Notes tone unturned

Browser share mid-2009, a perspective

2009-06-25T12:01:00.001+10:00

I’ve been tracking the so-called “browser wars” for quite a few years now, based on recording visits to my web site asiapac.com.au and its mirror notestracker.com (since 2002) and blogs (Notes Tone Unturned and others, since early 2005).

I’ve used SiteMeter and StatCounter and Google Analytics to track site visits. But I’m certainly not in ay way obsessive about SEO like some unfortunates, having too much regard for my mental health to get into that game!

I’m still basically a nuts-and-bolts guy, interested in the technology of IT, but recognize the need for web metrics as part of the marketing of my goods and services -- these days, mainly NotesTracker.

Here are some SiteMeter snapshots. Keep in mind that the number of daily visitors is rather modest, so that the visit percentages can fluctuate a fair bit from day to day. However they still seem to be in general agreement with browser statistics described at sites like Wikipedia or w3schools or Market Share.

Firstly, from late June 2008, we see that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) not on the scene, nor Google’s Chrome browser either:

(Click image to view an enlargement)

Around September 2008 we find IE8 beginning to show up, in low single-digit percentages:

Here’s one from May 2009, during a period where there were lots of visits via links on Planet Lotus (obviously the mix of users being somewhat more technical leading to a higher than usual ratio of Firefox aficionados):

A snapshot from 25 June 2009, pretty much the average browser type distribution. Usage of IE8 is gradually creeping up, but not yet reaching ten percent. All flavors of IE total around fifty percent, whereas in mid-2008 the total for IE was something like sixty to sixty five percent. IE8 plus IE7 plus IE6, No IE5 visits showing up though (yes, there still are some IE5 users out there, but not many).

I expect that once Windows 7 is released, the proportion of IE8 users will gradually increase (relative to IE7 and IE6). I’ll keep reporting on the browser battles from time to time.

Since my early days in the IT industry forty years ago, I’ve been a keen evaluator of all sorts of products and technologies. Starting with early versions of Netscape browser, over the years I’ve tried just about every browser variant out there.

I believe in using the best tool for the job in hand, switching between tools as needed. My personal favorites, used daily, are Avant Browser and Firefox, or Enigma Browser specifically for Internet banking (because I find that Enigma best keeps under control the pop-up multiple banking windows, showing them as tabs inside the main instance rather than as external windows).

How views affect size & performance of Lotus Notes databases (like NotesTracker usage log repositories) — a case study

2009-05-19T19:46:00.001+10:00

Some application performance tips, from a somewhat different perspective, for Lotus Notes developers and administrators…

Preamble - Performance still is important
Sooner or later, the performance of any application you’re using becomes important. It may start off performing quite well, and then begin to slow down and grind to a halt over time. In a few cases, it may perform abysmally right from the launch.

I spent more than two decades at IBM (starting in 1970, now long retired) and a fair bit of that was taken up advising, supporting and troubleshooting IBM customers on a broad range of performance-related matters. Forty years on, performance is no less important as we approach the end of the first decade of this 21st century.

We don’t usually notice a system’s performance at all when it is good, but we certainly notice it when it is slow. Think Google search, nearly always sub-second (which now we take for granted, and only notice the extremely rare slowdown), versus some other web applications that run at tortoise-like speeds. Overall, the performance of a system could be summarized as “what the end user sees and accepts as reasonable” for whatever applications they are running.

Once upon a time computing (or “data processing”) was nearly all in the form of batch batch processing on centralized machines, then along came mini-computers (smaller than corporate machines, typically in corporate divisions or departments or smaller businesses), then desktop machines (like the IBM Personal Computer, or PC), nowadays right down to handheld devices (PDAs, mobile phones, netbook PCs, etc).

As a general statement, the overall observed performance is the sum of the individual performance of each in a series or chain of stages involving different hardware/software components: central processing unit (CPU), main storage (RAM), buffers of various types, channels or similar data paths, communication links, the operating system binding it all together, and finally the applications being executed.

Then there’s the speed of movement of data between the stages: to and from non-volatile storage (persistent, long-term storage) on devices such as paper tape or punched cards in the early days, magnetic media (disks, tapes, diskettes), flash memory (getting faster and cheap enough to soon become widespread for bulk storage in the gigabyte range), and who knows what in the future (quantum storage, holographic storage, carbon nanotube storage, or whatever might eventuate).

The overall performance of a transaction — the time from when a user requests something to be done until the last bit of the result is served back — is the sum of the performance of each and every link or step in the device chain. It depends on the not just the raw speed characteristics of each step, but on the workload being imposed (often in a shared user environment, such as a Web server).

There are nearly always complex interactions between steps and at each stage in the overall process: queuing for service, task execution (at some relative priority and , for some length of time or “time slice”, perhaps getting preempted and dropping back in the queue), recovering from errors (often badly designed and handled), and more. As I said earlier, it’s a very complex picture.

Sometimes you encounter poor performance because of inadequately funded hardware (and perhaps software), poor infrastructure design (low-powered servers, slow communications links, and the like).

But quite frequently it’s a matter of poor application design: bad or even erroneous coding, choosing the wrong algorithm for a sub-task, inadequate or even non-existent error handling, and much more. Even an otherwise excellent service can be brought to its knees by a bad application, such as one with an extremely inefficient sorting algorithm, one that retrieves a data record in an extremely inefficient manner, one that waits for an error that is never going to be recovered from. One classic example is the deadlock or so-called deadly embrace record update situation, which can bring even the fastest of systems to a dead halt in processing your transaction (and at the very least locks out one other user too, but possibly more).

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino performance considerations
Here I’d like to share my findings on one aspect of performance that I haven’t come across being covered elsewhere, at least in the way that I’m going to explain it: the analysis of Notes/Domino view size as it relates to view indexing performance.

You’ll want to know how much hard disk capacity is needed to store the view indexes (indices, if you prefer) in your Notes applications, and from this get some feel for the effect on view index maintenance processing overheads which can have a major effect on overall Domino server transaction throughput and response times.

There are many resources from IBM and other parties which give excellent advice and guidance about analyzing and managing performance for both the Lotus Notes desktop client and the Lotus Domino server. I’ve no intention of going over this broad field, having already assembled many useful reference links for you at my web site here and its mirror/backup here.

Many of these (and other forums/blogs maintained by the Notes community) discuss the design of Lotus Notes views. Some of them give excellent tips for optimizing the performance of Notes views, either by optimizing view design (many considerations) or setting the properties of the views such as index refresh/discard options:

What follows is a brief discussion of views as they relate to NotesTracker (see here or here). I gathered this information when a user of NotesTracker asked me how to predict the size of the Usage Log repository database, and to give some guidance on when it should be archived.

NotesTracker concepts
NotesTracker is a set of easy-to-apply routines that you (once a licensed purchaser) can easily apply to the design of any of your own Notes/Domino applications. Read more about it in the NotesTracker Guide, a download link for which is on on either of the web pages mentioned a few paragraphs above.

Think of NotesTracker as a software development kit (SDK). Once you have modified the design of any of your applications, NotesTracker can write out a “usage log record” for each and every user interface transaction against that database: document CRUD events (Create, Read, Update, Delete), document paste-ins, document mail-ins.

You control what NotesTracker does via a NotesTracker Profile that you place in each database (on a replica by replica basis). For example, in the case of document update event you can specify whether or not field changes are tracked, and on top of that whether or not an e-mail alert is sent out (say, to Notes administrators or coordinators of that particular application database).

These events are logged as ordinary Notes documents, the same way for both Notes Client or Web browser interactions (no dichotomy here). For a given database replica, you can specify that the usage log repository be the database itself or en external Notes database,

With this very generic logging mechanism, you have tremendous flexibility in the way that usage log repositories may be organized, as the following diagram illustrates:

You might take the simplest approach, and send all build usage log documents to a single central repository. The top two groups of applications (circled in red and blue) indicate how you might instead set up a number of different repositories grouped by application category (Marketing, Finance, HR, Manufacturing, or whatever), and at the bottom (circled in green) have any database store its own usage log documents internally. Undoubtedly you would have many more Notes databases than illustrated above, but the same methodology applies.

NotesTracker uses nothing but regular Notes/Domino capabilities. Usage log records (documents) are replicated in the normal fashion between servers, giving a composite organizational usage picture covering both Notes Client and Web browser activities.

How is reporting done? Via ordinary Notes views of course, nothing special. A pre-built set of NotesTracker views are distributed with the SDK, and you can extend or modify these views any way you like, no specialist skills being necessary. Indeed, all of NotesTracker was carefully designed so that no more than a medium level of Notes developer and administrator skills are required for installation, programming and administration (including security).

