The next version of the Linux distribution Ubuntu is scheduled to be available for download tomorrow, April 26. Ubuntu 12.04 will be a so called LTS (Long Term Support) version, which means that it will be supported longer than the regular versions. For 12.04 the support will last for five years, both for the server and the desktop version. Previous LTS-releases were supported for five years for the server version, but only three years for desktop. Non-LTS-releases are supported for 18 months after release.

Ubuntu 12.04 is using version 3.2 of the Linux kernel. Below is a list of other changes, taken from the Ubuntu website:

New Applications and Defaults

• The default music player has been switched to Rhythmbox, which again includes the UbuntuOne music store.

• LibreOffice has been updated to 3.5.1.

 

Interface updates

• The System Setting's "Appearance" panel now allows users to easily configure some properties of Unity.

• Nautilus quicklist support has been added to Unity launcher.

• There is a new way to quickly search and access any desktop application's and indicator's menu, called the "HUD". Tap the Alt key and enter some letters and words, and it will show the corresponding entries, including some fuzzy matching. Press enter to execute the action. This one is executed on the current focused application as well as all indicator facilities (like managing emails, sound list, quit…). Also it learns from your previous choices to make the search more and more accurate for you.

 

ClickPad support

ClickPad devices are trackpads where the physical button is integrated into the trackpad surface. Ubuntu Precise now has enhanced support for these devices. When the button is pressed on a ClickPad device, a second finger may be used to drag the cursor.

• ClickPad support requires extra handling that conflicts with "Click Action" support. Click Actions allow for separate actions when multiple fingers are active on a trackpad. The default Ubuntu settings enable right button behavior when two fingers are in contact with the trackpad surface and the physical trackpad button is pressed. Because of conflicting behavior, ClickPad devices do not support Click Actions in this release.

• Most Synaptics brand ClickPads are recognized out of the box. Apple MacBook trackpads are recognized as well. Support for Apple Magic Trackpads and more Synaptics brand ClickPads will follow in the next release.

 

Ubuntu One

• All new Control Panel provides an installer, setup wizard, ability to add/remove folders to sync, and more

• Proxy support is now fully functional

• Ubuntu One music store in Rhythmbox

• Ubuntu One contacts sync has been removed

• Nautilus ribbon with enable sync check box has been removed

 

Other

• Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.

• Automatic Apport crash reporting now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

• When installing new software through software-center, corresponding language support packages (translations, spell check modules particular to that software, help files, etc.) are now installed along automatically. This removes the need to open "Language Support" after installing new software.

• pm-utils now has two new scripts to power down USB and various PCI devices in battery mode. A number of desktop packages were fixed to wake up less often. Both of these reduces power consumption and thus battery lifetime.

• resolvconf is now used to manage /etc/resolv.conf on all Ubuntu systems. For systems using Network Manager DNS resolution is now done through dnsmasq, which should help split-DNS VPNs and faster DNS resolution. You can learn more here

•  Output from Upstart jobs is now logged to per-job files in /var/log/upstart/, unless the job specifies otherwise by setting console to something other than the default of log (see init(5)).

You can download it (starting some time tomorrow) here. But be prepared thatthe servers might be busy for the first few days.

Google's cloud storage product Google Drive has now been announced. I am however still on a waiting list, as it seems like Google is adding users little by little, so I have not been able to test it yet.

Google Drive is a service similar to Dropbox. You get 5GB storage for free, and additional 25GB for $2.49/month. Clients are available for Mac, PC and Android phones, and a version for iPad/iPhone is coming, according to Google. The service let you access your documents from different devices and on different platforms. You are also able to share files with friends, family and other people. Google Docs is integrated with Google Drive, allowing different users to edit documents.

It will be interesting to see what differentiate Google Drive from Dropbox, box.com and other similar services that already exists. The cost for additional storage is much lower than the competing products, Dropbox give you 2GB free and charge $9.99 for 50GB storage. Box.com give you 5GB free and charge $9.99 for 25GB storage.

After weeks of speculations, it seems like Samsung will unveil their latest smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S3, at an event in London om May 3 called "Samsung Mobile Unpacked". Invitations have been sent out to media and a website with a teaser video is now available.

Samsung also released an app for the Unpacked event, where there is a reference to "Samsung Galaxy S3". The predecessor is of course Samsung Galaxy S II (with roman numerals), and there have been some discussions if Samsung will change the numbering from roman to latin numbers. Initially the phone was just referenced as "The Next Galaxy", leading some to speculate in Samsung doing like Apple and dropping the number from the name.

