According to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer: " Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux" (I presume he is talking about the x86 based servers, not the whole server market). <irony>So sticking to the popular strategy " Follow the leader" it is time to kick out that Windows servers.</irony> Of course together with IIS, since that is trailing Apache HTTP for quite some time now. While you are on it, check out IBM's Open Client and get your desktop some Suse, Redhat or Ubuntu.

Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae have been nationalized, but in world. Seems like the financial crisis will stay with us for a while. Forclosures seem to become a hot US election topic. How many of them can be avoided if morgage payments get substantially lower. But how? Socialism anyone. If the government would own your house it could lower your payments. But wait... they do own it now and I might have been almost right, except it's not about additional consumption, but basic capital service.

The old Chinese curse holds true: "May you live in interesting times"

When cleaning up existing applications it is good to have an overview what fields are used across forms. Unfortunately the synopsis isn't very helpful there. However with a few lines of LotusScript one can create a matrix that serves as an overview. It is a comparison by name only and doesn't tell you anything about computation mode or data-type. But it is a start. YMMV

Notes applications often get transferred between generations of developers. The session sheds a light on practices what you can do on the receiving end of such a transfer. Armed with insight and tools you can get on top of any historic application understanding what it does and how to improve it. Topics covered: Gathering evidence, assessing complexity, planning improvements, quick wins with your users.

Sametime out of the box requires chat partners to be online to chat. Other than some of the public IM products you can't "leave a message". If you are interested in this functionality you have to roll your own. To do that you require the Sametime Community Server Toolkit and working knowledge of Java. A good starter is the Redbook Working with the Sametime Community Server Toolkit which is valid since Sametime 3. Also a good read is the IBM Lotus Sametime Community Server Toolkit Tutorial that includes the skeleton code for the offline service. All the Sametime specific parts are covered, you just need to add persistence if needed.

One huge enhancement from Quickplace to Quickr is the availability of the Quickr REST API and the Quickr connectors that take advantage of it. The connectors allow you to access files stored in Quickr using Explorer, MS Office, Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes or Sametime. Before you can use a place you need to add it to the connector. While there is a simple GUI for that, it is inconvenient for new places. Luckily there is a simple way to get around it. I routinely add a link page to my Quickr places (in the sidebar) that points to:
quickr://name-of-your-quickr-server/library/[@name-of-your-quickr-place /@RMain.nsf] (The [ and @ and ] are part of the URL, and no spaces).
And voila the place is added to your place configuration.

Letting the xPages workshop sink in for a few days, I'm now preparing to spread the love. If you happen to be in Beijing in October 15-17 2008 you could join me for the first AP xPages workshop. It will be designed as a T3 (which stands for Train-The-Trainer), so you will not only learn what xPages is all about, but also how to spread the love. I think xPages will not only be a major overhaul how existing Notes shops develop web applications, but it also offers the unique opportunity for new developers to get started on an attractive platform. What makes xPages so special?

• You only need to learn one scripting language. Both client and server run on JavaScript
• You can move code from client to server to client easily. It is after all the same language
• You have the comfort of a fast turn-around (like all scripting based web pages) combined with access to all things Java
• The database is right baked in. So no tedious xDBC configuration or scaffolding or ORM mapping. Submitted forms become documents
• Domino's security right baked in. You just declare the fields that control access and you are done (Author and Reader fields for the non-Notes readers here)
• Ajax everywhere: You can just specify that any action should refresh only a given set of elements and xPages will take care of the Ajax calls

Once you get into xPages the list will get longer. So stay tuned.