LDC Giveaway

It all started with a simple rule:

Back when LDC were first starting to do promotions and freebies for conferences Matt White (who is less the leader of LDC and more the person we don’t argue with) laid down just one guideline

“Each year’s promotion must be better than the year before”

This was to ensure that we never degraded our giveaways into free pens, mouse mats or any of the other dross that marketing are sure will stick in the mind of a potential client

To this end we thought of amazing tshirts (you can get them from here as wallpapers) with thanks to Ben Poole and Julian Woodward for some truly original designs, but we were producing an original design for each day of IBM connect/Lotusphere (plus some for the other LUGS and things like the caffeine shot mugs) so our creative sap failed after a few years.

Then we came up with the conference survival kit which was heralded as “the best Lotusphere give away ever”

…….and so now we are f**ked

we have tried, oh heavens we have tried

we have brainstormed

 

 

and conceptualised

 

 

and pondered

 

 

and even gave it some thought

 

 

In the end the strain started to tell, Woowar lost his hearing and sanity to an over loud playing of the Macarena, Ben Poole lost the toilet and I lost the ability to not realise coffee flavoured tequila is not a good idea, then came a faint croak from the parched lips of an LDC member “I wish I had a magic drink ticket”

We focused on each other, “What? as in Beer tokens?”, “Yes, but posher”, “so we can buy people drinks at any time, you give them to people when you are not near a bar or when people are busy, so when they see any of us later we know we owe them a drink, it means that we can catch up with them, they don’t have to find the same LDC member to get said drink, win win all round”

“sounds a great plan, what could go wrong”

GIT Xpages Issue

I Little devil of an issue plagued me the other day, which I thought I would share

Scenario:

  1. You clone a git repository off a xpages app (I always use the git command shell).
  2. Then as normal in the package manager you open the local git clone as a “project”
  3. You right click on the project and associate it with a new nsf.
  4. This nsf you locate on your local machine.

Error:
you get tons of xPage and Custom control errors stating that you cant use this custom control even though the controls are obviously there and fine, editing and saving each custom control fixes the problem, but that means you are committing tons more than you need to, and other people using the same repository don’t have the issue.

Reason:
The security on the NSF/Git clone you are associating with, has “enforce Local ACL” & Default does not have manager rights or above etc etc,
Basically you don’t have rights to the db you have just created, for some reason this does not show up till you close the database and re-open

Solution:
Associate it to a new db on a server / get another contributor to change the ACL on the GIT hub version, you can change the security once the local db has been build but that has a tendency to touch all the custom controls, which means your git commit is huge and pointless

IBM Connect 2014 session

Last week the session that Matt White and I submitted for Connect 2014 was announced as one of the first wave of approved sessions.

This will be the first session that Matt and I have ever presented together, mainly due to our massively disparate methods of both preparing and presenting (he is the ultimate professional with proper preparation, practice and finishes everything well in time to step back and take an objective view of the session, as for me….I do all that as well but compact it into the two hours before I’m due to present 🙂 )

However given the opportunity of doing a f**king awesome session around a certain idea that seemed to have merit (which we thought of during a shared curry) we decided to work together (the decision might have been aided by the beers that went with the curry).

Well thank goodness the session got approved, and got approved EARLY as we now have s**t loads to get ready before we can even get to doing the 200+ slides for a “Show ‘n’ Tell”, Matt has to write a fully featured Notes app that will serve as a suitable base, not a noddy app either, one that you could see working in real life, while I build us a Domino and Connections demo environment, populate it with data and write the native connections app to go with the Notes db, this has got to be done to perfect standards as we have used the word ‘proper’ in the title and in our green and pleasant land that MEANS something, only then can we settle down and actually code and write the presentation, then Matt is going to make us practice it again and again till it’s perfect …. Wailll

Matt can’t we just go back to the curry house and do it later?

New Anime Series: Kyoukai No Kanata

First Episode(s) Review for: Kyoukai No Kanata
Summary:

A nice and understanding lad who helps others whenever he can but is a half demon is brutally stabbed but a nice and shy girl who happens to be a cursed demon slayer, despite this tricky start they are thrown together and try to get on while dealing with a whole truckload of emotional baggage (and demons)

Animation:

Another example of my favourite type of soft tone anime, as if everything is filmed on a summer afternoon.

Plot Potential:

Plenty of meat here, they have used a lot of rich settings and good characters, so lots to work with, looking forward to see if the main bad guy is as interesting as the good guys.

Music:

Just like a serious high school “soap” anime but with fight scenes

Reminds me of:

Errr well, imagine if Akane from Ranma 1/2 became a demon hunter in the setting of K-On! and you are nearly there

Overall:

I nice little series, Gripping enough to require your attention with good visuals and likable characters, thoroughly enjoying it and save for PG viewers.

 

 

 

Disclaimer: These are mini reviews of anime’s that are fresh out in Japan and are not licensed in the UK, buy them once they have been licensed or at the very least buy the merchandise, remember if the anime makers make a loss, THEY WILL STOP MAKING ANIME!!