Weblog by month (March 2006)
I apologise to the house
I have been remiss. It’s Friday afternoon, and I just realised there’s no SnTT post from me this week. My apologies. I will come up with a couple of crackers next week to make up, promise! This week has been frantic to say the least...
How much do you know about Apple?
The BBC has a silly wee quiz in its technology section, all about Apple. This is down to the impending 30th anniversary of said company. I got 7/10, which means “You have dabbled in the world of iPods but still rely on your Windows PC.”
Outrageous. Now you try!
How much do you know about Apple?.
Little Phatty
Synth aficiónados have been waiting, with bated breath, to see what Moog were going to come up with following a big mysterious campaign on their site and elsewhere. Well, they have now provided the answer: “Little Phatty”, a lovely-looking thing. The version pictured here is the limited edition Bob Moog tribute version (the late great Dr. Moog was involved in the instrument’s conception).
As one would expect, the wee chap has a touch of Minimoog about him with the angled control area—I particularly like the rear signature panel:
Domino & the state of Java
Mikkel Heisterberg has had some great threads going on lately, all around the use of Java by Notes and Domino developers. Here are the main posts; be sure to check out the comments too:
- Is the lack of Java skills in the Notes/Domino developer community the Achilles’ heel of IBM?
- Re: Is the lack of Java skills in the Notes/Domino developer community the Achilles’ heel of IBM?
- Ed Brill on Mikkel’s post
Much of this was prompted by a post over on Ed’s site that I mentioned a few weeks ago. Whilst I entirely agree with Mikkel’s overall message:
Instead of bitching and moaning I think we, as a community, should be thrilled and instead focus on the fact that IBM has seen this shift coming, and that Notes/Domino with the Hannover client is embracing the future and providing the tooling to leverage existing investments in other platforms. Lets embrace the future not hide away from it refusing to accept the change that is coming.
... I don’t think that this perceived “resistance” is down to the majority of Notes & Domino developers parading around the place with their procedural Lotusscript, pausing only to insert heads in the sand. As I’ve said before, it all comes down to how well Java works for you, and what project opportunities come your way. As an aside, seeing as IBM have added Javascript to their JVM for the new Workplace stuff, why not stick Lotusscript in there too?
When it comes to getting Lotusscript developers to learn Java, I’ve seen a number of people recommend that those developers write all their back-end agents in Java rather than LS, just to get the hang of things. Well, I have an issue with this on two counts:
- this should not be done within a production environment. By all means tinker with re-writes in development, just to learn syntax, but don’t roll this stuff out!
- most people, understandably, take this as a sign that they should simply emulate Lotusscript coding patterns in Java: i.e. they stay procedural. Net gain? Nothing. You’re not learning Java that way, just learning to insert semi-colons and curly braces in your code (oh, OK, you get nicer error handling!)
With Hannover pending, the waters become a little muddied. There is understandable excitement around what IBM have done with the various bits and pieces that make up the traditional Notes client—for example, separating the back-end from the old Windows C UI, replacing the decrepit stuff with Eclipse components. What I still don’t have a feeling for is how this “deep” Java integration will stretch, if at all, into the back-end Notes object model. Despite the impressive efforts of Iris engineers working on the Java model in 4.6, I would say that in 2006 Domino needs a far steadier hand when it comes to Java.
Will Hannover offer this?
The week so far
So far, my week has mainly looked like this:
... and then...
Bah.
Beware shared machines
The Register carried this story the other week, but seeing as it came up again today, can’t hurt to post it:
Contractor UK: Firefox ‘ruined my five-year relationship’.
OK, so Firefox is great, but this is an area in which Safari trumps the other mainstream browsers I would suggest: sometimes you need the porn-surfing “private browsing” option in the OS X browser...
Note: this post is not an admission of any browser-related misdemeanour on my part, nor should it be construed as such.
Apple podcasts
As part of various news stories, articles and interviews around Apple turning thirty, the San Francisco Chronicle has released some podcast interviews with various luminaries from the Apple world—Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, even John Sculley!
Worth a listen. On a separate—but related—subject, if your French is up to it Jean-Louis Gassée is now ’blogging!
Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Weekend Homework
Daniel Steinberg is still writing beautifully at his Dear Elena site:
Stop on your way back from somewhere and do something fun and impulsive.
“But I can’t.”
Yes. You can.
