Apple Stuff Up Books AGAIN

Here we go again. My iPad had to be replaced under warranty this week (it was only intermittently charging) so that meant all 4500+ books had to download from the cloud once more. It took about two days but down they came about 50/50 bought from Apple/Amazon. I immediately noticed that several of my books, all of them Amazon epubs, were missing their covers. So…

  • Off I go to iBooks on my Mac to verify if the covers were still there. They were.
  • I then try the trick of adding a new cover to a book (just drag and drop an image onto the book in iBooks - that made no difference to the iPad.
  • Then I tried removing the download on my iPad and redownloading - it again came down with no cover
  • I tried deleting the books from iBooks entirely and re-adding them - they disappeared from iPad and reappeared. Still with no covers.

Apparently Catalina has broken syncing. If you add epubs to iBooks then have them sync to the cloud and then iOS the covers often disappear. The reverse, syncing from iOS to Catalina works fine. This only applies to non Apple epubs (which is about half my book purchases). Here’s what I did to fix it

  • Download the Kindle book
  • Remove the DRM so I can use it / back it up
  • Drag the book to my iCloud on the Mac
  • Open “Files” on the iPad and download the book that is now showing in iCloud. iOS will open the downloaded book in iBooks, correctly showing the cover and then sync that back to iBooks cloud and onto my Mac.

It’s not a difficult solution now I know it’s there but it’s concerning how badly Apple are breaking iBooks on OSX when a primary reason for investing in their technology is the cohesive ecosystem.

Paypal and Direct Debits

What have you spent your morning doing Gab?  That would be removing over 60 direct debits set up in paypal since 2008.

Last week Pluralsight from whom I bought a 1 year license in 2018 went ahead without notice and charged me £199 for “another year” because I hadn’t checked the box to disable their auto renewal buried under my account details.  Strange they can email me multiple times a week with marketing promotions and telling me about courses but apparently can’t email me to tell me they will be charging me another year on X date and that I need to disable auto renew if I don’t want them to.  Even if I clearly haven’t logged in for months.

Lesson learned.  I cancelled the auto renewal, swallowed the cost and won’t ever use them again.

Today there was a charge from AVG Commerce for £99.99.  I haven’t used AVG in years having switched to BitDefender. The last charge was several years ago.  Apparently they just suddenly decided to charge me 2 year’s renewal for a product that had long expired, again because the auto renew was left on the account and because paypal had them as a direct debit.   The last charge was in July 2016 and this one was April 2019 so not even a renewal date.  At least AVG (who have multiple complaints of this behaviour on their site) offer a 30 day refund which I have applied for.  Luckily I could do that without logging in since their login is now a Salesforce login and no account details I have work.

I often use Paypal to pay for things because I would rather not share my credit card with every site but of course the downside is that Paypal won’t dispute a payment like that whereas my credit card company wouild.  So in I go to Paypal to deactivate all the direct debits that are on my account.

There were over 60.  Many times when I paid for anything with Paypal , even a one off thing like a game or theatre tickets it set itself up without telling me as a direct debit.  That means Paypal would have allowed that source to take payment anytime it wanted without notifying me until it was done.  Wordpress and GoDaddy were particularly egregious with multiple direct debits, one for every payment I ever made and all had to be deleted.

None of this would be an issue if Paypal would notify me when someone applied to withdraw money via direct debit or if they had a limit by date or expiry on how long the direct debit was valid, or even if they didn’t bury the direct debits far away from my home page.

I recommend if you use Paypal you go in and deactivate the direct debits you might unwittingly have in place.

Login to Paypal - choose “Settings” (the cog) and choose “Payments” then “Manage Pre-Approved Payments” - go ahead and cancel whatever you need.  I went from 72 to 5.