No end-user training is required whatsoever (indeed, they may not even be aware that NotesTracker capabilities have been added to a database, although there may be legal or organizational policies that require you to inform them that their actions are being tracked).

The build-up of NotesTracker Usage Log documents, and view index overheads
Because NotesTracker is creating usage log document (one document per user interaction), the Notes administrator will need to understand the ramifications: disk space consumed and server CPU workload implications.

Presumably this would be particularly important to monitor for databases where the usage log documents are being created internally (in that database itself) and could have a noticeable effect on view opening performance. It’s probably not so critical for central NotesTracker repositories (particularly if they are placed on a dedicated disk drive), because the usage log documents are being appended to what’s already there and the speed of doing so should be quite fast, though the effect (of rapidly adding many such documents) on view indexing might be considerable. But to stress again, this is “business as usual” in terms of Domino server administrative skills needed.

As a good first rough approximation, for NotesTracker the database size increases at 1.5KB to 2KB per usage log document. The growth rate needs to be monitored, and you should devise an appropriate archive-and-purge strategy if disk space is a worry. How frequently you purge log documents should primarily be determined by the length of time — typically a number of months (or even years) — for which you wish to retain usage metrics.

Of course, it’s not only document contents that take up space in a database. Keep in mind that view indexes will have a major impact on database growth, rather than the relatively small amount of data stored in the log documents. To reduce Notes Client view opening overheads (and Domino server workload needed to maintain the view indexes), the number of sorted view columns has been kept reasonably low. However, you may wish to alter the view designs to decrease the number of sorted view columns even further, or to make other changes that balance view opening times against indexing overheads to your satisfaction.

As a guide, one user of NotesTracker found that some 60,000 Usage Log entries occupied close to 1 GB of disk space, equating to an average of 16 to 17 KB per usage log document. I’m not sure if they removed any of the default views from the repository, or altered any of the views’ indexing properties, both of which could have a big influence on this average. (Naturally enough, other Notes applications could and almost certainly would have quite different characteristics. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.)

Disk Space management – the NotesTracker archiving agent
In NotesTracker there is an archive agent that can be run as-required or on a scheduled basis, giving you the control you need to remove historic log records for managing repository database size. The archive agent is discussed a little further on.

Monitoring and Managing Usage Log view indexes
The NotesTracker Repository is distributed with around 35 views. Some views will only ever contain a small number of documents, even down to a single document. Most of the views are based on a selection of Usage Log documents (all of them, or a subset), and might contain tens of thousands of documents depending on the level of activity in your applications and the length of time — weeks or months — that Usage Log records have been stored before being archived.

The set of NotesTracker views provided are configured generally to discard their indexes after 14 days of inactivity, and it’s simple for you to alter these settings if you wish.

You should monitor the NotesTracker view index sizes over time. If there is any view that is used rarely, you should consider setting its view the discard period to a smaller number of days or perhaps even consider removing the view from the Repository.

It’s interesting to note that NotesTracker has a unique method for you to make an extremely quick and simple, standardized modification to the designs of the views in a database, after which you can track individual view usage. This gives you a sound basis for knowing which views are heavily used (and should be retained) and which ones are seldom used (thereby being candidates for being removed from the database’s design). Indeed, one company purchased a NotesTracker license just to do this very thing.

In his IBM Lotus Notes Hints, Tips, and Tricks weblog, Alan Lepofsky gives a few tips about database sizes. See:
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/local-mail-part-2
In this second article, Alan describes how view indexes occupy part of the space taken up by a database:
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/size-really-does-matter

To get a look at the innards of a Notes database, you could use a Domino console command of the form:
show database database_filename

Here’s an example for database notestracker.nsf in subfolder notestracker_v5.1:

But let’s do things a much better way: using the Domino Administrator client to look inside the database. Consider a newly-created NotesTracker Repository database, which we select like this:

The resulting panel “Manage the views of this database” (next image) show as that a group of Usage Tracking views, circled in red, have indexes that are some three or four times larger than other Usage Tracking views (circled in green). The index size difference essentially reflect the complexity of the individual view designs, nothing else. For this exercise, it will be the views circled in red that we focus on., but this has no effect on the overall argument.

As mentioned above, this example database is quite small. It contains only about 900 Usage Log documents and its overall size is only about 14 MB.

Firstly, a new “empty” copy of the database was made, containing no Usage Log documents as a base point. Its size with empty view indexes was less than 4 MB. You will notice that the various view index sizes ranged between 1 KB and 4 KB.

Then normal database activity was carried out for a short while: creating, reading, updating, deleting documents inn other databases. This generated some 6140 Usage Log documents in this NotesTracker Repository database.

Then each of the twelve commonly-used views circled in red in the following image was displayed, causing their indexes to be created. The repository database size increased from 4 MB to 74 MB, and the index sizes (focus on the twelve circled in red) looked like this:

Note that this was somewhat atypical, having a very high disk space percentage used of 99.3% — because this NotesTracker Repository is essentially a logging database, the main activity being sequential adding of Usage Log documents. It is likely that most “normal” databases would in practice have a significant percentage of “white space” (until they are compacted).

Finally, a new copy of this database was made, and its size was reduced to 9 MB (an somewhat easier way to eliminate the view indexes, compared with manually initiating a compaction).

This indicates that the 6140 documents themselves occupied about 5 MB (that is, 9 MB minus the “empty” database size of 4 MB).

We saw a little earlier that with full view indexes the database size was 74 MB, therefore the 6140 documents had view indexes (for 12 views) totaling about This all indicates that each Usage Log document adds, as a simple approximation, about 1 KB per view!

Extrapolating this to thousands or tens of thousands of Usage Log documents obviously will lead to much larger overall Repository size. Obviously the removal of unused Usage Log views could significantly reduce Repository size.

Summary
This brief insight into view index creation should give you a more definitive basis for managing your NotesTracker usage log repository databases. The same general approach can be applied for managing the views in your own inventory of Lotus Notes/Domino applications.

I first learned about Notes in 1993, just into early retirement from IBM. Compared with the lumbering mainframe office systems architecture that IBM had spent a decade or more trying to get off the ground, I was (and still am) struck with the way that “plain vanilla” Lotus Notes and Domino do smart stuff such as replication with simplicity and elegance.

The basic underpinnings of the Notes/Domino document-oriented database architecture are still without peer, and there’s still a big role for it (compared with other platforms, which shall remain nameless, because Ed Brill and others in the community say quite enough to go round).

Let the battle rage on, competition is good for us all, keeping us all on our ties and leading to improvements all around. Crikey, it’s my 40th year in the IT industry, and I’m still enjoying it — I must be crazy!

How to stop Samsung 204B LCD monitor blackouts

2009-05-16T12:35:00.001+10:00

Here’s a tip that hopefully will assist those who have Samsung 204B LCD monitors and who are encountering random momentary blackouts. (It might help with some other monitor models too, or at least give you some extra ideas.)

A couple of years ago, tiring of the limitations of notebook PCs, I purchased a fast new dual-processor desktop system with two graphics cards. Each video card came with one DVI (digital) and one VGA (analog) adapter, and after a few months I had attached four very nice 1600 x 1200 Samsung 204B monitors, as shown adjacent, in a handy inverted-T arrangement.

Compared with only some five years ago, when a single 1600 x 1200 resolution CRT monitor could set you back well over a thousand dollars, today purchasing high quality LCD monitors is far less expensive, and it’s a false economy for any serious worker not to have at least two of them. Having three or four is just “icing on the cake” and won’t break the bank. I tend to have windows open all over the place, for monitoring e-mail, programming, web page and image design, blog monitoring an posting, and more.

TIP - The Samsung 204B has one additional advantage: you can rotate the monitor from landscape to portrait mode, the latter of course being extremely useful for intensively editing documents (such as the several weeks I spent carefully rewriting and extending the NotesTracker Version 5 Guide). Look for this feature next time you buy a monitor, and check that the vendor provides accompanying software to support the dual modes.

The only problem that I’ve ever encountered with the Samsung 204B monitors was this curious but also intensely irritating. There would be blackouts, each lasting a second or two, occasionally in rapid succession and with no easily discernable pattern of occurrence.

