Joel Patrick

Interview with Jake Howlett

Jake Howlett has been a factor in the world of IBM's Lotus Domino technology for some time now. He began his blog five years ago and has been working at it ever since. His site Codestore he explains is not about retail but rather a storehouse for the tricks of the trade. Jake is a bit the exception in the world of Domino programmers because he uses the web side of the IBM technologies almost exclusively and he does it so well. His opinions and points of view are a reference for many people. He has helped thousands of people by recording his techniques and discoveries. He is a personable and opinionated writer and a great read; it is easy to see why he continues to build his following.

Jake's blog certainly was the reason he has worked for me. I would not have found him in Muncie or Paris. Not surprisingly many of his engagements today involve travel, and he was in Paris two weeks ago. We managed to get him to stay an extra two days for some work and creative friction with some of my French contractors. While he was here I managed to improvise an intervew as a further development of my blog. I am posting it here. I will apologize in advance for the marginal quality of the video, but after trying a host of "higher quality" settings on the standard Windows Movie Maker program, I settled for the defaults and got what you will be able to see here. At least it seems to work and the sound is not out of sync. We filmed this on the last morning Jake was in Paris. The light in my office is awful for video taping so I turned it off. With only the early morning light, the resulting footage is too dark (especially on my dim monitor), but Jake's story and success make up for it. CLICK here or the image below to play the interview.

Convergence in Web 2.0

An article by Tim O'Reilly really caught my eye. Tim has been talking about this concept for some time now. In fact, there has actually been a conference dedicated to Web 2.0, not surprisingly sponsored in part by O'Reilly. For a long time people have dreamed of convergence without doing much ab out it. Today it looks like this will be the basis for may of the hottest trends.

Creativity is a key ingredient. Remix is a big theme as people discover how to connect websites. Google and Amazon's web services have provided big opportunities for creative remix. There are great examples of this such as Music Plasma as described by Jeff Bezos at the conference. But the really application that is still spawning marvels is Google Maps, which has led to mashups like HousingMapst and the the zipcode mapper.

As an alumnus of CICS, one of the things I was the most jealous of was the delightful story about the classroom failure turned celebrated success the real-world exercise using the cell phone as a platform, for a game.