 

 

The Painful Journey To Abandoning iCloud

As some of you know I’m very committed to the Mac ecosystem.  I have Mac laptops, an iPad with over 4000 books, iPhone (not the latest because who needs that), a watch Apple TVs x 4 etc etc.  I’m also extremely risk averse and cloud wary.  I gave in and let Apple put all my books in the cloud just because iTunes sucks for syncing and cloud syncing worked across all my devices however I also had a lengthy open support call last year with Apple wanting to know where my books were now stored on my Mac so I could find them and back them up

“they are all in the cloud”

“yes I get that but they are also on my laptop so where are they”

“no they are only in the cloud”

“well that’s not true because here I go, switching off wifi and hey I can still read my books in ibooks so they are here somewhere”

..>> pause for several weeks whilst this is escalated>>>>

“they are on your Macbook but stored in a way you can’t find them or access them”

(please no advice on this one, I found my own workaround to find them and backup un-DRM copies)

So.. iCloud. I agreed about 18 months’ ago to let my Documents and Desktop folders sync to iCloud.  My only reason for that was so that I could get at files if I needed to on my iPad or by logging into any browser but tbh I rarely used it.  Still it worked and seemed a decent idea.

Then one Saturday about two weeks’ ago it all went horribly wrong..

I was sat working when I got an alert saying facetime had been added to my watch.  Which was odd.  My watch is 18 months old and was on my wrist and nothing had changed. The watch itself had no alert.  So off I go digging and I find under my account and devices a list of my current watch and an old watch I wiped and sold to a friend to give to his wife 18 months ago.  Well still odd but no big deal.  They hadn’t done anything so clearly just an odd gremlin.  Just in case I removed that old watch from my devices.

Then I got alerts saying my credit cards had been removed from my watch.  Except they hadn’t been removed from the watch on my wrist and the other watch was flattened before I handed it over 18 months ago.

I did some research, found nothing nefarious and let it go.   I did notice I had been logged out of all my Apple accounts on all my devices and things like Sonos had to be re-authorised again.  Weird and annoying but a side effect of whatever happened I assume**

Then a few days later I restarted my laptop.  I probably only restart it every two weeks so this was the first time since that alert.  The laptop restarts but finder and anything that uses finder like spotlight or even terminal were entirely non responsive.  They would briefly work long enough for me to type 2 characters or click on a folder then there would be a spinning ball for about 25 seconds before it would respond.  That gradually got slower and slower over a few minutes.  So off we go to research because I now have a broken laptop.

After several hours research we found this article which gave a bit of a clue as it pointed to a cloud corruption problem http://osxdaily.com/2015/04/17/fix-slow-folder-populating-cloudkit-macosx/

Unlike some of the other Finder troubles, the Finder process usually doesn’t eat much CPU or crash repeatedly, it’s just inordinately slow when loading folder views, populating files, and opening folders.

So I followed the instructions and deleted the files they specify and immediately my laptop was more responsive.  OK.. Well that was a scary afternoon and I’ll just go ahead and disable cloud syncing so that never happens again.

Did you know Apple doesn’t let you do that?  If you disable cloud syncing for Documents anbd Desktop it actually deletes the contents of those folders and keeps the files in the cloud for 30 days in case you want them back.  So that’s dumb.  I decided to move the contents of both folders to temporary folders, disable cloud syncing then move them back but my laptop was working and I was busy so I parked that for later.

Later…. about a week later again the Finder sluggishness came back but this time I knew how to fix it.  Once it was fixed I went ahead and moved the contents of both Documents and Desktop to temporary folders, disabled cloud syncing and moved them back.  My laptop immediately started working, finder was faster than it had been for a very long time and I’ve had no more problems.

Now I wonder if that first alert about this non existent “watch” was a precursor to some cloud corruption on my account.  That cloud corruption caused all the authentication for my account to be lost and also corrupted the authentication for my cloud data which only tried to reconnect when I signed back into the OS.

** for anyone who was wondering if I had asked an apple “genius” about this. Yes I did. No they had no clue what I was talking about since most of them are “iphone experts” in store now and the one who called me back seemed to think I made it up.

Lesson learned. Apple iCloud for all but my books is now disabled.

HCL Launch New Collaboration Site & Client Advocacy Program

Today HCL went live with their own site for their collaboration products at https://www.cwpcollaboration.com. It’s Domino-based and we even have new forums you can sign up for (and the sign up process is easy).