I guess we will see in 9 days. Then the specifications will be official as well. But rumors are talking about a quad-core processor (everything between 1.4 and 2.8GHz have been mentioned), a 4.6" to 4.8" screen with a resolution of 1280×720 pixel (but a 1920×1080 screen has also been mentioned), 16GB or 32GB memory, 8-12MP camera, and possible a ceramic body.

Fredrik Malmborg just posted an article (in Swedish) on his blog about how the Swedish government have been moving several departments (taxes, defence, etc) from an IBM/Lotus platform to the Microsoft stack. He noticed that a certain executive with sales responsibility for public sector at a big software company became Secretary of State (not the same as "Secretary of State" in the US) right before the government asked a certain software company (guess which one!) to write the specification for the new system. Coincidentally that same company (Microsoft)  was then choosen to deliver the solution. IBM was never offered to even compete.

A year ago Computer Sweden wrote (in Swedish) about several departments moving from IBM/Lotus to Microsoft, without IBM being allowed to compete, or in some cases select Microsoft despite IBM being less expensive. .

Here are some arguments used in the studies presented to the government why the switch should be done:

* Outlook is used privately by many users and thus have a higher acceptance.
* The similar interface improves the user experience.

I know that IBM does not believe in those arguments, but the customers and the ones in charge (may it be politicians, civil servants or a CEO) buy that argument. Line, hook and sinker… Especially if the persons in change are among the ones that use Outlook at home (since it come bundled with many versions of Office). I personally know several people who use Outlook (not Outlook Express!) at home for their private mail, as they can easily aggregate several mail accounts into one client. I been building/rebuilding a number of computers for friends lately, and the request to use Outlook came up several times.

I believe that IBM should create a "IBM Mail" client, with support for POP/IMAP/SMTP as well as direct support for Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Why not add Domino and Exchange support, to allow users to connect to work, without installing the full Notes client?
The client must be able to aggregate mail from multiple sources, and send mail using any of those services. When you compose a new mail, there should be a dropdown where you select Gmail, your ISP service or Yahoo mail (depending on what you have setup), the same way as it works on most smart phones today. If you reply to a mail, the service is was received on should be default, e.g. if the mail was received through one of my Gmail accountrs, the reply should be sent using the same account.

This client should look like Notes mail, contain a calendar, to-do, journal, perhaps an RSS feed and support for widgets. Why not throw in a couple of simple but useful applications? Show that "IBM Mail is not just mail". Strip away as much as possible when it comes to complicated menus, settings, etc. The properties/settings in the Notes client causes any normal user to get a headache instantly… Make it easy and quick to setup, and make it available as a free download, without any annoying registration. Most of all, make the client fast.

The market perception will not change overnight, but in the long run, showing that "IBM Mail" looks modern and has the functionality people need will benefit Notes.

I wanted to share the recipe for the cake I made this weekend. It is very easy to make, and tastes great.

Mix 6 eggs and 3dl (a little over over 1 cup) of sugar, beet it until fluffy.
Mix 1.5 dl (9 tablespoons) flour and 1.5 dl corn starch (potato flour in Europe) in a bowl, add 3 tablespooons of baking powder and mix well. Fold this into the egg/sugar mix, stir gently until the batter is smooth.
Cover the inside of a baking pan with butter and then breadcrumbs. Pour in the batter and place in the lower part of the oven. Bake for 40 minutes in 325 degrees F (175 degrees C).
When done, turn it upside down on a cooling rack, let it cool down for a few monutes before attempting to remove the baking pan.

Slice through the cake twice so you get 3 equally think slices. On top of the first one, spead a jam, for example blueberry jam. Pend the extra $2 and get the best one you can get, low in sugar and high in fruit. If you have an IKEA nearby, theu got several good jams to choose from. On top of the jam, put a 1/2 inch thick layer of vanilla creme. I make it from Vanilla Sauce powder from Sweden, but here is a way to make it yourself. You can add some fresh fruit here, if you like. Why not fresh blueberries, to complement the jam?

Put the next layer of cake on top of the vanilla creme, then add another filling. I often mash 2 bananas and mix with whipped creme. Make sure the creme is nice and thick, it should be solid, not runny or soft. You can add fruit in here too, if you like. Perhaps chunks of fresh strawberries, they go well with teh bananas and creme. Add the last layer of cake, cover the whole thing with more whipped creme and decorate with fruit. Strawberries, rasberries, blackberries. Or why not go for a "mushroom cake", cut bananas in about 1.5 inch long pieces and place them standing up on top of the cake. Drain a can of apricots and put them on top of the bananas like mushrooms.

