Adrian Mateljan

Adrian’s rating: 8
First watched: 2nd May 2009 (VUE, Reading)

“Coraline” - Excellent animation, especially the facial expressions. A weird and wacky experience that might just grow on me some more.

Adrian’s rating: 7
Tilt: +1 Red Dwarf
First watched: 10th - 12th April 2009 (TV)

“Red Dwarf: Back to Earth” - Red Dwarf is back after 10 years. And it shows. The guys are all looking older (except perhaps for Kryten). The sets and costumes are very clean, almost sterile.

Part 1 is particularly sterile and wooden. I felt the actors were performing individually and not as a team. Lou thought it was the lack of canned laughter to fill the void between punchlines, though the gags were poor and not well orchestrated - I thought perhaps it wasn’t funny enough for even the canned laughter…

Part 2 was better and felt more like the series of old, until the groan moment of them coming through to our world. Not an exactly original plot device, and certainly not an easy one to pull off successfully. I managed to pick up the Bladerunner take-offs well before they became as subtle as a sledgehammer (not having seen or heard anything about the series beforehand). Again - a lofty goal. Better executed than the “back to earth” though.

Part 3 ended well, or at least, not as poorly as it could have…

Ok, the mateljan.com email addresses have been converted from doteasy to Google, and appear to be working well - including the spam filter. You will eventually be able to access your email via http://mail.mateljan.com, but this is currently still “in progress”. It should be accessible by Monday, however, in the meantime, you can go to https://mail.google.com/a/mateljan.com instead.

The first time you access your email you will be prompted to change your password. Passwords were sent out earlier this week and will still be in your doteasy mail (which is still accessible).

Any questions - just email, phone or leave a comment here.

Catchya,
Adrian

Adrian’s rating: 8
Tilt: +1 Doctor Who
First watched: 11th April 2009 (TV)

“Planet of the Dead” is the Doctor Who Easter special, although it felt more like a long epsiode rather than a “special”. The companion was so resourceful it bordered on contrived. Still, it seemed a bit odd that he decided not to take her with him - surely someone of the Doctor’s age realises he will lose people all of the time. In her favour, she seemed the most capable of all of his most recent companions of looking after herself (or maybe just getting into more trouble - but then so does the Doctor)

Adrian’s rating: 6
First watched: Monday 20th April 2009 (Blockbuster, DVD)

“The Tale Of Despereaux“. Great cast (including Dustin Hoffman, William H. Macy and Christopher Lloyd), great animation and great characters (love the concept of Hovis). Plot let it down for me. Too many characters and ideas, not enough exploration of any of them.

Adrian’s rating: 7
First watched: Sunday 19th April 2009 (Blockbuster, DVD)

“Yes Man” could not have made too much of an impression on me - I can hardly remember it! Oh, that’s right - Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel in a comedy of extremes…

Paul and I attended the 4th European RedDot Usergroup Conference on Tuesday May 19th 2009, held at the National Archives, London. This was my first time at a RedDot Usergroup conference - so my aim was to get a feel for the RedDot Usergroup, learn a few things and contribute where I could. The RedDot Usergroup is a non-profit organisation, so the conference was no free lunch. Which means evaluating the value for money for the conference and also whether to join up for an annual membership.

Disclaimer: I am a contract Management Server (nee RedDot CMS) / web developer currently working for the Legal Services Commission in London. However, I was at the conference on my own time and dime. I also blog for the Unofficial RedDot CMS Blog, for whom I gave a promotional presentation, and volunteer at Friends of the Earth, UK. However, all my views are my own and in no way represent the views of any of my affiliations, except by coincidence or accident

Welcome

The conference got off to a bit of a late start, what with some of the organisers, Open Text, partners and clients flying in from Germany. Of course it was someone from the UK that was truly late - London traffic and all. The welcome included a brief introduction to the RedDot Usergroup as well as current activities. Apparently a name change to the Web Solutions Usergroup is being investigated.

