Notes tone unturned

Simple Signer Version 1.1 for IBM Lotus Notes released

2009-11-03T01:14:00.001+11:00

When a Lotus Notes application is developed, it is a quite common requirement that it must be "signed" by an appropriate Lotus Notes user ID or Lotus Domino server ID before it will operate correctly in a production environment.

The developer (or developers) who over time created the various design elements in the database (forms, views, agents, etc) will have placed their own "signature" against each design element every time that they save it.

The situation commonly arises that the developer(s) who coded the database have signatures that do not provide sufficient or appropriate authority for agents that are to run on a Domino server, for formulae to be executed in a form, etc).

This is especially the case for “alien” Notes applications that come to you from outside organizations such IBM Business Partners and Independent Software Vendors, but can be true even internally in your organization when there are multiple developers over time or for a specific release of the application..

Therefore a given version of a database application is put into production, its design elements need to be signed by a Notes ID with the appropriate authority. (Refer to the IBM Lotus Notes documentation for full details about the concept of signing Notes databases.)

Although signing is not all that difficult to do, it can be a somewhat circumspect process for the uninitiated!

Hence a few years ago I released the “Simple Signer” for IBM Lotus notes. This is a single-purpose database that was developed to make life a little easier for everybody (including myself) who at some time or other, frequently or only occasionally, has to sign Lotus Notes databases.

Its one an only design goal is to make it extremely quick and easy to sign each and every design element in a given database.

Just switch the Notes ID (if necessary), select the database to be signed, and click on the big pink button.

Note that it works only in Notes 6.0 and later versions (because it relies on the LotusScript "Sign" method introduced in Release 6.0), but this is not much of nowadays.

Also note that the database’s design is not hidden, so by modifying a few lines of LotusScript you can alter the way that signing is carried out, to sign only agents for example.

Version 1.1 has no functional changes, it’s still as easy to use as always, but the “Help Using This Database” built-in documentation has been enhanced to show you how add a toolbar button to make it faster to launch Simple Signer.

Download version 1.1 of the Simple Signer from either of our mirrors at notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au.

Golly, gosh, it’s nearly quarter past 1 AM here Down Under so I’m heading off to the cot right away after submitting this post.

Technorati Tags: IBM,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino,Sign,Database,Application,Security,Authorization,Ease of Use,Freeware,Asia/Pacific Computer Services

How to resize text in embedded IE browser for IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony

2009-10-30T15:16:00.001+11:00

Not all web pages are easy to read, and small text is one of the main culprits.

I have a bee in my bonnet about website usability. Indeed, that bee has been buzzing around in my noggin since attending a usability workshop as an IBM Systems Engineer way back in the mid-1970s.

Yes indeed folks, IBM has focused on good design for usability in both its hardware and software products for quite a few decades, way before some famous IT industry names were hardly a twinkle in their founders’ eyes. (I’m thinking of the Apple Computers of this world and the way that people rave over the design of its iPhone and the like.)

For example, I recall back in 1983 or thereabouts attending an engineering design meeting at the IBM Rochester Lab in Minnesota, when I was going to give my feedback on IBM System/38 database journaling, an exceedingly important software feature that was about to be announced. But nearly all of that meeting finished up being consumed by a vigorous debate about the precise repositioning and relabelling of knobs on the system’s console. Now that’s what I call being picky!

Anyway, often when I visit a website I test to see if its text can be resized, and amazingly find that, being generous, not more than maybe fifty percent of sites provide for text resizing. A big FAIL for all those sites that overlook this basic capability.

TIP: review the tons of resource links here or backup site here that I’ve assembled about a wide range of usability and interface design topics.

Regarding web page text siding, one person in particular who seems to have hornets (rather than mere bees) buzzing around in his noggin: see Minimum font sizes for Thomas Baekdal’s firm views on this matter. His site has lots of other interesting articles, too.

The current crop of web browsers provide functions for zooming web pages, but the problem with this is that everything on the page gets resized, not just the hard-to-read text. Some of the browsers have a menu item, albeit often hidden away where a user may not find it, for text resizing.

When it comes to browsers that are embedded inside another product, such as IE inside IBM Lotus Notes or Lotus Symphony to name just two (and there are many more), sadly we find that there are rarely if ever any options that allow you to resize fonts or zoom pages.

