Weblog by month (March 2005)
Electronic maestros
If you’re like me, and interested in things (old) synth-related, then you’ll love this: New Scientist magazine has interviewed some real wizards from the field of electronic music, and the interview is on-line: Electronic Maestros. Very, very cool. Everyone knows about the Moog line of instruments, including their maker, the never-aging Bob Moog. But how about Peter Vogel, who along with Kim Ryrie, invented the amazing Fairlight CMI? Or Dave Smith, founder of Sequential Circuits who developed the famous Prophet 5 synthesizer and pushed the still-current MIDI standard? For synth geeks like me, this is all great stuff...
Related reading: Bonkers electronica
Via Boingboing.net
Hallelujah!
As you’ve hopefully already seen, Teamstudio have done all Domino developers a great service by releasing a class browser for Lotusscript. Oh, happy day!
A browser for perusing custom classes in script has been on the wish-list for years, yet IBM have always seemed disinclined to get with the programme and make the appropriate changes to Domino Designer. In the early stages of the Notes 7 beta, things were looking good, with the Domino Designer developers promising a class browser. However, a rare note of disappointment came from Lotusphere ’05 when these plans were shelved.
I find it extraordinary that we’ve done without for so long, especially given the complexity of things like the standard mail template — I would have thought that IBM’s own template developers were crying out for more control of their classes!
Oh well, no matter now, it’s all sorted thanks to Craig Schumann at Teamstudio. Bravo that man! Here’s what the Teamstudio site has to say about the utility:
The features of Teamstudio Script Browser are features that are found in most IDEs, except Domino Designer. It was out of frustration that Teamstudio created this tool for itself as a means of mitigating the tedium of using only the native script tools in Domino Designer. According to Teamstudio’s Notes Development Manager Craig Schumann, “I created Script Browser for myself, and it’s been an indispensable tool that I now can’t live without. In the first few weeks of having it, it’s saved me countless hours of pain and frustration. We figured if we can eliminate some of that frustration for other developers, then let’s make it widely available.”
Teamstudio Script Browser is a free download for registered site users, so don’t delay, get over there now!
NSF
Via Michael Sampson I see that the National Science Foundation has bought Groove Virtual Office. Now, what a wasted sales opportunity for Lotus right there! (Hint: the foundation’s acronym. Ahem).
Ruminating
Time for an update: why the hell has this site been so quiet?? Well, I am sorry to say that it’s all down to yer common or garden general malaise. It boils down to something as apparently mundane as this... (caution: a poorly-structured rant follows, meandering through things like Macs, Workplace, careers, life in general. You have been warned).
Typing this is hard. I don’t mean in some existential way, something painful or metaphysical... I just mean, “this is hard”: putting together a weblog entry in Notes on my Mac. The Notes client has come on pretty well in recent years, but ultimately, Notes on the Mac sucks. The Notes client is a second-class citizen, and it would drive me wild trying to use this day-in day-out as I do Notes on Windoze at work. And yet, using Windoze all the time in my day job drives me up the wall too. I like firing up Terminal and just... buggering about. Tweaking this, playing with that, occasionally doing useful things. I like using ls and cal and vi and all those other CLI tools. I know, I know, the Wintel world has cygwin, but it’s not the same eh!
I’m just not a Windows person I suppose. I’m a UNIX person, one way or t’other. Well, fat lot of good that will do me, working in a Microsoft world in a big ole’ international financial outfit. So it incenses me all the more that Notes is so... unusable on the Mac. It runs slow, is unintuitive, and is generally... URGH. Sorry guys. I’ve tried hard to like it.
But where’s all this unstructured whingeing coming from (and more importantly, where is it going?) I guess I’m thinking of the big players in our connected world. Google, Pixar, the revitalised Yahoo! and all the others... and feeling so disconnected it’s untrue. People are moving on, using this technology and that, switching to Macs, trying different languages, running new apps. Meanwhile, muggins here works on the same old shit, day in day out, with the same depressing mix of Windows XP and Lotus Notes. There must be more to one’s working life than this?
