Nick's corner

Still here...

2008-09-04T14:28:00.003+02:00

It has been rather quiet here for a while now. I haven't put this blog to sleep for ever but I let it rest for a while. All my attention has been going to the new project Wohill other sub projects

Wohill is another blog that I share with another author. I'll definately take care of this baby now and then anyway.

I have been saying for quite some time now that I am going to put a Java Web Service Consumer notes database here and I also intend to do so. I am only going to modify a few minor things. So for those of you interested in that(and patient enough) it will be here (and on Wohill I guess) with code for both a Lotusscript and a Java Web service consumer.

Take care!

MessageBox and InputBox easily in a Notes Java agent

2008-04-03T10:48:00.009+02:00

When you start to code Java as a notes developer you will very quickly start missing the msgbox and dialog boxes for simple interaction with the users. I did and started to develop my own MessageBox class which certainly could be better. Well, if you go through the Java API and look at the swing classes there are message boxes ready to use - Just what I was looking for.

Use this row to display information to the user:
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Test");

Use this row to get information from the user:
String s = JOptionPane.

showInputDialog("Get me some input dude!");

Example:
Add this code into a new Notes Java agent and run it from the Notes client:


import lotus.domino.*;
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

public class JavaAgent extends AgentBase {

 public void NotesMain() {

  try {
   Session session = getSession();
   AgentContext agentContext = session.getAgentContext();

   /* Display message to user - like Notes MsgBox or MessageBox */
   JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Test");

   /* Display message to user and get user input - like Notes InputBox */
   String s = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Get me some input dude!");

   /* Display the input */
   JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, s);

  } catch(Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }
}

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Java, MessageBox, msgbox, InputBox

PHP's next major release

2008-03-15T08:31:00.007+01:00

I have been working some with PHP but mostly as a script language for building blogs, admin interfaces or standard websites with lookups to mysql db's and similar, not too advanced that is. But the reason I keep doing it is that it has so much capability and there is so much information and examples all over the Internet.

PHP has come a long way and already is an object-oriented language. With the new upcoming release (5.3) more interesting things will come (originally intended for release 6) that makes it more competitive and assuring that it will continue being one of the best. Some of the new things you can expect are native MySQL support, variable static calls (like in Java), enhanced error reporting and namespaces (really cool). Read this article for all this information.

An if you want to get started your self, use the following two sites which is close to anything you need, except Google of course ;-)

- W3Schools tutorial
- php.net

Technorati tags:
PHP, MySQL, OO, Web, development

JavaScript references

2008-03-14T07:34:00.007+01:00

In my series of reference pages (see blog's sidebar) there is clearly one about JavaScript and its surroundings missing. So here it goes. As the others it will be constantly updated and will be here for my own use and hopefully helpful to others as well. Feel free to post a comment for any suggestions to changes or additions on the following bullet lists.

Tutorials/explanation:

References/APIs:

JavaScript frameworks/toolkits/libraries:

JSON/AJAX/blogs/etc:

JavaScript editor:

Technorati tags:
JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, framework, toolkit, references, resources

Get your own animated favicon

2008-01-30T14:22:00.001+01:00

A favicon for your site makes a better overall impression. My blog's favicon is the icon with the white B on an orange background in the address bar, which stands for Blogger (the platform).

It's actually possible to use animated favicons as well.
Either you can make the icon roll from up to down or you can have a marquee horizontel scroll text. It took some time before it started work in IE though and I have had some troubles with version 6 as well, but it should work for version 7 anyway and of course for mozilla.

Great feature!
This site will show you how to do it and provide you with animated icons as well.

www.wohill.com is an example site that uses an animated favicon. Reload the page if you don't see it first, it runs again on each refresh.

I will be on vacation for the next three weeks by the way, so no more posts til then. See you soon!

Technorati tags:
Favicon, Animated favicon, HTML

The Notes.ini ego parameter

2008-01-22T09:11:00.000+01:00

Add this line to your private notes.ini file:

Window_Title=Lotus Notes 7.0.2 mastered by Niklas Waller

and restart Lotus Notes. And don't remember to change the text, even if its ok for me to use it ;-)

Each new window in Notes will have the following title

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Notes.ini, Window title

Folder and embedded view problems

2008-01-18T10:00:00.000+01:00

Notes is not being nice to me right now!

The last couple of days I have been struggling with notes problems that are really frustrating and to me seems like they are limitations hard to get around. If it's possible to get around them it's a lot of work and causes something else in the requirement specification to fail. I have another problem not described below which makes this feeling worse. I might post about that later on.

I posted on developerworks the other day about one of the problems and got a response which were good suggestions but not solutions I'm afraid.

