Category: General

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So much going on

I know its been quiet here but that is because I have been a little busy with the new job at BCC .. which is great .. I love to be busy

so what I have I been doing ..

Starting at BCC which is awesome, I have been to MWLUG and spoke their again which was also great, We had ICONUK which was much fun (if a little stressful for the organisation team), Run a 5k and raised over £1,000 for charity, and I have been to SUTOL in Prague – all this and the day job at BCC 🙂

BUT I do have lots to blog over the next few weeks ..

Main topics

  • SUTOL16 in prague – I will have a run down of what we learnt at the 8th annual Czech user group
  • DB migration from Oracle on AIX to DB2 on Windows for a Connections customer – on going still on how and why we are moving the Connections DB from Oracle to DB2 (its been fun)
  • Admin Tool for Connections Cloud – some of the exciting things I am working on at BCC

and more ..

first up will be the SUTOL recap which I will post this week ..

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Been kinda busy .. BUT

Had a bit of a beast of a project which is almost done ..  Connections on IBM i (iSeries, AS400), with Docs on Windows, Kudos analytics and a bunch of other stuff .. I have loads to blog about that .. that is for another day as I am currently writing all the documentation up ….

 

In other news .. it may be a bit of a secret but I am a tiny bit of a Star Wars and Disney fan and I do like to throw a Costume on to raise money for a good cause or two. I have also been inspired by my good friend Mr Tim Clark who has recently blogged about making a change to lose weight and get fit. I have decided to follow his lead.

So two weeks ago I started the same Cambridge Weight Plan as Tim and I also have the support of the amazing Marissa – It hasn’t been easy as it is a massive shock to your body to basically stop eating *crap* and just give it what it needs, but I feel amazing ..

So on the back of this ..  my Best Pal, fellow Disney and costuming nut, the lovely Samantha Cunningham talked me into running a 5k at the inaugural Disneyland Paris Marathon Weekend .. initially I was terrified of the thought as I haven’t done any kind of real running since I was in High School (I used to be a 100 and 200m sprinter). The more I thought about it, I realised that I can use this as a goal and to keep me motivated to keep on with the weight loss and exercise.

I am not known for my will power I must admit, I was worried I may cave or give up !! To stop this from happening I am running for a charity. Specifically the 1st Sensory Legion who are the driving force behind Feel the Force Day.

 

Feel the Force Day events are film and TV conventions with a difference. They are the only conventions that are designed around disabled people and make them as accessible as possible. Access does not just mean a disabled loo and a ramp, it’s about attitude, contact and all the subtle things that make things easier. They are an amazing bunch of people .. so Sam and I are running for FTFD … we want to raise as much for them as possible as everything is funded by donations and the whole team are volunteers with day jobs …

If you can spare a £, $, € or any other currency please head over to my just giving page or the team page.

 

Thanks in advance for all your support .. 😀

runForFTFD

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Can you spare an item to help raise money for two amazing causes?

Friends, Geeks, Costumers, fellow Disney fans, lovers of star wars, friends of friends, basically everyone ….

As some of you know I am part of a team behind a charity convention later this year (August 7th).
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Our aim is to raise much needed funds for two amazing causes

Demelza Hospice Care for Children – a charity supporting children and young people (0-19) who are not expected to reach adulthood, and offer support to their families across Kent, South East London and East Sussex

Feel the Force Day (registed charity – 1st sensory legion) – Feel the Force Day is an accessible film and TV event designed for visually impaired and disabled people. Days include tactile costumes, props, vehicles, TV and film related smell jars… plus a few new and original ideas at each event.

All proceeds from Invictacon will be split between the two charities above – as you will agree both great causes.

 

So how can you help us?

The Invictacon team are looking for donations from you .. not in the monitory sense (although cash donations are lovely) – we are looking for items that we can use in our raffle and blind auction.

It can be anything related to film, tv, sci-fi, comic books, gaming, sport, any fandoms etc… that will help us raise some funds for Demelza and FTFD

 

How can you get it to us?