With such embedded browsers you’re stuck with what font size the product designers built in. If your vision is poor, or if the built-in font is tiny, such embedded browsers can deliver a very poor reading experience.

Here’s my “how to” tip for today, which should assist you for all those cases where the embedded browser happens to be Internet Explorer, and this is the majority of cases.

Download and install the FREE EasyRead tool from Iconico. This provides two browser toolbar buttons labelled '+' and '-' (for Zoom In and Zoom Out respectively).

But these two buttons are not available for the embedded browsers, so instead you can make use of the similar EasyRead context menu options ‘EasyRead +’ and ‘EasyRead –‘ which, of course, are displayed when you right-click on a page. These context menu should work for you in most embedded browsers.

For example, below is what you might see from the embedded IE browser of IBM Lotus Symphony (similarly for Lotus Notes, and quite a few other situations). The two context menu items are circled:

(Click for a larger image)

Issue resolved -- in most cases, at least.

Technorati Tags: Usability,Text Size,Readability,Legibility,Embedded Browser

Manipulating images resources directly in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

2009-10-19T10:53:00.003+11:00

See my suggestion for two new Lotus Notes formula language functions for programmatically manipulating images in Notes Client and Web browser environments, and please visit IdeaJam to place your vote on my idea.

Visit...

New formula language functions: @SetImageResource and @GetImageResource

Internet filtering by ISPs? The ACS looks at technical pros and cons

2009-10-13T23:53:00.001+11:00

Internet filtering is a contentious issue here way Down Under in Australia, as it is in other countries.

If compulsory ISP filtering is introduced in Australia -- as is possible, or maybe likely, in the not-too-distant future -- the ACS (Australian Computer Society) has just released a report recommending the creation of an independent oversighting system and an annual auditing process for blackIists.

It makes interesting reading. Take a look at the news release and the full report is downloadable in PDF format.

Much of what it says of course will apply in other countries.

How Aussies succumb to e-mail fraud (and other online evils)

2009-10-13T15:11:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I penned an article about a favourite e-mail tracking tool of mine, eMailTrackerPro, see here.

Following that up, I’d like to point out that the Australian Institute of Criminology has just published a report related to that:

Consumer fraud in Australia: costs, rates and awareness of the risks in 2008 (by Russell Smith and Carolyn Budd).

Abstract

This paper examines the current evidence of the cost, extent of and awareness of consumer fraud in Australia. In 2008, the ABS found that approximately five percent of the Australian population reported being victimised by consumer scams, with personal losses reaching almost $1b. This paper compares the findings of the ABS survey with those gathered by the AIC during the annual fraud awareness-raising activities conducted by the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce. In 2008, a self-selected sample of 919 respondents to the AIC’s online survey reported being victimised by a wide variety of scams, including those relating to fictitious lotteries, phishing scams, financial advice and other attempts to elicit personal information from respondents. Individuals from all age groups were targeted in these scams, with older Australians being victimised to a similar extent to those in their middle years. Armed with an understanding of the nature and scope of the risks, consumer protection and other regulatory agencies can tailor their fraud prevention activities to maximise their impact—therefore reducing the extent to which consumers take up offers which are too good to be true.

Remember that, it applies globally (and in outer space too, I suppose):
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

Tools I like – eMailTrackerPro

2009-10-12T17:07:00.001+11:00

A nice tool that I use every now and then to delve into the origin of a particular message is eMailTrackerPro from Visualware.

I’ve received many spam and suspicious e-mails over the years (nearly two decades as an active Web user). I’ve archived them all, an interesting collection they do indeed make!

By the way, this is the first in an occasional series about PC tools that I use and which I like enough to recommend to you – otherwise, I wouldn’t waste your time. And lest you doubt my motives, the products that I describe will in nearly every case be either freeware or paid for by myself.

For example, today I got this “Nigerian 419 scam” message:

From Miss Sarah Jones
Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire.

(CONFIDENTIAL MESSAGE)
Dear

Good thing to write you. I have a proposal for you.This however is not mandatory nor will I in any manner compel you to honour against your will.