The big news for me is the launch of their Client Advocacy Program which you can read about and sign up to on the site. The Client Advocacy program connects customers directly with a technical point of contact in development, it’s free and open for registration now.  You can read more in their FAQ here, but for those of you who are tl:dr here’s a taster.

Why is HCL Client Advocacy participation beneficial?

A Client Advocate provides the participant:

  • opportunity to discuss successes, challenges, and pain points of the customer’s deployment and product usage
  • a collaborative channel to the Offering Management, Support and Development Teams
  • proactive communications on product news, updates, and related events/workshops
  • more frequent touch points on roadmaps and opportunity to provide input on priorities
  • facilitation of lab services engagements or support team as appropriate

You can request to sign up here

I think we can all agree that even in these early days HCL are showing customer focused intent and following up quickly with real actions to reach out and encourage us to talk to them directly.  I know this is just the beginning, the foot is down hard on the acceleration pedal and I’d recommend you follow HCL_CollabDev on twitter as well as the new Collaboration site.  And feed back.  They want to hear what you think and what you want.  If you feel something is missing or you have an idea, feed back.

Above all don’t paint HCL with the IBM brush, this is a new company with new ideas and their own way of doing things.  Exciting times.

Whooomf - All Change. HCL Buys The Shop…

According to this Press Release as of mid June 2019, HCL take ownership of a bunch of IBM products including Notes, Domino and Connections on premises. Right now and since late 2017 there has been a partnership with IBM on some of the products such as Notes, Domino, Traveler and Sametime* so this will take IBM out of the picture entirely. Here are my first “oh hey it’s 4am” thoughts on why that’s not entirely surprising or unwelcome news ..

HCL are all about leading with on premises, not cloud. The purchase of Connections is for on premises and there are thousands of customers who want to stay on premises. Every other provider is either entirely Cloud already or pushing their on premises customers towards it by starving their products of development and support (waves at Microsoft). *cough*revenue stream*cough*

HCL have shown in 2018 that they can innovate (Domino’s TCO offerings, Notes on the iPad, Node integration etc) , develop quickly and deliver on their promises. That’s been a refreshing change.

They must be pleased with the current partnership products to buy them and more outright.

When HCL started the partnership with IBM they brought on some of the best of the original IBM Collaboration development team and have continued to recruit at high speed. It was a smart move and one I hope they repeat across not just development but support and marketing too.

HCL already showed with “Places” that they have ideas for how collaboration tools could work (see this concept video https://youtu.be/CJNLmBkyvMo) and that’s good news for Connections customers who gain a large team and become part of a bigger collaboration story in a company that “gets it”.

Throughout 2018 HCL have made efforts to reach out repeatedly to customers and Business Partners, asking for our feedback and finding out what we want. From sponsoring user group events (and turning up in droves) around the world to hosting the factory tour in June at their offices in Chelmsford where we had two days of time with the developers and their upcoming technologies. I believe they have proven they understand what this community is about and how much value comes from listening and - yes - collaborating.

Tonight I am more optimistic for the future of these products and especially Connections than I have been in a while. HCL, to my experience, behave more like a software start up than anything else, moving fast, changing direction if necessary and always trying to lead by innovating. I hope many of the incredibly smart people at IBM (yes YOU) who have stood alongside these products for years do land at HCL if that’s what they want, it would be a huge loss if they don’t.

*HCL have confirmed that Sametime is included

All the 10s, Let’s Make Things Simple..

