Weblog by month (November 2003)
Geek out!
For those of you like me — i.e. you came to this coding lark from an entirely different academic background — any articles which cover key programming concepts are A Good Thing. So, whilst persuing Buzz Andersen’s weblog, I was pleased to discover the “What the heck is...” series of articles, by Dan Sugalski. These are seriously good, and cover stuff like dynamic versus static typing and walking the stack. Recommended.
Dan Sugalski’s “What the heck is...” series.
RIP Stinky
My computer at work, a T23 StinkPad, is on its way out... it’s not that old, but it’s had a hard life, so time to replace. I have to say, the iMac (switched on 24/7) makes all these computers look like real wusses. In the time I’ve had my iMac I have had at least six laptops at work. Six! Having said that, ThinkPads are good machines in terms of build and durability. I suspect the OS is the main problem here...
Anyway, the StinkPad is dying. Oft-times I rouse it from its slumber to find that it just cannot wake up. I have to do a hard re-boot to get going again. In addition, certain keys are extremely worn on the keyboard. The machine is barely a year old, but can you guess which keys have had it?
Yup. CTRL. And ALT. And... well, DELETE is pretty knackered, but actually the SHIFT key on the left side is worse. You can always tell a Notes developer too: not only is CTRL getting fuzzy, so is the PAUSE / BREAK key
Oh well, such is life. Hopefully I’ll be upgrading to a T40 with twice the memory — half a gig should keep WinXP a little happier I hope. And maybe I won’t have to re-image the machine quite so often (roughly every three to four months at the moment).
Spuggy
Have recently added a new link to the ole’ blogroll, one Richard Spence, AKA Spuggy. He appears to be good chums with Bill Buchan and Chris Coates, but if that isn’t recommendation enough, he has a brilliant way with posting. Some samples for ye...
On coding:
Just checked my timetable and it appears we have double computing again this afternoon. The really sad thing is that we are going to have it again tomorrow morning!
Sat at the back with Pants. He reckons if I let him see my Lotusscript then he'll let me have one of his refreshers.
He does Domino and J2EE stuff too:
WSAD, or as I heard a Blue Meanie pronounce it "Wussad", is a giant champion sumo wrestler as software goes. It needs a minimum of 512mb RAM to run, but probably a hell of a lot more. Needless to say, it is far too big and hairy for my effeminate laptop.
I have a big girl’s blouse of a computer too... has a hard time with Eclipse, let alone the plug-in-mungous WSAD.
Woo hoo
Hey, I got published! The December edition of e-Pro Magazine is out, and my first article, 7 Easy Tips for Creative Domino Developers has been published (free subscription required). How exciting. I also noticed this letter:
Just a sincere thank you to Thomas Duff for his articles [Web exclusives, article IDs 1824, 2446, 3147] about sharing personal nabs and group management. These tools have helped us considerably as we roll out Notes! With a little bit of tweaking, I was able to modify his app to also retrieve various users’ log files so our admin team could review key data.
Go Duffbert!
Workplace
Over at the LDD they’ve published an interesting piece, What is IBM Lotus Workplace? Looks good. Just one thing to note for future reference at Lotus: learn to do decent screenshots!
The future & J2EE
There’s been plenty written about the future of Notes: Workplace, Websphere, J2EE being the way forward, etc., etc., etc. I’m not as curmudgeonly as others on the subject of Java (just kidding Andrew, I know you like it really), but it’s by no means the perfect language (you’re a fool if you think you can find such a thing). I follow a pragmatic school of thought that says find something, learn it, and make it work for you. That’s not to say I don’t have the odd whinge along the way, but of course J2EE != Java, and the former is a nasty beast at times.
From the general furore surrounding J2EE — particularly in Domino circles — it’s refreshing to read Charles Miller’s take on one particular aspect of the platform that drives him nuts:
It seems it’s impossible, these days, to write a decent-sized Java application without becoming reliant on fifty different library Jar files... On one hand, this is great. It’s great that Java has such a vibrant culture... It also makes for frustratingly fragile applications."
For many Domino developers starting out with Java, I think it’s amazingly difficult to build something rock-solid. We come from a world of RAD, which is remarkably forgiving, even if we don’t always think so. As a recent poster on the LDD said, “Does x = x+1 have to be this hard in Java?
”
Returning to Charles’ point, what to do? J2EE isn’t going away, and the current state of play so admirably encapsulated by his post is here to stay too.
So here’s my outlandish notion, as an arrogant newcomer full of piss and vinegar:
Code re-use is all well and good... it’s a definite plus-point for OOP, and I’ve spouted about it most fulsomely in an as yet-to-be-published — possibly never — article for e-Pro Magazine.
I believe in the concept passionately, yet it’s really one particular element of code re-use that I like to focus upon: take an idea, be it a single routine or whole application construct, and code it as elegantly and as (reasonably) loosely as possible. Whether you use someone else’s library or roll yer own is largely irrelevant, just so long as the application — and your approach to it as a coder — are not compromised unreasonably.
If your approach is to take one or two lovely ideas expressed well in an otherwise cumbersome open-source JAR file, then do it. Take the code, and bend it to your own nefarious will. If you’ve read about a nice-sounding pattern in a book, code to it.
Sure, you could scour the ’net for Yet Another Library to import, but I would argue that for 90% of these occasions, by the time you’ve found some code, tweaked the source formatting to your liking (be honest, you do this don’t you? Please say you do...), re-named some variables and removed some of the irrelevant stuff, you may as well have started from scratch with something of your own (OK, p’raps nicking a few ideas on the way).
What think ye? Am I evil beyond all hope of salvation? Or just a silly arse?
