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I have been very interested lately in articles, studies, etc., about Virtual Teams scattered in different locations throughout the world and their interaction. Primarily because I’m in one Global Virtual Team since several years ago working on the development and support of IBM Lotus Domino for System i (including QuickPlace, Quickr, Sametime, Domino Document Manager, etc.).

Recently I found the link to this white paper titled New Methods for Studying Global Virtual Teams: Towards a Multi-Faceted Approach where one of the different findings, not surprisingly, was that of trust. This same issue of trust is something that we know happens also between people in a team working in the same place.

Communication and collaboration tools are critical to the success of a project, and thus every member of a team needs to be educated so that he or she can make effective use of the tool at hand.

I don’t remember where I found the link, but anyways I wanted to share it here.

Anybody knows if Juice will ever support Atom feeds? It has been sleeping for several years now that I’m sure there are not developers left doing anything with it.

Anyone knows how can I get the source code? I would like to take a look and see if I can add the Atom support.

Some hours ago I read this post and it’s sad and unfortunate that when pride and you-know-who reign in your soul it’s obvious that you won’t believe in anything, in fact I have seen and heard people that say they are god. Success, happiness and wisdom are essential things that do not agree with pride and intelligence very much. Wisdom is something that only God can give you, unfortunately almost no one deserves it these days. And it shows.

I really feel sorry.

With great excitement I can tell you now that IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 is available for everyone to download for free!

It has good support for ODF, OpenOffice, MS Office and Lotus SmartSuite documents, so you can get rid of all of those other office applications and have just one installed (as I’m gonna do next!).

I just finished hearing episode 27 of the No Agenda podcast and the stuff about China is pretty interesting. Worth a look.

I was just informed today that one of the few supercomputers that UNAM got last year partially burned. It never worked well, and when it reached the 50% utilization it burnt. Won’t mention here any of the strange things that seemed to happen in the deal between HP and the University ‘cause you can read them here (in spanish).

The question that remains is, was it really a supercomputer ever?

Some months ago I read a magazine that I would rather call Software Newbie due to the basic nature of its articles, it comes with some translated articles from some other sources but anyways I don’t recommend it much.

What was interesting, but not surprising, was the survey that they made last year on their website which gives some numbers related to salaries in the IT sector in México.

I’ll mention briefly few of the figures that were interesting to me. Depending on the type of job, the job functions that are better paid than “Development” are: Quality, Security, Consultant, Sales, Project Management, Architecture, and Directors (managers, I believe) at the top.

Salaries are also subject to age and degree of studies. This is obvious, right?

By programming language I’ll just mention that the best paid are those who do Cobol. In the Platform arena, the ones at the top are Mainframe, Unix and AS/400. Around databases the two at the top are DB2 and Informix as second place.

The last interesting figure is the one by certification. If you have a Project Management Institute certification then you’re at the top, then come IBM WebSphere, Security, SAP and IBM DB2.

I just read the article “Some Viruses Come Pre-Installed” by the Associated Press in ABC News and the fact that any type of gadget (hardware) coming from China could contain several viruses and infect your computers is very bad.

Not only gadgets come with several viruses each like iPods, digital picture frames, the TomTom navigation gear, external hard drives, etc., but there’s toxic toothpaste, poisonous pet food and toy trains coated in lead paint.

Be sure to check that your computer has the latest antivirus signatures before plugging in whatever gadget you buy. Almost always, the cheap stuff turns out to be more expensive.

Some time ago I read Andrew McAfee’s article “The Ties that Find” where he cites a really good article created in 1973 by Mark S. Granovetter called “The Strength of Weak Ties“. I didn’t have the chance at that time to read the article but, some weeks ago I decided to read it and I have to say that now I understand more clearly the real impact that the current social software makes in all aspects of our day to day activities, and more importantly for us knowledge workers who depend on finding the right people at the right time to be able to solve whatever the problem we’re faced with.

Definitely a good read; and by the looks of it, seems that there are a few other interesting papers in there, hope to have time later to check them out.

I just read an article in the IBM Systems Magazine titled “Preparing for V6R1” which I suggest you go and read if you’re planning to move to V6R1. It’s concise and well explained. The only thing that seem to not work is that I get a Server Error when trying to see the figures, I’m getting an “HTTP 404″ from the “Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.832; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.832″… no wonder why, really.

There’s an “Impact on Domino” supplement that is good also.

I haven’t posted anything here regarding Domino and V6R1 because we’re trying to have everything properly documented. You’ll see the redpapers for i5/OS, information in the Domino for System i ibm.com page and not sure if in the Release Notes. I’ll probably talk about something if I see anything missing in those.