Weblog by month (January 2005)
Stopping to think
A sobering diary entry if ever there was one. BBC writer Ivan Noble has been keeping a diary of his battle with cancer for the past two years. He has written his final entry, and it’s crushing.
This is my last diary.
I have written it ahead of time because I knew there would be a point when I was not well enough to continue.
That time has now come...
One of Ivan’s earlier entries this year said this:
I used to fear I would never see my son’s birth.
Now there will be a fight but it is one which might still see me show up at his first birthday...
Can you imagine just facing up to this, never mind everything else that your illness entails? The human spirit thus expressed amazes me.
Dynamic sites with Domino!
With all the talk of Notes 7 betas, using Domino 6.5 this and 6.that, it’s heartening to see some businesses still proffering their services via some really old versions of Domino. I give you: DynamicSite!
DynamicSite runs on a Domino 4.63 server on WindowsNT 4.0 and is capable of generating pages dynamically. Browsing our pages, you have the option to do so securely, using SSL...
Checking the Netcraft survey site, sure enough, it’s not simply out-of-date content, they are really still running 4.6.3!
Apple release security update 2005-001
apple have released their latest security update. It includes tweaks to the following components and applications, although there’s scant detail in the software update page at the moment (this should be updated later today / tomorrow (depending on your timezone!)):
- at commands
- ColorSync
- libxml2
- PHP
- Safari
More on OpenWiki
The Lotusphere wiki is running OpenWiki v0.9.5b, which has as much object recycling as I can fit in. It is still failing, and I’m rapidly losing the will to continue working with LS2J.
It sucks.
On that downbeat note I shall turn back to the day job (yes, I know it’s gone ten at night) and work on the latest Domino-based CMS / community website I need to get out of the door.
I’m hoping that this project will be my last Domino website, at least for some time. Coding web-based applications in R5 is bad enough, but doing apps that are not a good fit for Domino, within a heavily controlled environment like ours, is frankly soul-destroying.
And it doesn’t matter how many custom Lotusscript classes I dress it up in...
Vicarious living
Well, it’s busy here, but not half as busy as over there! Bruce has been taking a shed-load of pictures in Orlando, as have other members of the brigade at Lotusphere. Check them out:
Lotusphere 2005 Group Photo Pool.
Russell gets (another) Mac
Very cool: Russell Beattie has got himself a Mac Mini, and has done a wee pictorial of the day
The Mac Mini and iPod shuffle have made their retail debut in the US today, although it would appear that the shuffles are selling out fast. It’s good to see such a buzz around what Apple are doing nowadays, although as usual, the success of iPods and what-have-you mean failure in the eyes of some analysts:
The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers—not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity... I’m now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple’s inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins.
[...]
Much of the problem arises from the psychology created by the overpriced iPod. And Mac users who buy the players contribute to the problem by encouraging the company to maintain its high-margin death march.
OpenWiki 0.9.5a
The latest version of OpenWiki has been released. Version 0.9.5a offers the following in terms of features and bug fixes:
- New regexp wiki parser means a number of wiki parser bugs are addressed
- Category removal bug fixed
- Some internationalisation support (page content, not subject)
- RSS 2.0 feed showing recent changes
- Configuration document & view, mainly to support RSS feed
- More detailed set-up / usage instructions in "Using..." document
- Some default pages to get going with!
Download or, uh, be wiki-d about. Note that this version can currently be seen in action in both my wiki as well as the Lotusphere 2005 wiki.
Getting hold of Workplace
It would seem that Paul Robichaux is no closer to getting hold of Lotus Workplace for evaluation purposes. Paul first posted of his experiences with IBM in December. Now, he’s a month further on:
Why is IBM being so tight with this technology? Sure, it might just be a matter of risk management; they don’t want customers to have bad experiences with the product. That’s understandable, although I note that Microsoft and Oracle (among others) restrict access to beta versions of their product, not the released versions. (As a side note, I find it a little offensive that IBM expects me to audition to gain the right to buy their product, but maybe that’s just me. At least there’s no swimsuit competition).
Dear oh lor’ (via Network World Fusion).
Ordered
You know, it’s ironic. Here I am, living in a country with a currency very strong against the dollar. Apple products are the cheapest they’ve ever been, and that means in the UK too. As someone who’s moaned about the cost of Apple gear in the past, I think we’re doing much better now. I’ve just ordered the basic iPod shuffle for £69. That equates to $123 using today’s tourist exchange rate (£1 equalling $1.78). The same bit of kit sells for $99 in the US. But that doesn’t include sales tax — the UK price I have just paid does (all 17.5% of it. Oof). When you add that back in, clearly we’re not doing too badly on the pricing front for once (OK, some states don’t have sales tax, but you see what I’m getting at). It is all the more ironic then that only now are people in Europe starting to threaten — ooooh, get them — an on-line petition re Apple’s pricing — specifically over the Mac Mini!
How do prices look in Europe? We’re still not on the Euro here in the UK, so I’m interested to see how Apple’s prices pan out on the continent. If we include sales tax, it looks like the extra amounts on Apple hardware in some territories aren’t that much — indeed perhaps to be expected with a currency as changeable as the dollar (realistically I believe one should use an average when performing conversions of this nature, not whatever the current tourist / market rate is. But hey, I’m no economist ).