Apparently -- though Samsung doesn’t seem to have publicly admitted it -- this behavior results from the 204B model, running at native 1600 x 1200 resolution with 32-bit color depth and at 60 Hz refresh rate, not quite being able to cope with the 165 MHz transfer rate of the DVI interface. I only found out about this cause by scouring forums and blogs (see here, for example: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?p=721013 ). When I originally encountered this problem in early 2007, it was resolved as suggested by such non-Samsung sources, by opening the NVIDIA Control Panel, selecting the obscurely-named “CVT reduced blank” timing option, and setting the refresh rate to a value slightly below the default 60 Hz.

All went swimmingly until a few days ago, when one of the two video cards failed. Upon checking, it looked as if the other one might be on its last legs, so I obtained two new cards each (preferring to have two identical models for ease of configuration). As before, each card had one DVI plus one VGA adapter.

When I fired up the system again, I soon found out that the blackouts had returned with a vengeance! Remembering the original solution, I blithely went about re-applying the original “CVT reduced blank” solution. However, I found that the NVIDIA Control Panel had been redesigned, and it took a frustrating fifteen or twenty minutes before I could even locate this setting again. (Why do software designers move things around between releases, making them hard to find?)

There no longer was a “Manage custom timings” high-level menu item. It took me a good while to discover that instead you have to select the “Manage custom resolutions” high-level menu item,which opens a panel like this:

Simple, I thought, there’s an option if plain view to alter the refresh rate.But when I tried to enter a refresh rate of 59.90 I discovered that it ignore the decimal point and finished up with 5990 Hz instead. Frustration! What to do now?

Next, I clicked the “Advanced” button and the panel expanded out like this:

Aha, now I could see a “Timing standard” field. So I expanded the timing standard drop-down list, and was able to select the “CVT reduced blank” option. Problem solved, I said to myself:

But when I looked at the bottom of the panel, the “Desired refresh rate” was grayed out(greyed out, if you prefer). Throwing all caution to the wind, I selected the “Manual” timing standard option, and at long last was able to drop the refresh rate to a value slightly below 60.000 Hz, like this:

And I can now report, after more than 24 hours of running, that there have been no more screen blackouts. Hurrah! Hooray!

SDMS Version 4.5 for Lotus Notes/Domino now available for Beta testing

2009-05-11T23:53:00.001+10:00

SDMS is a very popular free “simple document management system” for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, see the home page asiapac.com.au or notestracker.com for the download link to the current production version 4.4 of SDMS.

SDMS incorporates our NotesTracker capability for comprehensive tracking of database activities.

Version 4.5 of SDMS has been completed, and is now in beta testing. If you would like to carry out some testing of SDMS v4.5 then please send a request to participate via e-mail to SDMS_beta < at > asiapac <dot> com <dot> au

Image served out by Domino not visible in browser – Help needed!

2009-04-21T17:41:00.005+10:00

I’ve been working on some enhancement to SDMS (a freeware “simple document management system” with built-in NotesTracker), and have encountered a Domino web design issue that I haven’t been able to nut out.

So I’m now calling for assistance from all you Domino web design wizards out there whom I know do far more IBM Lotus Domino web design than myself and who have in-depth knowledge/experience with how Domino serves out Rich Text images to the web. None of the many blog posts and forum discussions that I’ve scoured seem to be tackling quite the same browser image-handling issue that I’ll describe below.

I’ve done a fair bit of research on the matter, but haven’t quite crack this one. Perhaps I’ve overlooked some basic Domino web design point – which would be far from first time for me -- but I suspect it might be one of those quirks of the Domino web server that irritate us.

My aim was to add four new user-editable fields to the SDMS Profile document so that, in both Notes Client and Web Browser environments. they would appear at the top of each SDMS window alongside the previous three plain text heading lines.

The four fields are labeled A, B, C and D in the following two images (Notes Client on the left, web browser on the right, click an image to enlarge it):

…

Fields B, C and D are plain text fields that display without problem in both environments. Change them in the SDMS Profile document and the changed value displays in the Notes Client or browser.

The problem that I’m having is with Rich Text field A. This is intended to act as a container of a user-selected logo image to better represent or brand a given SDMS database. (In current versions of SDMS, this is a static image of my own Asia/Pacific Computer Services logo, and I want to allow users now to be able to override this with an image of their own choosing.)

I use the following code to retrieve the logo image and display it on the form (inside the top frame of the frameset):

temp_Logo := @GetProfileField( "SDMS_profile"; "Logo" );
@SetDocField( @DocumentUniqueID; "Logo"; temp_Logo )

These formulae work fine for the Notes Client, but fail miserably for the web browser client.

All that appears is the dreaded image download placeholder, which I’ve highlighted in yellow in the above right illustration.

I just cannot get the logo image to display in a browser. I’ve tried several browsers (IE8, Firefox 3, and others) with the same result regardless of which browser.

The image placeholder has properties like in the third illustration.

If I save a different-sized image in the SDMS Profile document, the dimensions property at F changes to match the new image, and the image placeholder correspondingly changes shape.

Thus the Domino server (HTML task?) must be retrieving the image file, but why doesn’t it actually display the image in the browser window? As you can see at point E in the illustration, curiously the image’s URL consists of everything but the image filename.

What’s going on under the covers? Is it some quirk of the Domino HTML task that prevents it in some subtle way from being able to handle/display an image retrieved from a Rich Text field?

I was toying with writing some LotusScript that would store the image file into a database Image Resource object that had a fixed filename, but couldn’t see any script class with a method for doing this. Is there any way to accomplish such a feat? Besides which, why should I have to go to so much extra trouble when the text fields are being displayed without drama (via the simple @GetProfileField and @SetDocField formulae) yet the image stored in the Rich text field isn’t?

So guys and gals… Please HELP, HELP, HELP!

Small businesses bringing economic stress home – Microsoft survey

2009-04-21T14:33:00.001+10:00

I’ve just published a podcast interview and associated summary article at iTWire that has just been released by Microsoft Australia.

“It appears that many small businesses have clearly been hit by the reality of the global economic downturn as many of Australia’s small businesses are feeling the pinch and experiencing increased stress in this climate of uncertainty,” said Ms. Inese Kingsmill, director of small and mid-market business, Microsoft Australia.

38 percent of Australian small business (SMB or SME) owners and managers report their business is currently struggling or worse, when compared to this time last year. Of those, nine in 10 say the health of their business is having a negative impact on their personal lives.

I’d be extremely interested in hearing back about how you think these research results compare with what’s happening in your neck of the woods: North America, Europe, Asia or wherever.

The Australian federal government has just in the last few days admitted that it’s now inevitable, here Down Under, that we’re going to move into the same recession that they thought/hoped they had fended off by spending billions of dollars in economic stimulus packages.

My personal view is that we should continue to spend on iT, but do so rather more frugally and with explicit, definable targets in mind.

I certainly agree with the study that we should make better use of current IT resources -- such as by taking advantage of products like my very own NotesTracker to gain a better understanding of Lotus Notes usage and use Notes applications more efficiently! (Sorry, but we’ve all gotta make a living, eh?)

So, how’s business over there?

Koala Flags Down Cyclists to Quench Thirst in Australian Heat Wave

2009-02-11T20:14:00.003+11:00

I don’t know whom to credit for these images, sent to me by a friend in South Australia. I will gladly attribute them properly, it the photographer contacts me.

It has been extremely hot in south-eastern Australia during the past few weeks, especially in Victoria (where the tragic, deadly bushfires raged last Saturday, 7th February) and in South Australia.

Below are some photos showing what koalas are having to do to get a drink. The photos with cyclists were taken on Tuesday night, 3rd February 2009, on the old “Eagle on the Hill" Highway (near Adelaide, South Australia).

View Full Photo Album

UPDATE:
Here’s another koala, a female called Sam, rescued by a fireman the following weekend in Victoria. Sam was so thirsty that she drank three bottles of water:

Bushfire catastrophe in Victoria, 07 February 2009

2009-02-10T18:43:00.001+11:00

Last Saturday afternoon I reported that down in the south-eastern corner of Australia, in the state of Victoria, we were the hottest day ever on record, and that the expected bushfires were raging all over the state.

It saddens me to report that as I was writing that blog post, another tragic record was being broken: the most lives ever lost in Australia due to a bushfire inferno (several hundred souls lost, and the count is still increasing as the ashes are combed). It is now classified as Australia’s worst ever peacetime natural disaster.

Many people live in towns and villages an hour or so by road from downtown Melbourne, enjoying the beautiful Australian bush while being quite close to a major metropolis.

But mother nature had this terrible event in store, with hot gale-force northwesterly winds funneled in to the Victorian region after traveling across the hot continent, and on a day of record temperature. Whether caused by lightning strikes, accident or arson, the fires roared through the tinder dry forests at speeds that caught out even the best-prepared citizens.