Here is the issue with more information on other approaches:
We have a situation where there are currently 13 databases, one for a specific project and all inheriting from the same template. The prediction is that a new database (with the same template) will have to be created every week for some time. This is not a suitable solution and instead we want one database where all projects can fit in.

The people working with a specific database still need to feel that they are working the same way seing only the documents for a particular project. The database has a frameset with an outline displaying 23 views which are opened in the right frame.

Approach #1:
For each existing and each new project (former db), create 23 new outline entries and 23 new views. Since we don't know how many projects the new db will contain this is not a good solution looking at performace and usability.

Approach #2:
Use an environment variable to set which project a specific person is working on. Depending on the choice, a fixed amount of outline entries would display computed content in a fixed amount of views or folders, based on the environment variable.

Using approach #2 and views:
It is possible to (in queryopen of a view), when clicking an outline entry for the view, perform an FTSearch (for example FIELD field_name = field_value) to find and display the documents for a specific project. However the resultset is not categorized and it has to be, so this is not an option.

Using approach #2 and folders:
In queryopen of a folder, delete any existing content in the folder using "RemoveAllFromFolder" (from previous runs), perform a lookup to a view (getDocumentsByKey on the environment variable value) and put the result (notesdocumentcollection) into the folder.

This last solution works great BUT only when there are no response documents and also only if you are the only one working with the folders since they are shared. When clicking on a folder that has response documents, a message box displays saying:


"Notes error: All related response documents are being removed from this folder along with their parents. (FolderName)".

Also when refreshing the folder afterwards, all documents disappears. This error is due to the "RemoveAllFromFolder".
I can't seem to catch the error either (I think it is 4005) and do a Resume Next or similar because it is not treated as an error. A messagebox appears and the folder is not rendered as it should.

If I uncheck the folderoption "Show response documents in a hierarchy" the problem is gone. However this is not an option either.

So even if I got rid if this problem I would still be stuck with the shared folder problem. I don't won't to create private folders because then I would be stuck with perfomance issues anyway if there are many users.
I guess I could create a new folder each time an outline entry is clicked for a user, populate it and then remove it when the user leaves. But that really seems complicated as well as time-consuming for the user. It can not take longer time than it already does to open a folder as it is now.

Approch #3:
Each outline entry refers to a form which has the original view embedded. Now this is simple and works great BUT now I can't search in the embedded view AND the embedded view can not be auto-collapsed which makes it harder to read.
I tried to fix the search issue by adding a text input field above the embedded view and do an FTSearch but FTSearch is not available for NotesUIViews.
Then I saw a post on developerWorks with a link to an article by Mr André Guirard from the View which has a solution where the search button is an action in the embedded view's action bar. When clicking on it a dialog box opens a new form which creates a query and performs a search.
This does not work for me however as I want it to. Not in the following example database and not when I try it myself. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I am running out of patience though...

I am stuck and either they will have to live with multiple databases as it was before or they will have to use this last example without the search capability (I have added a section in the outline where all views are categorized on the projects so the functionality is still there).

Now I wonder:
#1 Does anyone know a solution or workaround to this folder approach or any of the other approaches?
#2 Does anyone have a suggestion to another solution?
#3 Does anyone have a shoulder to cry on? ;-)

Below is the QueryOpen sub of one of the folders for approach #2:


Sub Queryopen(Source As Notesuiview, Continue As Variant)
Dim s As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim folder As NotesView
Dim view As NotesView
Dim folderName As String
Dim viewName As String
Dim coll As NotesDocumentCollection
Dim vec As NotesViewEntryCollection

folderName = "ReqByReqIdFolder"
viewName = "ReqByID2FolderLookup"

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

' * Get environment variable
value$ = s.GetEnvironmentString("currentProject")

Set folder = db.GetView(folderName)
Set vec = folder.AllEntries

Call folder.Refresh
folder.AutoUpdate = False

' * Remove all documents from folder from last session
Call vec.RemoveAllFromFolder(folderName)

Set view = db.GetView(viewName)

' * No environment variable has been set
' * Add all documents in view to folder
If (value$ = "") Then
Set vec = view.AllEntries
Call vec.PutAllInFolder(folderName, False)
Exit Sub
End If

' * Get all documents from view which are categorized by the value 'value$'
' * Put them in folder
Set coll = view.GetAllDocumentsByKey(value$, True)
Call coll.PutAllInFolder(folderName, False)

Call folder.Refresh
folder.AutoUpdate = True
Call folder.Refresh
End Sub

/ Take care!

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Folder, Search, Embedded view

Conditional statements in html code

2008-01-01T15:20:00.000+01:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2008 is here and I am confident it will be a very good year. My first post this year is no breaking news. Still good to know.

When creating web sites it always comes up browser specific issues where Internet explorer and Firefox don't render the code equally. So annoying... However using css and/or conditional statements in the html code it is possible to launch different html blocks depending on if the browser is Internet explorer or not.