As for writing open source stuff, hah! I sometimes wonder what the point is in this: loads more work and grief with no reward, financial or otherwise (Damien, FWIW, I think you made the right decision!) *
For me, there is light on the horizon: as I’ve (albeit subtly) intimated in past entries, a few of us at work have been taking a look at IBM Workplace Collaboration Services, and it’s all pretty damn nifty. I’ve seen many aspects of it in action at IBM, and I’ve compared it with what the other side are offering. I know vowe had a justified pop at the approach to coding apps for this beast, but really, it’s all quite exciting. Sure, you can engineer stuff that seems like crazy talk for a Domino developer, but when you look into the whys and wherefores of coding proper apps for Workplace, it becomes pretty compelling. For me, the Eclipse-based rich client is so full of possibilities — both as user and developer — that I become very animated talking about it. I can’t wait to start developing stuff for this baby! But that’s just not going to be happening for me. So... (that was the “lights switching back off” bit)
... Anyone want to give me a job?
It’s such a shame for anyone to feel like this at work, an environment in which we spend so much of our time. I’ve spent weeks putting together YABDW, and it’s depressing: I have no great insight to offer other than the odd CSS tip, so I’ve kept quiet here. Hell, I haven’t fired up Eclipse in weeks!
Now, all this aside I’ve read some very good books lately. My latest recommendation is the much-hyped (and deservedly so) The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time: go read!
So dear reader, how are you feeling now we’re a quarter into 2005? Is life good on the professional front, or are you suffering too? Come on, ’fess up!
This post was inspired by the letters “w”, “a”, “n” and “k”, and by this post. I thank you.
* - yes, this means OpenWiki can bloody well wait.
A Tudor whodunnit!
Time for a book recommendation. I’m not normally one for whodunnits, but I’m glad I made an exception with one of my recent reads. Dissolution by CJ Sansom is superb — especially when one considers it is also Mr. Sansom’s debut novel. The story is set during the reformation, when Henry VIII was on the throne. The tale is told from the perspective of Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer working for Cromwell in the dissolution of England’s monasteries. Shardlake takes his trusty side-kick Mark to a monastery suffering from more that its allotted mystery and intrigue — and of course, murder!
The story is a corker, the setting and historical background authentic, and the protagonist a sympathetic and compelling narrator. Thoroughly recommended, and look out for Sansom’s follow-up, Dark Fire — I know I will be!
Visiting Pixar
Ain’t It Cool News has a great little piece on Pixar, in which their reporter visited the famous animation studio campus in Emeryville, California, and wrote it up — with pictures. The two things that struck me most reading the report were the “Pixar University”, and the way the outfit goes about ensuring full-on creativity. Check out the alternative “cubicles” all Pixar animators have: cool beyond belief!
Sigh. I guess like me, many of you have a lovely grey cubicle zone to look forward to when you hit the office. So inspiring. Not. Anyway, check out how Pixar develop their people:
They offer classes to all of their employees, no matter what department they’re in, on all aspects of filmmaking. The theory is that they want everyone in the building to understand exactly what it is that the company does, so they can all appreciate the main goals of Pixar.
Read on: Ain’t It Cool News: THE INCREDIBLES At Pixar.
SharePoint
Today I attended an “executive briefing”* on Microsoft’s SharePoint technology, with m’colleague John Barrow. This free seminar was hosted by Xpertise partnered by the Ashton Court group. This was quite interesting. To be frank, I can’t see my organisation taking on something like SharePoint, but nevertheless, anything that gives IBM and co. a kick can’t be bad. The interface is slick, the integration with Office 2003 (predictably) is very good, and the products tick a lot of boxes...
If you’re a Microsoft shop.
And you don’t use anyone else for your main IT investments (CRM, HR systems, content management, finances, etc.).
I must confess, when we covered the document library and Microsoft’s ridiculously proprietary “web-parts” (translation: portlets, MS-style), we didn’t have the guts to ask whether JSR-170 and JSR-168 compliance were on the table. I don’t imagine they are
So... an interesting set of technologies, and some good ideas in there. But nothing new. I can’t quite see what the Groove acquisition may mean for this area, beyond beefing up real-time working in Office, but then again, maybe that’s enough. Either way, will MS get enough done to seriously compete with the Workplace rich client I wonder? IBM, it’s over to you...
* - what does “executive” really mean in this context anyway? I’ve never understood that one. In the UK we have “executive homes”, “executive briefcases”, and now “executive briefings”... all aimed at senior manager types, i.e. the kind of people who actually “execute” naff-all... LOL.
Shuffle
OK, I promised a wee review of the iPod shuffle, so here it is. It’s very mini though... Heh.
