Archive for September, 2002
Tomorrow I go on holiday to the south of Spain for a week. We've hired a friend's villa with its own pool and not a PC in sight. Nice.
While I'm away I've left you something to play with. What is it? The answer to the eternal question "How do I send HTML mail from Notes?" no less. I know I've discussed this before but that was with Java whereas this solution uses nothing but LotusScript (To do this it uses the WinSock DLLs and so will only work on Windows servers. Sorry). If you've not worked it out already you can download the database by clicking the icon. Have a play (start by web-previewing the root of the DB once it's on your server) and e-mail me (Jake AT codestore.net) any suggestions and/or bugs. Will then try and get v1.1 out soon after my bronzed return ;o)
Many thanks to Anders Åbjörn for sharing his work.
Thanks also to Mr Golding for the extra prompting it took to get me to add response counts to my blogs. He even gave me 90% of the solution. Damned response views are the least intuitive of all Domino's features.
Will leave you with another thought. Did you know that the longest word you can spell with the top row of a "Qwerty" keyboard is Typewriter? "Really? How interesting Jake...."
Every now and then, for no apparent reason, my default Domino Designer page becomes the good old Workspace (as illustrated below). This strange phenomenomem doesn't last for long though (and, no, it's not another prank!). Which is a shame as it's quiet nice to be able to use something other than bookmarks.
Anybody know how to make this a permanent change?
Note the topmost icon in the bookmarks. This is something I want to get to you before I go away for a week this Saturday. It's a nice way of sending HTML mail using nothing but LotusScript. Many thanks to Anders Abjorn for sharing the code. Will try and write an accompanying article but you may have to make do with a simple download...
WiFi broadband started paying dividends last night. Having told flatmates that McVities called their Jaffa Cakes™ cakes so that they could avoid the higher tax of being biscuits, they looked at me like I was crazed. Reaching for the laptop I quickly did a Google and there it was in black and white. That silenced them ;o)
Talking of boring your mates. My favourite motorway game for long journeys is called the File Name Game. In it you look for cars whose registrations end in a three letter combination (all UK plates have a 3 digit sequence in them e.g. T638 WUT or LX02 THY) the same as the three letter combination of a file type (eg. DOC, JPG). When you see one you tell everyone in the car. Most fun is had when you're forced to play alone because nobody else has a clue what you're talking about. Anyway, here's a list of them all. I can only remember seeing NSF once or twice
Damn, I really am a nerd!
My comment on my new network (in my bedroom in the flat) generated more interest than I expected. Hence I decided to represent it in a diagram to try and make it clearer. A little crude but it gets the point across (doesn't it?).
You could argue that I've paid £300 just so I can use the internet while I watch the TV. To a certain degree that's all it lets me do but there is also a whole new world opening up...
For somebody who hates using mobile phones you can guess that having all these nasty waves in my room as I sleep is worrying me. A little (re)search helped.
If you think I've finally crossed the road in to Nerdsville then have a look at this lot!
What do you get if you cross one of these with one of these and one of these and an account with these? Broadband internet, anywhere in the house, from any PC. Brilliant. I write this watching TV in the living room...
Reading an interesting book on the Tube at the moment (How The Web Was Born). In it there is a picture of the first ever browser - Nexus, written by the Briton, Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN. Note that Tim invented the World Wide Web, not the internet.
The release of R6 is imminent, yet I've hardly made mention of it. Why? Don't know. Just not half as enthusiastic as I was when we were approaching the release of R5. In fact I was one of the first R5 CLPs, taking the exam before it went "Gold". You would often find me saying things like "Yeah, but, you can do that it R5!" about every ten minutes of the day. Mental note: must start looking at R6! From what I hear, it sounds like lots of our headaches will be solved. Need to be able to justify the response "Yeah, but, you can do that it R6!"...
Figures for the crimes commited in the part of London I live in. Note the Flash pie chart. Wonder if it's dynamic ;o)
I always thought that the Vatican City was the smallest country in the world, closely followed by Monaco. But then I saw Sealand on the BBC's InsideOut programme. Small? It's tiny. But they have their own passports and stamps.
The interesting thing is that they are now in the spotlight as the fight against terrorism has brought attention to their "secure" hosting services company. Mainly used for American gambling sites wanting to avoid US laws and people who don't want government bodies reading their e-mail.
It's a strange old world...
From the IBM developerWork site, some usability tips that aren't written by Jakob.
Today I was going to pretend that I had come up with a way to get Domino running with Apache and to comply to XHTML standards. Here was the proof. Note the Domino header in the source and the .nsf URL!
Then I thought that maybe Friday's practical joke was enough for one week. Sure you all know what happened to the boy who cried wolf one too many times ;o)
Anyway the reason I am spoofing .nsf URLs is to see whether it's feasible to switch CodeStore from Domino to PHP. The main reason not to would be that there are endless links and bookmarks pointing to things like /A55692/store.nsf/unid/EPSD-5DTT4L etc. These would all break and I would have broken one of the golden rules of the internet. However, in Apache's .htaccess file you can add the the following line:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .nsf
So, any files ending in .nsf are treated the same as a .php file. All I have to do then is add a PHP file called store.nsf in a directory called A55692 and I can handle/redirect all these links. Brilliant. A simple example:
Now this is really cool. There is an undocumented function in JavaScript that will let you launch any application on a user's PC. Here's a link to launch Notes on your PC. Useful?