The other week we had a new executive start at my work. I stopped by her office today and offered to help her with Notes if she had any problems. I asked if she had used Notes before, and she said no, she came from an Outlook shop. So I asked her what she thought about Notes this far.

She told me that the mail experience was very close to Outlook, with sortable columns, etc. She als told me that she really like the action buttons with dropdowns for reply, etc. The fact that different windows are available in different tabs was another thing she liked.

She then switched over to the workspace and told me how she loved it, and how it was much better than Outlook, easy to find things, etc. I then quickly showed her how she can name the different tabs, change color and organize her icons. She was very impressed, and liked that.

For the last week or so, she have been meeting with different departments, and yesterday she got to meet with IT. We went through the different applications we have, and we explained how the different Notes applications are tied together with each other, as well as with several other systems. This is something else she is very impressed about, and she told me that that level of integration was something she had not seen at her previous workplace.

She is very impressed with Lotus Notes, and she is still just running 8.5.2 Basic version…

This spring is gearing up to be very interesting. The rumors are flying about both an upcoming new iPad and a new Samsung Galaxy Tab.

According to the rumors, Samsung will launch the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 at Mobile World Contress in Barcelona at the end of this month. The new tablet will (again unconfirmed) have a 11.6 inch screen with a resolution of 2560×1600 and be powered by a 2GHz dual-core Exynos 5250 processor. Some rumors talk about a quad-core processor, but I personally find that unlikely in this first version.
The operating system will, not surprisingly, be Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Despite the bigger screen, the actual size of the tablet is said to not be much larger than the existing Galaxy Tab 10.1.

As soon as Apple releases one product, rumors start about the next generation. But it seems very plausible that an iPad3 will be released this spring (the rumors talk about March). Here rumors talk about a quad-core processor in the 1MHz range (but the rumors are all over the place which processor it will be and exact clock speed), and a new graphics chip driving the 9.7 inch display with a resolution of  2048×1536 pixels, double the resolution of iPad2. A redesigned interior to allow a bigger battery is also probably, based on leaked pictures of the case. 4G LTE support is also a pretty good bet. The iPad3 will supposedly be slightly more bulky that the existing version, about 1.5mm thicker.

I guess time will tell, but this spring could be very interesting for tablets, and the summer/fall will be interesting for smartphones. Expected launces of iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3 and phones from RIM with Blackberry OS 10 (QNX-based and rumored to be able to run Android apps) are the ones I see as the most interesting.

How many times do you not want to count the number of documents you process, perhaps even a few different counters? Today I was working on a Lotusscript agent where I wanted to keep track of the total number of documents processed, as well as individual counters for a few different types of documents. Normally I would have used a handful of variables, but I realized that I could use lists for this.

This is what my old code would look like:

Dim cnt As Long
Dim totcnt As Long
Dim type1cnt as Long
Dim type2cnt as Long
Set view = claimdb.GetView("(LookupView)")
Set col = view.AllEntries
view.AutoUpdate = False
totcnt = col.Count
cnt = 0
Set entry = col.GetLastEntry()
Do While Not entry Is Nothing
    cnt = cnt + 1
    ' Do stuff here 
    If entry.ColumnValues(0) = "Type1" Then
        type1cnt = type1cnt + 1
    ElseIf entry.ColumnValues(0) = "Type2" Then
        type2cnt = type2cnt + 1
    End If
    Print "Processed " & cnt & " of " & totcnt
    Set entry = col.GetPrevEntry(entry) 
Loop

My new code would look like this:

Dim cnt List As Long
Dim doctype As String
Set view = claimdb.GetView("(LookupLargeLossSummary)")
Set col = view.AllEntries
view.AutoUpdate = False
cnt("Total") = col.Count
cnt("Processed") = 0
Set entry = col.GetLastEntry()
Do While Not entry Is Nothing
    cnt("Processed") = cnt("Processed") + 1
    ' Do stuff here
    doctype = entry.ColumnValues(0)
    cnt(doctype) = cnt(doctype) + 1
    Print "Processed " & cnt("Processed") & " of " & cnt("Total")
    Set entry = col.GetPrevEntry(entry) 
Loop

Note that the list tag is case sensitive. The example also assumes that the document type is displayed in the first column of the view. You can also use ForAll to get the values of all list elements:

ForAll c in cnt
    Print ListTag(c) & " = " & c
End ForAll

That’s it for today. Happy coding!

During the last couple of weeks I have revisited some of the sci-fi classics I read when I was young. Robert A Heinlein was always one of my favorites. In what would be considered middle school in the US (4th-6th grade) we had one hour each week when the class was reading whatever book we had picked out in the library. At one time, I think it was in 5th grade, I read the Swedish translation of "Have Space Suit ?Will Travel". The other week I listened to this book as an audio book. This one was actually more of a radio theatre play, with different actors playing the different parts. I then followed this by listening to "Citizen of the Galaxy" and "Double Star".

