Winter seems to have had an effect on our internet activity... well, that and the new baby & new job have certainly slowed down any activities other than just getting through work (we were 2 or 3 guys down for a long time - we're only just starting to get back to full capacity), and enjoying the whole "new dad" experience.

Whilst Emily has been no trouble at all recently, she still takes up a lot of time - that's my choice though... I love coming home and hanging out with her and Laurette after work, and then after that, on the nights that I don't have extra work to do, getting the motivation to write up something isn't coming easily.

I would like to say that I'm about to ramp it up (there's a lot of things I have on my list that I want to get out there), but honestly, I don't see it changing for a little while - work is ramping up big time (it hasn't slowed down since about September last year) and I have a lot of things that I want to do there, a lot to do with Laur & Em, a lot to do at home (we're looking at moving house soon - "soon" is about 3 months in our timeframe!) as well as everything else....

hopefully I'll get a chance to get back into things soon.. we have a lot of things going on with openslice (about 4 versions that have been released to a small group - it's faster & cleaner), a number of standard-based discussions to kick off, and hopefully we'll be able to get things going again with a view to heading over to Lotusphere next year (about a 25% chance at the moment... but still a chance)

hope everyone else is doing well

ok.. I couldn't let this one go by without a little comment...

Laurette and I were just watching a tv show where they showed the "inner workings" of an AI program that can drive cars... don't get me wrong - it's just a tv show - not a documentary...

anyway, Laurette, trooper that she is, and desperate to get her mind active again in the land of code after the birth of Emily, rewound the pvr and paused the code on the screen so she could read it to see if it was legitimate, and give it a quick peer review... needless to say, it drew a number of scoffs at the poor quality - even for the half-baked pseudo code that it was...

scary... true... and one of the many reasons that I love her!

Just a quick post - I've been pretty busy lately - with a return to work, and keeping up with Emily, things have been pretty hectic.

One thing I just wanted to put out there though, is the current state of play of the market in Sydney - I've advertised for a couple of positions and have had some trouble filling the roles - the one that I'm especially surprised about is the Domino role - it's the classic web development role with a Domino background (internet, intranet, extranet sites) but I haven't exactly been inundated with heaps of applicants. There have been a few - some too pricey, some underskilled, some pretty good - but certainly not as many as I would have expected.

What are other's comments on the market at the moment (elsewhere as well as Sydney)?. To me, it seems that the market is pretty good if your skills happen to fit one of the niche jobs (they have some good dollars to offer), but for the rest of the roles, there seems to be a lack of candidates. I've talked with a few friends who say the same sort of situation is represented in places like Melbourne and Canberra so maybe we're in a bit of a rut at the moment. What's interesting though, is that despite the market appearing a little tight, the salary ranges aren't reflecting the demand - there seems to be a price set on a developer salary and no matter what the market is dictating, most places aren't looking to extend beyond their current ranges.

At the moment, it's almost as if there are more positions than candidates - I know that's not the case, but in the past you'd see 10 or 20 people applying for a role on the first day it's announced, now there's more of a trickle effect.

Am I just an anomoly? (don't worry - I've been called worse!)

so...

Yesterday was "Lotusphere Comes To You" (LCTY) for Sydney - there was a pretty good turnout for the 4 or so hours of information on offer - a good sign for those of us in the local industry to see that there is still a lot of interest in Notes8. It was a bit hard to tell, but I think there were around 5-600 guests - most of which who were pretty excited about some of the things they saw and what's just on the horizon for Notes and Domino.

[executive summary - again, another great year of development in the Lotus brand - lots of new stuff on the horizon, looks like a lot of fun to play with, but more importantly it looks like creating a more effective and efficient user experience in the Lotus suite - good stuff guys]

Unfortunately I don't really have a lot of time at the moment but just wanted to kickstart myself into blogging about some of the details - I hope to give a bit of detail about the sessions, but this entry is a more general outline of the (half) day's events.

...more »

Just a quick request to anyone who might be able to point me towards some useful software to convert Lotus Notes documents into PDF files. I know that there are a number of applications/add-ons out there, but most do some, but not all, of my wishlist:

1 - enables printing of Lotus Notes documents to a PDF file
2 - doesn't require a client side installation of a printer driver
3 - doesn't require any client side dll files
4 - doesn't require http to be running on the server
5 - handles rich text fields without conversion/issue
6 - enables the pdf generation to be done programmatically
7 - is quick enough to be real time
8 - is free/open source (ok - this isn't a "must have" but would be nice in an ideal world)

The documents are just normal documents - but they do contain rich text fields which can potentially have formatting (eg letter templates, images, tables etc)

anyone got/used/heard of something that might help?
(note items 4, 5 and 6 - they seem to be the biggies - I can't seem to find something which does them both)

also - if anyone has played with iText, I'd be interested to hear how it went with rich text fields...