Write it on a Rock

A lot of people in the sports world are blaming or seem to be blaming the Yankees' pitching for the reason they didn't do better this year. They point to Ian Kennedy & Phil Hughes and how they were a disappointment this year and perhaps should have been traded last off season for the great Johan Santana. They point to Wang's injury which left them without their ace, the pitcher with the most total wins in the last two years in MLB. They point to the injury to Joba Chamberlain and also the fact he got moved from being Rivera's setup man to a starter. I disagree with them.

While Kennedy and Hughes were pretty terrible (17 starts between them with an 0-8 record and a 7.50 E.R.A.) and losing Wang certainly hurt, it was the Yankees' bats that were the main reason they couldn't make it this year. We can look at some of the pitching stats from last year, which was the worst year since the late 90s, to this year.

2007 pitching stats

• 4.49 ERA
• .268 opponent batting average
• 777 runs allowed
• 1.43 WHIP

2008 pitching stats

• 4.28 ERA
• .266 opponent batting average
• 727 runs allowed
• 1.36 WHIP

You can see that opponents batting average was roughly the same but they had a lower WHIP this year, which means the Yankee pitchers gave up fewer walks in 2008 as well as 50 less runs allowed. While their pitching wasn't a lot better then 2007, it WAS better. Now take a look at a few hitting stats between 2007 and 2008.

2007 hitting stats

• 1656 hits
• 968 runs
• .290 batting average

2008 hitting stats

• 1512 hits
• 789 runs
• .271 batting average

That's almost 1 run a game difference. They lost 18 games by 1 run this season. 13 games by 2 runs. Give them a fourth of those games and they finish with the same record as the first place Tampa Bay Rays. While better pitching certainly could have made a difference it was timely hitting that really did them in this year.

That's a pretty big request/suggestion. I can't imagine how much they would need for all the ice cream they make.

Here's an article about it

Here's a link from PETA's website

I had to do a little work yesterday evening and my girlfriend was over who had never seen the Notes client before, just the Designer one. I'm running the 8.0.2 Standard client and I use the workspace. I have 13 tabs on it with over 400 icons spread out between the tabs. The first thing she says when she looks over and sees the client, "What is that? It looks old and crappy." I'm more then a little confused and asked her why she thought that. "Look at all those icons, they look terrible and aren't pretty at all. It looks cheap." I agreed about the icons and told her that I was pretty sure this was something they were working on to get more up-to-date.

Not wanting her to think Notes was a piece of ugly junk, I showed her my email, calendar and contacts to which she said, "Yeah, that's looks a lot better and really nice." How many others do you think would have this response at seeing a Notes 8 Standard client for the first time? How many users who were on earlier releases of Notes and get upgraded to a Notes 8 Standard client don't really think it's a UI improvement?

I know on IdeaJam that Mika Heinonen has an entry for improving the database icons and I encourage you all to go over there and promote it. I think after all the hard work Lotus has done to improve the UI that there shouldn't be a reason for someone to look at Notes and say that it looks "old" - they should be commenting on how nice it looks instead.

They have some good articles on the site and you can download some free PDFs like "Getting Started with Eclipse", "Getting Started with Ajax", "Core CSS" among others with some useful information in them.

Refcardz link

I got an email from a co-worker about this. Looks like it could be some pretty neat stuff and I'm definitely checking out the Computer Science ones since I never took any of those courses in school.

From the website:

This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering

Introduction to Computer Science
Programming Methodology
Programming Abstractions
Programming Paradigms

Artificial Intelligence
Introduction to Robotics
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning

Linear Systems and Optimization
The Fourier Transform and its Applications
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems
Convex Optimization I
Convex Optimization II

This will be my 6th Lotusphere to attend and probably the one I've been most excited about. The first I attended was in 2004 and cost $500 less then this one. I suppose that's not too much of a price increase over that many years. I also went ahead and reserved a room at the Beach Club Resort. I've stayed there last 3 years because it's close to the Boardwalk shops (ESPN Zone) and I enjoy the walks in the morning and afternoon to the Swan & Dolphin.

See you all there!

Jeff Atwood, who many of you know as the author of Coding Horror.com, has been working with some others on a site to try and help programmers become better programmers.

"Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal."

Here is Jeff's post about their new site. It will be interesting to watch and see what becomes of the site.

I have some old applications that I inherited and they are set up to send some formatted emails to people based on a few different conditions. Upon save & submit it does a lookup to a view that contains all the Routing documents and emails the people listed in the field it needs to go to. This works just fine except when people are hired and they say stuff like "Jack needs the same Notes access as Jill has" or when someone is removed from the directory because they are still in those routing documents.

I was thinking of using server group names for all the different routing conditions because then it's easier to give someone the same access as someone else and when they are removed the directory they get removed from the group. Downside is there will be A LOT of groups in the server directory.

Is this the best approach or would something else work better? How do you have your applications set up?

With the 8.0.2 client you can now get your selection margin (I think usually referred to as the "gutter", maybe?) back in your mail file.

Just go into your Preferences and under Basic Notes Client Configuration find it at the bottom of the additional options.

It will prompt you to close out of your calendar/email if you have them open and here's what you get on return.


Thank you Lotus!!

Kevin Pang compiled this list from a question on StackOverflow.com.

For me, I think my top three, in order, would be #9 (Interruptions), #3 (Vagueness) and then #8 (Scope creep).

Now to just get the final "OK" from my boss....