The Jagular

One reason I haven't posted in while is the trip my wife and I recently took to the Galapagos islands and to Machu Picchu.  In addition to all the travel and trip preparations,  I managed to get access to a photographic device for taking large panoramic images that's not yet on the market.  It's called a Gigapan (short for gigapixel panoramic), and it can make some amazing photos that contain a wealth of detail.

You can see the results below the fold.


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The FooPlot site allows you to plot stuff on a web page. It's a useful gadget.



Supported Functions:

abs,acos,acosh,acot,actoh,acsc,acsch,asec,asech,asin,asinh,atan,atanh,ceil,cos,cosh,cot,coth,csc,csch,exp,floor,ln,sec,sech,sqrt,sin,sinh,tan,tanh

Coming soon:

fact, gamma, erf
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Fortran was the first computer language I learned and the first I got paid to program in. It's sad to see its creator go. His reason for creating Fortran? Lazyness. He said he didn't like writing programs, so he wanted to make the process easier.

IEEE obituary
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I don't do New Year's resolutions any more, having resolved once to give up on them. On the other hand, every time I go to Lotusphere, I come back with cool ideas and only get around to trying out a few of them. This year, I'm going to try and do more.



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You've got a list of all items and list of all scanned items.  You want a list of unscanned items.  Below is how I did it with my BetterListStr class.

Whether this is the most efficient way to go probably depends on whether you've got one or more of these lists on hand already from previous processing.  I should also mention that in this case, determining whether something was scanned or not wasn't as simple as getting a document and checking a field.

Also, I'm pretty sure there would be a very succinct way to do this in formula, but this isn't taking place in location where formula would help.

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I love it when something I did inspires other people to do something cool. Vince DiMascio took the idea of Universal Export and ran with it - to the web. Read more about that here:

Vince DiMascio's blog
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is a reference that is circular.



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I was hiking in the Picos de Europa the week before last. Here's a few of the photos

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Trapping keystrokes is one of those things that's just not easy to do in Notes (break right in if you know better), so I was pleased to find this tip on the Notes 6 & 7 forum. It's not without drawbacks, but it may well be enough for what I want to do.



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Rob McDonagh's comment last week led me to try an experiment. This week's version of the duplicate spotter runs through a NotesViewEntryCollection instead of just getting documents from the view. This requires you to have a view that shows the field you want to check. That's not much of a drawback, and this version is much faster. This one actually does run in somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes. When I re-tested last week's version, I found that it took around 15 minutes. I don't know how I got a time of 2 minutes last week. Perhaps I was distracted by a shiny object of some sort on the Internet.

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Just got a t-shirt in the mail from IBM. It's a gift for passing my R7 developer certification and has a picture of the ultra-cool yellow IBM boxing gloves on the back. I wonder, is there some level of testing that will give one the actual boxing gloves?
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This falls into NSFW (Not Safe For Work) terrifory, but it's about those evil user agreements that everyone (almost) clicks past without ready. Watch this and be warned!



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Me, that is. I passed the upgrade exam yesterday.



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It's impressive enough that Babbage's difference engine would be completed in this day and age, but doing even a simplied version with Lego Technic pieces is a whole new level of obsession. Will it ever be steam powered? And what's next? A Lego Turing machine?

Nope, Lego Turing machines have already been done.

(found via Wild Bill Buchan's blog)
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I have an idea for a Greasemonkey script that I've done a little work on. I ran into a problem that initially looked like it might have beendue to a change to the most recent version of Greasemonkey. I didn't find a Greasemonkey forum, faq, or example that helped, so I joined the Greasemonkey mailing list and fired off a question.



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Does that make me a hopeless geek or one of the cool kids???



