Yikes! That looks cold to me for this time of year. At least the pollen count should be much lower than I'm used to. See you there?

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-28-08 Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:52:23 EST I haven't seen one of the new $5 bills yet, but I keep hearing about them. Here's what they look like:

Not too terribly different, but they were able to ugly it up just a tiny bit more with weird purple tints and a grossly out-of-place oversized "5" on the back. This page on moneyfactory.gov describes the new security features and whatnot.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-24-08 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:28:51 EST This came up in my Google Alerts yesterday: Vista's automatic network tuning may cause Lotus Notes network timeouts.

The story was that someone was having trouble with Lotus Notes (and other network applications) on his new Vista machine, and when he disabled the "automatic network tuning" everything started working again. I don't have Vista installed anywhere and I honestly don't know anything about this autotuninglevel stuff, so usual caveats about "this is something I found on the Internet" apply. I just wanted to pass it along in case it helps someone else.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-22-08 Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:45:05 EST I was looking through the Quickr Entry Entitlement announcement just now (that's the product formerly known as Quickr Personal), and the Quickr Entry product page. Anyone been able to download these yet? I know when Ed Brill mentioned it last month the download link wasn't up.

UPDATE: from the comments, it sounds like when you install the "regular" version of Quickr 8.1, you have the choice to activate either just the Entry functionality or the full Standard functionality (and in fact upgrading from Entry to Standard is as simple as changing an INI variable). So it's possible that there's not going to be a Passport download specifically for Quickr Entry?

UPDATE #2: according to Ed Brill, the Quickr Entry-only download is now available on the Passport site.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-21-08 Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:50:52 EST Let's say you have a web page that references a LOT of different JavaScript libraries. Maybe you need to find out which library a function is in, or maybe you want to see how many different places a function is being called from. Hmm, there must be some good way to do this, right?

This is a question that has many different answers. I couldn't find a way in Firebug to do it (which is usually the answer to everything), so below is what I came up with.

1. Open the page in Firefox. Duh.

2. Use the JSView addon to open all the JavaScript libraries in new tabs. As an example, let's say I was looking at the Yahoo YUI Multi-Page Calendar Example. When I click the JSView button in the status bar, here's what I see:

What you want to do is click the "View All JS" option at the very top. This will open all the JavaScript libraries in new tabs (well, that's the option I have set anyway -- there are other "open" options too). Okay, cool, all the libraries are open in tabs. So how do you search?

3. Use the Showcase addon to search all open tabs. The final part of the equation is the Showcase addon. It displays all the open tabs in a thumbnail view:

You can then use Control-F to open the "Find" textbox at the bottom of the thumbnail screen and search through ALL the open tabs. In fact, the thumbnails that don't contain the search term even start dropping off, so you get a nice visual effect as well as an easy way to select all the tabs that contain your search term somewhere.

From there, you can open the selected tabs in a new window, or invert the selection and close everything but those tabs, or whatever. At least you know where to look.

One little tip with JSView for you too: you might want select the "Delete temporary files on exit" option, because otherwise all the JavaScript files you open will start littering your Temp directory. On the other hand, if you want to easily save all the JavaScript files that you opened... well, just look in your Temp directory and there they are (prefixed with "jsview").

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-10-08 Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:42:42 EST I was trying to debug some JavaScript tonight, and I got to wondering whether or not you could determine which function called another one. You know, to do a mini-stack trace or something (and yes, I know all about Firebug thank you).

Well, a few minutes of Googling and I found out you can. Here's an example:

http://www.helephant.com/Article.aspx?ID=675

Pretty cool. Yet another thing I didn't know about JavaScript.

Oh, and speaking of function tracing and whatnot, did you see the new LotusScript error logging tool that Corey Davis just put out on OpenNTF? I played around with it a little, and it looks really nice. Lots of great options, and a 97 page user guide. Wow!

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-08-08 Sat, 05 Apr 2008 10:16:28 EST Just a quick note to point you to an article I wrote for the latest Clippings newsletter. It talks about some of the different ways a Domino server can serve up file attachments.