  • IBM/LOTUS/Conference people – we are at Connect 2016 in Orlando and Engage 2016 in Einhoven – bring it along (as long as i can fit it in a case)
  • Costuming friends – we will be at a few sci-fi / comic cons this year – let us know where you will be and we will come and collect or arrange for a friend to accept it on our behalf
  • Anyone else -You can contact us to arrange pick up (if you are local to the southeast of the UK) or postal / courier

 

Any donations will be gratefully received – and we would love to tell the world that you have donated a prize (if you don’t want us to do that, that is also ok)

We are also looking for category sponsors for the costume / cosplay competition (or for the whole comp) – a small prize, trophy and certificate will be presented in each category

  • Kids under 10
    Kids 10 – 16
    Adults 16 and over
    Best Group

The competition is being judged by the lovely Alan Flyng – Star wars (ESB / ROTJ – storm-trooper and imperial officer) who is an amazing costume maker / wardrobe master who has worked on thousands of TV, film and theatrical productions.

 

Thank you

So my plee for help ends .. if there is anyway you could part with something no matter how small to help us raise funds for both causes the whole team would be so so grateful.

The team and I can not thank you enough – we are all volunteers and get nothing but a warm and fuzzy feeling for raising some well needed funds for two amazing causes.

 

So thank you

Sharon, Sam, Nathan, David and Nicky

 

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Calling my developer friends

Hello developer types .. as most of you know I do a lot of work with the iCosplay anti-bullying charity and we need some help (please).

We are looking to reward costumers for doing charity work, community work, visiting sick kids in hosplital, etc . Their progress will be voted on via FB which is straight forward enough – but at the end of the year the top community costumers will be invited to the Wyntercon event in Eastbourne (in Oct 2015)  for the *end of season* pageant where ultimately they will be recognized for everything they have done throughout the year.

We are after a mobile app that we can use for the team to mark each of the entrants – on their costume, community assistance and charity work and anyother details that they can provide about what they have done through-out the year. It needs to be able to run on ‘droid and ios, the backend / server can be anything really as long as I can put up a server for it ..

If any one can help out .. we will be eternally grateful, will happily promote your awesome skills via the iCosplay site and FB page and you will get tickets for the Wyntercon event.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give us on this .. please ping me via twitter / FB or Skype if you think you can help us ..

 

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dandering for dosh -the story so far

We are just about to start dandering for dosh day 3 & so far despite a few injuries (mainly to me), some very rough terrain and much scorching of the sun – we all appear to be enjoying it 🙂

Day 2 mostly involved us being mountain goats, although we did get an hour on the beach on the fabulous Warren & kitty ‘ s inflatable sofas.

Loving the dander so far – more news and pictures to follow ;).

 

 

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Please sponsor us Dandering for Dosh

The Cube Soft team (Nathan and I) have joined with some other fantastic members of the ICS (Lotus) Community and are joining this years Dander for Dosh.

10 Geeks, 100 Miles, 5 days – what could possibly go wrong :)

In previous years a group of community members have raised money for worthy causes with a sponsored walk across some of the British Isles most beautiful country side.

D4DThis years walk is the Lleyn Peninsula Coastal Path (Edge of Wales Walk) 85 miles in five days, and as our coordinator the  lovely Eileen Fitzgerald says “.. there will be blisters , there will be tears .. but most definitely there will be laughter and wine :-) .. ”

This is a truly global community effort with community members from Ireland, NI, the Netherlands, UK and the USA who have signed up so far. This is the route we are taking Lleyn Peninsula Coastal Path (Edge of Wales Walk)

 

 

 

msfThis year the charity that we are supporting is MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders) a fantastic organization that does some amazing work in developing countries.  Steve himself has worked with them in the past. So go on and give generously !!

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If you would like to sponsor me/us checkout our just giving page or for any of the team please head over to the team just giving page and hand over your hard earned euro, pounds and dollars.

You can also text a donation

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it is for a fantastic cause – thank you SO much in advance from this years team.

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Sorry for the radio silence ….

I want to apologise for my lack of blogging and tweeting – there has been a lot of ups and downs in my personal life over the last 10 months, serious injury which is still not totally resolved and a bunch of other things that have contributed to not only my lack of blogging – but has stopped me attending and speaking at LUGs.

