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!

Christmas card musings....

I'm (finally) writing out some Christmas cards. And hitting a dilemma. I've always signed our cards with my name and Steve's, followed by those of all the kids. As I started out signing them that way this year, it occurred to me that the first three kids are quite solidly adults, living in their own apartments, and maybe it isn't right to include them on our Christmas card. After all, my mother no longer includes me on hers... Yet the youngest of the six still lives at home as he's still in high school, and the next older two live at home when not at college. It doesn't feel right to name three of six kids, and it doesn't feel right to name all six at this point, either. But I'm also not sure I'm ready to let them go... So, for this year anyway, all six will still be on the card...

New Domino blogger

George Langlais, who has worn many hats on the Domino programmability team, has started a blog - aptly named George's Blog. It should prove an interesting read, I encourage you to keep your eyes on it!

And I promise to get back to blogging here, too. With 8.5 finishing up, power outages, Christmas, birthdays, it's been more than a bit hectic around here...

those other files....

Anyone who has looked at the contents of an NSF in one of the Eclipse navigators rather than Designer's navigator knows that we've added a few extra files (stored as hidden file resource design elements) to make each nsf a good Eclipse citizen. And if you've worked with xpages and have wanted to include some java classes, you've discovered that you can just add in files to the nsf in the projected hierarchy through standard Eclipse mechanisms.

Which leaves me with a dilemma. These extra things really are file design elements, except that their path is not relative to the Resources\Files juncture in the virtual file system. They are also something that not everyone wants or cares to see. I'm worried that users who have worked with "traditional" file resources might be a bit annoyed to see stuff they didn't create show up there.

I'm leaning towards adding a separate category called "Project Files" (or something like that) that contains these other files, so they'd be accessible from the Designer navigator. And I believe whether or not that category is presented in the navigator ought to be controlled by a preference. These files would have paths relative to the project root - so if you wanted to add a file there, you would just type the relative path you wanted.

But others have said we should just dump them in with the other file resources. A file is a file, so why make an artificial difference?

I could use a sanity check here to see if I'm making an artificial distinction or a helpful separation - please let me know what you think (and an answer of it doesn't really matter is also helpful information!) Thanks!

sugar mountain

On my twentieth birthday, I listened to Sugar Mountain all day. Today, on the freight boat back to Woods Hole, watching the dark blue ocean, and the bright blue sky, it came on again, uncommanded, as if it knew it was that time again.

I'm an unspecified number past 20, and I was definitely leaving the island too soon...

It feels like I've gotten away with being 20 on Sugar Mountain for a long time - every day remains a new adventure, even a few decades later :-) Maybe someday I'll grow up, but not this year.

fresh eyes

It's funny, sometimes things are so much a part of the UI that you are accustomed to, that you just no longer even see them. As we brought Designer over to Eclipse, many pieces of UI moved over almost exactly as they were in the "old" Designer. But thanks (really!) to a customer who talked to me after a demo a little while ago, now every time I look at this very old piece of UI design, it drives me crazy. So not long after deciding to just "look around," I found myself actually changing some code - and those design doc properties, that have looked like that since before I started working on Notes, now (I hope) make a little more sense! The old way was designed for the space constraints of the infobox! And the most likely significant piece of information (the note ID) was last, and the UNID was spread over two lines.... I'm thinking this design is better, but I have a few questions.... (And to be clear, it's not even checked in yet, so surely won't be in 8.5, but rather in whatever number comes next!)

Does anyone even need to look at sequence time and number? Is this a better order? Do you really need to see the database replica id on every design element doc id panel? Does anyone really need the old way of presenting this in that form?

As my silence here reflects, the past month has been insanely busy, putting the finishing touches on 8.5. And simultaneously designing what's next. As usual, there are already more things I want to do than time to do them.

In my engineering "childhood," we just built the next logical extensions of what we had just done, or if someone had a cool idea, we'd do that, after doing some logical calculus of what fits under the curve til the next release. I'm not sure if it's my perspective changing because I am more part of the process than I once was, or if things have changed (or both!), but now what goes in to the next release seems much more disciplined.

What goes in has to provide real value, and it has to make a difference. Now I'm not a marketing person, so I don't really have or have access to the data to predict that adding feature A will generate Y positive result. Yet I know inside me that many of the things we are considering will make a huge difference, and I have a strong sense of which are most important. I know it intuitively, I know it instinctively. INFP that I am (though the F edged out the T only by a small margin), going on instinct works for me :-) But I find I need to be able to *prove* it.

It's too soon to be saying what we're looking at doing next - still much more to figure out. But it is fun to be trying some ideas out!

She was my first real friend, we met in first grade. Her grandfather taught us how to do the Irish jig. Dressing up in our moms' clothes and high heels... Swinging on the swings at the school across the street from ours, talking about how dumb all this growing up stuff was.

I was the tomboy nerd; she the fashion princess. We would grow apart over time, our interests and directions just too far apart. I haven't seen her in a long time, but when I heard she died last week, it hit me hard.

As different as we were, parts of us were also the same. Tonight I'm wearing mascara - not something I usually do, but something that just felt right tonight.

Transitions

I remember sitting in my Metaphysics final exam, spring semester, senior year of college, last exam. I had finished the exam. Once I turned it in, I would be a college graduate (modulo a ceremony). I sat there with my exam a good long while. I seriously contemplated not turning it in. The only way I could fail the course would be on the technicality of not turning in the final - that would give me an FX in that course. Then I wouldn't have to graduate. I wasn't sure I wanted to let go - I wasn't sure I was ready. I loved my college, and my four years there were precious. But once this exam was done, I was done...

