This is the last one. The Domino blog is ready and willing. Getting my content onto the Domino blog template is a breeze – no formatting issues.
Please keep an eye out on bingham.co.za, as the rss links will change. I’ll be moving over in the next 48 hours. You’ll see the updated look and feel – please visit the site and recheck your rss feed.
Here is an updated guide to the Business Cards for Sametime 7.5 post. It includes modifications on the procedure based on recommendations by Greg Walrath that ensure your changes to the Domino template stay: Sametime with a Sangoma 1.1
Hannover looks to have some interesting modifications to the address book that may make life MUCH MUCH easier. I look forward to the first beta to test this. It’s no good hiding a photo in the ‘Other’ tab. Within IBM we have a business card solution called bluepages, and I know that that photo is important part of establishing a contact.
You can see some contact related screenshots of Hannover here: Hannover contacts
Previous posting (out of date):
Sametime has a great business card feature built into the Sametime Connect client that allows peoples photos and some basic details to be quickly viewed. A person can view the business card by just mousing over or clicking on a contact in the Sametime 7.5 client.
Business card photos improve the whole chat experience experience. Putting a name to a face is often the specific type of information needed. The setup of this is also quick – it took me less than 5 minutes to do. Getting people to add their photos might take longer though 
.
If my documentation doesn’t make sense to you, the Sametime 7.5 administration guide has a whole chapter (chapter 9) dedicated to business cards.
A business card as viewed within the Sametime 7.5 client
The steps required to setup this feature depends on whether you use the Domino Directory or LDAP.
Domino directory procedure:
Step 1 – Add a Rich Text field to the person form on the Domino Directory template, pubnames.ntf
Step 2 – Refresh design of the Domino directory, names.nsf
Step 3 – From Notes or Administrator, edit/add a person document and insert a photo. Save the person document
Step 4 – Logon to Sametime administration and navigate under configuration to Business Card Setup
Step 5 – Map the photo field to the list of attributes used for Sametime business cards
Step 6 – Update the attribute changes
Step 7 – Restart the Sametime server
A note about LDAP. If you are using LDAP, then you would need to find a suitable field in your LDAP directory. So steps 1-3 would involve editing your LDAP directory. Step 5 would involve mapping to an LDAP field instead of a Domino field. This guide is for using a Domino directory but the principles for LDAP are the same.
Step 1 – Add a Rich Text field type to the person form on the Domino Directory template
Open the Person form and add a rich text field
Add a rich text field
Step 2 – Refresh design of the Domino directory nsf
Make sure though that you use pubnames.ntf and not names.nsf, otherwise the data may be lost. Once you have changed pubnames.ntf, then do a File, Database, Replace Design over the names.nsf file to update the nsf.
Refresh the design of the Domino directory
Step 3 – From Notes or Administrator, edit or add a person document and insert a photo
You can now add photos to the Domino directory using the new rich text field you have created.
Adding a photo to the Domino directory
Test adding a photo – from Lotus Notes
Step 4 – Logon to Sametime administration and navigate under configuration to Business Card Setup
You then need to tell Sametime to use this field. This is done using a simple mapping table in the Sametime Administration console – which tells Sametime to place a photo field in the business card, and which field to reference. When viewing these, you may need to update the profile info by right clicking on the user.
Steps required:
Logon to the Sametime Administration
The Sametime Administration menu
Step 5 – Map the photo field to the list of attributes used for Sametime business cards
You should see the business card setup page as per the screenshot below.
Mapping Sametime business cards to the Domino Directory
Step 6 – Update the attribute changes
While you are using the Sametime 7.5 Connect Client, by clicking on a user or mousing over a user you will be presented with the business card with the photo. You may want to fill in other fields or change their mappings too by changing the Attribute value in the Business Card Setup.
As viewed from within Sametime 7.5 Connect client
A ‘Cows-of-a-leather’ contribution
I’m proudly making the move the DominoBlog. The days of writing something on notepad for my blog and then losing them are over. I will be able to write my documents peacefully on Lotus Notes offline and then replicate later. Thanks to my wife‘s business for allowing my blog to be hosted on their Domino server.
My wife has been migrating her blog entries across and it’s quite a task. Fortuntely I don’t have nearly as many entries as her. Moving across should take an evening. The DominoBlog template looks fantastic – nicely configurable, neat and all blue rinsed 
I can’t wait to start modifying the look and feel, doing some ‘mashing’,adding tagclouds, plazes etc. I think i will have to set rules for how much time I can spend tweaking it. WordPress has been great, but I’m a Loti.