The books were written in 1956, 1957 and 1958, and I noticed something interesting. Despite them taking place in the future, where space travel (even faster than light) is possible, and with all kinds of exotic technology available, many things we take for granted today are lacking.

In "Double Star", the main character is studying using an encyclopedia in the ships library. As we know today, online encyclopedias like wikipedia and internet searches have all but killed off the traditional printed encyclopedia. There is no way for a printed publication to stay current. If a celebrity or any other person dies, within minutes their wikipedia page will be updated with date/time and cause of death.

In "Citizen of the Galaxy" the missile control computers onboard the trade ships are manned by young adults with good math abilities. They seem to be somewhat aided by a rudimentary computer, but it is mainly the operator who calculate trajectory and time for release of the missiles. The result is recorded on a spool (which can be read by humans, so probably some kind of paper-like material). The concept of digital storage did not exist, and I am sure any PC (or even smart phone) today could perform the calculations needed much faster than any human, and with greater accuracy.

Some of the books also talk about huge archives, using micro film. Even if that still today is a great medium for long term storage, it is not the best choice for the kind of short term archiving used in the books. Again, the concept of digital storage does not appear in the books. The books basically build on the technology known in the 1950´s, but "enhanced" as imagined in the future.

However, there is on interesting thing in "Double Star". When recordings are made (for public broadcasts), they are "stereoscopic", i.e. 3D. It is not until the last year or two we have actually seen 3D television become common. Personally I believe that we soon will see 3D television sets where we don´t need to use special glasses (several manufacturers already have those) and that more and more tv shows and even news will be in 3D.

All this is not a slam on Robert A Heinlein or any other sci-fi writer from the past. It just illustrates how hard it is to predict a paradigm shift like PCs or the development of technology. For being almost 60 years old, the books are still very enjoyable. If you have not experienced Robert A Heinlein yet, pick up one of his books or an audiobook at the library, bookstore or favorite online retailer.

The discussion about the IBM rebranding of different products, including removing "Lotus" from a number of products, have me got thinking. What is really in a name? Well, a product name is really not that different from a person name. We have a firstname/surname which is our identity, and a lastname/family which indicate what family or group we belong to. In some cultures the family name is listed first, but the idea is the same. Sometimes we also have a nickname that we are know as, or that our friends call us.

When a woman get married, she often takes the family name of her husband, or combine her family name with his. Jane Doe becomes Jane Smith or even Jane Doe-Smith. A product is often named the same way. Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime. When IBM took over ("married") Lotus, eventually the name became "IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Domino, etc. We continued using the "nicknames" Notes, Domino and Sametime, as they are shorter and easier to say/write.

I am sure we all remember when Sametime was renamed "IBM Lotus Instant Messaging" and Quickr was renamed "IBM Lotus Team Workplace". The names were quickly changed back”…” Not that the names were bad, they actually explained much better the nature of the product. But they were much harder to remember and did not have the familiarity people needed. Compare that with if I would change my son´s name from Erik to say Allen (which happens to be his middle name). That would cause a lot of confusion.
And if you dropped the "family name" part ("IBM Lotus"), like we all do in normal conversations, the result did not provide any good branding. "Do you use Instant Messaging?"

Some products have already lost the Lotus part. We now have "IBM Sametime", and at Lotusphere, it was announced that "IBM Docs" is the new name for LotusLive Symphony. I think that is a great name, it explains the product and also have the family name in there. "IBM SmartCloud for Social Business" is a long name for LotusLive, and perhaps not the best name. But I never thought LotusLive was a good name. I know that a few years everything cloud was "Live" (Windows Live, etc), but it felt like just another buzzword.

I understand the need of IBM to group products into different families. That makes sense. But everything does not have to include "Smart". What about simply giving any cloud offering/product a "Cloud" designation? IBM Cloud Docs, IBM Cloud Mail (LotusLive Mail), etc. To me that is a no-brainer.

For the traditional client side products in the Lotus family it is a bit more complicated. We all love the Lotus brand, but it has a somewhat tainted or dated sound these days. It is simply old, and people still think "Lotus 1-2-3" when they hear it. I would have no problem with IBM Notes and IBM Domino. We already have "IBM Xwork Server". What about "IBM Smart Client" (for Notes) and "IBM Smart Server" (for Domino). There, IBM got their Smart-designation, and we got a good descriptive name on the products.

You are welcome, Ed.