Ireland's Bard

I am so sad to hear of Liam Clancy's passing. He was an amazing musician and a kind man.

Back when music was played on stereos that were French Provincial furniture with embedded record players, my father discovered the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's music. We had all their albums, and it was pretty much all I listened to in grammar school. When I was nine-ish, they played Kleinhan's Music Hall in Buffalo. Somehow, it was arranged that I was to meet the band (how is lost in the fuzzies of childhood). But Liam is the only one who came out to shake a little girl's hand, a hand that wasn't washed for days.

Their music connected me to my identity, my heritage. (And really annoyed my violin teacher when all I wanted to play was Rising of the Moon instead of the assigned etudes.)

The nine year old grew from the girl who wanted to marry Liam Clancy when she grew up to someone who still loves their music. My iPod plays his music today; he lives on in the music he loved and gave the world.

Goodnight sweet bard. Sing a tune tonight with my dad, please (if you can get him to sing, otherwise, just let him listen).

when in Designer...

when editing a composite application design element....

Should the Comp App Editor (if installed) or the XML editor open by default when you go to edit the application design note?

Leaning towards Comp App Editor here, but wondering what others thought!

Thanks in advance :-)

sometimes you second guess yourself...

In Designer 8.5, we thought long and hard about whether or not to allow preview of custom controls. In many cases, it "just works" fine. But then we got a serious case of the "what ifs" - what if the custom control takes parameters, should we just preview without the parameters, or do we have to build a framework for sending parameters on preview (and there was no time to fit that part in)??? We don't preview subforms, and that really isn't possible, so symmetry would also say custom controls should not preview. So not previewing them won (at least so far...)

So now looking ahead, I find myself rethinking that... We've had some recent feedback that not being able to preview them is a problem. It's not a huge code change to allow it (unless we start asking for parameters). Should we allow preview of custom controls? Should we just warn if the control has parameters and allow the user to continue or cancel the preview (that's my current leaning!) Sanity check, please!

long train running

Blueberry (my 1994 camry wagon) hit a milestone today. I wasn't behind the wheel, my son was, but he knew I needed to share the occasion....

She's going strong, and I can't wait til the kids are ready to hand her back to mom :-)

I think I need to read this at least once a week...

thank you ClumberKim for the link. This is just an amazing post on and for mothers!

is it just me?

I hate videos. OK, I guess that was rather general, maybe I should be more specific. It seems many sites are using video for news, product pushes, etc. If I'm on cnn.com, if there's something there that I would normally click on, but I see it's a video, I just don't. I want my news faster than that - I want to just READ it! Maybe it's a left/right brain thing, or maybe I'm just odd, but just because we have the bandwidth for video doesn't mean it is necessarily the best medium for the audience or the message.

My vent for the day :-)

Wendy-Woo: 1/27/2001-6/10/2009

The euphemism would say she is no longer with us, yet she will always be with us. Wendy, aka Weaverwood's Winsome Wendy went to the Rainbow Bridge around noon today. I held her as she took her final breaths and her spirit was set free. She didn't have the longest life - she was only eight and a half - but she was clearly dying, and we had tried all reasonable medications to help her.

Her four field spaniel friends surround me, and I think they miss her, too. I will remember her swimming in Sengekontacket Pond, pulling us on the leash the entire way there because she loved it so much. And I will always hear the echoes of the WOO she would always greet me with when I arrived home. And how the sound of a whipped cream can could get her to the kitchen in record time.

Thank you, Wendy, for eight years of love and fun. Wait for us by the bridge, it won't be heaven without you.

best of times, worst of times

So I've been quiet for a while. In many ways, the time since Lotusphere has been very nice. We spent a week in Germany for Entwicklercamp, giving some talks and touring Heidelberg, Trier, Strasbourg, and the Black Forest. Lots of good feedback from the Notes developers there (I was told Entwickler is developer in German!) and a very nice and well run conference.

Next week I'm off to Prague for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then I'll be home for a bit...

In the meantime lots of work on Designer 8.5.1, which is progressing. With the LotusScript and Java editors under control, I've been focusing on core usability issues (UI *is* my favorite thing!) and searching for the most important things for us to improve *first*. Working sets are on that list, as is improving the creating a new XPage experience. Plus some smaller things that don't feel so small when you run into them (like disambiguating the Remove Database from Navigator function from actually deleting the database!)

So lots of goodness going on, yet there's been some background stress with Steve job hunting. Though he is finding that in spite of all the news reports, there actually is a job market out there, with some interesting things going on. Change is certainly stressful, but sometimes it does bring good things, and I am looking forward til then.

And since I returned from Germany with a very nice viola bow that I found in a shop very serendipitously (there are those who believe there are no coincidences, and many times I agree with them!), I am taking some time to learn how to play my viola. And when I can play music, all is right with the world.

Year 10

When Bob was handing out Lotusphere buttons Saturday night, I started counting and... this is my tenth Lotusphere! There have been so many changes in those ten years - but Lotusphere is a thread that links it all together. Yesterday I co-presented an XPages Jumpstart with Maire Kehoe, for whom this is her first Lotusphere. Walking around she remarked that I seem to know everyone here... Now I don't really know everyone, but I do know enough faces and people to make this feel like a reunion. A Domino reunion.

So I'm now compulsively preparing for my next session (Domino Designer 8.5: A New Beginning) that is at 2:15 today. There's lots to show, and only 60 minutes, so I'm still tuning it. It's interesting to think of how much Designer has changed in the last ten years! And me with it. It feels in many ways like Designer and I have changed and grown together.

Back to prep for now, but after the session stress is done, I can focus on the reunion (and catch a replay of the OGS!)

a new track!

Earlier this year, I read a book that was recommended to me: Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. The book was a bit dry (in my opinion), but the points it made were spot on. From the first page, my feelings and experiences were validated. I love what I do - I love to build things and make them work. But I have always felt more insecure/less confident than at least most of the men around me appear to (and maybe the key word is appear...). I *feel* like my lack of interest in dissecting my laptop makes me less serious an engineer. And I feel like my desires to read novels, knit, and other outside interests make me less serious an engineer. And of course I am a perfectly serious engineer, and even know it on other levels - but it's about how I feel inside. This book made me realize - it isn't just me!

I had dinner with Kristin Keene at DNUG when I was reading this book, and was talking to her about it and how I felt. And she had this eureka moment - and decided that we should have a Lotusphere session on this! And a BOF! So if you're going to Lotusphere, on Tuesday, from 11:15-12:15, in Swan Mockingbird, some of us will be participating in GEEK102 "Nerd Girl" Panel: Making Geek Chic! The BOF is on Wednesday, from 5:45 to 6:45 pm, in Swan Toucan 2. The experiences of women in computer science affect all of us - male and female - let's see what we can learn when we share our thoughts!