I have just one question for those of you who attended IBM Connect/Lotusphere. This is mostly for those of you who were there this year, but people who were there in the past but not this year can answer, too. Here’s the question:
As of now, do you believe you will attend again in 2015?
This is the first time I’ve missed two in a row. I’ve missed three out of the last four. Before that, I had never missed the US version of Lotusphere.
This is also the first time I’ve not even bothered to watch the video stream of the OGS, or of any other sessions. My only contact with the conference this year was through watching my many friends’ updates on Facebook and reading blog posts.
I’ve done almost zero Lotus-related work in the last two years. I’ve been working with Java, and C++ and C# and .NET, and with Exchange and SQL Server and even indirectly with Facebook and some other cool stuff, but after 20 years of living and breathing Yellow, it hasn’t been easy to just “move on”. That explains why although my blog has been mostly silent, I’ve racked up 5000 reputation points on StackOverflow in the last few years, almost all of it on Lotus-related questions, as well as actually increasing my activity level on the Lotus forums on the website that I still call notes.net’.
But despite the fact that I don’t think I’ve let go, and that I still feel engaged with the community enought that I considered going to Orlando for the weekend just to see friends, I just wasn’t interested in the conference content. I didn’t miss that part at all.
So back to my question. Do you think you’ve just been to your last Lotusphere, or that you went to your last Lotusphere already a year, two or four ago?
It has been a loooong time since I learned basic Unix shell scripting. In fact, it’s been a long time since I forgot 95% of it. Therefore, I am giving myself a cookie for figuring this out today.
find . -name “*.xml” | grep -v test | xargs grep ‘\${env’ | awk ‘{print substr($0,index($0,”{“)+1)}’| sed ‘s/}.*//’ | sort | uniq
P.S. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken to figure it out without google and stackoverflow.
P.P.S. One or more of my friends is surely thinking “I could have done that with about 20 characters of perl”. Perl makes my brain hurt, so keep it to yourselves! 
P.P.P.S. Any of you who looked at that and immediately said “Oh, sure… He’s printing all the environment variable references in his non-test ant scripts”… You win a prize. (And I hate you!)
P.P.P.P.S. Yes, I know it’s been nearly two years since I posted anything at all on this blog. Shame on me. And if anyone’s actually reading this without having followed the link I’m about to post on Facebook, I’ll be surprised. But I couldn’t bring myself to post this directly on Facebook, and it had to go somewhere!