This AJAX thing
This ajaxwrite.com thing has gone mainstream this week and everyone’s excited. The coder in me thinks it is pretty damn nifty: doing all that in the browser is very clever. But the technologist in me... well, that character is just thinking “What on earth are you doing? Emulating MS Word? In a browser? That’s just f*cked-up! :o)
OS X is five
I follow a shed-load of Apple-related weblogs, occasionally pruning when the hysteria or fan boy mentality becomes too much. But I would forgive all of those sites a little posturing on this fact: OS X was released five years ago today.
The only site I check out that has actually noted this is good old Ars Technica, the people who have been publishing amazingly detailed reviews of every release since 10.0.0...
Kudos to John Siracusa et al.
Wise words
It seems obvious, but Lordy, sometimes you need to re-visit the basics:
Negotiation, meaning “discussion intended to produce agreement”, is fundamental to every software project. Developers and customers must reach agreement on what the system is supposed to do.
A wise agreement will define achievable goals and meet the users’ real needs.
Hannover at EclipseCon
Given my long-running interest in the Eclipse platform, particularly when it’s key to IBM’s rich client plans, I have long followed Andre Oosthuizen’s Unplugged weblog. Andre is currently at EclipseCon in Santa Clara, and has just posted to tell us his impressions of Hannover:
They have done some amazing things with the presentations API and the app was very responsive. Seeing it in action, it was hard to identify anything reminding you that this is built on Eclipse. It gave me some interesting ideas.
Good stuff! Read more...
Show ’n’ tell V: database properties
For this week’s show ’n’ tell I opted to re-visit an existing tip from way back, and expand upon it. The tip itself isn’t actually on benpoole.com (although it is referenced in my old article, Issues with code in R5), it’s on the developerWorks Lotus forum.
My original developerWorks post was a code snippet to restore a database’s launch properties (in some versions of R5, a Notes client crash would cause launch properties to be lost, and users might not have the right level of access to put them back manually). But this stuff has wider possibilities and is equally valid in later versions of Notes. Let me explain.
There are stacks of database properties that developers like to tinker with programmatically. But if you don’t do the C API, only a subset of these properties are available via Lotusscript or Java. As new releases of Notes are made, IBM usually make more of these attributes available to programmers, but there’s still a bit of a hole (and some settings may only be read-only).
As such, this is rather a “niche” tip, but there we go. Onwards. The trick with this is to gain access in your code to the NSF’s “icon” note. This is achieved easily:
Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
' // This is the "icon" note
Set doc = db.GetDocumentByID("FFFF0010")Super. Now to add to the $Flags attribute of that note:
' // YOUR_FLAG = flag value you want to set
' // per the list you can download in this tip
doc.~$Flags = doc.~$Flags(0) & YOUR_FLAG
doc.Save True, FalseSo far so good, but what flag settings do what? Well, thanks to a number of people on the developerWorks forums, various lists are out there. I have attempted to put these all together, and you can grab it here. I haven’t tested the whole list, so if there are any errors, omissions, etc., then let me know.
Anyway, how about a simple example: say your administrator wants to enable LZW compression on a bunch of databases. Easy. Write an agent to loop through your specified directories, and add Z to each database icon’s $Flags field. Job done!
NOTE: you may need to tinker with other values in your database icon note. For example, say you switch on soft deletions using the $Flags setting “4”: you now need to specifiy what the soft deletion period should be. In this example, this value is written to a separate $ field in the icon design note, called $SoftDeleteExpireHours (I appreciate that this is a somewhat spurious example given that you can tweak these attributes via the NotesDatabase class nowadays).
To find out other $ field names (e.g. the name of relevant design element in the various database launch properties), look in the attached flags list or check out an example database using NotesPeek (look for the “Database Icon” design element).
XP on the Mac
So now we know how to install XP on Intel Macs, and even get it going properly, we have to move on to the next question: for the love of God, why??
I think this cartoon says it best: The Joy Of Tech.
In case you were in any doubt...
... It is now official: Steve Ballmer has lost it:
IBM increasingly is a services company. At the end of the day, we’re a software company.
So how does Ballmer reckon this works? Well, he’s just announced that Windoze Vista and Office 2007 “are the future” for MS—heck, for everyone. Good to hear some innovative thinking from Redmond.
Microsoft really are a software company: after all, IBM have only delivered Workplace 2.6, a new version of Domino, new versions of Websphere / Websphere Portal, and so on and so forth. Later this year IBM are posting betas for the next version of Notes (“Hannover”), and in the summer, Sametime. So clearly IBM are not delivering in the software space, not like Microsoft.
Um, when is Vista supposed to come out again?
The Register: Ballmer pushes Vista and Office vision to businesses.