Announced at the Domino 10 launch today: if you have let your licensing for Domino lapse you can renew it until the end of the year saving up to 50%, and if you have licensing and need more then IBM will discount new licensing by up to 20% until the end of the year.  I don’t sell licenses but that seems like a good deal to me.  Why should you? Well, why shouldn’t you?  If you have Domino in your environment even with a lapsed license you are keeping those servers around because of all the data that’s on them - don’t you want to use that data?  Let’s talk about what you get if you are licensed:

  • access to your Domino data using Node and modern javascript development tools
  • a new query language for Domino (DQL) which allows you to access Domino data from external platforms (buh-bye ODBC!)
  • access to your Notes applications (yes even the really really old ones) on an iPad
  • entitlement to not only use instant messaging in your Notes and web clients but also on mobile devices
  • a ton of TCO features including a new 256GB db size limit, auto database repair, cluster symmetry (automatically populating entire directories from one server to another and keeping them in sync), publishing of stats to New Relic and other cloud based reporting tools, new full text indexing engine, …

I’m not mentioning a ton of other features too.  I’m giving credit to the team who did such a great job today and especially Luis Gurigay whose presentation was seamless and showed how your back-end Domino applications work with no required code changes on an iPad, how your Domino data and web apps can be integrated into O365 and (this which he showed live and I took a screenshot) of showing a Notes document being created and then published in Slack, Microsoft Teams and Watson Workspace concurrently.

The code for this will be made available via the IBM Destination Domino site tomorrow.

So Domino 10 is out tomorrow.  The beta for the application development pack which includes the Node module is due out this week, and the beta for Notes on the iPad is due out this month.  If you want to sign up for the betas go to the destination domino site and if you want to talk licensing and you don’t have someone at IBM to talk to let me know and I’ll see who I can point you at (and then step away because I do not want to do licensing :-))

Ideas, Demos & Your Last Day To Sign Up for Beta 2

So much interesting activity going on around the IBM/HCL products so in case you missed them I thought I could summarise for you.  All are worthy of your time if you care about the future of Domino, Traveler, Verse or Sametime

BETA

Firstly - no time to lose - the registration for Beta 2 of Domino , Notes and Traveler closes TODAY at 12pm EST/5pm GMT.  If you want access to that Beta due this month hopefully then go and sign up here now https://www.ibm.com/blogs/collaboration-solutions/2018/06/11/announcing-ibm-domino-v10-portfolio-beta-program-sign-today/.  Don’t leave it then be disappointed when you don’t get access.

IDEAS

If you have ideas for what you want in Domino, Notes, Traveler, Sametime or anything else - there is a new site (requiring no login) where you can add your ideas and vote on other people’s.  It’s been running for a few weeks and there are some great ideas there already to vote for so it’s a good place to browse during your next coffee break.  Remember the rule - if you don’t ask you don’t get https://domino.ideas.aha.io/ideas

DEMOS

HCL are publishing a series of videos showing how features that are in v10 will behave.  Here are three interesting features announced so far.

Definitely different - a few days looking into the future with HCL (and IBM)

If this blog is tl:dr then here’s your takeaway

I can’t thank everyone at HCL enough for throwing open the doors and leaving them open. Together we will continue to innovate great things for customers

Last week Tim and I were invited to the 1st CWP Factory tour held by HCL at their offices in Chelmsford.  “CWP” stands for “Collaboration Workflow Platform” and includes not only the products HCL took over from IBM late last year such as Domino, Traveler, Verse on Premises and Sametime but also new products that HCL are developing as extensions of those.  These (that I can talk a little bit about) such as HCL Nomad (Notes for iPad) and HCL Places (a new client runnvetaing against Domino 10 and providing integrated collaborative services such as chat, AV , web and Notes applications) will be leapfrogging Domino far over its competitors.

I want to start by thanking HCL for inviting us inside to see their process. We met and made our voices heard with more than 30 developers and executives, all of who wanted to know “do you like this?”  “what are we missing?”.  I came away from the two days with a to-do list of my own at the request of various people to send in more details of problems or requirements I had mentioned when there.  John Paganetti, who is also a customer advocate at HCL, hosted the “ask the developers” impromptu session (we had so many questions so they threw one into the agenda on day 2).  We were told to get to know and reach out directly to the teams with our feedback and questions.  If you don’t have a route to provide feedback and want one then please reach out.

