The 2012 edition of the Bloggers Annual Lotusphere Dinner (BALD) will again spontaneously erupt at Big River Grille & Brewing Works on the Disney Boardwalk, starting at 3:30pm. If you want to come but can't make it until 4pm or 5pm or 6pm or ....no worries. Just show up if you care to and when you care to and look for the geeks with beer. This is intended as a purely fun and social and informal gathering. You do not need to be a blogger. You do not need to be bald (but of couse, as any bald guy will tell you, bald is quite attractive. 'Course I didn't start saying that until I was bald.)

Suggestion: Please consider bringing cash if you can. If you and whoever else is at your table can consolidate and pay your ticket as cash and as a single ticket, that is MUCH easier on the servers. Each year we have more folks, and if people are wanting to pay individually with a credit card, it causes a bit of stress for the staff (each credit card purchase must be authorized, and so it causes quite a delay when there are 10 or 20 credit cards needing to be authorized!) These folks work hard, so let's try to help them help us to have a good time. Remember, the quicker they can process the payments, the quicker they can bring refills :) ...As the evening comes on, folks typically then migrate over to the ESPN club just a bit down the Boardwalk for Turtle's party.

Looking forward to seeing everyone. Don't be shy, please just show up and join your fellow geeks. It's really a quite friendly bunch.

I've been reading the new IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques book and must say, just the first few chapters are WORTH the price of the book. If you own a car, you probably pay attention to how it's running and do regular maintenance. Many of us take stock of our eating and other lifestyle habits and make adjustments from time to time. But how many of us do the same kind of critical examination of our application development habits? I've been in IT for 25 years and I must admit that the first few chapters of this book have me taking a fresh look at how I work.

While the first chapters are geared to someone new to Domino web devlopment - offering suggestions about using available resources to glean ideas from public web sites and from Domino Help - the recommendations around organizing one's own environment and planning work, organizing a project, laying the proper foundation for development of a new site or enhancement of a new site, etc, are what REALLY caught my eye (and mind!). Much of what's mentioned in the book are things most of us hopefully do. For me, however, having so many ideas that SHOULD be common sense spelled out in this well-organized format is a valuable aid to use in an inspection of how I am going about my app dev business. And of course, this is fantastic material to anyone new to Domino web development.

By the time author Richard Ellis eases into the guts of Domino web development partway into Chapter 3, he has covered (in a very readable and usable manner) planning the design (before coding!), standards for naming / version control / ACLs, organizing testing and deployment, and ...oh yeah ...reporting all the cool things you accomplish so your boss has an idea of what you've been doing with your time. Seriously (SERIOUSLY) just this last item would quite possibly bring more real return on investment if one were to implement the suggestion. How often does performance review time roll around and we struggle to communicate just what we've really accomplished? If one is careful to regularly document the fruits of one's labor (and Ellis provides a very sensible and simple and usable format), then management continually knows the value one brings to the organization. And that is what is needed to be deemed worthly of raises, bonuses, renewed contracts -- the financial reward for quality efforts.

As I move into the middle chapters of the book, I'm eager to see what Ellis has provided in guidance for the rather odd (and powerful) duck that is Domino web development. Stay tuned....

Many of us have been doing Domino web development since the R4 days. Back then there were a lot of hacks we'd use (remember putting HTML in the field Help property?). Things have gotten a lot better.

For folks new to Domino web development - or for old dogs who may not have gotten around to learning the new tricks - this new book from PACKT Publishing may be just what the dev doctor ordered: IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques. I'm just starting on the book now, and will post a review in a week or so. Stay tuned....

To register for IdoSphere, go to http://bit.ly/IdoSphereDiscount, scroll to the bottom of the page for the Registration button. During the registration, enter the code IDS2011JL for a 10% discount, making your registration fee a total of US$31.50. Not bad for a 2-day conference! All sessions are being recorded, so you can go back and listen/view any sessions afterwards. You can even register after the conference (for a slightly higher fee) to have access to all sessions.