Seem basic? Maybe, but did you know that by turning off compression for a file attachment on a document, you can actually make the file download faster? In fact, if you have PDF attachments that are saved so they can be viewed "page-at-a-time" on the web, the only way the page-at-a-time stuff works on Domino is if the attachment is saved without compression. I also point back to my blog entry from a few months ago on gzipping Domino file attachments -- could be handy if you missed it the first time.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-04-2008.htm#04-05-08 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:03:44 EST I've used LotusScript code locking exactly once before in my life, I think, and that time I'm not sure if I actually ended up using it in production or I ditched it before I was done playing. For reference, here's a class I dug up that makes code locking take a few less lines of code:

• SimpleCodeLock.lss (also in html format)

Anyway, I found a technote that said there was a CodeLock server crash condition fixed in 6.5.5 and 7.0.1, but there wasn't much else on it. Does anyone have any warnings or caveats to offer before I use this function? It may be necessary in the very specific case I'm dealing with.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-03-2008.htm#03-31-08 Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:08:43 EST If you haven't been keeping up, Ben Langhinrichs proposed a fun little writing challenge where several people join together to write a story, one person per chapter. Chapter 1 is on Ben's site, and I just finished the second chapter here:

Web of Deception: Chapter 2 - A Welcome Visit

I gave it its own page because it was easier to read that way. Rob McDonagh has been tagged for the next chapter, and you can always follow the story at the Web Of Deception RSS feed.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-03-2008.htm#03-18-08 Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:21:55 EST I heard about this site on the radio this afternoon:

The concept is (so I'm told) that whenever you see someone parked very horribly in a parking lot -- a large, shiny pickup truck double-parked across two handicapped spaces was the example that was used -- you're supposed to pull a handful of I Park Like An Idiot bumper stickers out of your glove box and plaster them all over the offending vehicle.

If you're lucky, the owner of said pickup truck won't see you do it, beat you senseless, and plaster "I Just Got My Ass Whooped" stickers all over your broken body.

Around here, the main offenders seem to be handicapped spaces occupied by brand new BMW's and Mercedes, driven by people who don't have handicapped stickers and don't appear to have any physical handicap. Perhaps the handicap is a condition where they feel compelled to spend over $50,000 on an automobile and park in handicapped spaces... I dunno.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-03-2008.htm#03-12-08 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:35:33 EST In the coming months, I'll be doing several Notes 8-specific sessions at the Lotus Developer 2008 conference in Boston and the Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Development Seminars (in various cities). Come by and say "Hi!".

It's actually been very interesting putting together the sessions for Notes 8, because (A) I have to keep digging deeper and deeper into the technology to see what's going on, and (B) there were a lot of little changes between Notes 8.0 and 8.0.1. The last two weeks have had me going back through all the slides and demos to make updates for the 8.0.1 release.

One of my demo apps was pretty fun to put together. It's the session on "Deconstructing the Mail Template", where I go through a lot of the interesting UI features of the Mail and Contacts databases and show how to implement them in your own application. Many of these things require "Java Views" (a.k.a. Eclipse-based UI features), which are currently unsupported for custom applications but are useable thanks to some research by Stephan Wissel. Here are some screenshots of the demo -- you'll recognize many of the features from Mail and Contacts:

Tabbed navigation lets you filter by letter.

Side preview option and business card view.

Split action buttons with a default action.

Wrap-around text in views, and hover text on view icons.

To see how it all works, you'll need to go to one of the conferences though. Or you can figure it out from publicly available information -- like Stephan's article and the Reviewer's Guide, and the very fact that the database design of the Mail and Contact databases is open -- but it's a lot more fun if you come to a conference.
;-)

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-03-2008.htm#03-04-08 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:47:58 EST I upgraded my demo laptop to 8.0.1 yesterday. That's the old Thinkpad I bring with me to conferences -- no private data or confidential files, and I don't care how beat up it gets. Since I use it for presentations, I also have some of the fonts cranked up pretty big so everything is easy to see from the back of the room.

However, after I loaded up Notes 8.0.1 the tab fonts were a bit large even for my taste:

All I could think of was Tiny Elvis: Damn, look at those fonts. Those things are HUGE! (That's right, E! Score another one for the Tiny E!)

Luckily, someone else (one Janko Stefancic) already had the problem and posted the fix on the LDD forums -- adjust your Windows Messagebox font. No telling how much time that saved me. The Messagebox font setting is one of the "Advanced" options in the Appearance tab of the Windows Display Properties:

A font size of 10 worked okay for me, although 9 is probably better on a "normal" machine.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-02-2008.htm#02-29-08 Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:18:17 EST As seen on Paul Mooney's site (and several others), registration for ILUG is on. If you don't register now, you may well miss your chance. I already bought airline tickets hoping that Rob McDonagh and I get to do a session -- I'll be there in any case. Even if my session is refused and my registration doesn't get accepted, I'll be there lurking in the nearby bars.