Back in February I attended a Domino Jam hosted by Andrew Manby (@andrewmanby) from IBM in London.  These were held all over the world and attendees were pushed to brainstorm around features that were missing or needed.  That feedback was used to create priorities for v10 and many of the features requested at my session and others have appeared in the current beta and are committed to a v10 release.  At the end of the 2nd day of the factory tour we again had a Domino Jam hosted by Andrew Manby but this time for Domino 11 features - wheeeeeeee!   With the Jams and the Destination Domino blog as well as the #domino2025 hashtag activity, IBM are really stepping up to the products in a way they haven’t in several years.  I want to recognise the hard work being done by Andrew, by Uffe Sorensen, and by Mat Newman amongst others, to make this IBM/HCL relationship work.

So what was the factory tour? It was a 2 day conference held at HCL’s (still being built) offices. I am pleased to say it was put together very informally, we were split into groups of about 10 (hi Daniel, Francie, Julian, Richard, Paul, Nathan, Devin, Fabrice!) and one by one the development teams came and took our feedback on the work they are doing.  We worked with the Verse (on premises) team, the TCO team (looking at the Domino and Sametime servers), the Notes client team, the Nomad team and the Application Development team.  It was an intense day in a good way with so much information being shared with us and questions being asked of us.  It was also good to be told that the majority of what we saw and discussed could be shared publicly.

A few highlights (out of many) from the two days that were new to me:

  • The new database repair and folder sync features in Domino 10 (shame on me for not remembering what they are called). The database repair feature will detect when a database is corrupted and replace it whilst the server is running with a new instance from a working cluster mate (another good reason to cluster).  The folder sync feature will keep any  Domino database files or NLOs in any listed folders in sync.  This stuff is so cool and exactly what Domino clustering needed so we asked for them to extend the sync feature to include any files in the HTML directory such as HTML CSS and CGI scripts and they are considering that (v10 is a tight delivery timeline right now so no guarantees of anything).
  • Some very candid discussions (I think repeated multiple times by everyone there) about getting rid of WebSphere for Sametime in the future and how to better provide Sametime services purely under Domino.
  • HCL Places looking much evolved even in the few weeks since it was first shown at Engage - this is going to be a game changer client when it comes out.
  • The Domino General Query Facility (DGQF) available in Domino 10 is the biggest investment in Notes/Domino code in 10 years. A query language accessible outside Domino that doesn’t require any  knowledge of Domino design by a developer.  Using DGQF you can rapidly query collections of documents represented by any criteria not necessarily views or forms.  Using DGQF a regular web developer would be able to build a Node application, for instance, using back-end Domino data without ever having to learn the structure of the Domino database or touch Domino Designer.  Here’s a sneaky picture I took of the positioning for DGQF.John Curtis who is the lead designer behind DGQF has been very responsive on twitter to questions about how it will work (@john_d_curtis)IMG_0313
  • A lot of stuff Nomad and Node related which is still NDA but you’ll hear more about them at Collabsphere in Ann Arbor - HCL will be out in force as will IBM speaking, showing and listening so if you can you need to get yourself there.   Turn out and turn up - there’s still time to get your voice heard.

 

The Champion & Confidence Dilemma

I wanted to share today something I’ve been dealing with for a few months and inspired by shares from others.  For those of you who don’t know the IBM Champion program, in short it was set up to acknowledge the work done by people who contribute to their Community outside of their regular jobs.

When I started as a business partner in the mid 90s the IBM community I was introduced to was full of people interested in IBM technology, wanting to learn and wanting to share what they knew with others for no reason other than they were excited about it and enjoyed seeing others doing the same.  In the past 20 years a lot of that has changed and I miss those days.  There are still lots of people who share and want to learn but the days of not wanting credit or taking a back seat are often (not always) gone.

I was encouraged and inspired for 20 years by people many of you will have heard of and many of you wouldn’t.  Without Andrew Pollack to tell me I was smart enough to learn this stuff and present, or Chris Miller offering to present wtih me or Rocky Oliver encouraging me to write, or Ben Langhinrichs asking the tough business questions about why I don’t charge more, or Carl Tyler giving me no leeway to make excuses, or Paul Mooney who was as enthusiastic about educating as I was and happy to work with me - without those people and many more in Penumbra and further afield I wouldn’t have chosen the path I did.  The path that led me to be an IBM Champion and 3 years ago one of the first (along with the amazing Theo Heselmans) IBM Lifetime Champions.