One eye witness described a fire front first appearing some twenty kilometres away, then reaching his location about two minutes later. TWO MINUTES! Others said that the front approached like a tsunami of flame ten or twenty metres high.

Embers were reported settling down up to ten or fifteen kilometres ahead of the fire fronts. People found themselves suddenly and totally unexpectedly surround by raging fires. A few were lucky to survive where they were, but too many poor souls weren’t.

Some tried to flee by car, but they had no hope of outpacing the fires and were incinerated as they drove.

There were shocking images of the shells of their cars, showing the alloy wheels having melted and spread across the road. One driver who was lucky to survive said that his timber truck had melted, not burned!

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has coverage of the tragic bushfires here.

Victoria had two earlier bushfire disasters in the summers of 1983 (“Ash Wednesday”) and 1939 (“Black Friday”) but the firestorms of 7th February this year were even worse than those.

Please spare a thought and say a prayer for all of the victims and their families.

You couldn’t stop this inferno with 10,000 fire trucks and 1,000 helicopters:

Is it POSSible (or PROSSible) that the great FOSS debate is missing an important point?

2009-02-10T17:04:00.001+11:00

David M. Williams (one of my fellow writers at iTWire) has just posted an opinion piece that got my grey matter going, see Free software isn't freeware: why Linux and FOSS have a higher standard

You’ll find some interesting, on the whole supportive, comments to David’s article here.

I thought that thee was an additional aspect of open source missing from his arguments, and missing also from just about every other thing I’ve read on the FOSS topic, including those by the arch-advocate Richard Stallman, so I added these comments on iTWire

You haven't quite covered all the bases regarding "free" and "gratis" and "non-gratis" and "open source" in my opinion.

Let's have a pseudo-hypothetical example. Apart from other gratis apps that I generously offer, suppose I have a non-gratis product "Fantastic App" -- gotta make a living somehow, so why not charge for at least one of my apps?

I've slaved away developing over many months, and keep coming out with minor enhancements (let's call these "releases') and less frequently major enhancements (let's call these "versions"). If you are willing to agree with the license and usage terms for FantasticApp and pay a license fee for any given version of it, then I let you have it together with all the source code to use however you like throughout your organization. All bug fixes and minor releases incur no extra fee, but there's an upgrade fee if you choose to upgrade to a newer major version.

Since you have all the source then surely FantasticApp is "open source" is it not? If I get run over by the proverbial Bourke Street bus (you probably don't know that we had double-decker buses in Bourke Street, Melbourne, some decades ago), there's no issue since you have all of the code.

But it's proprietary because the license states that you cannot share it with anybody outside your organization. Nobody forced you to purchase the license in the first place. You were free to try to get the same or a similar app elsewhere, presumably agreeing to license my app because it was the only one of its sort or the other were in some way unsuitable for your needs.

I would intend to demand payment from and/or sue any organization that obtained the source for FantasticApp without paying the appropriate license fee, or released to other organizations who hadn't paid up.

So this is a piece of non-gratis "proprietary open source software" (or "POSS") is it not? Or maybe it would be more accurately labeled "proprietary restricted open source software" (or "PROSS"). What's wrong with all that? Surely we aren't expected to develop apps like FantasticApp for no financial return if we want to make a living from them from at least some of our efforts, that seems absurd to me.

Richard Stallman, eat your heart out over this one!

And what are your opinions on my POSS/PROSS concept?

Technorati Tags: Software,Freeware,Open Source,FOSS,POSS,PROSS,Proprietary

Hottest day ever in Melbourne!

2009-02-07T19:36:00.001+11:00

It’s Saturday 7th February 2009, and the temperature reached 46.4 Celsius, the hottest day on record for Melbourne (and the entire state of Victoria).

Gale force northwesterly winds became scorchingly hot as they baked while moving across the oven that is the heartland of Australia. … Bushfires all over the state, loss of property, all as expected.

Here’s the thermometer I carried back from one of my work trips to the IBM Development Lab in Rochester Minnesota, where it now sits on the fence in our back yard.

For Yankee people not used to thinking in Celsius mode, here’s a mid-afternoon shot:

That’s around 113 degrees Fahrenheit. A tad on the warm side, eh?

I’ve experienced a winter in Minnesota, so I know what it’s like when the needle points toward the 9 o’clock position, but here in suburban Melbourne the needle will barely get over to the left side of the scale.

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention yesterday that while southeastern Australia (South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales) has been in severe drought and sweltering in oven-like conditions, the northern sub-tropical parts of the country have been awash under meters of floodwater in this year’s monsoon.cyclone season.

Technorati Tags: Weather,Record,Melbourne,Australia

A squeaky wheel runs amok in ultra-hot hot weather (all about Lotus Notes 9.0)

2009-02-07T10:45:00.001+11:00

Thanks to the great meeting place that PLANET LOTUS has now become, I came across the following post by Glenn Irvine: What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 (go take a look at it)

Let it be clear from the outset I have nothing whatsoever against the feature changes that Glenn is requesting. It’s just that when he talked about “Notes 9.0” I expected it it the be about, well, Notes 9 as a whole – but it only happened to be about several usability shortcomings in the mail application in Notes.

So I made the following comment (maybe because it’s around 10 AM and already warming up. The Bureau of Meteorology predicts a real scorcher here in Victoria today. They reckon it will reach 44 degrees Celsius or more, which would make it the hottest February day on record down here, and very ominous for bushfires. (UPDATE: see what actually happened here.)

We had a couple of similarly hot days near the end of January. People, animals and plants are under considerable weather stress in our corner of the continent. The last rain of any significance was in December last. The weather was quite cool then, but it has warmed up with a vengeance recently.

A day or two ago, ex-Collingwood footballer Peter Daicos, when putting out his wheelie bin in North Balwyn (just a few kilometres away in the heart of suburban Melbourne) was bitten on the toe by a venomous red-bellied black snake. (Talking about snake, scientists have found in Colombia a fossil 13-metre giant snake, as long as a school bus, which used to devour giant turtles and primitive crocodiles. Scary.)

Another sign of the unusually warm stretch we’ve had here in south-eastern Australia is the fact that many of the less hardy deciduous trees have been dropping their leaves, months before the stat of our southern autumn.

Maybe this has put me a bit on edge, but I just commented on Glenn’s story as follows. Let me know if you agree, or otherwise:

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
What disturbs me a bit about the content (but sometimes only the title) of posts like this is that all too often they’re restricted to talking about desired enhancements in apps bundled up with Notes. Often the comments are restricted to Notes Mail (as in your case above, Glenn) — or to iNotes or Sametime or one of the other IBM apps.
Understandably, IBM people (like our famous and most gentlemanly leader Ed Brill) often talk about specific enhancements in their own apps. Hey, I worked for IBM for a long time, and know that it’s hard enough to keep up with what IBM is announcing much less what happens outside IBM.
Many of the vast community of IBM business partners and independent ISVs, not to mention all those thousands of Notes customers big and small alike who roll their own apps (and some of whom have a vast inventory of such apps), do like what they see being added to or fixed in in Notes Mail.
But in many cases they also want major new generic enhancements in Notes. A perfect example of this would be the grouse new Xpages capability that’s just been released in Notes 8.5 for us all to savor.
Notes remains a fantastic application platform [for certain classes of apps] as we all know. While there have been many outstanding mainly server-related enhancements in the past few years (major compression improvements, DAOS, etc) it’s not quite as common for a startling application-building enhancement like Xpages to appear.
So what would I myself talk about when I say I’d like to see something new in Notes 9 or Notes 10?
How about a few REALLY big hitters, for generic app design and development? For one, the ability to design an application once and have it behave exactly the same in the Notes client and a web browser? (Not asking for much, am I?)
IBM in an earlier release used to make available what I’ll term “some trusty old Lotus Notes applications” which you’ll find listed here on my website: http://asiapac.com.au/Links/NotesDomino.htm#TRUSTY_OLD_LOTUS_NOTES_APPLICATIONS
They’re quite old and rusty pre-Domino apps (so are not web enabled), but my point here is that one thing they did at that point in time was to let people see that Notes is note just about mail (as important as mail still is), but that Notes is really very good for building a vast range of other application types.
The old hands at Notes (customers and others) were very worried that IBM had lost its way in the early part of this decade, but needn’t worry now since it’s apparent that IBM is solidly behind Lotus Software including Notes.
A recent extremely promising move from IBM is the decision to get behind OpenNTF.org and help push out the message that Notes is a great application platform, and that there are lots of free apps available from OpenNTF (and from a range other sources too, for that matter)
In summary, what I would have called this post is “What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 Mail” because there are LOTS of other bigger things I’d like to see in Notes 9 (and 10 and 11 and ad infinitum) as a whole!
- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes 8,Notes Mail,Application Platform,IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

An oddity in Windows Live Writer

2009-02-06T19:50:00.001+11:00

As mentioned in the previous post (about OpenNTF.Org), I now use the Writer available under Windows Live to create and update posts to my blogs.