Sametime 7.5 is out. And it’s early. Read about it on Adam Gartenberg’s and Ed Brill’s blogs. It’s an historic moment.
There is an enormous amount of energy and passion that has gone into this release of this product from a team of brilliant people working long committed hours. There was an equally passionate and substantially bigger group of people testing the product (many thousands of IBMers, customers and business partners). I feel priviledged and proud to be a part of this whole experience.
The Sametime development team are a diverse group of characters from quite different backgrounds. I’m sure if a plane crashed on a island with limited resources, between them they’d build a computer and continue developing Sametime. Maybe right now they might disagree with the bit about the computer and Sametime… I’ll supply the sunbeds and cocktails.
There is little rest planned for this team, with Mike Rhodin announcing a stream of updates for the product. MSOffice integration, Outlook integration, ecure public IM integration, Linux support (more here), toolkit updates, mobile support etc. No time for rest.
Business partners are busy too. Expect a flurry of plug-ins, bots and new features from IBM business partners such as:
And some events:
Learn a bit about it here, or try an online demo.
Buzz around Sametime 7.5.
Tell everyone about it! Start using it today
Yes our little baby is all grown up now. We are so proud – as foster parents. For in fact Sametime‘s real parents are DataBeam and Ubique. You can see Databeams instant messaging and web conferencing capabilities and Ubique’s place based awareness features shining through in Sametime. But Sametime had some tough times ahead. The adoption (in 1998) meant lots of changes – a new home and new rules. Sametime had two bigger brothers – Domino the older and Lotus Notes the younger. In a neighbourhood where respect was hard earned, Sametime found Domino a protective and loving brother. They quickly became inseparable and were very popular.
Sametime’s foster parents focus changed to their careers during the rocky teen years of this kids life. It was a difficult time for Sametime. Sametime was left alone with little guidance. Domino and Sametime were taken to a private school – IBM and there they grew up together. They had their enemies, as does any school kid, both in their own school, as well as enemies in other public schools – especially Microsoft.
Their parents focus on their careers mean that they were not always there when needed during those important school years. While Domino was protective of his younger brother, he had his own issues to deal with. But they stuck together and supported eachother.
The friendship between Lotus Notes and Sametime grew during the later part of Sametime’s school years. Lotus Notes and Sametime would share many an hour chatting in school rooms. Sametime also built up many friendships. Sametime was a very friendly and likable person. Sametime was ungainly and shy, and while he was a trustworthy and reliable friend, his two close friends GAIM and Trillian were more outgoing. When GAIM and Trillian were out with the ladies from public schools like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, Sametime would stay at home. AOL – a cousin from Ubique would sometimes visit.
The parents, in the mean time were building successful careers for themselves. They also had another little kid called Workplace. Workplace was a difficult child, often resorting to temper tantrums that would see the parents give in to his every whim. The father – WebSphere – found new energy in a child from his own bloodline. WebSphere drove Workplace hard, sending him to pre-school and as a result Workplace developed very quickly. Workplace didn’t much like his brothers, and tried to outdo his much older brothers.
At the time that Domino and Sametime were getting to the end of their school years, Sametimes parents would argue and disagree about their children often. WebSphere was not convinced these kids would amount to much. The loving mother – Lotus – believed in their talents. Domino, Sametime and Lotus Notes all received good grades right throughout school, but none of them had received bursaries. As Domino always respected his father, Domino went to the same unversity WebSphere had gone to. Domino studied architecture as his father had done. Lotus managed to convince WebSphere that Sametime and Lotus Notes should be sent to a college to further their specific talents. Little money was left for Sametime and Lotus Notes. Fortunately both Sametime and Lotus Notes were awareded bursaries and with these they were sent to the most respected and desirable university – Eclipse University.
Sametime was invigorated by the people and surroundings at Eclipse University. Sametime found within himself tremendous capacity to learn and grow like never before. What’s more – Sametime grew into a confident and handsome student with an infectious laugh, and took on all challenges with energy and passion in adundance.
Sametime will be going through graduation in August. The ladies from other universities – AOL, Google and Yahoo constantly seek his attention. The pimples and the awkwardness are gone. A confident and ready man awaits the world. Two proud parents eagerly await this momentous day, as do all his friends and family and all the eligible ladies. And his enemies had better beware… Sametime is here!!
Darling is a place I new nothing about just a month ago. And then a friend at work told me about their golf course – affiliation at low prices (R800 a year all costs included including 10 free rounds at Darling). As I was to play several rounds in Plett and George area soon, I took up the offer. Non-affiliation is so expensive.
Darling is 45 minutes, 85km from Cape Town, 15 minutes from Atlantic Beach.