I’ve had the iPod for over a month now, and it has had very heavy use in that time. Executive summary? It’s a splendid little tinker, I recommend it.
Long version: the shuffle is ideal for a certain kind of listening experience. As you probably know, it doesn’t have a display or any of the whizzy playlist enhancements of its older siblings. It has been criticised — incredibly unfairly — for this. The lack of display suits me down to the ground, and here’s why: I use the shuffle on my daily walks to and from the railway station, both at home, and in London when getting to the office. This means that the iPod gets well over an hour of play a day, not including the times I have it going on the train / trying to ignore people in meetings etc. What I don’t do is look at it. I plug m’self in, slide the clip over to shuffle, and press play. That’s it, and this is why the thing suits me. I have the half gig model, which can take around 100 - 125 AAC-formatted files at 128kps. I’d say that ’s about the right number of songs for a unit like this, and they ’re easy to replace and update. Now, I mentioned the bit-rate. Of course, you could get snobbish about sound quality and stuff, but this a digital music player. Chances are, you’re going to be listening to it on the move — maybe outside — whilst doing something. An ideal listening environment none of that makes, so why worry about bass response when the number 42 bus is thundering past??
Other reasons for my choosing the shuffle:
- Price. The thing cost me £69, delivery included. That’s pretty cheap for the kind of player it is
- iTunes. I already have stacks of my music in iTunes on my Mac. Having to use said app to shift files between my computer and music player is therefore not an issue for me: your mileage may vary, so people bitching about this aspect of the iPod get no sympathy from me. As an aside, EQ settings in iTunes don’t appear to come across when syncing the iPod, but volume settings do so be careful!
- Ease of use. This wee chap is an absolute breeze to get up and running, loaded with music. Autofill is a great feature, and yes, you can play songs in sequence if you want (sometimes handy when you stumble upon an album track and decide to hear the rest).
- Size. This thing is tiny and weighs practically nothing. You can slip it in your shirt pocket and it’s totally unobtrusive. I really like that after my clunky ole’ mini-disc player.
OK, so now the gripes:
- Scratching. The shuffle has had a lot of use, which invariably means scuffs, drops and scratches. This doesn’t bother me — you should see the state of the MD player it’s replaced! — but again, you may differ here. If maintaining the pristine white looks of your iPod are crucial for you, I would suggest investing in some kind of cover. It survives drops onto concrete well by the way!
- The slider control on the back: this works really well, unless you’re wearing gloves— then it’s a fiddle
And that’s it. I’m very pleased with this purchase, and I love changing my choons around whenever I fancy it (no more real-time CD recording on to mini-disc for me). With regards battery life, no complaints so far; It will be interesting to see how long the battery retains any semblance of memory, as needless to say the battery is not user-replaceable.
Jens-Christian discovers OpenLog
It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again: OpenLog is a fantastic piece of work, and it is heartening to see that some great developers out there think so too:
Jens-Christian Fischer: openNTF log.
Not tried it? Shame on you. This is the OpenNTF template that all Domino developers should be playing with. Bravo Mr. Robichaux!
CSS kerfuffle
I am in recovery. As I sit here on the sofa, Groundhog Day on the TV in the background (brilliant film, one of my favourites), doing some work, I ponder the past couple of days. Heck, the past couple of weeks. In short, they have been particularly manic — in quite a good way I suppose. I’ve been working on a new web application in — what else? — Domino. I have no real tips for Domino per se, but I have learned couple of things that it may be useful to share with you, dear techie reader...
Internet Explorer sucks. It really, really does. There you are, cruising away with a nice layout, some nifty wee design tricks, general all-round CSS goodness, and BAM Internet Exploder goes and buggers it all up. I develop in Firefox, with its standards support, excellent web developer plug-in, and of course the splendid Javascript debugger and DOM inspector.
Pause while Phil Connors tries to save the old man’s life. Gets me every time.
Where was I? Oh yes, IE. So, what have I had to use in this new app I’m working on? Well, there are some conditional comments embedded in one part of the site. Then there’s my wee work-around for a particular instance of the peek-a-boo bug, and it really blows that in 2005 the latest version of Internet Explorer still doesn’t know a damn thing about child selectors. Grrrr.
OK, stay with me here. I have finished my pointless rant, let’s step through a couple of the things I did, in case they will be of help to others out there!