So I guess I like to hang on to things. We're in that part of 8.5 where we are doing the hard triage. Some of the bugs are clear, we have to fix them. Others are not so clear - the ones that show up when you stand on one foot, under a full moon and the wind is blowing from the east. I cling to each bug as if it were that final exam. There are some very patient souls triaging with me :-)

But it's nearing time to let go, turn in the exam. There's the next round to think of, new features to build, thoughts to complete.

I did turn in my exam that day, and I did go on to grad school. I am working on the list of next things for Designer. But first I'm going to fix this one bug....

positive or negative....

One thing that has always bugged me about Notes is the negative logic. "Hide when"/"Do not maintain unread marks"/etc. In newer properties, I've been making that logic positive, and in a few cases in the application properties editor, I have reversed previously negative logic to be positive. So "Do not maintain unread marks" turns in to "Maintain unread marks."

The problem... Whether or not to update the infobox. In an ideal world, sure (probably). In the beta, you'll see we have not yet changed the infobox, just moved the application properties editor rendition to be positive. Long term, the db infobox will be obsolete, so I am a bit hesitant to put much investment there. But will the inconsistency here be so bad that we really have to change the infobox? Personally I'd rather put the energy elsewhere, but if the new UI differing from the old UI is really going to be an issue, it is certainly possible to align them (though that would ripple through documentation, etc).

Thoughts?

my favorite debugging technique

Over the past few years, I've spent more time debugging Java than C++. I like things about both languages, and I don't really have a strong preference. In general, both languages work, and both languages let me say what I need to say. But when debugging Java, there is one feature from C++ I sorely miss...

Set Next Statement

I can't tell you how many hours that one technique has saved me... Now that I get to debug C++ again, every time I use it (like just a minute ago), I smile.

so says the whippoorwill...

My song for today. He's better. Still in the hospital, but change is in the air!

atonement

if last weekend saw me shirking maternal responsibility, this week saw me swimming in it. One of my boys has been in the hospital since Monday night, and is projected to be there til next Friday. He'll be ok, though the path from here to there is still a bit uncharted, and some paths are easier than others. It's not easy to see your child connected to endless IV lines, and you know life has turned around when you're happy to hear him complain about it.

When the big stuff hits, there's no denying what a mom needs to do....

maternal failure

I'm having one of those "I'm the worst mother in the world" moments. I have six sons. I don't like sports. And that's a really bad combination.

My youngest loves basketball. At least it moves at a faster pace than baseball, which set me to walking laps around whatever field those games were in, as I just couldn't sit and watch a game that went so slowly. So I should be feeling fortunate he has settled on a sport I can almost stand to watch.

Whenever I do watch one of my kids play a sport, my attention stays focused on the game only as long as my child is actually doing something. Not for a moment longer. And, one of the things that makes me a bad mother, sometimes less. I watch the other parents, apparently really into the game, and feel like I must be from another planet.

There's a basketball tournament this weekend we learned about just this Wednesday. Thursday night ferry tickets got moved to Saturday night. Now, oh, the tournament goes to Sunday, too. Rory says he can skip the second day. Even I know he can't.

I really should try to be one of those mothers who cheers loudly from the sidelines. But I'm just not that person! I'm leaving basketball for the guys this weekend. I'm going to the island without them. I hope bad mothers are welcome there.

halloween redux

I got away from my laptop for a bit this afternoon and tried to find the garden. It has gotten way overgrown due to my neglect. I decided to clear a 6 foot patch again.

I was pulling and pulling, making quite a pile of weeds. I got to a strange looking couple of plants. I pulled one, then looked at it carefully... It looked like a squash plant. That's odd, new kind of weed, I guess. OH! That pumpkin from last Halloween that spent the winter in the garden must have had some fertile seeds. The plant in my hand was one of two little pumpkin plants. I replanted it back in the garden next to its sibling - if part of the garden becomes a pumpkin patch, I can live with that. With this kind of start, it will surely be one of the most sincere pumpkin patches around!

single/double click dilemma

Sometimes defaults are really tough to figure out. Right now we're really going back and forth on whether single click should open things in the Designer navigator (as it always used to) or whether double click should open things (as is the default in Eclipse). We do pay attention (post-beta) to the Eclipse default.

People used to Domino Designer want single click. People used to Eclipse want double click. People who started out used to DD and then started using Eclipse (me, for one!) adjusted to the double click. But we've also had people get blocked thinking there's no way to get a list of forms because single click didn't work.

So the question is... Now that we listen to the Eclipse preference, should that Eclipse preference in a Domino Designer install be set to single click to open or double click to open? And remember that this behavior affects *all* perspectives in the Eclipse instance.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

old vs. new

I realized that I keep saying that Designer 8.5 will have no LotusScript editor. When I say that, I am thinking about the brand new LotusScript editor we are building based on the Eclipse framework that has a class browser, etc. In my head, because that isn't ready for 8.5, "it" isn't there.

But I've heard that some take my statement very literally - that they think Designer 8.5 won't have any LotusScript editor at all. What we do have (still) is the old LotusScript editor, while we continue to work on the brandy new one.

In my heart, it's the new one that counts, but that's different from not having any LotusScript support at all, and of course we still support the old one!

Just thought I'd clear that up :-)

twittering about

I've been experimenting with twitter lately (late to the party, but that seems to be my style..) Not sure what I think of it yet, but giving it a try. The one thing I find I do like about it is that it is easy to do. Sometimes the thought of writing a *blog post* is daunting - it feels like a blog post must have some profound meaning, and sometimes deep and meaningful just doesn't fit in the day.

So we will see what twitter brings. On twitter, I'm mvgirl, of course!