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I had the pleasure of chatting with Damien Katz about software development at the blogger gathering. He was responsible for the rewrite of forumula language and is applying what he learned doing that to a project of his own. He had some interesting things to say about counterintuitive design decisions.
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I am. It's only a few days now.
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Here's a link:
http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
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A quote from Joel on Software:

"A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said. That's true. Google also uses full-text-search-of-the-entire-Internet the way Microsoft uses little tables that list what error IDs correspond to which help text. Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't. "

What's your level of abstraction? Joel on Software has interesting essays on software developement and active discussion groups: here
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I ran into a situation where the current view (Notesuiworkspace.currentview) wasn't available in some circumstances for an embedded view (edit mode), but it was in others (read mode). I got around this by keeping a global handle to the UIview. I obtained this in the PostOpen event. Here's a link to the post:

link
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I'm probably the last nerd on the planet to notice, but it's been determined that Minesweeper is NP complete.

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Last night I gave a brief talk about the Real ID bill at the New England Notes Domino SIG. In a way, it was my friend Rich who made this happen. Rich, who rarely sends out mass emailings about topics political, had sent out an email about the evils of Real ID just before the previous group meeting. A few people wondered what it was all about. I had read a little about it and written my representatives to express my disaproval, so I volunteered to learn more and to give a talk.

My notes for the talk are neither prose nor Powerpoint bullet points. Though I tried, I just don't seem to think in bullet points. It's sort of like an outline with paragraphs and sentences stuck in here and there. I won't paste them in here, but if someone really wants them, get in touch.

Below are the resources I used in preparing the talk.

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If you decide to use the DXLImporter and DXLExporter objects in Lotusscript, there's a few gotchas you'll want to know about.

First, the properties referenced by the DXLExporter are those that belong to the design document (2nd tab in the design document dialog box), not the document properties of individual document that you're working with. That's probably obvious to anyone who's used Lotusscript to access design documents before, but it confused me for a bit.

Next, when using the DXLImporter, be sure to set the .DocumentImportOption property. The default is to do nothing. Very perplexing for a first time user, expecially when at least some of the examples don't show the property being set. For example, the DXLImporter example doesn't show this option being used. The example for .DocumentImportOption does, so at least once you know that you need it, you'll know what to do.

Once I learned about this property, DXLIMPORTOPTION_REPLACE_ELSE_IGNORE was just what I wanted.

Now for a philosophical question. What's the best way to handle a situation like this where there's a function that could be used in a variety of different ways?

Do you provide one function with many parameters (and accept null/empty for those not used)? Do you provide one parameter that ORs together a number options that aren't mutually exclusive? Or do you make the parameters into properties of an object? Is one of these choices more obvious than another? Does it depend on your background (OO vs. non OO, for example)? Or is it a question of providing documentation that shows the user what to do?

I've recorded my thoughts below. What do you think?



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on planet IBM Waltham

Introduction to the IBM Workplace Client Technology

Day 3 was the Introduction to the IBM Workplace Client Technology session. Till now, we'd been looking at apps (portlets) that run in the browser. Now we switched to examining the Workplace Managed Client, the Workplace equivalent of the Notes Client. Like Notes, the WCM provides a rich user experience and the possibility of disconnected use (and synchronization too)

Synchronization in Workplace seems simpler than in Notes, but the same issue comes up in either case. Users have to know what to expect when operating disconnected. One of the labs, unintentionally or not, highlighted this for me. Part of the lab is to send an email from one account to another. When it doesn't arrive, you wait until you remember that a synch is needed or one happens on schedule. Working solely in the browser is simpler, but you miss out on all the bells and whistles available in the client. For those who can't be trusted with sharp tools, perhaps the browser is the best choice.

I won't say much about the features available in the client. They're what you'd expect. I'll save the detail for info of interest to developers. It's worth noting that IM (and presence awareness) are available and there's a Quickplace/Teamspace style application available as well.

Workplace has something called provisioning which seems to be how you get the applications that the admin signs you up for. I think it's also how you get updates to those applications

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I'm going to use this entry to store links and tips I think are worthy of sharing.



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