Unofficial RedDot CMS Blog

This was an awesome and thankfully very short presentation given by yours truly. I can’t take credit for the powerpoint presentation - that was all Frederic’s work - but the spoken content was all me, for better or worse. Contrary to popular opinion at the conference, its not *my* blog - I am merely one of the eight contributing authors. Perhaps if the stats rise significantly due to my presentation I might be able to join the coveted inner circle

Open Text Artesia Digital Asset Management

This was my first look at Artesia, having missed the presentations at the Open Text Content Day UK. Or maybe I should rephrase that as my first glimpse. One of the issues I have with a lot of vendor and partner presentations is that from a technical point of view, the content is minimal. Between the marketing spiel and the high level nature of the presentations - well maybe I am just not the right audience. The reality for me is the coal face of actually making things work in real life. Still, there were a couple of interesting points to come out of this. With the current move away from documents towards video I have to agree with the presenter that it is a bit unfortunate that Open Text has the word text in its name. Perhaps Open Video or Open Media would be more appropriate looking forward? Oh, and general consensus amongst clients was that no one was happy with the inbuilt Asset Manager in Management Server

Coffee Break

Had a great conversation with Ulrich Weiss about performance issues with Navigation Manager and 700+ instances of the master page templates - before I realised he is on the RDUG management board and also an accomplished RedDot developer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - as would be proven in a later session.

Roadmap and Version 10 Preview / Live Demo

After another lengthy marketing spiel (including slides from the Open Text Content Day UK and the previous Artesia presentation - well I can’t say Open Text don’t know a thing or two about content reuse!) and some buzzword bingo worthy rhetoric (We care, provide a compelling user experience, agility and innovation) - finally got some information on the roadmap and my first view of version 10 - mostly in Powerpoint slides, but with some live demo.

Nothing is final with dates, but we can apparently expect version 10 to drop in June 2009 (hey - that’s now!), with a smaller service pack or upgrade codenamed “Falcon” in December 2009. The next major version after that (codenamed “Orca” - not a good sign) is scheduled for April 2010, and is likely to be a major update of the backend to .Net.

Version 10 would seem to include a new version of the PageBuilder written in .Net, which supposedly could increase PageBuilder performance by up to 70% (depending on project implementation / complexity) and an overhaul to the SmartEdit interface - slicker, with drag and drop. The PageBuilder enhancements also have multi-processor support - which should allow publishing and editing at the same time - yay! It will also be released as an upgrade to version 9 separate from version 10.

The new SmartEdit will work across Firefox, Safari and Chrome (and IE of course!). SmartTree is planned for all four browsers, but it is not certain yet (it may contain an IE only tree). The clipboard comes to the new version of SmartEdit, as well as a read only Navigation Manager tree to help navigate the site, drag and drop content classes, a right mouse button menu to replace the Action Menu and a number of other common information / actions are promoted in the interface - project switching, views (SmartEdit, redlining - though still no structural redlining, form view, preview and Delivery Server preview - though no preview by date - you will have to do that the old fashioned way for now) and the current page identifier.

Search and tasks have been improved. You can now access recent searches and also save customised searches for later. The results may be grouped by your choice of search criteria. The excessive clicks, pages and popups required for tasks has been simplified - replaced with a new home page, fully customisable iGoogle style with “widgets”. For example, a custom search showing recently modified content. Presentation can be customised by group, but you can still only see information relating to the current project.

Last bits - should support 64 bit, should run on VMWare, while RQL should still be supported you will need to test as their is no 100% guarantee. There are no changes to SmartTree.

Discussion centred around the upgrade from 9 to 10 - basically play it safe - ideally upgrade on a separate box and migrate across (with all the fun that this entails). If there are going to be upgrade problems, this is going to be it. Of course, you always have the option of staying on 9 and upgrading the PageBuilder only - which should garner significant performance improvements by itself. Also - no date on version 10 service pack 2 (the first “usable” version, as one of the members joked).

My thoughts? It looks promising - but the proof will be on the ground in real projects, not in presentational demos. It has certainly been a long time coming. While I think most of the interface improvements will be for the better (and remove some RQL plugin requirements) the question is - is it enough? That will become even more pertinent if the upgrade process turns into a nightmare. I will add one personal note on the user interface - the drag and drop content classes. From the demonstration (which wasn’t perfect) - you can drag the content class from a pop out menu on the right. Apparently this will only show those content classes that are available on the page. The red dots you can place that content class on will remain red (others will be greyed out). Does this seem backwards to anyone? Wouldn’t it be better to present the available content classes from a context menu on the red dot itself? Also, there doesn’t appear to be any visual representation of content classes - which would have been a nice addition too.

