gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

The call for speakers is still open for Impact 2009 until January 16. I’ve never been there, but from all I read and heard it sounds like an impressive SOA conference. I only saw a few repeat sessions and hands-on labs at WSTC 2008 from Impact 2008 and they were all of extremely high quality with excellent speakers.

Don’t know yet if any of my customers will be there or maybe even presenting. We’ll see.

If the future of Redbooks is remote residencies and wikis anyone can edit, then I’ll think twice to contribute to the wikis and I’m almost certainly not contributing to future Redbooks. I don’t like the travel that much, but this is just an unproductive change similar to the move to ILO courses.

I don’t have too much against using wikis, but it needs changes to the process. Review of non-SME changes – IBMer or not. If someone is authorized on a book as an SME he should be able to make annotations and edits. Annotations should be reviewed by the other authors and not seen by people who’re not SMEs and there should be only one truth. The same version that’s available on w3 should be available to our customers. And if I’m the last person to prefer FrameMaker over using a browser to edit a Redbook, then so be it.

The problems that you have with ILO like not being in the same timezone and only connecting through phones to people you’ve never actually met are just that more serious if you have to produce high-quality output for weeks when working on a Redbook – not to mention the fact that you need to focus on the task at hand and not do it part-time.

I hope someone thinks about this, at least for WebSphere Redbooks. I won’t be at Lotusphere, so I can’t provide feedback there. I would’ve liked to see a session like this at WSTC, but we know how that went. Let’s hope we can do this later in the year, but I’m not holding my breath.

Sowas dachte ich mir gestern auch in etwa. Die Parkplätze wurden auch knapp, aber das sind wir ja gewohnt. So wie die Autos mit laufendem Motor direkt vor dem Gebäude die rasch mal noch ein paar Kisten einladen. Aber am 7. Jänner ist alles wieder normal :-)

“Worried about the safety of your personal information? On second thought, maybe you’re not — if you shop with your American Express card, surf eBay or use an IBM system.” – Most Trusted Companies [via w3]

Just in case you’ve never heard of Software Premium Support Services or want to get a good idea about which services are available through Premium Support, there is a good article on dW covering our IBM Software Premium Support Services.

I’m not sure where I got the link from, but short of a presentation, this is the best written article I’ve seen covering the value Software Premium Support Services bring to our customers. Great stuff!

I finished this years expertise assessment last week and deferred my PBC results until early next year. At least I like to think so because I haven’t gotten any reminders yet :-)

I like the new structure AIM Software & Support used for this years expertise assessment and I hope it will make resource deployment more automated next year. Think globally integrated enterprise :-)

One hint, which is actually quite sad; I was using a standard e-Client setup with IE6 and had real problems with my skill assessments. Each click on a skill causes some JavaScript to run. This causes IE6 to “think” for about 10 seconds. Let me tell you. This is even less fun than filling out the assessment with a working browser. So save yourself the pain and use Firefox. For whatever reason the standard rollout of Firefox is way faster for this.

Update 12/17: Got a PBC reminder from my manager today. Looks like I’ll have to do this before my vacation :-)

“We’ve been given this on a silver platter,” says Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM. “We might as well use it as an opportunity.” – Big Blue’s Big Plan [via Bobby's blog]

I wasn’t able to understand the article in the NYT about this so I haven’t posted about it, but Irving’s post about Living in a Smarter Planet actually does a better job of explaining this idea. Thank you!

Update: More links on Bobby’s blog.

The druids take over the Diana building. Beware of magic potions placed between the other drinks during lunch. You never know!

Update 11/10: Turns out the deal hub teamed up with the druids to hatch some eggs.

We got a Wii now :-)