Archive for March, 2002

I saw somebody on a blog not long back using photos to convey how they felt about certain current affairs. I found a few at the Picture Of The Year that nicely sum up my views on the whole Lotus/IBM thing. Here they are.

Get looking and let me know if you have any others.....

Mondays are bad enough without getting to work to find that you've left your cherished website open to Admin access by the whole world. The worst thing being that, with port 1352 closed, there was nothing I could do from the office but wait for the American hosts to wake up in 5 hours time.

Thanks to all of you who were considerate enough to let me know. To save writing the same mail over and over I will thank you all here. Many, many thanks to:

• Glen Holmes
• Clint Caraway
• Dan Lowden
• Zak Zarachiwala
• Sandeep Kohli
• Mark Elgar
• Colm Finn
• Steve Cannon
• Jef Reynders
• Lahbib Marouan
• Jaap Steenis
• Gaston Annebicque
• Ulf Grindstad
• Dave Meehan
• John Marshall
• Paul Veitch
• John Seto
• Warren Muckell
• Val Cassidy
• Jean-Wilfrid Moreau

As for those of you who couldn't resist having a play with Edit and Publish buttons. Tut tut, shame on you.

Later tonight I will replace the live site with a fresh replica. The worst damage now is to my pride. You've all seen a) what an idiot I am and b) how embarrassingly simple the mechanics of this site are. At least one good thing came of it: I've learnt to not replicate ACL settings from a local machine ;-)

The trouble with news reporting as I see it is that stories hardly ever get followed up. Are SearchDomino going to follow up their bad news from yesterday by letting us know about this change in events. I doubt it. This then leaves the reader misinformed.

I quite liked the line from the Domino Administrator who origainally made the claims:

But, if I can draw the analogy that just because everyone should wear a computerised bullet-proof vest doesn't mean that shooting people to find out who isn't wearing one is the best answer.

An offer: Give me something for free and I will shamelessly link to it. Like this link to J-I-M Peek.

Today I found a great bit of JavaScript for formatting dates. The reason I show you this is to make you aware of the prototype property of Objects. Learn this! Remember, JavaScript isn't just a toy ;-)

I've not mentioned Puakma for a while now have I. Don't go thinking it's vapour-ware - it's still heavily under development. Being in charge of everything GUI it's down to me to get something together nice enough to introduce it to you all. Trust me though, the more I see the more I like it... here's the logo to keep you excited:

I've been told twice now that not only is it nice for me to share a list of books and software I rely on but also some of the websites. This though is what I use this part of the site for. However, what I will do is write something along the lines of what's in my Favorites [sic] folder and how they are organised.

Here's a few for you though. An interesting news site is The Register - there was an article today about how Domino has brought about the end of ORBZ. Apple's website has some interesting writings on it. This font comparison page is worth bookmarking. Then it's always nice to simlpy read something other than code. Read Steve Champeon talk about why JavaScript is misunderstood.

On my walk most lunchtimes I pass the new Swiss Re building and follow its progress. Don't need to now as they have a (Domino) site where I can do it from the desk. You can see where I work - the group of brownish buildings in the middle of the far right of that shot.

The architect happens to be my favourite. In particular this building in Ipswich that I used to work close to. Hard to believe it's as old as I am.

Sorry that was completely off-topic. Well at least one of the pages was a Domino one ;-)

Thanks to Steve Judd for pointing out that I'd spelt HMTL wrong in my latest article. Luckily he pointed this out on Sunday before most of you would have noticed.

Also to Jef Reynders for pointing out that a useful indicator of the number of Domino developers in the world is the number of CLPs out there. Not that that proves a thing of course. In the same way I know developers who never use the Notes.net forum I also know some who have never seen the point in becoming certified. Talking of certification, Adam Crawford sent me a link to a site where you can do the tests online. Here it is - Skill Drill. Still got what it takes? I think I would fail now as I no longer know anything at all about developing client applications. Not sure if I'll bother becoming R6 certified yet anyway...

Any Domino developers out there using Macs? A guy called Brandon might have something of interest for you if you ever wanted to do Domino Admin from the Mac.