I would like to think that I may be over the worst of it – I had a fantastic holiday with my daughter Emily in Feb 2013 to Disney World, I am working with some great people (thank you Stuart, Warren and especially Tim who has been awesome), so I now need to give myself a kick up the arse to get back into the swing of things.

I was due to present at BLUG on administering Connections and its associated software – I will get that presentation finished and posted at some point.

I have thrown myself into work and am working on a project that involves my favourite thing – INTEGRATING – Connections, Sametime, Notes and Domino and all the ICS stack pretty much – so that is keeping me busy and I am learning new things all the time.

So .. you should be seeing more of me again dear reader – I am back .. not with a bang, but a little fizz – we’ll work on the bang 🙂

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I’m back .. it’s been a while

Many of you may have noticed that I have been AWOL for a while.

I had much going on in my personal life and I would publicly like to thank my close friends for assisting me through that difficult time.

I am now back .. with a vengeance.

Since mid June 2012 :

  • I have lost over 36lb in weight – and I feel like a new person
  • Presented at UKLUG with a trapped nerve in my back – thanks to Bill Mal, Steve Mc D, Wild Bill especially for being so fantastic.
  • Changed jobs – I am now very pleased to be working with good friend and former college Stuart McIntyre as I am now a member of the fast growing Collaboration Matters Team.
  • I have dislocated my elbow – not recommended. It’s on the mend but has stopped me exercising 🙁

The next Social Connections user group is in 10 weeks, I have lots of exciting project work lined up, I will be going to not Lotusphere (Connect 2013) and I have additional trips planned to Disney World in Orlando next year.

Onwards and upwards and its good to be back

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Tidying the blog

Today I decided to tidy my blog and to try and make a bit of sense out of all the *stuff* I throw up on this site ..

That is throw up as in post .. not as in .. well you know what I meen …

Anyways after much hacking and slashing at php files, creating new templates for pages, new side bars for said pages and eventually getting my head around functions again, I think I have myself organised.

The SocialShazza site now has two main topics .. Technology and Disney.

All of the Disney stuff can be found under the Disney heading, and all of the Connections related things can be found under the connections heading.
All blog posts will still appear on the front page, but I have made category pages for Disney and Connections to appear under their menus.

This means I can now highlight awesome new stuff like Paul and Gab’s Connections 101 and people can find it easily 🙂

I am hoping now that will mean that things will be easier to read and find here – although I am open to suggestions on keeping it tidy 😉 and that much of the Disney will be filtered out for those weirdo’s that don’t “Do” Disney – and for those of you that do all the wonderful Disney goodness is all in one place for you now 🙂

as Tigger would say TTFN – ta ta for now 😉

 
Sorry I couldn’t help myself

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Weird issue with TDI Connections Wizards

I noticed a weird issue with the TDI Connections population wizard today.

Originally we had TDI 7.1 installed for some specific issue that were addressed when synching different LDAPs together – that worked, the connections population wizard and all the scripts worked a treat (good news if you want to use TDI 7.1)

Now due to one thing and another we took TDI 7.1 off and put TDI 7.0.0.5 back on the machine – BUT if you do not replace the Connections Wizards directory you will get issues.

The GUI DB population wizard runs, everything looks good, you can fill all the info in it will do things, but then reports zero records added – build sucessful !! I was puzzled, I could connect to the LDAP ok – an LDAP search reports back ok, DB connections are all ok – what is going on.

The main issue is once you have run the wizard over a TDI 7.1 install the derby DB inside the wizards directory updates to a newer version. If you then downgrade TDI and run the same population wizard TDI throws an error as soon as it attempts to iterate at all as it can not read the internal derby DB – reporting it is at a newer version and is not compatible.

The only reason I discovered this was to run the collect_dns job and watch the TDI log. If you tail the TDI log from the wizard, becuase it runs multiple jobs and they wizz past bt so quickly you can not catch the error!!

So its an easy fix – delete the exising wizards directory and re-extract it and attempt again – and of course it will work.

I am guessing the moral of the story is use TDI 7.0.0.5 unless you HAVE to use 7.1 and try not to have to roll it back 🙂