I decided to check out the Writer web site for updates, and installed the latest version (build 14.0.8050.1202) which has even more nice features. The upgrade all went fine.

That done, I started researching a problem that has cropped up a few days ago, with Windows inscrutably refusing to go into Standby mode.

It’s very irritating. Now, instead of quickly powering down into standby the system nearly always hangs displaying the “Windows is now shutting down” panel. My only option then is to do a hardware reset in order to get going again.

Some software that I installed or patched in the last week or so is probably the culprit. After a little research, I decided to uninstall certain products that I suspected might be the cause of the hangs. (Windows power configuration issues like this can be frustratingly difficult to sort out.)

So I opened the Control Panel, and got the following result (only the top few lines are shown). Notice the oddity, near the top?

(Click to show a larger image)

I’ve never seen the likes of it before, in any version starting with Windows 95.

An examination of the Windows registry (by searching for “LiveWriter”) detected the minor but amusing gaffe made by somebody at Microsoft:

(A quite unusual registry key value)

HTML rules, it has now infested even the registry! … And I thought it was only me who did silly things like this.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,Registry,Gaffe,Humor

Messing around with OpenNTF.Org’s sign on and download process (updated)

2009-02-06T10:19:00.001+11:00

Don’t get me wrong, I reckon that OpenNTF.org is an absolutely fantastic boon to the Lotus Notes/Domino community. There are lots of excellent tools, frameworks, utilities and applications available for download at the best possible price [free, as in beer].

But right now I cannot download anything. Frustration… It accepted my long-time password without complaint, but still shows my status as “not logged in” and prevents me from downloading anything.

So I request a new password, which it tells me will arrive shortly, but I have to wait maybe fifteen minutes for it (didn’t take an exact measurement of the elapsed time). Having to wait so long was another frustration, such things should happen within seconds, a minute or two at the very outside.

I signed in using the new password, but it still showed me as being “not logged in” (highlighted in yellow in Figure 1) so I couldn’t download anything. Therefore I repeat the sign-on process a number of times more, sometimes deliberately entering the wrong password and having it knocked back. … Swearwords flowed liberally!

After a few more minutes of puzzlement and messing around, I decide to try the same with Firefox browser, and everything worked fine this time. Then tried to work out what configuration setting (or cookie or whatever) was causing my IE-based Avant Browser session to spit the dummy and prevent downloading [even while accepting the new password].

I decided to give up on that quest and, not liking the cryptic new password, wanted to reset it to its old easily-remembered value.

I hoped to find a conventional “Manage your profile” or “Reset Password” function just underneath the “Register” and “Forgot Password” links in the right-hand column (where the green highlighted area is in Figure 1) but it wasn’t there.

Maybe I was just just having a bad morning or am going blind, but having signed in (under Avant Browser) couldn’t see a “reset password” facility anywhere, so it appears that I’m stuck with the cryptic password.

[UPDATE STARTS HERE] But then I look at the Firefox window again and, as shown in Figure 2, see that indeed there is an “Update Profile” option (thought there would be all along, actually).

Now I’m an old-timer in the IT industry – still think that punched cards and print-outs are the most reliable form of input/output devices devised so far! One of the reasons I have misgivings about new fads like AJAX and cloud computing is that they’re so reliant on HTML and browsers in all their variations, and problems like I experienced this morning with cookies (or whatever it was) are really awful to experience and nightmarish for the web application designer/developer to handle elegantly.

I write regular articles for iTWire which uses Joomla and so I have to use a browser-based editor which I find quite awkward to use. And the built-in browser-based editor for Blogger.com that I originally used for writing posts in this very blog was also quite clumsy and restrictive. even compared with the nice Writely editor they acquired for Google Docs (which they should adapt for use in Blogger.com, I’d recommend). But now I use Microsoft’s excellent free Windows Live Writer and find it far, far nicer to use for blog content management. It’s a cinch to create everything offline in a familiar GUI (very similar to using Microsoft Word, or Expression Web / FrontPage) and when you’ve finished composing your article you just click on the Publish button and everything (text, images, more) is updated on you blog with no hassles whatsoever. It’s a very nice piece of work, congrats Microsoft.

Browsers do some things nicely, but I find them not at all good – sometimes quite horrible -- for really serious transactional activities of various types. Conceived as a means of displaying web contents, they are now being force-fitted into all sorts of environments where they perform less than ideally.

Footnote:
I find the OpenNTF site (kindly hosted by Prominic) to be a little on the slow side. My impression is that the average response time is around ten seconds or so, just on the borderline of acceptability. It would be nice if it were snappier (and a better advertisement for Prominic’s Lotus Domino hosting offering -- hint, hint).

Technorati Tags: OpenNTF.Org,Password management,IBM Lotus Notes and Domino,Freeware

UPDATE #2:
I implied above that I might possibly be going blind. Being a thorough type, I did further research on the causes of blindness, and just by chance came across the following little gem concerning a form of blindness (in dating)…

UPDATE #3:
Strangely enough, next day the sign on problems that I had experienced under Avant Browser (a front end to IE) went away. I have no idea why.

Coexistence of Notes 7 and Notes 8 on the same system

2009-02-05T17:16:00.002+11:00

Over the last couple of years I’ve posted some blog articles explaining how you can install several different releases of the Lotus Notes client on a single PC.

I know from web page hit tracking that these articles are opened many times per week, and from every continent. I can picture out there the wide range of Domino developers and administrators (at IBM customers and business partners, plus ISVs), all developing and demonstrating and supporting users across the spread of Lotus Notes releases, with the common aim of having several releases of Lotus Notes client and Domino Designer coexistent on a single system.

The last, most detailed post was in April 2008, see: Steps for installing multiple Lotus Notes Client releases on a single system in which I explained exactly how you might go about installing Notes 5, 6 and 7 releases (plus the benefits and shortcomings, which I won’t repeat here).

I’ve now removed Notes R4.6 and R5 and R6 from my system, and recently have been working with only R7.0.3 and 8.0 on my development system.

All along I’ve also been testing, in a Virtual PC environment, the beta versions of Notes 8.5 and as soon as R8.5 went gold I replaced R.0 so that I can now report (using exactly the same approach as laid out in the earlier posts).

I have verified that NotesTracker operates without any drama under Notes 8.5 (both the standard and the basic client).

I was just about to launch into using DDE (Eclipse-based Domino Designer 8.5) for doing work on the next release of NotesTracker (version 5.2).

But then I came across Tommy Varland’s two recent bug reports for DDE 8.5:

My first bug found in N/D 8.5 … “When you're working with an application in the new Domino Designer, and open/close the application in the Client, the QueryClose event doesn't get fired. I had to close DD to get the event to fire. This probably isn't the most serious bug, but it is annoying when working with/testing QueryClose.”
Serious bug in N/D 8.5 standard configuration - NotesUIWorkspace.CurrentDocument returns Nothing … “When debugging code that fetches the active NotesUIDocument from NotesUIWorkspace, NotesUIWorkspace.CurrentDocument randomly (?) returns Nothing.”

Well, it so happens that NotesTracker relies very extensively on events like QueryOpen, PostOpen and QueryClose. So for me the first of these DDE bugs would cause me constant, excruciating pain!

Therefore for the moment I’m going to keep on using the trusty old Domino Designer 7.0.3 until DDE 8.5 is fixed up, however long that takes. I wonder what sense of urgency the IBM team has about correcting these (and any similar) designer bugs. When can we expect fixes for them?

I’ll therefore only be using the new DDE 8.5 for research into Xpages and all the other interesting new development options in release 8.5.

UPDATE: I more recently found “QueryClose Annoyances” (which IBM's Andre Guirard posted back in early November 2008) giving some insights into the less-than-perfect implementation of QueryClose in Notes 8.x Standard clients (problem report SPR #AUDITS). It seems that the completely redesigned Eclipse-based front end and the C++ back end code are not yet dancing together in complete unison, but this is understandable in a radically changed code base -- even if not quite forgivable (they should have caught any severe basic errors like this before release).