I still have plenty more to cover, but that is a post for another time (soon!). On Wednesday I am off to the UK Web Solutions Community Day 2009 in Reading - which should hopefully shed some more light on version 10.

Until next time,
Adrian

Adrian’s rating: 8
Tilt: +1 Science Fiction
Last watched: 13th April 2009 (DVD, owned)

Great actors (Ewan McGregor, Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan) / actress (Scarlett Johansson), great action, great sci-fi. I particularly like the vision of 2019, the layering of future technology over our current technology. “The Island” is not perfect, but a lot of fun - critics be damned!

86.7kg

After a week in Orlando and three weeks of dubious diet and neglible exercise I was expecting to see my weight head back up, or best case, flatline. I don’t feel any thinner - perhaps I have just lost muscle mass? Still, quality aside, I have still been making sure to drink plenty of water and not to overeat. It could just simply be that I will lose my weight in stages - I was not keeping track so closely the last time I pulled this off. Go me!

I keep forgetting that five of his six ends are pointy when he lies like that.
- Calvin and Hobbes

So it has now been two weeks since Lou and I returned from Orlando, Florida. I promise I will post about that soon - after I finish my RedDot User Group Conference post, which I attended the week before our holiday… The last two weeks have been kinda hectic - but I finally have some time to fill you all in.

We flew back into London on the Sunday morning and got to do all those fun things that need to be done on return from a trip away - unpack, do shopping, pickup Kobe etc - so I didn’t manage to settle much before being back at work on Monday. To make things more challenging, I had arranged to take the Friday off in order to go with Lou to pick up Hobbes - and therefore squished my 35 hour week into four days. The original idea was to give us the full weekend to settle / integrate Hobbes into our home.

During the week, Lou’s various Hobbes related purchases arrived - as can be seen below. Click on the image to see a bigger version, again to see it in its full glory! From left to right we have the small cat tree (in the bedroom), the large cat tree (in the family room) and the litter robot (just above the stairs). The trees came in five pieces, so some evening assembly was required.

Although the drive to pick Hobbes up was almost two hours (both ways), we had no trouble bringing him home - even with the carry box open at the top. The rest of Friday was the same - he was only interested in sleeping / hiding. Initially in the bathroom, and then behind his small tree in the bedroom (we shifted him because we thought the noisy bathroom fan probably wasn’t helping). By evening he was timidly checking out the room and glad of the baby barrier we had erected around his small tree and litter box - we couldn’t keep Kobe out of the main bedroom overnight.

As I suspected, Kobe hasn’t had any issues with Hobbes. If anything, she couldn’t meet him soon enough! Hobbes on the other hand was very wary of Kobe and would hiss at her across the room. Saturday saw Hobbes more confident with the bedroom and a little less wary of Kobe. By Sunday Hobbes was exploring the family room and hissing at Kobe was restricted to being set upon while playing.

Lou wasn’t confident to look after Kobe and Hobbes by herself on Monday, plus we needed some supplies and rest, so I also took Monday off from work. However, Hobbes was becoming more confident each day, so it wasn’t too much of an issue. We had had three earlier urine related “accidents” and a couple of near misses, but things were now turning to protecting areas Hobbes hadn’t been able to get to previously - the table, the upstairs room with my miniatures and paperwork etc.

So I squished another 35 hours into four days. Lou and Hobbes coped and Hobbes pretty much has the run of the place now. He and Kobe are getting on fine - though we still can’t play chase games with him while Kobe is in the room, and we need to be wary of Kobe swallowing his small cat toys. I’m not sure he particularly likes the attention from Kobe, but he doesn’t hiss anymore and only attacks if he has been interrupted attacking something else. Kobe is starting to demand more attention as the novelty of Hobbes wears off.

Its been a long two weeks, what with nine hour days (plus four hours travel) and limited rest acoss our first four days with Hobbes. The London underground strike on Wednesday and Thursday did not make things any easier. I haven’t had time to exercise since before Orlando (ie three weeks) and some of our eating has not been the best as Lou hasn’t been in the mood to cook. I doubt my Monday weigh in will be positive.