Short summary of Swedish g33k date

Yesterday, May 24th 2007, the first g33k date took off at the premises of Ekakan, who acted as host, with an impressive collection of talented Notes/Domino developers and celebrities present.

It was very successful and I am quite sure everybody got something valuable out of it. Johan Känngård and Joachim Dagerot were keynote speakers and talked about different subjects, mostly in some way connected to the web. Johan Känngård has written a good summary about the event and also put his presentation and examples available for download on his blog. Joachim Dagerot has also posted a blog entry which is a follow-up on a subject that came up yesterday.

Next occassion will probably be after the summer in september or something like that. I guess it depends on who's hosting it and the interest and availability of everybody.

Here's a picture of our talented fellow N/D bloggers/developers and keynote speakers from yesterdays success.

Johan Känngård & Joachim Dagerot


Joachim Dagerot


Technorati tags:
g33k date, g33k meet, Lotus Notes, Domino

Flickrvision

I read on Next Generation Internet about Flickrvision. It's a really cool service accesible directly on the website which let's you watch as images are uploaded to Flickr in real time. Take a look at a subwindow below or click on the link for the site.



Technorati tags:
flickrvision, Flickr, Google maps

IBM Education Assistant for Lotus Software

Here's a tip if you need another learning resource.

IBM Education Assistant for Lotus Software provides help for Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Lotus Expeditor, Lotus Sametime and WebSphere Portal for different versions. The help is divided into text, video and audio.



Technorati tags:
IBM Education Assistant, Lotus Software, Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime, Expeditor

Widgets are really cool!

I found the Yahoo Widgets Engine when I was browsing IBM's community site IBM Web Innovation, which itself is pretty cool. Find more similar spaces or create your own if you miss one at developerwork community topic spaces.

Downloading the Yahoo Widget Engine will grant you access to to download around 4000 different widgets. I just started play with it and some useful and/or funny ones are widgets for displaying:

• Wheather
• Flickr photos
• Notes mail
• Clock
• Recipes
• IBM information like news, stocks, promotions, general search or the employee directory. The last one is pretty handy. It actually gives me information like email, phone number, city and country for any IBM employee in the world (not Sam Palisano though... hmm..). I can recall several times when I wanted contact information and had some trouble finding it.
  
  Here's a screenshot from the IBM Widget showing search results from the Employee Directory. This one is public available information of Ed Brill's contact information.
  
  
  
  
• radio
• gmail
• itunes player
• del.icio.us
• and much more

Just click on the widget in the widget bar and a window will open the actual widget, like the IBM widget in the screenshot above. I really enjoy web-based widgets to put on your blog and so on and desktop widgets have not really been working for me earlier. I'll give it a shot now and see if it becomes useful to me.

More widgets here for websites and desktops (thank's Alex).

Technorati tags:
Widget, Yahoo, IBM, Desktop

Learn Java with Head First Java

While the platform for Lotus Notes, Domino and Sametime applications changes, the need of understanding Java grows bigger. Although IBM is designing their new development tools to minimize the need for new learning curves when it comes to development I still believe that you as a Domino developer (and Domino administrator) is better off understanding what Java is, how it works and it would certainly not hurt learning how to develop some in it as well.

I made the decision to learn Java a few months ago and to actually do it this time, and really good - you know to be a kick-ass Java developer (to almost quote Bob Balaban). I have studied/tried quite a lot of different programming languages before and looked at both C++ and Java (both object oriented) before but never really gone into the depth of it. But I have tried, several times. I have bought books (read the first chapters before I found something more interesting to do) and read tutorials on Internet and that has helped me to some point of course but when it comes to Java (in my opinion) it's a lot about understanding and a barrier to climb before you get it and fully can enjoy it and really make use of it. But once you have climbed that barrier you just keep going and nothing will stop you. And then it is up to you to decide whether you want to use your understanding of Java in what you do today or if you want to focus more on it and keep learning more like servlets, Java beans, JSP and whatever is out there.

What made me climb the barrier (I think I really got over it a couple of weeks ago) is an excellent book that I have to tell you about, it's called Head First Java and covers Java 5.0. Give it a chance although it at first almost feels you're going back to the early school years when briefly looking through it. It is a lot of pictures and a lot of explaining but that's what's so good about it. When you have read the first chapter you should be as excited as I am. And you don't have to be a newbie, in fact you shouldn't. You should have some basic knowledge about programming to get the most out of it I think. If you do, go ahead, you're gonna love it.

Here's a sample from Google Books (thanx Thomas).

The authors of the book has a blog as well called "Creating passionate users". And there are a few more books written in the same manners, take a look at them here.

Some Java-resources:

• J2SE 5.0 API Specification
• The Java tutorials
• Lotus Notes and Java
• Java Ranch

Technorati tags:
Java, Head First Java, Lotus Notes, Domino, IBM, Learn Java

Domino Best Practices Guides

Lotus Support has started blogging and in their second blog post was a table of the currently published best practices guides which (although it's a lot of reading) is a must reading for admin guys. Haven't read them all but I will.

If you in the last couple of months already have seen some of them be aware of that some more were published in the beginning of May and there are even more to come. Keep on eye on the Notes from Lotus Support blog for updates.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Best Practices, Guide, Administration

New notes.ini settings page

I read on Domino Blog that there's a new page on developerWorks with public notes.ini variables with descriptions, examples and comments.

-- UPDATE -- View of new notes.ini variables from the Notes/Domino Fix List

-- UPDATE -- I posted a comment on Domino Blog where I was pointing out that the list seems kind of small especially when compared to another Notes.ini list called the DrCC Notes.INI Reference. Amy Smith replied: When the notes.ini info was in the admin help, we could only update it at major releases. It was hard to keep up with all the new .inis being created. Now, when a new Notes.ini variable is created, or an existing one changes or is rendered obsolete, that info can be updated on devWorks fairly quickly. So you can expect to see the .ini list on devWorks increase soon. Currently, the existing Notes.ini documentation from 7.0 has been migrated to devWorks. We are now in the process of gathering new and updated notes.ini info for Domino 8. We plan on updating the on-line info every two weeks for the time being. That will probably slow down to once monthly after Domino 8 ships.

Technorati tags:
notes.ini, notes, domino

Maintain your web 2.0 collection with Wink

Wink markets themselves as the people search engine. This social search engine searches MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Live Space, Friendster, Twitter and the web which right now according to wink means over 166,845,664 people.

Besides this which is both interesting and useful you can register for an account and state your different web2.0 accounts you have on the web. They have listed lots of them and if something isn't there you can state your own url.

After making some adjustments I copied a script, which can be both HTML and Flash, and put a wink widget on my blog. Whenever I make a change on wink it is reflected in the widget.

I can see three obvious and good ways of using this; the widget to put on the blog, a place which keeps track of all my different accounts and a people search engine.

Technorati tags:
Wink, , Web 2.0, Search Engine, Widget