They've found the first ever smiley :-)
Mozilla have got a useful tool on their sire. The web sniffer. If you know what it is then you will know why I say it's useful. If not, I guess not. You can't please everybody ;o)
Thanks to all who responsed to Tuesday's post. That should be enough fuel to keep me stoked for another year. My favourite comment was from Aljosa and read:
I have a little site when it grows up it will be codestore.
Remember the Minority Report trailer parody I linked to? The Morning News now have an equally hilarious take on the Harry Potter merchandising team. Brilliant.
Thanks to Mike Golding for finding and sharing this page. If you have any doubts about PHP and its future then give it the time of day.
All being well, within the year, codestore will reside here:
Of all the tributes I've seen today I think the most fitting and poignant was that of the falling petals at St. Paul's Cathederal in London. What hasn't been mentioned in any coverage I saw of this event is that its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, designed the dome from where they fell to be 365ft tall. So the 3000 plus white rose petals slowly fell to the floor, a foot for each of the days that has since passed...
Today's a special day at codestore. The site's 2 years old today. Woohooo!
This time last year I was not a blogger so I wrote an "article" to celebrate instead. The response to it was amazing and still it's the things like this that keep me fuelled for more years of codestore action.
Which brings me to make a point. Something people have been picking up on are the (*cough*) PHP noises I've been making recently. Am I going to give up on codestore you ask. Of course not! It would be stupid of me to do that. This site is literally my bread and butter. Without it my résumé would just be another in the pile on the pointy-haired boss's desk. This site has had more than a helping hand in getting me my last 4 positions. In fact it was the only thing that got me the job I'm in at the moment. So to stop now would equate to professional suicide.
That's not to say it won't change in form over the next year or so. This site is basically where I share what I learn from day to day. It's daft of me to think I will be working with anything but Domino for at least the next two years, so I will therefore be writing about any new Domino happenings. I also plan to learn some complimentary skills along the way and these are bound to be included from time to time. Hopefully you find them of interest too.
A lot has happened in the last year. Not just personally but on a global scale. Unfortunate events led to a downfall in the Notes job market and I lost what I thought was a fairly secure contract. I then spent the following five months "looking" for work and I am now eternally grateful to Mike for my current role (Burger King beckoned). Other less significant happenings include:
- Notes.net spotlight
- 2 new looks (previous).
- LDD was dropped on us
- Got you all steamed up over SVG and then didn't produce
- Spent 24 hours blogging for charity
- Revealed the cassetica spam controversy
- Was interviewed by Newsweek
See you again this time next year.... who knows what the site will look like then (maybe with a URL ending in .php??)
What am I doing tonight? Well, funny you should ask, I'm going to look at a collection of dead bodies preserved in plastic.
Can I gently remind all those who sponsored me in the Blogathon on July 27th, and who haven't paid, that it's been over a month now...
If you didn't sponsor me or don't know what I am talking about then you might like to know that you can still get your grubby mits on the last version of this site's template by donating at least $20 to MSF and forwarding me the confirmation mail.
For those worried that the template is not the latest and so does not benefit from all the CSS work I did on the site, rest easy. You can get the CSS without having to "buy" the template. Here's the general CSS page and here's the one I use for printing. Because the template makes such heavy use of this technique it's a simple case of a right-click & view-source to get the new(er) design.
Something I've wanted to do for a while now, but never got round to, is to analyse a snap-shot of the questions on the LDD Gold Forum. My idea being to see what category the first page of 50 or maybe the last hour's posts fall in to. Be they posts that could have been answered by a simple search, posts that have nothing to do with Notes/Domino, posts that show a basic lack of understanding or the infamous "second post!"s. All of which make the site itself virtually useless. My bet is that, for this snapshot, only about 10% of the posts are actually worth being asked and the other could be solved by the smallest amount of research.
This year I personally have only posted one question on the forum and I ended up answering that myself. The forums are no longer useful for, dare I say it, the advanced developers. The main reason to visit, following boredom, is to bestow knowledge on those "less advanced"...
One thing the forum really needs is the ability to distinguish questions about the Notes Client from those for the web browser. The number of times I've read a problem and found myself wondering whether they mean the web or the client. Whether there would be any use in an option to specify the level of the question (i.e. beginner, intermediate, advanced) is another matter...
On a totally different subject. Travel to foreign countries is made ever more dangerous by not knowing about things like this.
This morning the postman delivered another book. This one was a surprise as it was promised to me by David Clark some time ago in return for solving a problem he was having. Thought he'd forgotten. Thanks David, and sorry to have doubted you. It's a good job I'm going on holiday at the end of the month...
Every six months Marko Karpinnen checks to see how many of the W3C members have compliant websites. Only 4.6% do!
Last night I finally managed to get Anonymous FTP working my on Linux server. Apache is also running, but PHP doesn't seem willing to play. With a lot of school-boy errors and the least secure server in the world, I am getting there ;o)
The postman delivered two books this morning. That should keep me from staring at the shoes of my fellow Tube travellers for a while yet.
Will Linux ever make it to the corporate desktop? I don't think so. It's just too geeky. Now, I like to think I'm fairly clued-up when it comes to PCs and their generals working, but I still find myself pulling my hair out as I try and do the most basic things on Linux PCs. Not only that but it has that look that just says "written by gamers" all over it. The kind of people who think that a good logo for a web-browser is the head of a red dinosaur!
While he's not on the slopes Brendon is still busy with improving the Puakma server. There's now a new web design app and an improved export format.