Peek-a-boo Bug
This is a nasty one. The peek-a-boo bug is all about dodgy screen re-drawing in Exploder. Typically this occurs when you’re dealing with list entities rendered over some kind of graphical / CSS-driven background. In the site I was rendering a list within a simple div with a border all around it. As the mouse hovers over the links, the borders start to disappear, and come back in random sequences when the page is refreshed. A huge pain. The fix? A really simple one. In the CSS for the entity surrounding the list (in my case, the bordered div), ensure you’ve set a line-height attribute (1.2em worked well for me). That’s it! I believe others have had success with adding position: relative to the ul, ol or dl entities you may be using. Didn’t work for me, but YMMV.
Phil wakes up for the nth time to I Got You Babe. This time, Rita is in his bed, and it’s tomorrow! Woo hoo!
Conditional Comments
OK, next up. You can only embed conditional comments in your HTML body, they don’t work in separate stylesheets. They only work in recent versions of IE on Windows, all other browsers will ignore them. Here’s what a typical set look like (with obligatory shouty Poole narrative):
<!-- There now follows a conditional comment. Only for IE5.x + -->
<!-- This is to resolve an IE-specific positioning CSS bug -->
<!-- See the stylesheet for more under '#sidebar' -->
<!-- I feel so... DIRTY -->
<!--[if IE]>
<style>
#sidebar {margin-top: 0.1em;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
Grim, isn’t it? But hey, it works, and you get the idea.
Child / Pseudo-Class Selectors
Stylesheet code like this can be really handy. I really wanted to use this today:
#a-great-list-thing li {
border-left: 0.01em solid #fff;
}
#a-great-list-thing ul>li:first-child {
border-left: none;
}
I wanted to add a padded left-hand border to the left of each item in a (horizontally-presented) list, thus mimicing a pipe character between each item. However, I wanted to skip this styling for the first item: that would look odd. The code above provides an elegant(ish) solution to this, but guess what? It doesn’t work in IE: IE can use selectors, but not child selectors. No great work-around this time I’m afraid. For me, the fix lay in Domino: the list in question is being generated dynamically in the Domino application — there can be one item in the list, there can be ten. Some jiggery-pokery with @Subset and @ReplaceSubString (this site is in R5) sorted this out for me (how I yearned for a simple ND6-style loop. Sigh).
Nice navigation
To round up on a high (well, a high for me anyway!), today I cracked another styling issue: that of providing pleasant, rounded tabs for the site navigation, when the menu options are defined dynamically as in-line lists. You can’t do rounded things in raw CSS for all browsers, you have to use graphics (Gecko relies on -moz-border-radius directives, but that’s no good for mainstream use). By far the best cross-browser solution I have come across is contained in the article Sliding Doors of CSS by Douglas Bowman over at A List Apart. Read, tweak, and you’re done. An excellent (and elegant) solution to the problem.
Further reading:
- Explorer Exposed! (a great resource — loads of IE bugs and work-arounds detailed there).
- :first-child pseudo-class
- IE Whitespace Bug
- A List Apart. Such a great site for solving those pernikety CSS things.
But, you know, it’s all just a hack. It feels so wrong
More Domino spammers
You should, by now, know all about the scumbags at Dominofiles.com / InsideDomino.com, with their pathetic business practices. If not, Duffbert has the low-down. Well, I think it’s time to add the IntelliPrint gang, Cybernet Software Systems, to the crowd. Now, once upon a time I used to receive reams of sales emails from these people at work, dating back to when I asked them for some product literature at Lotusphere Berlin five years ago (silly me, my fault).
However, over the last couple of years I’ve noted that CSS occasionally spam the developerWorks: Lotus forums — especially ironic given that one of Cybernet Software’s people even complained about spam on the LDD!
But now they’re spamming my personal address, which I have never given them, and the email footer really ticks me off:
This mail is not a SPAM. We respect your privacy and all international standards and conventions for mailing etiquette. You are receiving this mail because you have visited our website and have downloaded products and solution kit earlier, with explicit sign in for receiving emails from us OR you could also have visited us on events like Lotusphere, user groups and have registered with us. If you desire not to receive any future mails form us, please visit http://www.intelliprintplus.com/remove_me.html and unsubscribe. We would remove you instantaneously from all future campaigns. Thanks.
Utter bullshit. I have never given these people the email address they are currently using. They are spammers, pure and simple. Avoid.
