The Jagular

Still here (with some cool panoramic photos to show)

bruceperry — Tue, 4 Dec 2007 23:11:42 -0400

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.

(Updated) Setting Selective Replication via LotusScript (and C API)

bruceperry — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:36:14 -0400

Update: this technique works in two databases and fails in two others. I have no idea why. I think "Enforce Consistent ACL" is being used in all cases.

I spent more time than I'd like this week figuring out how to set a replication formula via the Notes C API (but calling the C API via Lotusscript). The basics were done for me already, but there were a couple of weird gotchas that made setting a selective replication formula useless till I figured them out.

Here's the summary. To make the code below work, you need to have your server explicitly in the db's ACL. Having the server name in a group (such as LocalDomainServers) doesn't seem to work. Your ID needs to have a minimum of editor access. NoteDatabase.Replicate() needs the canonical server name. If you don't get these details right, you'll see a replication occur, but the selective replication formula won't take effect.

Note: this is tested on Notes 6.5.4. I don't think it can work on versions earlier than 6 (NotesReplicationEntry came in with 6). If you happen to try it on 7 or higher, let me know what happens.

Create graphs on a web page

bruceperry — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:21:52 -0400

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

BetterListStr V2 (now with fewer bugs!)

bruceperry — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:26:20 -0400

In my last post, I mentioned an error in BetterListStr, a class I've been using for nearly a year now. Jens Augustiny of LIGONET has kindly pointed out a fix which I have (finally) incorporated. That, along with a few other small improvments, can be seen below.

Oops! - found a bug in class BetterListStr

bruceperry — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:47:36 -0400

Some work I did on a potential open source project turned up a problem in the BetterListStr class I posted a while back. Turns out there's a flaw in my "double-indexing" technique. Why didn't it crop up before? Because I used the class in a new way. Or, put another way, there wasn't a test plan or a unit test for the class. It was just a little class after all...

John Backus, father of Fortran, dead at 82

bruceperry — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:48:33 -0400

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

Cool new Google app

bruceperry — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 15:53:51 -0400

Google has a beta application called Notebook that works with selected blocks of text in the browser window. You right click on the selected text, and one of the options is to direct the text to a notebook. The text is copied, with any links intact, to the end of the current notebook. The web page that the text came from is also recorded with the selection. Notebooks can be divided up into sections, and It's possible to have many notebooks and to share them. I think I'll be using this quite bit.

For me, this solves the annoying problem of how to keep track of useful web pages when I work on multiple machines. Yes, I could export/import bookmarks, but I'm lazy. This is even easier.

VMWare questions

bruceperry — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:52:42 -0400

In pursuit of my Lotusphere resolutions, I've been trying out VMWare (VMWare Server) on my laptop as a means of testing Notes 7 without affecting my current development environment. I have no revelations, but I have noticed several things. I couldn't find an obvious way to copy a file into my VMWare guest OS other than to put it on a CD. The VMWare forums seemed to suggest that newer/more advanced versions of VMWare would make this possible. I suppose I can't complain too much. VMWare is free after all. The other thing I noticed is that after shutting down VMWare, there is sometimes a 512 Meg process (named something like VMWare.exe) hanging around. I don't know if that's due to my not knowing how to properly close VMWare or if it's some sort of bug. Not a huge problem as the Task Manager can kill that process without complications.

Next step, try a Notes 7 server installation on a server with spare cycles.

Lotusphere Resolutions

bruceperry — Sun, 4 Feb 2007 14:18:44 -0400

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.

Creating repetitive sets of design elements (special Lotusphere edition)

bruceperry — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:15:32 -0400

Have you ever been faced with creating a form with 30 or more lines of repetitive sets of design elements? It can make for a boring afternoon, a strong likelyhood of at least one cut and paste error, and a chance at RSI as a bonus.

In my case, I couldn't collapse the design by storing the data in one field and breaking it out to display columns or some similar. I decided that creating 30x7 controls just wasn't a fun option. Using DXL export/import as a shortcut. seemed like a good alternative. How does exporting and importing the data help? Well, if you don't do anything else, it won't help. On the other hand, you can extract the section of DXL that represents your row of design elements, do a rext replace on the design element names to create a new row, and paste that new row into a new version of the DXL document, the process might be done with less typing.

Note: to make this really easy, you must use a common prefix for all your design elements (eg. "row1_"). You can then turn all elements on row 1 into row 2 with just one text replace. After all, the point is to benefit from the power of applied laziness here. Why make a shortcut that doesn't minimize the effort?

I might not have save much time doing this the first time, but I'll definitely benefit the next time I need to do this. You, dear reader, can benefit without needing to create the import export code.

Note: the first block of code below exports all forms in db to file c:\dxl\. If you only want to export one form, copy the form to a db with no other forms. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution, but I was in a hurry. The second block of code imports the file c:\dxl\ImportMe2.

I still think have to prepare for DXL work by setting properties vs using parameters is cryptic. How are you supposed to know which ones to use? The documentation contains hints, not complete recipes. That's one reason I'm posting this.