By the way, I had been wondering about using the 8.5 designer and saving the NotesTracker databases and templates with .NS7 and .NT7 file extensions, respectively. Despite various attempts over the years, I’ve never found an official Lotus Software technical description of exactly how the .NSx and .NTx file extensions work.

Can anybody point me to any such technical description? Does is even still work? That is, suppose I create (under the 8.5 designer) an application with a file extension of .NS7 or .NS5 for argument’s sake. Will I be able to open such a database under a client at R7 level or R5 level, respectively? (Let’s assume, naturally, that I don’t use any LotusScript or Formula Language feature that is unavailable in R7 or R5, respectively.)

Putting it in generic terms, if you use Domino Designer at release level “n” how many back levels will this trick work for? “n –1” or “n – 2” or what? Is this formally and explicitly described anywhere?

Technorati Tags: Lotus Domino Designer,Bugs,Concurrent Releases

First impressions of Skype 4.0 – mainly very good, but a few stumbles!

2009-02-05T15:48:00.001+11:00

I’ve been a longtime user of Skype, and over at iTWire I’ve put down my first ideas about Skype 4.0 (mainly about several details of the new GUI).

See Skype 4.0 - first impressions of some GUI and function changes

Technorati Tags: Skype,GUI,Design Change

Windows 7 won’t plug this dyke, I’m quite sure

2009-01-26T21:34:00.001+11:00

I’ve been using computers and studying their innards, software-wise, for forty years or more. The first twenty years was nearly all with various IBM mainframe and midrange commercial systems, process control systems, communications controllers and the like.

Then in the early 1980s along came minicomputers that the common man could afford to buy for personal use. I used the Apple IIe and the Commodore Amiga and later the IBM PC, all essentially with primitive disk operating operating systems (initially diskette based, later hard disk based).

The early PCs mostly had fairly crude GUIs which, as far as the the average user was concerned, only stated to get adopted on any scale when Microsoft came out with -- pirated, some would say – their own windows-style OS towards the end of the eighties. They suffered from problems such as limited memory access (the dreaded 640K barrier, and so on).

I didn’t ever use Windows 1 and Windows 2, first got my hands on version 3.0/3.10, not too long after that, version 3.11 (or “Windows for Workgroups”).

For its time, Windows 3.11 wasn’t too bad, but it suffered from a number of drastic architectural limits, like problems with 16-bit addressing of ever-increasing memory and hard disks (The problems were with handling megabytes and gigabytes in Windows 3 and Windows 9x days. Now in the early 21st century it has factored up to handling gigabyte and terabyte dimensions. Will it ever end? Not likely.)

Has Microsoft lost its way with Windows? Or have they “lost the plot” as some have put it?

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about Windows 7. Will it save Microsoft, or is it in effect just “Windows Vista Service Pack 3?” I’ve downloaded Win7 Beta 1 version and will give it a fling, in a virtual machine, some time soon, when I get a round tuit. I’ve read a fair bit about Windows 7 and have seen it demonstrated at a couple of Microsoft events here in Australia, so I”m pretty familiar with what it promises.

Where do I fit in the spectrum of opinion folders? Well, right now, having refused to install Windows Vista because I just dislike its look and feel and the irritating UAC nag prompt, I reckon that there are a few nice enhancements in Win7.

So it’s very likely that I’ll install Win7 soon after it ships, as long as Microsoft make it possible to upgrade direct from Win XP Pro to Win7. (With all the tools and add-ons that I’ve installed, Win XP still works fine as far as I’m concerned.)

What discourages me is that, after some two decades, Microsoft appear to be making no significant move towards introducing an “OS for the future” that eliminates some long-time basic architectural shortcomings and flaws.

This has been discussed by others and I won’t repeat them here but instead let me here describe one such shortcoming, a very basic one in fact, that I haven’t seen raised elsewhere.

Take a look at Figure 1 (click to view a larger image).

I tried to mount a new disk drive. (It happens to be a TrueCrypt encrypted drive, but that’s not pertinent. It could equally well have been a USB drive or similar.)

I selected a file and clicked the “Mount” button. Next I was prompted to select a free drive letter from the list. What free drive letter? The list was empty.

The drive list was empty! And that brings out the basic shortcoming, which arises from the architectural underpinnings going way back to the original MS-DOS.

In the early days, many or indeed most PCs only had only a single diskette drive (it was something of a luxury to even have a second one). A year or two later, hard disk drives started appearing on top-end PCs, all of 10 MB or 20 MB in size, for those who could afford them (they were prohibitively expensive).

What’s the cause for the empty list of drives above? Well, these days it’s common to have quite a few drives on a PC – CD/DVD drives, internal hard disks, external USB or Firewire or eSATA drives, network drives, virtual drives, and so on.

And the figure on the right shows how my system was just before I attempted to mount the additional (TrueCrypt) drive.

There are 2 terabytes of internal hard disk drives (some physical, some logical) fusing up drive letters C: to N:

Also plugged in was an external hard drive made up of five logical drives, two internal DVD drives plus an external one, a digital card reader with four slots for transferring my photos, and several USB thumb drives.

In Figure 2, the external hard drive letters T: and U: are highlighted in yellow, and the arrow immediately under them points to the spot where three more logical drives on this device should have appeared in the list -- but didn’t, because there were no more free drive letters, although there was no warning at all that this was the case! So naturally enough, when I attempted to mount the additional (TrueCrypt) drive it correctly showed en empty drive list.

Admittedly, for the purposes of the exercise I added more drives than I normally would ever use. I usually have four or five spare drive letters available. When I disconnected several of the devices, the list of available drives went back to a more normal situation, as illustrated in Figure 3.

But I’m sure you get my point: still having a single alphabetical drive letter for mounted devices is a very nasty Windows limitation.

We don’t need such a basic flaw in the 21st century, and Microsoft really should already have released a simple, elegant solution for this and other such basic flaws (emphasis on simple).

Sure, Windows NTFS has symbolic links and Vista has extended this to ~~symbolic links~~ junction points, but these only partially resolve the issue and are strictly for IT specialists or power users only, definitely not the average user. (Symlinks originated in the early 1980s for BSD 4.2 UNIX, and are currently found in Linux and Mac OS too.)

Let’s suppose that Microsoft decided to go ahead with some sort of fix for this issue, what might it be?

In my opinion, a neat solution would be to allow two-letter or why not multi-alphameric (letters plus digits) drive names, not just single letters of the alphabet. And without necessarily changing anything else in file system support, in order to minimize other impacts.

For example, your marketing applications and files might be on drives MKTG1: and MKTG2: (or MARKETING1: and MARKETING2: to avoid cryptic naming and so make it even plainer to nontechnical users).

Another related bugbear of mine is that in Windows you have to carefully manage where folders and files are placed on the various available drives. IBM’s System/38 introduced an elegant solution for this storage problem way back in 1978, and the concept still thrives in its descendant the “IBM i” system (that’s the latest in a series of brand names for this family from IBM’s development laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota).

I was intimately involved with S/38 and its wonderful follow-on the AS/400, or “Application System/400”, emphasizing that it’s prime directive was to be as a superb platform for serving applications. (For the record, I happen to consider the S/38 architecture and the fundamental Lotus Notes architecture two of the outstanding widespread commercially-released IT conceptions of the 20th century.)

Among the wonderful architectural features of the S/38 and its descendants is single-level storage (see here or here or here or here for some insights).

Around the turn of the century, Microsoft was rumored to be working on some great changes to file storage, labeled WinFS. These were shelved in mid-2006, and perhaps the closest we’ve come to seeing any real change so far is Windows 7 Libraries (see Ars Technica’s overview).

The System/38 and its descendants also have libraries, but these are completely different: they are named groupings of related objects (programs, database files, queues, and any other sort of system object) that make the design, development, securing and running of jobs extremely easy to be controlled. They could be thought of sort of as “classpaths on steroids,” to make a crude analogy. But this is a different topic a very important topic, more about it some other time perhaps, since Windows PATHs and Java CLASSPATHs make up another weak point.

What do you think? When, if ever, will Windows fix basic shortcomings/flaws like this?

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Computer Architecture,File Systems,Drive Letters,Libraries,Microsoft,IBM,System/38,Single-level Storage

UPDATED on 27 January 2009, to rebalance some of the wording and to correct bad spots in spelling/grammar.

Teach ‘em young!

2009-01-26T16:27:00.001+11:00

It’s the Australia Day holiday, 26th January, when we celebrate the “birth of a nation” in the sense that it recollects the establishment of a British colony here in the eighteenth century … An event that tends to cause considerable discomfort in the minds of our long-suffering indigenous peoples.