I am Miss Sarah Jones, the only daughter of my late parents Mr.and Mrs Jones. My father was a highly reputable busnness magnet-(a Cocoa Merchant, Diamond and Gold Dealer)who operated in the capital of Ivory coast during his days. It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously in France during one of his business trips abroad on 2nd March 2008.Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth! My mother died when I was just 4 years old,and since then my father took me so special.

Before his death on 2nd March 2008 he called the secretary who accompanied him to the hospital and told him that he has the sum of Seventeen Million,Seven Hundred Thousand United State Dollars.(USD$17.700) deposited in SECURITY COMPANY in Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire.

He further told him that he deposited the Consignment in my name as the next of kin,and he registered the Consignment as Family Valuables and finally issued a written instruction to his lawyer whom he said is in possession to handle all the necessary legal documents of the Consignment which he deposited in the SECURITY COMPANY and he instructed the lawyer to handover the documents to me whenever I need it.

I am a university undergraduate and really don't know what to do.

Now I want a foreign partner who assist me to retrieve this consignment from the SECURITY COMPANY in Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire .

This is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast.The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life.I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this regards.

Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.

Now permit me to ask these few questions:-

1.Can you kindly tell me what the type of a profitable venture this fund will uesd to invest avoid waste of it.

2). Can you honestly help me as your daughter?

3). Can I completely trust you?

4). What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you after you have collected this consigment on my behalf?

Thank you so much.

Yours Sincerely,
Miss Sarah Jones

Please reply me in my private email address sarah209jones03@yahoo.co.jp for more details

Where did it come from (precisely, or as near as can possibly be determined)?

Well, I fired up eMailTrackerPro, copied the e-mail’s header info into the Windows clipboard, from where it automatically got pasted into eMailTrackerPro, thus:

Clicking on the Advanced Trace option yielded, after a few seconds hopping around the globe, the following earth map view and trace route table:

And selecting the View Report option (circled) gave a browser page like this:

Starting in central Africa and ending in south-eastern Australia. Easy, eh?

SDMS Version 4.5.00 for Lotus Notes/Domino released

2009-09-30T02:10:00.001+10:00

SDMS is a very popular free “simple document management system” for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino:

SDMS incorporates our NotesTracker capability, which enables comprehensive tracking of database activities for usage details (document creates, reads, updates, deletes, pastes, mail-ins, view or database opens, etc) and for monitoring database compliance (who did what, when, and where).

See our home page asiapac.com.au or notestracker.com for the download link to the current production version 4.5.00 of SDMS.

The e-mail merge feature was enhanced, as requested by a user of SDMS, now allowing any of the user's mail views and folders to be selected as the source of mail messages to be merged:

Previously, just the Inbox was available for selecting memos. This view shows a merged mail memo:

Also added was an agent to import SDMS documents from a different SDMS database into the current one (very useful, for example, when upgrading to a newer SDMS version).

You can better tailor the SDMS page header area, by specifying your own database logo image together with your website URL or your e-mail contact address.

Notes client header, showing user-specified logo (and logo description) plus website link:

Web browser header, showing that (if you like) for the Web environment you can set up a different user-specified logo and logo description:

And as you might expect, there are various usability improvements. Plus some bug fixes, of course!

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,SDMS,Document Management,IBM,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino

Lotus Notes 8 – windows title withdrawal syndrome?

2009-09-26T18:11:00.001+10:00

For application support and development compatibility testing, I run up to four or five different versions of Lotus Notes on my system, at times several them concurrently in virtual machines. This can get a bit confusing at times: it’s quite easy to find yourself working in the wrong Notes version’s window.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been taking advantage of one of the NOTES.INI settings that enables you to modify the window title and display whatever text you desire – refer to the Window_Title setting at IBM developerWorks.

For version 7.0.3 (running in the virtualized Windows XP Mode of Windows 7 Ultimate), I have:

Thus, the Notes Client displays:

For no particular reason, until today I hadn’t gotten around to trying this with Notes 8, and for the Release 8.5.1 managed beta refresh I set up the Standard (eclipse-based) Notes Client’s NOTES.INI file like this:

However, the modified window title text did NOT appear in the title bar:

Why not? In my dotage did I miss something obvious here, or doesn't this work (at least, for release 8.5.1)?

