBM building in Cologne near the river Rhine. The slogan was “Go social, do (mobile) business”.

Ed Brill was not able to speak at this LCTY because of some overlap with other LCTY events in Germany. So this year there were no “high rank” speakers from the US to present a session in Cologne.

But ebf got Dr. Peter Schuett as the keynote speaker. Dr. Schuett is the leader of Software Strategy & Knowledge Management in the IBM Software Group.He has great presentation skills so even for me as a Lotus Notes tekkie his presentation was not boring at any time although it was all about strategy.

There were all the now well known topics in his talk; Lotus Live Symphonie, Activity Streams etc. The fazit for me ( putting my administrator hat on ) is that we have to aggravate our efforts in the mobile business. More and more content will be available on the mobile device. And there is another important point that comes into play. BYOD ( Bring Your Own Device ). More and more companies allow their employees to use own devices at work. So from the company’s perspective you will no longer be able to handle only one mobile device technologie in the future. You have to lookk for solutions to get the content onto different  end-point devices ( Nokia, Blackberry (PlayBook) , iPhone/iPad ).

Putting my developer hat on, the message clearly is “Learn XPages. If you have not started, do it NOW !!”.

Device management is also a big topic, IT departments have to deal with. Looking at all the different devices and the inconsistency in security and the lack of features in remote wipe and also billing, you should think about a device management solution that tries to simplify the handling of different device types.

MobileIron is the solution that was presented at LCTY. It is not feature perfect. Some features like the billing for iPhone/ iPad are not available. But this is caused by iOS.

So even the device vendors have to do some work to put all the features into their operation systems to allow a consistant way of handling different end-point devices in the future.

To sum up this event. A free event, perfect location, excellent catering. Keep in mind that ebf does not provide much technical content in the sense of code samples and stuff. The target audience is decision makers and managers. Maybe Marco can comment on this :).

One sidenote on presentations in general. Most of the presentations were original slide decks from LS 2011. These sessions are meant to be held in 45 – 60 minutes. It is irritating for the audience when you try to present a 45 minute session in 30 minutes and skip some slides from the presentation because they may not be important from the speakers perspective.

Let the audience decide, which slide contains important information from their point of view and not simply skip a slide because of time pressure.