So I’ve been taking it easy, listening to an Australia Day radio program from Hyde Park in Sydney by national broadcaster ABC FM, and looking thorough my digital photo archives.

We train ‘em very early in life in our part of the world. Here’s our two-year-old grandson, Hunter, who loves investigating my computer library. Here he is casually picking up some VB .NET language facts:

(Click to view a larger image)

Hunter quickly absorbed a VB technique or two, he looks at me obviously keen to get cracking on the code:

In contrast, his elder brother Lachlan at the same age a couple of years ago was more into chocolate biscuits (cookies, if you must):

…

Technorati Tags: Early education

Lotus Notes 8 at last unleashes the recalcitrant properties box!

2009-01-23T00:16:00.001+11:00

Recalcitrance indicates some degree of difficulty to control, unwillingness to obey requests or directions, uncertainty in behavior.

And that’s exactly what the Lotus Notes properties box used to be, whether used in the Lotus Notes client (for end-user activities, such as setting text properties like font size and color) or in the Domino Designer client (for setting all sorts of properties for a wide range of object types, such as fields in forms or view column properties).

Alan Lepofsky in his LepoLand blog has quite a few good basic and advanced tips about using the Notes properties box. This search link should list most of his tips.

Now let me ask you a question. What’s the important distinction between the dispositions of the following two Lotus Notes properties boxes?

Did you work it out? Probably not, I suspect.

The one on the left is what happens up to and including Notes 7.x if you have multiple monitors and attempt to drag the properties box to a secondary monitor configured to lie on the right of the primary monitor (number 4 in the image below). The box only moves half way into the secondary monitor area and then gets stuck, half in the primary monitor and half in the secondary one. … Yoiks!

The image on the right shows what you get for Notes 8. Well, for Notes 8.5 at least, I can’t verify that this also happens for Notes 8.0 because I don’t have it installed any more. Three cheers, at last this usability glitch has been done away with. It’s about time, but better late than never, so thank you IBM! Now all you have to do is give us a resizable properties box.

These days I happen to use four 20-inch Samsung LCD monitors of 1600 x 1200 resolution arranged in an inverted T configuration (enjoying glorious high-resolution wallpapers, such as the panda, from Webshots).

Yes, I’ve spoiled myself, but that’s at least one benefit flowing from being self-employed.

When doing really intense application design work with Domino Designer, I find it incredibly efficient to have three or more designer panes open at once (for form design, view design, coding, etc) all laid out in their full individual glory on separate monitors. It’s really effective for side-by-side display of, say, two form or view designs, or two LotusScript subroutines.

I can also rotate any of the screens to portrait-mode position, such as when I spent almost two weeks carefully rewriting the NotesTracker Guide.

In the past -- especially when working at customer sites (where short-sighted stinginess tends to reign -- I’ve had to do the same complicated design tasks on a single pokey low-resolution monitor, slowing me down tremendously and thereby costing the client more (perhaps significantly more on lengthy projects).

Errant behavior like the above is far more commonplace than it should be. I find the native Windows XP/Vista support of multiple monitors to be excellent. You can position your two (or three, or four, or more) monitors in various positions relative to each other, and Windows handles it all with aplomb. When you rotate a monitor, Windows handles this flawlessly too. Splendid work by Microsoft!

Unfortunately there are quite a few applications out there in the wild that don’t correctly handle multiple monitors. Some refuse to work on any but the primary monitor. Others do bizarre things, such as always opening in a particular secondary monitor, or opening spread across all of the monitors as if they were a single huge monitor. This is just poor application design and/or coding. I’d hate to see such really unreliable work done for things like airplane control or nuclear power station operation. (Maybe it is, in small ways?)

Over nearly forty years in the industry, I’ve noticed that there aren’t all that many many employers willing to provide their IT staff with much more than basic hardware (or software, for that matter). More’s the pity, since these days items like good quality high-resolution LCD monitors and well-endowed desktop/notebook PCs are quite inexpensive and are IMHO essential productivity tools to give to power developers (and administrators).

Technorati Tags: IBM,Lotus Notes 8,Domino Designer,Properties Box,Bad Design

NotesTracker validated against Notes/Domino 8.5

2009-01-22T18:37:00.002+11:00

Just a short post to mention that NotesTracker underwent testing against IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 during the Beta1 and Beta2 testing phases, and again a week or two ago against the official ND 8.5 release.

NotesTracker works fine in ND 8.5 (as it does with ND 8.0). I could detect no functional issues at all.

Gratifyingly, this is in contrast to what happened with Notes 6.0, which introduced a bug in LotusScript’s handling of Rich Text fields forcing me to redesign the subroutines used for handling changes in the content of database fields.

Please note, however, that there’s now is a functional limitation, indeed for me it’s a major inconvenience: with the Notes 8.0 and 8.5 Standard client you’ll find that the "Open in New Window" context menu option is missing from three ultra-convenient places where it was available before: view navigator, workspace tab, and workspace icon.

Consider the following screenshots, on the left the Notes 8.x Basic client and on the right the Standard client. Click an image to see an enlargement (in a new browser window):

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace icon.

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace icon
is entirely absent.
MISSING IN ACTION

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via view navigator.

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via view navigator
is grayed out.
MISSING IN ACTION

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace tab.

Notes ND 8.5 Standard client -
Open via workspace tab
is entirely absent.
MISSING IN ACTION

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,Lotus Notes 8

The ND 8.x Basic client works properly, as with earlier Notes client releases, as shown in the left column of the above table. No problems (or “no sweat” as we say in Australia).

But the Eclipse-based Notes 8.x Standard client simply hasn't implemented it yet, as shown in the right column of the above table. What a pity. I hope that IBM fixes this glaring omission soon, I (and one or two others) asked IBM to rectify this way back in ND 8.0 Beta1 days.

It's a bit of a shame, but only significant if you happen to have implemented any auto-refresh RSS-style "Breaking News" views. Now you need to follow a a much more convoluted pathway to launch such views in separate external windows.

As explained in the NotesTracker Guide, the idea is to move the external views to the side where you can monitor them separately from the main Notes client window. There's also a brief description here.

This is not a NotesTracker limitation, rather it's caused by the as-yet failure of IBM to support this feature in the Standard client. The only way you can launch an external window is by fiddling around: you'll need to learn how to set up each such Breaking News view as a widget/gadget, and only after doing so will you be able to launch the view in an external window (via its context menu).

So with the Notes 8.x Standard client it's no longer same trivial operation of merely right-clicking on the view in the navigator or the tab across the top and then selecting Open In New Window from the context menu) as it was before.

IBM ANZ's Jonathan Stern outlines Lotus collaborative and social software strategy (podcast at iTWire)

2009-01-16T23:30:00.001+11:00

Hey, this is my first post here for quite a few weeks, since last November in fact!

It’s not that I’ve been inactive or have nothing to say, just that recently my blogging efforts have largely been directed to writing articles for iTWire. But I do plan soon to refocus on writing more articles here (and on my other Blogger.com weblogs, listed at right).

IBM’s Lotus Software products are on a roll, not just for the re-architected Lotus Notes and Domino 8 but also for enterprise social software offerings and the very popular free Lotus Symphony office suite.

I’ve installed Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 gold code and have repeated testing of my NotesTracker SDK to confirm (as with the two ND8.5 public betas) that NotesTracker works just fine with this latest Eclipse-driven Notes client release.

As well as regular writing, during the second half of 2008 I recorded a number of podcast interviews, see them listed here at iTWire.

I’ve been very much in a Lotus frame of mind during the last few months, so would like to draw your attention to the latest podcast uploaded that I’ve published just a few hours ago: IBM's Jonathan Stern outlines Lotus collaborative and social software strategy

In this podcast interview, Jonathan – who is IBM ANZ regional executive for Lotus Software – gives a wide-ranging outline of the Lotus communication and collaboration products.

Another podcast being prepared should be of a fair amount of interest to IBM and Lotus followers in particular. It’s with Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, who talks in depth about Lotus Symphony and other similar Lotus Software product development topics. So watch for it at the aforementioned iTWire podcasts home page.

Just to show that while I like Lotus I’m not totally one-eyed, look out for the last of the three interviews that I recorded in the weeks immediately before Christmas (and also to be published fairly soon), this one being with Greg Stone, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Australia.