I'll be co-presenting a session titled "Linux Desktop: From OS Install through Running the Applications". The target audience is folks who are either brand new to linux and Ubuntu, or who may have played around a little with linux, but have not yet tried installing Lotus software (Notes, Symphony, etc), have questions about installing Windows in a virtual machine in order to be able to run Windows-only applications like Domino Designer, who might wonder what apps one uses in Ubuntu to address standard tasks like managing tunes, taking screenshots, chatting with friends, etc. And then my partner in crime, Bill Malchisky will do a deeper dive into VPN, connecting to remote machines, and other geeky goodness.

We had submitted this as a Lotusphere abstract - intended to be a 2-hour session. So it's pretty ambitious to shoot through this in an hour plus some question /answer time. But as stated, the sessions are all recorded, and we'll have a lot of slides in the presentation so you can review later. Should be a blast :) ...Pop over to http://bit.ly/IdoSphereDiscount, register with the discount code IDS2011JL and we'll see you there! Our session will be Tuesday 15Feb at 2:15pm Eastern US time.

...oh, and yes I blogged this from Notes running on one of my linux machines :)

Following up on the Linux Installfest that Bill Malchisky and I hosted at Lotusphere 2011, we are each also among the presenters next week for IdoSphere. This is an online 2-day conference, with a host of great sessions.

I'll be co-presenting a session titled "Linux Desktop: From OS Install through Running the Applications". I've been taking a million screen shots (ok, it feels like a million, actual count is somewhat less) to show every step of installing Ubuntu linux on a PC. We'll start with the web site from which you can download Ubuntu. We walk you through every mouse click and option selection to end up with Ubuntu running on your machine (and you can choose to run it from a CD or USB stick first if you'd like to try it before nuking your hard drive ...or you can install in a partition for a dual boot system). You'll see how to install and run Notes natively on a linux system. You'll learn about installing a virtual machine, so that you can run Domino Designer or other Windows-only programs within a Windows virtual machine ...running on your linux machine. You'll learn about linux software that you can easily install (from the "Ubuntu Software Center" - automatically available when you install Ubuntu); free open source solutions exist for chat, managing MP3 players, word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, image editing, and on and on.

To register for IdoSphere, go to http://bit.ly/IdoSphereDiscount, scroll to the bottom of the page for the Registration button. During the registration, enter the code IDS2011JL for a 10% discount, making your registration fee a total of US$31.50. Not bad for a 2-day conference!

...and of course I blogged this from Notes running on one of my linux machines!

What: Linux Installfest at Lotusphere (various flavors of linux)
When: Thursday (03Feb2011) 12:15pm
Where: Yacht & Beach, Grand Harbor Salon 1

If you are interested in seeing linux running on a PC with Notes, or want to pick up some free media to use to install it, or try installing live, or might like to talk to someone about linux on the desktop or on the server ...then please come and join Bill Malchisky and me (Joe Litton) on Thursday, 03Feb. This is a completely unofficial happening. We're slotted after Ask the Product Managers (and other sessions at that time) and before Ask the Developers, so this won't conflict with other events. Grab your box lunch and come on over. I plan to bring several USB sticks with Ubuntu 10.10 on them (Ubuntu is a popular version of linux) , so you can boot from the stick and test drive Ubuntu without affecting your machine. This is a great way to see if it works with your hardware, to see how the interface looks and feels, all with no stress. You can see Lotus applications running on linux, along with other applications that one typically wants on any machine.

Bill is very experienced with Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu and more and can discuss client and server implementations with great authority.

I am not nearly as knowledgeable as Bill, yet even I have installed and upgraded many versions of Ubuntu on my Dell netbook, Toshiba laptop, and Gateway desktop machines (and some other versions of linux going back about 10 years). I am proof that you do not need to be a linux guru to happily install and run linux as your operating system of choice - or to just experiment and expand your knowledge.

Hope to see you there! You can also hear a bit more about the InstallFest on Lotusphere Podcast 021, during which Stuart McIntyre chats with Bill and me about our plans.