Friday, January 26, 2007

another killer app from .... google

I was a long opponent of brower toolbars. My browser never installed toolbars. Never. Because of performance issues when loading a new window, because of pottential issues with JS and so on.

That was until today, when I discovered Google Toolbar. What it does so beautiful that I fell for it ?

It allows me to finally keep my bookmarks in sync, be it IE, Firefox, Windoze or Linux. And this is solving one of my business needs: to find information I once bookmarked. I do not remember site names (I'm not a cyborg, not yet). When I have something interesting I know I will need to follow-up, I set a bookmark. Going home on my recently installed Fedora 6, I had no idea how to retrieve that interesting article I stumbled upon. Until today.

Firefox users, for the Bookmarks within Google Toolbar to work, you need to install the Toolbar beta, from here

talk about world dominance, I kinda like Google's dominance instead of Microsoft's :)

a little addition to this blog

I gave up of the feedburner feed aggregator on the right side of the site, as it totally sucked on Firefox - and it showed only 3 subscribers :)

Instead, I added my del.icio.us tag clouds. I quickly hit on my firefox del.icio.us buttons when I find something interesting to read or when I want to refresh my memory where I've read something interesting.

Five Things You May Not Have Known About Me

I was tagged by William Beh

This is fun, so here you have it:

1. I am the kind of sports-person who cannot find time anymore to practice his favorites sports. I've been playing tennis for about 15 years (starting at the age of 5). This is my "pro" sport, hardly can find a partner to compete :)
Also did/like cycling, basketball, karate shotokan (only 2 years, almost got my orange belt when I dropped it).

2. When I'll be 40 (now I have 32) I plan to get myself a powerful ride, something around 500Cc with two wheels. If it happens sooner, so be it :)

3. School was never among my preferences, nor was I an brilliant student. During the years I've learned that lack of brain can(somehow) be compensated with hard work and passion for what you do. But the passion is not always good. I've also learned that it's better to first listen than speak (leave the passion out), so I usually tend to keep quiet.

4. My first car was an ancient Dacia 1300 since 1982 (I think). Never heard of Dacia ? Then I owned a VW Golf II Diesel for three years. I have some adventures to tell about my old cars, this is why last year I've bought a brand new Ford Fiesta 2006, facelift model. No more car related problems and adventures, I get in and drive and that's it.

5. I always wanted to speak English with that specific accent of UK's people. I consider myself quite fluent with English (passed the Toefel exam, btw) but the brit accent is something I cannot learn. I suppose I have to live in UK for this to happen, or start reading Shakespeare not translated in my own language :)

Not sure if the following fellows have already been tagged, not having the time to fully check, but I now tag Andrei Kouvchinnikov and Ferdy Christant

Happy tagging :)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

what I want from Notes 8

These days the Lotusphere is ending. While I haven't got the opportunity to attend it, I did had the opportunity to read from others the new and improved about Notes 8.

And here comes what I'd like to have with Notes 8: I want a FAST email client which should store all my mails locally into a nsf database. I want it faster than my current Thunderbird, in terms of application load and grabbing mails (be it Notes server, POP3, IMAP, whatever). This email client would run as a instance of its own, allowing me to quick Alt-tab and see what new mails arrived.

Then, a second instance of Notes 8 would be my usual development environment, allowing me to open the designer, admin and the client, swithing ID's and scratching my head into the development area.

Notes 8 should allow me to:
- start a 'small' client, having only mails, calendaring and IM - with the speed of light. Perhaps I would need to create a shortcut like 'notes.exe -smallAndFast'
- allow running multiple instances of Notes8 on the same machine.

hmmm...not sure if Notes 8 will be totally Eclipse RCP, but I can start multiple Eclipse instances .... so ... maybe I will be able to do it.

Remember when I said: "forget Notes 7, let it be Notes 8 ?" :)

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Domino forms and the Back button of the browser

Suppose you have a sequence of application steps as following:
UNID?EditDocument -> user change -> document is saved and redirect user to UNID?OpenDocument

More than that, suppose it's an application already working, which performs a JS sumbit(), then the WQS agent kicks in, create the document, then the same agent does :
Print "[/" & web_db_name & "/(someView)/" & docSaved.UniversalID & "?OpenDocument]"
which is basically the redirection.

Where does the Back button fit this picture ? from OpenDocument resulting page, if the user performs Right Click/Back, it ends up in the same EditDocument page and you don't want that. What to do ?

The simplest solution to avoid this:
Instead of printing the redirection URL directly, print the HTML code of a page which performs the redirection on the onload event. The code would look like this:


Sub Initialize

... set doc context, perform some rocket science

Dim sLocation As String

sLocation= "/" + UtilEscapePath (db.FilePath) + "/(someView)/" & docSaved.UniversalID & "!OpenDocument"

WebReturnUrl (sLocation)

End Sub


The UtilEscapePath and WebReturnUrl are two subroutines which you can find in the names.nsf of your server (WebLSUtil library, for Domino 6). Thanks IBM for that, good idea ! It is sometimes useful to have a look into the design of Domino default templates, specific the system names.nsf :)
UtilEscapePath basically changes \ with / so it will comply with URL format. Most interesting is WebReturnUrl:


Sub WebReturnUrl(sLocation As String)

Print _

|content-type:text/html

<html>

<body onLoad="window.location = '| + sLocation & |'"></body>

</html>

|

End Sub


There you have it, the first 'level' of Back will no longer open the document in Edit mode. This is not a full-proof solution as selecting browser's drop-down and going back two 'levels' will of course break this. However for the 'right-click/back' it works and may be sufficient for your application.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

what happens if temp folders are not accessible

until I figure the pictures issue with this blog, let me share something with you.

I discovered the first thing that breaks for a Domino server if it does not have access to the system's temp folders: you cannot upload any file using the HTTP stack. I also suspect uploading files with the Lotus Client also break, though I have not tested.

The temp folders are defined by the system environment variables TEMP and TMP on Windows. In my case these were c:\winnt\temp and c:\winnt\tmp

I have a Domino server with tons of web apps which used to work fine, specially uploading files. After a movement on a newer hardware, I accidentally discovered no file could ever be uploaded to the server. No error msgs in the console, no nothing. Applications looked to be running fine, except this tiny detail :)

Then I started the server as "regular application" and guess what: file uploads were working !

Finally, after three days of alternate searching/working on other stuff and scratching my head, it struck me:
- when I start the server as a service, the LocalSystem account uses above temporary folders.
- when I start the server as "regular application", the server is started in the context of the logged user, thus using other temporary folders.

So, remembering that when uploading files, Domino makes use of the temporary folders to store them until it moves them to the database, it was clear to me that something was wrong with the temp folders for LocalSystem account.

And sure it was !

blogger's uploaded pictures not showing in firefox ?

you may have noticed I am playing with my blog's design a little bit. I would not have done that if I could see my uploaded pictures in Firefox. But I don't. I can only see them in IE. Firefox not working. Why, I have no idea at this time, I need to keep digging a little bit.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

This is my first post this year, I wish all of you a Happy New Year !

Is this picture supposed to worry me already ? :)