Then I started enquiring about Darling. It’s a quaint little place worth visiting – not just for the free golf. Darling is the location of Evita se Perron, where Evita Bezuidenhout performs shows such as Tannie Evita praat Kaktus.
So I haven’t been there yet, but this is what one website had to say about it..
The little village is tucked away between hills of vineyards and golden wheat fields. You can explore the town on foot. Browse through the antiques and collectables and visit the interesting small craft and gift shops. Enjoy a cup of coffee on the ‘stoep’ of a coffee shop or farm stall, linger a while and see the locals go by. Although traditionally known for its spectacular wildflowers, Darling has so much more to offer visitors. Darling is becoming a new discovery area of modern Cape wines and already some of the region’s wines have achieved the highest critical acclaim. The famous Evita Bezuitenhout entertains ‘volk en vaderland’ at her Evita se Perron theatre complex, situated in the old Darling station.
Now Darling is set to become the site hosting South Africa’s first fully fledged wind power project. The city of Cape Town has signed a deal to buy wind-generated electricity. The 70m rand deal will allow the building of a 13,200 MWh pilot project at Darling. The “green” electricity will be sold at a premium rate to users who want it. Mayor Helen Zille has said the project would help Cape Town to reach its target of sourcing 10% of its overall energy requirements from sustainable sources by 2020. Four turbines are to be built by November, and a further six next year. The environmentally friendly electricity will be sold initially at a 50% premium.
Cape Town signs new wind power deal
I’m really happy I joined the golf club. I can’t wait to visit. A morning of golf followed by Evita, food and some fine wine and surroundings (followed by some more golf and some more…)
During my happily misspent youth, I spent many hours playing with video and arcade machines. The little ZX Spectrum home PC (wiki), with its rubber keyboard, was the source of many hours of entertainment. It only had 8×2 colours - Bright on/off) and the sound was awful even for the time (although game programmers did the machine proud). The zx is where I spent many hours learning basic and assembly – trying to get the most out of this little 48k 3.5Mhz beast. Built by the famous Sir Clive Sinclair, it was the best of British. BBC Micro take a step back please….
The rubbery keyboard loved by many a rodentToday digital watches are far more powerful. I also read in Popular Mechanics that a Digital watch has more processing power today than all the computing power in the world in the 1950′s!
Sire Clive in his C5 – not recommend on the highwayI also nostalgically recall playing Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga, Gyruss, Xevious, Pac Man and Ms Pac Man and a whole bunch of others. In fact go here to play these original games online
Which brings me to a current day hobby – emulation. As PC’s are somewhat more powerful than all these machines, an emulator is a software application that provides a window on your device (PC, phone etc) within which the old games (ROMs) could run. It emulated the hardware and the original game would be none the wise. Once inside the emulator – voila. Map some keys, map the hardware to sound, graphics, regulate the speed etc and away you go. Accurate to the point that you have to ‘insert coins’ to play (the coin insert is mapped to a key) 
I’ll be digging into this emulation thing often – as it is a big hobby. Back to the ZX Spectrum. I still have my original ZX Spectrum, but that #%@#$ tape loading is so slow… There are many ZX Spectrum emulators instead:
EmuZWin is my favourite. There are about 8,000 ZX Spectrum games too – all downloadable. These games were stored on analogue audio casettes. They took about 5 minutes to load from the cassette. In emulation its instant… but for the purists amongst us, there is the option to use the audio (TAP) file – which will allow the full, tedious, noisy sharp screaming experience along with all the anticipation (will it load???). Piracy happened in those days too y’know. Games were copyied tape to tape. Meant great anticipation to see if a game would load – knowing full well this new copy has some new crack, snap and pop noises in it.
The games were wonderfully inventive. Most of my favourites from the company Ultimate (now called Rare Software). Games like Knight Lore, Manic Miner, Hungry Horace, Jet Pac, Penetrator (Melbourne House), Atic Atac, The Hobbit, Skool Daze, Jet Set Willy, Full Throttle, Scuba Dive, Way of the Exploding Fist and many, many more. By clicking on the links above you can play these games online.
Classic Spectrum games, Knight Lore, Ataic Atac, Jet Pac and Highway Encounter
While these games were perfect on the ZX Spectrum, remakes of many Spectrum classics have been developed.
So if you feel so inclined, download EmuZWin and download some games
There were many other machines that I loved – Intellivision, ZX81, Atari, Commodore 64 (love-hate thing as it was the main competitor to the ZX), Apple, BBC – I could go on… I share some of those experiences some other time – and also how to play them all on your PC
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