This week I made some wild claim about there being more Domino developers at large than PHP. To be honest I have no idea if that's true or not. How many Notes/Devs are there in the world anyway? There are ~41,000 who've ever posted on the Iris forum. Of which, let's say 60% are developers and 70% of them have some dealings with Domino. That makes.. errm... 17,000 Domino developers. Can that be right? If there are 60 Million seats and each company has on average 2,000 of them each that's 30,000 companies. That's less than one developer per company. Hmmm, me is wrong me thinks.

The Notes world certainly is a small one though, well in London anyway. Last week my friend Gene who I worked with at HSBC went to two interviews in the same day. At the first they somehow came on to the subject of Codestore. Don't ask me how. It was at this point they realised that they had both worked with me in the past. Don't know who the other person was but he was at Ebone the same time I was (apparently). Later that day Gene sat chatting to another friend Pete from my days at Merrill Lynch who was also waiting in reception for an interview. This time neither realised that I linked them together in this small world that is Notes...

I think I own about eight O'Reilly books in total. Of these I use maybe two on a regular basis. With the others I find I buy them with the best intention of learning a certain skill or simply to read-up on one particular topic. This makes most of the books redundant for most of the time.

Luckily now I'll never need to buy another O'Reilly book again. They've had the revolutionary idea of making all their (and other's) books available online. The way this works is perfect for people like me. I pay a minimal fee for a month's worth of reading a few books and then I can swap and change my virtual bookshelf. They do a better job of explaining it than I do.

Brilliant. Thanks to Mike (new colleague) for showing me this. They even have a multi-user corporate account so no more arguing over the books in the office.

Have a look at the list of Articles by Topic down the left hand side of DevArticles.com, "articles for the serious web developer". Listed is just about every skill we should at least know a little about. No Domino though. Okay, so it's a niche market. Or is it? Surely there are more Domino developers than there are PHP developers! Hmm.

Thanks today go to Pat Read for his perfect demonstration of what I originally intended the Comments form to be used for. For you to share your knowledge.

Anybody out there have any war-stories or lessons-learnt in their experience with IIS and Domino cohabiting?? I'd love to hear from you...

Looking round WebReference today I found two interesting articles. The first is a primitive but effective way of showing graphical data using JavaScript. The other is the groundings of an article I've been putting-off writing for months now about using JavaScript to traverse an XML document's nodes. Being as lazy as I am I've chosen to blog them instead ;-) After all I wouldn't want to just plagiarise another person's work like a certain somebody I'll tell you about tomorrow.

I've always been against the misuse of TLDs. Especially the TLDs reserved as country codes such as the .tv domain. But obviously there isn't one for every purpose and I had to use codestore.net. But I'm not a Service Provider, which is what these domains were originally reserved for. Neither am I, strictly speaking, a not-for-profit organisation that can warrant the use of a .org domain. I'm happy now though as I can proudly announce:

codestore.info

I've been playing round with Java agents that send mail in HTML format via SMTP sockets today. Very interesting. Shall try and share what I've learnt with you as soon as I get the chance.

New contract seems to be going pretty well. Finally seem to have met a developer with the same ideals as I have. Hopefully, with his permission, I'll have some fresh new ideas to share with you all.

He even managed to make me feel better about the cell wrapping problems which you can see here (if your browser window is narrow enough) by pointing out that Microsoft suffer the same problem.

A few messages of thanks. Thanks to David Frahm for letting me know about this handy little tool. Also to Trish Uhl, as her question prompted me to find this utility for stress-testing web applications. Thanks to Professor Stephen Hawkin (well, his web developers I suppose) as at the point I got lost, reading this lecture, I noticed that the paragraphs were justifed and I've now added the CSS to this site. Last but not least, thanks to Stephen Cryan for letting me know the download links in this article are out of date and that the Script Debugger can now be found here. Damn Microsoft for constantly changing their site.

Last year I wrote a few articles for Xephon's Domino Update journal. Since which this particular journal has ceased to exist. Not surprising really as nobody I know has ever heard of it. Anyway, the editor (Anthony Patton, author of this book) has since gone on to work for CNet's Builder.com site and has asked me to write an article for it. How can I resist? I'll let you all know when it's published...