On a related note, here's a screenshot of the ILUG 2008 event page on Facebook (available to those of you who haven't dropped off of Facebook yet). I thought the sponsored ad choice on the left was rather interesting -- not sure what keywords caused that one to pop up.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-02-2008.htm#02-25-08 Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:52:20 EST Okay, I suck at taking pictures. Coupled with the fact that (A) I didn't bring a real camera to Lotusphere so all I had was my iPhone, and (B) I deleted all my people pictures because they were blurry, this means that I have no good pictures of Lotusphere last month. Thank the Lord for Flickr (and other people's pictures).

However, as a purging exercise, here are the Lotusphere 2008 pictures I was able to salvage from my iPhone. It's a miserable collection.

	The day I left, it was snowing in Atlanta. All the entries in red up on the Delta Departures board in the picture are cancelled flights. Luckily, all of the Orlando flights were on time and leaving regularly.
	Hmm, maybe "on time" was a little misleading. The planes actually pushed back from the gate on time, and then waited 2 hours to get de-iced. Notice the conspicuous lack of snow on the ground (4 hours after it started snowing). This counts as a snowstorm in Atlanta.
	Finally in the air, flying to Orlando. We left the gate at 2:30 (on time!) and took off at 5:00 (yawn).
	The saddest sight in all of Lotusphere: a coffee service table with NO COFFEE. This picture was taken at 8:11 AM. Unfortunately, the absence of coffee was not because they were about to put coffee out, it's because they just put it away. At 8:00 AM, when the early morning BOF's finished up. No coffee service until AFTER the 8:30 sessions are over, just an empty table to remind you of what you're missing. My yearly bad coffee karma continues.
	"Eeek! Mommy, who is that scary man with the scary beard-thing?" "Don't worry dear, it's probably someone who works at Tower of Terror. We'll walk on the other sidewalk over there."
	Here's the room for me and Rob's charting and graphing session, about 10 minutes before we began. The room filled up by the time we started talking. It was somewhere between 650 and 700 seats.
	At night, no one can hear you scream. Especially at 4:00 AM after you've been slugging back drinks in the Dolphin rotunda.
	And, here's the flight home. Is that a nuclear power plant we're flying past? What the hell?

See, I told you it's a crappy set of pictures. And those are the ones I didn't delete.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-02-2008.htm#02-08-08 Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:26:00 EST I'll say it again: it's easy to get something working on my machine. It's much more difficult to get it working on your machine. Especially if you speak a different language and are in a different locale.

Jesper Kiaer and Dietrich Willing were having some problems getting the Java Chart examples in the ChartTest database working. They were both having locale issues. I fixed the problems in the database and reposted it (so you'll need to re-download if you got it before around noon today), but here's what was going on:

• Problem #1 was that JFreeCharts was only working if your computer was using a locale of en_US. There's a known issue and workaround with JFreeCharts where if you're using the library without access to the localization resource bundles (like from an applet or using LS2J), you need to create and include a Java class for the bundle you need. I included an "en_US" class for my sample, but forgot to include any others. Dietrich picked up on this pretty quickly and posted the answer in yesterday's comments (thanks!), and I added a general LocalizationBundle class to the wrapper class library in the sample database.

• Problem #2 was that JTreemap was only working if your computer uses a period as a decimal separator. If you're in a locale that uses a comma as a decimal separator, you got an error. The issue there was that the JTreemap code was using Float.parseFloat() to convert a String to a decimal number, but parseFloat() ALWAYS uses a period as a separator -- so if your code outputs a number string with a comma in the decimal place, you're out of luck. The correct answer to this is to use NumberFormat to convert Strings to numbers. However, I took the lazy way and simply replaced all the commas in the decimal strings to a period before Java even sees it. Less debugging that way.

So again, please re-download the database if you were an early adopter and you downloaded yesterday, so you have the latest code. Until the next bug fix, of course...

N.B. Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn is the "word" that Sam Ruby suggests using to test for character set issues.

]]> http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-02-2008.htm#02-07-08