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes 8 NOTES.INI Window_Title Title Bar IBM developerWorks

Please help Marek to solve his “dual Notes” problem

2009-09-25T21:29:00.001+10:00

I’ve blogged several times about how to install multiple versions of Lotus Notes and Domino (releases 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) on a single system.

The most recent article was Coexistence of Notes 7 and Notes 8 on the same system. The following comes as a consequence of one reader contacting me to see if I could provide assistance with a problem that he has encountered.

Below is Marek’s outline of his problem, which I’ve taken the liberty to paraphrase slightly since he’s based in Europe and English is not his first language:

We are using in our company dual Notes, but not 2 installations of different notes but it is created with a VBS script a particular copy of the original installation. So we are running on 2 notes clients which are connected to 2 different servers with different databases.

I am working now on a VBS script, and am having problems with connecting to the right Notes session.

If I use Set Session = CreateObject("Notes.NotesSession")
it connects to the session of the first-started Notes client.

The problem is if somebody starts the wrong Notes client as the first the script just breaks down with an error message like “database not found”.

I was already thinking about how to identify the [appropriate] session and then switch it. Am able to identify the session (every session has his own INI where is stated the server and other login details) but I’m unable to switch the sessions.

The second idea was to register the nlsxbe.dll but both Notes clients are using the same nlsxbe.dll so this does not help.

I would really appreciate if somebody could help or come up with some good ideas and help move me forward.

Now, if you read my blog posts, it’s apparent that Marek is attempting something completely different from simply installing multiple Notes clients on a single system. His problem is a design/coding issue, not an installation/configuration issue as such (although I suppose that some configuration option or other just might have some effect on what’s he’s trying to accomplish).

Marek’s working in an area of Notes programming to which I’ve been little exposed, therefore I’m going to “pass the buck” over to the wider Notes development community. Do any of you have experience in this area (interfacing with VBS scripts) and are you able to give Marek any tips that will help him to achieve his objectives?

If you can help in any way, please reply to this post and/or contact me (for example via the home page of Asia/Pacific Computer Services, asiapac.com.au or notestracker.com) so that I can pass on to you Marek’s contact details, which I’m loath to include here in case the spammers get his e-mail address. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Coexistence of Lotus Notes releases 7 and 8 on the same Windows 7 system (using the new Windows XP Mode)

2009-09-25T21:28:00.001+10:00

Back in February 2009 I blogged about Coexistence of Notes 7 and Notes 8 on the same system.

In previous years, I had written about how to install multiple versions of Lotus Notes and Domino (releases 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) on a single system, but from now on I’m going to stop bothering with releases earlier than Notes 7.

Specifically, at the moment I’m focussing on Notes/Domino 7.0.3 and Notes/Domino 8.5.1 -- I’ve been running the managed beta of 8.5.1 for a while, and liking it a lot. My main concern is that apps that I develop or modify under release 8.5.1 should be as compatible as possible with release 7.x, and thus most likely with release 6.x, which should cover the great bulk of Notes users.

Around two months ago, I experienced a motherboard failure, and my local hardware expert gave me the bad news that while it was still under warranty I’d be without it for at least a couple of weeks while it got repaired. So I reluctantly agreed to buy a new motherboard as a rapid solution, but being newer it obstinately refused to recognize the fifth hard disk drive under Windows XP (which had no problems recognizing it). Sadly for me, I was informed that I needed to upgrade to “a more modern operating system” ... I had a strategy of staying with Windows XP for a couple of years more, but (needing to remain compatible with what my clients were using) it could only ne Windows Vista, which I dislike – or, he suggested, why not skip Vista and go to Windows 7 (which was close to being finished now)?

So now I’m using Windows 7, the “gold” or RTM version. What’s more, it’s the 64-bit version, so that at last I can use more than 4 GB of RAM to support running lots of concurrent tasks, such as multiple VMs with various versions of Lotus Notes/Domino, and other such nerd’s dreams.

Indeed, in one of those earlier posts, I already recommended running side-by-side VMs as being the cleanest way to support multiple Notes/Domino releases on a single machine. Here I say “cleanest” because each virtual machine has its own Windows registry settings intact.)