The HTML will run if the browser is Internet explorer:

<!--[If IE]>
HTML
<![endif]-->

The HTML will run if the browser is NOT Internet explorer:

<!--[if !IE]>-->
HTML
<!--<![endif]-->

W3schools has an excellent css reference and this blog post explains and shows examples on conditional statements.

Technorati tags:
css, html, browser, Conditional statement

Second Life References

2007-12-17T15:30:00.001+01:00

Soon, Ekakan will make it public on our new virtual land and office in Second Life. We will be there in person as a company with some cool features and functions as well. Stay tuned!

This blog post will function as a references page for Second Life which, like the other reference pages for Lotus Notes/Domino and Java, is constantly updated.

General:

Development

Articles:

Tutorials:

Other:

Mobile access to Second Life

Technorati tags:
Second Life, lsl, references, resources

When "Recompile All LotusScript" returns an error

2007-12-12T14:01:00.000+01:00

Recompiling all lotussript for a database returned an error today:
"<form name>: LotusScript Error - Syntax Error"

Good thing it did, but it would have been helpful knowing what was wrong. I got no hint at all other than the form name. So I looked at the modification date and by who a change was last made and tried to find the most probable change request. Still its not easy if the form is big with a lot of scripts tied to it.

I opened query save, removed a bunch of code and tried to save and there it was. The other day I had copied over a small table with some fields from another form and forgot about two buttons which were making calls to functions in a script library. This script library was not declared in Options with Use "scriptlib", but no error was raised when saving until now that is. I decided to copy the functions into another script library that was used in this form, modified them slightly and everything worked and went back to normal.

While searching for this on developerWorks I found another probable cause which might be good to know about. When defining a public class in Lotusscript named 'Picture' it can be saved without errors, but when running "Recompile All Lotusscript" the same error occurs.

Technorati tags:
Recompile All LotusScript, Domino, Lotus Notes

Book recommendation for SCJP 5.0

2007-12-06T14:12:00.000+01:00

It's time for a new book recommendation from me. In May earlier this year I recommended the book "Head First JAVA". I finished the book two months ago or so. The book stayed being excellent through the end and it's time for the next step in my mission to be a Java God ;-)

To really understand and remember everything I have combined my theoretical knowledge with practical work in the Domino environment as well as outside in Eclipse since experience is invaluable in the learning cycle. Of course I have oceans of information and experience to learn and teach but we all have to start somewhere.

So this mission must include a certification and therefore the natural choice for me had to be a preparation book for the certification test. I want to be a certified programmer for Java 5 so what would be better than reading a book named "Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5" with the same authors (Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates) as the previously recommended book? The book is really thick and is good exercize for my muscles carrying it around to and from work. Oh, and it is good reading as well. I have completed a chapter now and I am impressed as before. It has excellent coverage of all parts for the certification exam with tips and tricks, exercises and so on in a very structured way. It not only learns what to study but also how.

So go ahead and get this one if you want what I want. Read more on Google book search.

An interesting topic post from 2004 - Does Java certification matter?

Technorati tags:
Java, Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5, SCJP, Learn Java, Book recommendation

Slow database performance

2007-12-01T13:42:00.001+01:00

A database with slow performance can be caused by a lot of reasons. My last two cases were probably due to readers fields and deletion stubs.

If you have a slow view with a lot of documents in it, check if the documents have readers fields, it's a common cause and there are several suggested actions to take. If the user accessing the view only has access to a small part of all the documents it will render very slowly. A page (memory unit) will be read into memory consisting of approximately 300 documents. When scrolling down the view it will be recalculated. If you have access to all documents it will render pretty much as usual.

The other day I was troubleshooting a database which was slow to open with slow views. It had a view that it took about 2 minutes to open. The database had 50.000 documents and 129 views and this and several other views used readers fields so I figured that would be the problem.
I copied the database with all documents and accessed it with the same user and they behaved very differently. The same view that took about 2 minutes to open in the original database was opened in about 5 seconds in the copy. The only difference was the size of the database. The original was about 990MB and the copy started at 108MB.

So I figured that would be due to view indexes. An it probabaly were to some point but together with the view index it turned out that deletion stubs were part of it.

Five days a week, on each day, approximately 40.000 documents was deleted an new ones were created from an excel file (this was an old solution to update them). The purge interval was set to 120 days. So this means that there were about 40.000 * 88 (only weekdays) = 3.520.000 deletion stubs in the database. Since a deletion stub is about 100 bytes (at least it was in version 6) it means that the they used approximately 352MB of the space and the database consisted of a minimum of 352MB of deletion stubs although the count is more impressive.

The number of deletion stubs probably together with a corrupt view index caused the database to perform very slow. Fixup and Updall took a very long time as well and had to be aborted.