Back to my order: now I just have to wait 2 - 3 weeks for the device to become available and for it to be delivered. I would contend that this is the real downside of buying Apple products outside of the US: if the shuffle delay wasn’t bad enough, European Mac Mini customers are looking at a 3 - 4 month wait at least. Pretty harsh.
So why did I go for the shuffle? Well, I’ve always hankered after an iPod: when I’m not working from home, my commute is 45 minutes on a train, plus 40 - 45 minutes of walking, twice a day. This means that my trusty mini-disc player gets a real hammering most weeks, and that is starting to tell on the poor wee thing. It’s becoming very forgetful, and frankly, re-recording my “mix” mini-disc every few weeks is a huge pain in the arse: remember, it’s in real time! So, when the iPod shuffle was announced, I figured that was it. It’s cheap, the one I’ve ordered can hold 100 - 130 songs, and it syncs nicely with iTunes, my music software of choice. Oh, and it’s nice and small. Job done: I can’t justify spending more than £100 on a music device, so whilst I like ’em, the traditional iPod / iPod mini have always been out of my reach. This one will do nicely, and what is more, I got hassle-free permission from the purchasing committee
MSN Maps & Directions
Do you fancy doing some route planning courtesy of Microsoft? My old chum Stuart sent this wee gem: once you’re in the MSN Maps & Directions site, enter “Haugesund” as your starting city in Norway. For your end point, select the (also Norwegian) city of Trondheim.
Click “Get Directions”, sit back and marvel at this technology God help us all when Microsoft’s Windoze spyware eradicator comes out of beta!
The wiki
As many of you know, the wiki has died. I suspect massive memory leaks courtesy of LS2J. Of course, it’s pretty tricky to troubleshoot issues like this on a server which isn’t yours! Occasionally a page will load, but usually the rendering fails, and all the user is left with is the subject of the page in question.
I make use of a Web Query Open agent to create a new WikiPage object in a custom Lotusscript library. This class does all the heavy lifting, including referencing some ORO regexp code in Julian’s excellent script library (see his LS2J examples database). This ran happily for three days before dying yesterday afternoon.
My suspicions of a leak are bolstered by the fact that I get this error message when I try to trigger a test agent (this time pure Java) on the server:
HTTP Web Server: Lotus Notes Exception - JVM: Attempt to retrieve Java agent attachments failed.
I understand that this error can mean that your JVM’s heap size is trashed, which would make sense. The agent logs that Domino Developer Network make available to its users aren’t showing anything untoward, and debug statements in the code are showing no issues... so there we are. Flummoxing. I’ve logged a support call, so we shall see.
In the meantime, my apologies to uses of the Lotusphere wiki. Hopefully normal service will resume soon. You can edit your content as much as you like. You just can’t see it
Another Lotusphere wiki
You may have seen over on Volker’s site that we have launched another Lotusphere wiki. This application is based upon an early beta of the next release of OpenWiki, 0.9.5. In this release there are a few bug fixes, an RSS 2.0 feed for recent changes, and an improved wiki markup parser (this uses the Apache ORO regexp classes, wonderfully wrappered in an LS2J library by the geek-munous Julian Robichaux. I will be releasing the code on the OpenNTF site soon, but just wanted to use this new wiki as a test bed for my iffy code for a few days yet...
But I said “another Lotusphere wiki” didn’t I! Well, Mac Guidera’s sessions wiki looks really good, and makes effective use of Ben Langhinrichs’s sessions database. Check it out!
Hilarious
Ah, ole’ Radicati is sticking her head above the parapet again:
In a spurt of year-end creativity, the research team at The Radicati Group took some time out of a very busy schedule and put put together our list of top 10 developments we observed in 2004—it’s been quite a year. And next year will be no less exciting...
... We expect IBM Lotus Notes/Domino to continue losing market share to MS Exchange and other players...
... Blogging will fade away from the corporate world and be considered a consumer tool, no longer a credible source of news.
Quite right Sara! Those “weblogs” will indeed become consumer tools! And then we can all get back to the important stuff that big businesses like the Radicati Group like to talk about.
What a joke. Sara Radicati, showing the world yet again that a PhD doesn’t equate to intelligence or common sense.
Via vowe.
It’s (nearly) all good!
So, the much-awaited Apple announcements have been made. We now have Mac Mini, a lovely bit of kit with a sweet price ($499 — let’s not talk about the UK price, urgh — 6.5 x 2 inches, G4 processor, combo optical drive, plenty of the right software), iLife ’05 as predicted, with GarageBand 2 amongst other things. Then we have iWork, the subject of much speculation (“Pages” a word processor, together with Keynote 2). Any more hardware? But of course: iPod shuffle for less than one hundred dollars, a flash-based diddy music player.
All good stuff. Nice work Apple. But sort your damn prices out. $499 = £339? Jeez.
Guilty pleasures
I am currently listening to a song called Can I Play With Madness by none other than Iron Maiden. And I’m loving it. I haven’t listened to any Iron Maiden in years.
The song dates back to 1988, and it is the one and only Maiden single I have ever owned. I see now, having bought the track on iTunes, why I shelled out for this at the tender age of fifteen (despite the fact that then I was a total jazz-fusion nutter). It is a grrrrrrrrrrrrreat rock song. Looking at UK chart details for the era, I note that the single made it to number three. Tremendous!
That is all <grin>.