I have a mere 8 GB of RAM installed (four 2 GB cards) because 4 GB cards were unobtainable at the that time, even though I aspired to having 16 GB, but 64-bit Windows 7 seems to manage RAM fairly well and for the moment 8 GB seems adequate.

I also took the opportunity change from a dual-core to a quad-core processor, so as to run more concurrent processes (managed by the very nice Process Lasso, highly recommended for the serious nerd). And now that I’ve gotten the repaired motherboard back, I’ve used it to set up a second system and have commenced a regimen of system-to-system dynamic backup (with around 6 terabytes of hard disk available), not really much more expensive than purchasing one of those relatively a “dumb” dedicated external storage devices.

Blimey, when I started at IBM way back in 1970, not even mainframes had anything like this much power, and even if they had existed they would have been unaffordable for an individual (millions of dollars)!

I chose to install Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) edition, and because I made sure that I got a new processor that incorporated with the requisite hardware virtualization support -- see the Windows Virtual PC website. It explains that “Windows Virtual PC requires a CPU with the Intel® Virtualization Technology or AMD-V™ feature turned on.”

I’m able to load Windows XP Mode (which is available only with Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate). Windows XP Mode is a licensed download for Windows XP Professional (with Service Pack 3) running under Windows 7 Virtual PC. Below we see the XP Mode window opened in the top center monitor, with the Lotus Notes 7.0.3 Client workspace opened inside it.

I do find that Windows XP Mode is quite seamlessly integrated with the Windows 7 host, I have found it to operate more closely like a stand-alone Windows XP machine than virtualised clients that I had used previously, such as Lotus Notes Client running inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or Sun VirtualBox.

On the top center monitor we see Windows XP Mode (which is a license, included with both Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate versions, for Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 running under Windows 7 Virtual PC), and open inside it is the Lotus Notes 7.0.3 workspace.

Bottom left is the Domino 8.5.1 Administrator managed beta client, with the Domino Server 8.5.1 (64-bit) console overlapping it in front.

Bottom center shows the workspace for the Lotus Notes Client 8.5.1 managed beta (with Windows Live Writer underlying it, Microsoft’s excellent Microsoft desktop productivity tool that I’m using to write this and all my other blog articles).

Bottom right is the Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.1 managed beta, which offers a major opportunity for designing and developing some amazing new Lotus Notes and Domino applications.

I really do need two more monitors, don’t I, so that I can run even more things at once!

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes 8.5.1,Lotus Domino Server,Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.1,multiple Lotus Notes releases,Windows 7,Windows XP Mode

Does Notes/FX work properly with Lotus Notes 8.5? … Help badly needed.

2009-08-04T21:51:00.001+10:00

A new client has asked me to help redesign and modernize their key revenue-generating Lotus Notes application. They want to add new function and utilize all the latest Notes/Domino 8.5 capabilities to implement up-to-date look and feel

Generating all sorts of official letters and forms is a crucial part of their operations. In the current application, Lotus Notes/FX is used to automate the transfer data fields between the Notes database and all sorts of Lotus WordPro documents. We’re aiming to replace WordPro with Lotus Symphony and use LotusScript (or whatever) to perform the field updates.

In one of their two offices, yesterday they upgraded Notes/Domino from Release 6.0 to Release 8.5 – and immediately ran into a problem. Notes/FX is not working properly in the Notes 8.5 Client, creating what appears to be a WordPro document with blank fields.

(However, when the WordPro docs are opened later they DO have the expected data in the various fields. It’s just that is is extremely off-putting, to say the least, for the fields not to be visible at the time of generation.)

Is this one of the known UI bugs under Notes 8.5, with Notes/FX and/or OLE and/or WordPro 9.8? I conducted a number of searches, but didn’t come up with any problem reports about it. (Indeed, there are surprisingly few mentions of Notes/FX in general.)

The redesign (to use Symphony, etc) is only in its formative stages, so we’re urgently looking for a fix or workaround that will enable the fields generated by Notes/FX to be visible [as they were under Notes 6.0, which fortunately is still installed in their other office].

Every day counts. Any rapid feedback/assistance from knowledgeable IBMers and the Notes community will be greatly appreciated.

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