That should have been it right? Validation. The pinnacle of achievement.  Confirmation I was doing something right.

I hadn’t allowed for two things.  People’s misjudgement and their need to tear you down. Those two things in the past few months have brought me near to walking away.

I’ve learned to trust my judgement and my judgement says when people isolate me and ignore me it’s because they want to cut me out, and I assumed because they didn’t like me. I don’t consider myself that likeable so that’s a reasonable, although sad, explanation.  However I have realised in the past few weeks that apparently I am in some sort of competition that I was unaware of:  “Don’t let her get involved, she has enough credit”,  “Don’t get involved in ideas she has, she has enough credit”.  Little comments people have said in passing in my hearing serve to destroy my confidence daily. There have been many of these incidents, all small but incemental.

In a group discussion a few weeks ago I was trying to encourage someone I respect to put themselves forward to be a champion.  Another person in the group asked of the group, “Who thinks they deserve to be a champion?” and I, along with the other couple of champions there, put up my hand thinking we were supporting the discussion. This person said, “I don’t. I don’t think any of us do”.

I felt blindsided

I felt awful.

I still feel awful.

Maybe that person was right.  In which case the validation I had been accepting and working to deserve was just ego.  I didn’t think I had much ego but maybe I do. Maybe that’s what puts people off.

So this is to say to all of you out there:

  • Don’t project onto anyone a motive for their actions. Least of all your own.  Someone once said to me “well we all present for the applause don’t we”.  No. No we don’t.  Some of us do it to learn and to help others learn. That’s it.
  • Don’t project confidence where none exists. Don’t assume how you see someone is how they see themselves.
  • If you’re jealous, own that as your problem. I will put my hand up and admit to in the past being jealous of successful friends (Paul, Rob, Stuart) but that was my problem about where I felt I fell short and I truly hope they never felt the effects of it.
  • Don’t try and tear people down to make yourself feel better.

Your comments hurt. your actions or in-actions hurt. You cause hurt.

I wish it was still the mid 90s and we could still be that community that recognised the success of one is the success of all, but that was pre a lot of things and this is where we are now.

I’ll keep doing what I do because that’s the only way I know how to work and because presenting, blogging , sharing, learning, teaching make me happy.

 

Destination Domino (yes, yes I’m late to the party) **

Well this is a lot of good news all at once.  IBM have launched the Destination Domino site - a one stop shop for all your Domino v10 and future strategy news.  If you doubt their commitment to the future development of Domino and the community that believes in it, well just look at all that yellow.

On Thursday 24th May (the day after Engage) I’ll be participating in a webcast on what’s new for Mail, Verse, and Chat for v10.  I will be joining Andrew Manby (Director of Product Management @ IBM) and Ram Krishnamurthy (Chief Architect, Notes, Designer and Xpages @ HCL) on the call.  Registration is here. I recommend you also sign up to the newsletter on the Destination Domino site to stay on top of the developments happening because those are coming at us pretty fast.

I was fortunate enough to visit HCL’s offices in Chelmsford, MA last week and met many of the development teams working on Domino, Verse, Traveler and Sametime.  Some I have known from their years at IBM before they moved to HCL and some were new to me - most of the day is under NDA and you’ll be hearing more about what they are going to deliver at some point if you attend Engage, DNUG, MWLUG and other conferences this summer. If you can’t attend just keep an eye on the Destination Domino site.

One thing I can share that isn’t under NDA is how impressed I was not just with the rapid development of features many of us have been waiting a long time for but also the innovative and open thinking behind Domino as a development platform and the energy and enthusiasm just about everyone I met that day (over 30 people) had.  We are going to see a lot more on the Notes client for iPad and the integration of Node.JS in the next few months and that’s all very exciting.

**I have a good excuse since I’m currently on holiday in St Lucia BUT we interrupt this pool / beach time because this is really important.