🙂

Below is my comment to Rockys post. If you have comments to the below lets keep the thread over at Rockys blog.

Rocky,

in the wake of the various blogging presenters have been making their evaluation results public, I have been thinking a little about the evaluation forms at Lotusphere. Of cause I don't know how the other scores look so take the below with a grain of salt...

Although I agree that many of the presentations and the presenters were in fact excellent I think the evaluation form lacks options and that it shines through in the published scores. I really think that question 1 ("How would you rate the quality and relevance of the information in the session/BOF?") and question 3 ("How would you rate the quality and effectiveness of the speaker(s)/facilitator(s)?") lacks a fourth option where one could indicate that the speaker wasn't really doing a good job.

While I recognize that given too many options it is sometimes difficult to choose the correct answer, I still think that only giving people options for positive feedback doesn't really suffice. I know one have the option of commenting on specific sessions and giving ones opinion in prose I still think that it twists the results of the evaluation if I have to give at least a "Fair" evaluation. Sometimes a "Dissapointing" or similar option would be nice. At the end of the day, to get an overall picture of the event, you would have to look at the overall picture of the response and here comments don't really get through unless I, as the one responding, can couple it with a score of "Disapointing" or similar.

Another option would be to go the other way and to restrict the number of options from 3 ("Excellent", "Good", "Fair") to 2 ("Above expectations", "Below expectations"). Only having two options would really make people make a choice. I recognize that it also makes the responses less fine grained.

I'm not really educated in making feedback forms or in statistics but i think it could be worth looking into whether the evalutation forms tell you what you want to know. Given that a person is more likely to publish his/her evalution if they are all good, I think that an overall score of 95% "Excellent" is a problem. The score should probably be as in school where the majority of presenters would receive a "Good" score and a minority receive an "Excellent" score (the famous "Camel"/"Bell" curve). Otherwise it devaluates the "Excellent" score.

Just some thoughts.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.5.0.1 (here is a complete list of fixes):

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

Note: I had to manually uninstall and reinstall the Venkman JavaScript debugger in order for me to make it work under 1.5.0.1.

As mentioned previously I have started using a SessionFactory approach when working with session to Domino using Corba/DIIOP. I forgot forever to mention that you should really combine the use of the SessionFactory with a servlet filter to recycle() the session once the thread has completed. The filter could be as simple as this:

import java.io.IOException;

import javax.servlet.Filter;
import javax.servlet.FilterChain;
import javax.servlet.FilterConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.ServletResponse;

import dk.horisontnet.domino.SessionFactory;

public class CloseSessionFilter implements Filter {

   public void init(FilterConfig config) throws ServletException {
   }

   public void destroy() {
   }

   public void doFilter(ServletRequest req, ServletResponse res, FilterChain chain)
                                            throws IOException, ServletException {
      // do work from other filters
      chain.doFilter(req, res);

      // close session
      SessionFactory.closeSession();
   }
}

The above filter uses a new method in the SessionFactory class called closeSession():

public static void closeSession() {
   try {
      // declarations
      Session session = null;

      // look for a session in the thread local
      session = (Session)pSession.get();
      if (null != session) {
         session.recycle();
         pSession.set(null);
      }
   } catch (Exception e) {
      // do nothing but log it
      logger.warn("Exception thrown while closing session to Domino", e);
   }
}

Deploy the filter via web.xml as described previously.

Update on 13/Feb/06: Remember to nullify the ThreadLocal (code in bold above) after recycling the Domino session to avoid having a recycled session being reused once the thread is reused from Tomcats thread pool. Failure to do so will result in the dreaded “Object no longer exists on server”-NotesException.

After Lotusphere I have been spending some days driving around Florida more specifically going to Tampa, St. Petersburg, Naples, Everglades, Key West, Kennedy Space Center and Daytona Beach. Now I’m in DC where I’m going to spend a couple of days before leaving for Copenhagen on Friday afternoon.

One question though – where do people shop in DC? I’m really looking for some shops with sunglasses and clothes in general but have been unable to find any. I guess it is because I’m staying in a business part of the city (I’m staying near the Washington Monument).