Update: Doh! Doing some surfing today, and what do I find? A good post about JAR file organisation and so forth courtesy of Richard Spence (AKA “Spuggy” I believe!) Look for the post entitled J2EE: Of packages and script libraries — his permalinks are broken. Link now works!
LS 04
Lotus have published a summary thus far of the tracks and sessions they’re going to be offering at Lotusphere 2004. It all looks good, and what is more, they don’t appear to be turning the conference into the Workplace love-in that some of us expected, so that’s cool.
I trust the attendees with weblogs will ensure they are properly-equipped to tell us all about it in a timely fashion!
Further reading: The Totally Unofficial Gonzo Lotusphere Page 2004.
YESSSSSS!!!!
What a game. Both sides... amazing.
You have to laugh - II
When I decided to close down my referrers list, I removed all of the basic spam referral checking code I had. For example, I had code that ignored referrers from domains and IP blocks specified in a configuration document, code that ignored referrers with certain words in the address, and so forth. All this went — no longer required you see — and it’s been interesting to see how little crap I get in my referrers, even over the course of a full week.
Until today. Yes, today I received one solitary referrer spam from GMTV. GMTV, as my UK-based readers will no doubt be aware, is a sad, shitty, Daily Mail*-style morning TV show. And needless to say, a link to this site was nowhere to be found on the GMTV health page.
* Translation: mindless trivia, celebrity-pap news, ill-thought-out right-wing rubbish about beggars, asylum seekers and those annoying people you see on the bus.
How I laughed
Moving on
Ed Wrenbeck is moving on from Lotus Notes & Domino, and writes,
Come December 2003, Lotus Notes/Domino will no longer play a central role in my life. Although it may not seem that unusual to you, it feels kind of strange to me...
... Perhaps even stranger, cutting the ties to Domino Designer will remove the last link to the Wintel world.
Getting rid of Wintel eh? Even better! Heh. I wish you luck Ed, and will certainly keep reading — I think I can empathise with your change of direction. Despite still enjoying Notes and Domino development, I get more out of learning this OOP thing and coding away in Java. That Cocoa business looks like a whole lot of fun too. Of course, the best thing about Java and Cocoa versus Domino is the fact that one is no longer tied to bloody Windoze.
Notes 6.5 on OS X
Finally did it: got Notes 6 running on OS X again. Some time back, I had Notes 6.00 running quite happily on my old iMac with OS X 10.2. I was foolish however, and tried to get 6.03 up and running on the machine. No dice. The installer would run, and the Notes set-up process would kick in as expected, but then... nada. The thing would crash, and there was no resurrecting it. I tried trashing the Notes preferences file, plists, you name it. So I left well alone, removed all trace of Notes from my Mac, and carried on with things.
Until today. For some reason, I decided to give things another go, and it all went swimmingly. Here’s what I did, in the hope that this may assist others attempting the same. I am now running OS X 10.2.8 and Notes 6.5.
- First, I checked my ~/Library folder and related directories for any trace of previous Notes installations (prefs files and the like). If you have anything, delete it!
- Next up, I downloaded the 6.5 trial client from the LDD downloads area. Don’t bother with the product pages up on the IBM / LDD sites — despite repeated notification to the webmaster et al they haven’t fixed the broken Macintosh download link.
- I got hold of my DDN ID file and stuck it in the Data directory.
- I fixed permissions on said ID file. This is important. I copied the ID across from my Windoze machine, which meant its permissions were all wrong (related to the PC’s OS X account and not mine). I updated the file ownership details once the ID was on my Mac. This seems to be the crucial element in getting Notes running properly, and I guess I’m a dunce for not realising that sooner.
- I fired up the Notes installer, and let it do its thing. Hmmm... why does the installer force all your other apps to quit? No need for that! Oh well.
- Once installed, I loaded Notes and followed the configuration wizard through. I decided not to connect to a Domino box or anything like that, just acted as if I had a disconnected installation. YMMV with this, but I find I have more control over things when I do it this way.
- I opened up the up local address book and set up location documents etc. (A virgin name and address book is a must I think).
- I ran the client re-configuration wizard from the Notes menu in order to establish a TCP/IP port and connection to my DDN server. I don’t use Notes mail, so this is pretty straightforward.
- All done! I could connect to this site and what have you, no worries.
One last step: as a Mac Notes user, of course, one has to sort out those damn fonts!!
Computers in the workplace
Apparently, computers ‘hamper the workplace’ in Britain:
Computer systems at work are not working as they should, despite costing millions, a report says...
... Workers do not have enough guidance about technology, support staff are cut off from other staff and managers are “naive”, said the year-long study.
Sounds about right. I’ve touched on this stuff before, and I’d be interested to see whether companies do anything about this. My feeling is that they won’t — it’d cost money to address.
You have to laugh
Where oh where do some Americans get their information? Along with the (in)famous Arby’s ad a decade ago — which claimed British beef was violently over-cooked and cost something like a month's salary per kilo — I have to file this wee nugget:
Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks.
Yeah right. Five to six weeks. Uh-huh.
Michael Kamen RIP
Very sad news: Michael Kamen has died. An amazing composer, and a sad loss to the world of music.
ciao vowe!
Another weblog entry that’ll have to wait for a network connection and thus replication... . This evening, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Volker, and we had a very jolly time. Volker already mentioned on his ’blog where he was staying. And indeed, it’s a splendid hotel. However, a G&T was probably the best part of a tenner at that place, so we scooted down High Holborn to The Melton Mowbray for a few pints of Chiswick and some fine conversation... Splendid. What a good start to the week!
It was great to meet up with Volker (and he even threw in an encounter with Snoopy as a bonus).