Apart from podcasts, my regular stories for iTWire are in the section A Meaningful Look at Desktop and Enterprise Computing

And if you like puzzles, why not check out my contributions at the the iTWire TechWords Interactive Crosswords section. I really need a bit of encouragement/justification (by your visiting them, that is) before I decide to devote any more precious time to composing these technology-oriented word puzzles!

Eh bene, ciao bambini.

Europe’s pragmatic approach to open standards

2008-11-10T11:07:00.001+11:00

In my blog section over at iTWire I’ve highlighted a new European Commission report on open standards, a topic that I’ve been extremely interested in for decades (during my long time at IBM, and now as an independent consultant).

Here’s the link to that article. Go take a peek at it since there’s lots of interesting/important content:

A pragmatic European approach to open standards (a must-read)
Sunday, 09 November 2008
The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.

Simple Signer for Lotus Notes Version 1.01 released (04 November 2008)

2008-11-04T21:53:00.001+11:00

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes,Database,Sign,Security,Deployment,Configuration

Today has been a busy day for me. While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I’ve been dusting off my Lotus Notes freeware applications, checking them out and making small design tweaks here and there. This is the final one in the bundle.

Because of the strong security model that has always been one of the major features of Lotus Notes right from its outset, it is sometimes necessary to “sign” a database before it will work properly in your organization’s operating environment.

Here follows a brief, highly simplified explanation. It is definitely NOT intended to act as a tutorial in Lotus Notes/Domino security.

When the Notes database application was built, its design elements (components such as forms, views, frames, framesets, agents and much more) were all created by one or more developers. These design elements would have been given the “signature” of the original developer(s), which may not be (and generally should not be) adequate to pass the runtime security in your organization’s production environment.

In many but not all cases, it is sufficient to sign all of the design elements with an appropriately-authorized person’s Notes ID. This is exactly what Simple Signer does, in a few easy-to-perform steps.

STEP 1: Open the Simple Signer database. If necessary, switch to the desired the signing user’s ID file (top button), then click on the lower button (as shown by the red arrow) to select the database to be signed.

STEP 2: Use the normal “Choose Database” dialog to locate and select the desired database.

STEP 3: The selected database’s title, server and path are shown. Click on the lower button to sign ALL of the design elements in this database.

If your Notes ID has adequate signing authority for this particular database, it will be signed, else you’ll be informed that the signing process failed.

Remember that this is called the “Simple Signer” and it’s not meant (as distributed) to cope with complex signing requirements.

Because the Simple Signer’s design is not hidden, your can get your Notes developer to tailor the design to cope with more complex signing requirements. Otherwise, purchase a more powerful tool.

Simple Signer is a FREE tool designed to carry out a common, basic sign-everything-with-the-same-Notes-ID process and to do it both easily and quickly. … No more, no less. No apologies!

You can obtain your free copy from here or here.

Version 1.01 of Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes released (04 November 2008) – Eat your own dog food!

2008-11-04T11:36:00.002+11:00

I don’t give many presentations these days, but expect to do so tomorrow afternoon at the Melbourne (Australia) Lotus User Group meeting.

So I took out my unique little “Presenter for Lotus Notes” application and brushed up a few cobwebs on it. No new functionality, mainly some color changes to alternate view rows and little things like that.

Its now ready for download at either http://asiapac.com.au/NotesPresenter_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/NotesPresenter_Download.htm. Naturally, it’s still completely free.

But you are probably asking: “What on earth is Presenter for Notes?”

Well, the story behind Presenter goes like this…

I once did industrial chemistry and high school chemistry/mathematics teaching, then spent a long time at IBM (from 1970 to the mid-1990s, now retired), and find myself as a consultant still in IT 39 years after starting at IBM. My fortieth year in IT begins next January, is that good or bad I keep asking myself.

During all that time, I’ve seen a vast number of lessons, lectures, business presentations and the like. In the early days, they were done on blackboards and paper. Later overhead projectors were in vogue, with their transparent plastic “foils.” These foils, in any quantity, weighed a ton and weren’t much fun to prepare, distribute and lug around (as I can attest from giving lots of IBM presentations across Australia, and Asia while supporting the IBM System/38 and AS/400 and other systems).

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, along came Lotus Freelance and Microsoft PowerPoint and suchlike. A better thing? On the whole, probably so.

But overdone to the n^th degree. Now we have PowerPoint presentations in plague proportions! See here or here (especially look at the articles about “Unplug that projector” and “Drag and drop” and “warts” and “disaster”).

When I was to give a presentation several years ago, I asked myself if there was a different and/or better way.

Being active in the Lotus Notes community, I decided that “If you promote and sell it, you should use it!.” So I developed a “presenter” platform to be used in the Lotus Notes Client environment itself.

The rationale for having a tool like Notes Presenter is briefly outlined in an earlier blog post of mine, see Notes Presenter -- Let's eat our own dog food with more details on the download page given above. There’s a user guide built in to the database, in the “Help Using This Database” document.

You can use Presenter not just for preparing and giving presentations via a Lotus Notes Client, but also for packaging and delivering virtually any Notes applications (databases) together with any sort of related supporting files: executables, documents, data files (even other Notes databases, including design templates), and much more.

You could, as just one example, hold different versions/releases of a Notes application suite – or a presentation, or anything else -- either inside [separate documents held in] a single Presenter database or in multiple Presenter databases each one dedicated to s single version/release.

In fact, whatever can be attached to a Notes rich text field can be delivered via a Presenter database as one tidy self-contained package.

With the various Presenter views (such as the view by Category/Concept shown just above), and via full-text search, you can quickly and easily locate a particular slide or group of slides related to a given topic.

For example, in the question time at the end of a pitch, somebody asks you about a particular term you used that’s buried deep within one of many slides. Use a full-text search to rapidly locate that slide instead of fumbling around (as I’ve seen happen a number of times) and perhaps not even be able to find that slide again.

There’s a lot more I could say, but let me just say that if you’re a Lotus Notes Client user you should “eat your own dog food” and avoid using PowerPoint wherever possible. Download Presenter for Lotus Notes and go try it out!

IBM’s ITSO sails on… Long live the ITSO!

2008-10-31T21:22:00.002+11:00

For some months now, I’ve been writing a lot of articles for Australia-based iTWire rather than here, and think that it;s about time I linked across to them for you.

Here are two articles about IBM’s International Technical Support Organization, (ITSO), with which I had a close working relationship during my career at IBM Australia.

Big Blue sees Red -- Celebrating 40 years of IBM international technical support
Thursday, 25 September 2008

IBM recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its international technical support organization, ITSO, and has committed to continue producing its core product, free IBM Redbooks, which these days are downloaded in the tens of millions.

IBM's Jackie Olson explains ITSO mission and services (iTWire podcast)
Tuesday, 07 October 2008
Jackie Olson, program director of IBM's International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) and Authoring Services, tells us in this iTWire podcast with Tony Austin about the ITSO's numerous products and services, plus its benefits to IBM customers, IBM business partners, other parts of IBM, and the general IT community.

See all my articles, including podcasts ...
A Meaningful Look at Desktop and Enterprise Computing

Have some fun with a challenge or two that I've devised!
Go visit the iTWire TechWords Interactive Crosswords section.

CAPTURE Version 2.2 released (30th October 2008)

2008-10-30T22:04:00.002+11:00

CAPTURE version 2.2.00 is now available for download from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm(or its mirror at http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm ).

From the same page, you also can download the built-in "Help Using This Database" document as a separate PDF, if this is more convenient for you to read outside the Notes environment.

CAPTURE stands for "Customer And Project Tracking with Usage Reporting Extensions" and is a completely free Lotus Notes CRM application -- with Asia/Pacific Computer Services' NotesTracker^TM incorporated so that you can track and audit usage of the documents in a CAPTURE database.

Apart from a few very minor changes, the main functional improvement added is the ability to specify (for each CAPTURE database replica) the three headings that appear at the top of each page.

This is shown in the following illustration. Click on it to open a larger image (on a new page).

This was requested by a CAPTURE user as a means of applying “branding” to a CAPTURE database.

And the best news is that it is still a FREE application. So download and enjoy!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Having NotesTracker capabilities built in is a unique feature, possibly not found in any other CRM application. For example, you can see who updated the sales forecast figure for your customer Acme Widgets, and when they did it, or who deleted a Contact from the database.

Another option is to keep open the RSS-style "Breaking News" view so as to see database actions appear automatically as soon as they occur (in the case of events on remote Domino servers, as soon as then next replication cycle occurs for the database).

You can purchase the NotesTracker toolkit to add powerful features activity tracking and compliance management to the design of your own IBM Lotus Notes/Domino database applications.