If anyone has any pointers I would really be grateful. I guess I need to take the subway or similar to get out of the central part of town but some general directions would be nice… 🙂

As an aside – I have spent the day (re-)seeing the sights (was in DC a couple of years ago) and it really seems that every other shop in DC is either a coffee shop (it seems like Starbucks really has a stronghold here) or a deli selling sandwiches. Quite amazing actually…

It feels like waking up on New Years Day. I’m tired. Really tired. I blog this after the General Closing Session sitting alone in the lobby of the Dolphin with my laptop trying to get my head around the past couple of days, watching Lotusphere 2006 being packed into crates. It seems to intensify the feeling of emptyness.

It has been amazing. As a first time visitor, and Lotusphere being the first kind of these conferences I have attended, it has been overwhelming. So much new stuff, having met so many new people. Putting faces to blogs, talking to strangers at lunch sharing ideas and getting really energized by the commitment of IBM which really has come across. The distance from a developer from Denmark to Lotus has never been shorter.

Personally it has been nice meeting people I have only “met” via e-mail – none mentioned, none forgotten. Many very nice comments and interesting conversations. I even experienced a person coming up to me and thanking me for LotusScript.doc. Whow!

Thanks to you all and remember:

Yellow is the new black… 😉

See you next year.

For those who didn’t attend, the concept of the session is to have the presenters from the Best Practices track on stage and have them take questions from the audience. A good idea though I didn’t find it to be as fruitful as it could have been.

Only having an hour set aside for the session I found it unnecessary to spend time on questions that really should be asked during the “Ask the developers” session later in the afternoon. Another thing is that, although it underlines that Lotusphere is indeed a multi-lingual and global event, some of us (myself included), who doesn’t have English as their mother tounge, take a little longer to express what we mean. Because of this a lot of time was spent trying to simply express the question and make sure that all were on the same page.

From my perspective, as primarily as listener to the session, it would have been better to have the questions submitted beforehand. Then the GURU’s would have had the time to sort through the questions, find out who should answer it and make sure that time wasn’t spent on questions that really couldn’t be answered in that forum. I realize that it kinds of defies the point of the session but in the interest of getting the most questions answered I think it would help. Another option could be to have a daily GURUpalooza.

Just some thoughts…

To quote the article:

“The deals with AOL and Yahoo are similar to deals Microsoft struck last year with the two IM service providers. The difference is Lotus does not plan to charge for the integration. Microsoft is charging customers to integrate its IM platform with those consumer networks.”

The highlighting was added by me.

Link to the complete article in Computerworld Australia: Lotus preps new IM gateway software by John Fontana.

Went to see if my editor at The VIEW (Ann Baker) was here at Lotusphere which she was so that was very nice to finally meet her in person. We have been exchanging e-mail for the last 6-7 months now so a face-to-face meeting was definately overdue. She was quite surprised to see how young I looked which is always nice to hear although I don’t consider myself young looking anymore… 🙂 Ann told me that the next issue was in the presses which means it will be out to the subscribers soon. Very exciting. I really hope they picked up the changes I added at the last read-through.

In the lab I was kindly directed to James Cooper who is the guy in charge of the Lotus Domino backend objects at IBM and hence the guy to talk to about these things.

At present my solution to the missing default constructor is to always have a view I know to be empty view in my databases. I do this with a selection formula like “1=2” to make sure it is empty. Then to create a new documnet collection you do a GetAllDocumentsByKey-call on the view which of cause will return an empty collection. While the approach works and is a valid workaround it is messy and means that other developers must know why that stupid view is there in the first place.

From my perspective adding the possibility to use the New keyword would be the way to go.

James told me that they never really thought about it, which I find hard to believe, but I accept that. His basic problem would be how to create a compelling business case for it within IBM since a working aworkround exists. The performance penalty to the current workaround is probably also negiable which makes it even more difficult. Anyways he took it down as a feature request so we’ll see how it goes with that.

Now that I was there I also asked the LotusScript team about whether to expect expansions to the core LotusScript language with some built-in classes for collections (ArrayList, LinkedList, Set and a Map) and for proper regular expression support (no more “Like”). I am under the impression that both should be fairly easy to expose via a LSX since the functionality is probably already there somewhere under the covers. I know that it raises some questions in regard to the Set since you need some standard way to tell whether when I, the developer, consider two elements equal. This should be relatively easy when using the built-in classes or primitive datatypes but will be more difficult when using custom classes.

Maybe it’s time to introduce a common base class for custom LotusScript classes. Well I guess that is a whole new can of worms…