A copy of the database solved the problem but a long-term solution is of course to recode the agent to update the documents instead of replacing them and to make the purge interval more frequent.

Technorati tags:
Readers fields,Deletion stubs,Slow database performance, Domino, Lotus Notes

Problem printing rich text fields

2007-10-31T08:10:00.000+01:00

If you have a rich text field that contains a fair amount of information it will print nicely, but when it exceeds a certain amount of information each text paragraph will be printed on a separate page which causes a printout that normally would be of two pages to turn up on 40-50 pages. Really annoying and a waste of trees!

The solution to this problem is to enclose the rich text field in a table which compresses the content in the rich text field and prints nicely.

While testing, look at the print preview which shows the same result as the actual printing.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Rich text, Richtext, Print

Prevent pasting documents into a view

2007-10-23T15:41:00.000+02:00

Short tip today!
If you want to prevent documents from being pasted into a view, click on section 'Querypaste' for the view and type Continue=False in the sub routine.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, View, Paste documents

Print selected documents and attachments from a view

2007-10-18T18:11:00.000+02:00

I have been trying to figure out how to print a document and its attachments when marking it in a view. A colleague had an agent which did the works as long as the attachments only are word documents. But if you don't know if it is a word, pdf, rtf, jpg or any other attachment the code gets long, uggly and still you proabably haven't covered all possible cases. I have however found a solution thanx to Charles Robinson who shows how to shell a windows application to open the attachments.

I have used my existing code with this one and the result is an agent that can run on selected documents in a view, print the documents and each document's attachments. It is run through a view action.

The code is not ultimate at all and there are still some minor problems left like when no application gets associated with the attached file nothing is printed out and that acrobat reader doesn't close when done. Probably fixable, but I am satisfied for now.

As you can see below I have used a sleep command. This might have to be adjusted depending on many different things, but it is needed or else the documents and attachments competes who gets to the printer first and everything is unsorted.

Here's the code. Hope someone can enjoy it!

In Options add Uselsx "*lsxlc"

In Declarations add Charles Robinsons code:

Const SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS = &H40
Const SEE_MASK_FLAG_NO_UI = &H400

Private Type SHELLEXECUTEINFO
cbSize As Long
fMask As Long
hwnd As Long
lpVerb As String
lpFile As String
lpParameters As String
lpDirectory As String
nShow As Long
hInstApp As Long
lpIDList As Long
lpClass As String
hkeyClass As Long
dwHotKey As Long
hIcon As Long
hProcess As Long
End Type

Declare Function ShellExecuteEx Lib "shell32.dll"_
Alias "ShellExecuteEx" (SEI As SHELLEXECUTEINFO) As Long

Declare Function TerminateProcess Lib "kernel32"_
Alias "TerminateProcess" (Byval hProcess As Long, Byval uExitCode As Long) As Long

In Initialize add the following code:

On Error Goto ErrorHandler

Dim SEI As SHELLEXECUTEINFO

SEI.cbSize = Len(SEI)
SEI.fMask = SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS Or SEE_MASK_FLAG_NO_UI
SEI.lpVerb = "print"
SEI.nShow = 1
SEI.hInstApp = 0
SEI.lpIDList = 0

Dim s As New NotesSession
Dim session As New LCSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim object As NotesEmbeddedObject
Dim dc As NotesDocumentCollection

Dim doc As NotesDocument
Dim downloadfolder As String

Dim extrachar As String
Dim filecounter As Integer
Dim filecount As Integer
Dim filen As Variant
Dim antalfiler As Variant

Dim i As Integer, x As Integer, y As Integer

Dim sFile As String

Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument
Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim success As Variant

' Create a folder for temporary storage of files
downloadfolder = Environ("tmp")

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

Set dc = db.UnprocessedDocuments

For i = 1 To dc.Count
Set doc = dc.GetNthDocument( i )

' Print document
Set uidoc = ws.EditDocument( False , doc , True , )
Call uidoc.Print(1)

' Get all attachments and print them
filen=Evaluate("@AttachmentNames",doc)
antalfiler=Evaluate("@Attachments", doc)

Call uidoc.Close
Delete uidoc

If antalfiler(0)>0 Then
For filecounter=0 To antalfiler(0)-1
x=x+1
Set Object = doc.GetAttachment( filen(filecounter) )
If ( object.Type = EMBED_ATTACHMENT ) Then
fileCount = fileCount + 1
If Dir(downloadfolder+"\"+ filen(filecounter))="" Then
extrachar=""
Else
' Extra character in case there are attachments with the same name
extrachar=Left(doc.universalid,4)+"___"
End If
Call object.ExtractFile (downloadfolder+"\"+extrachar+ filen(filecounter) )
End If
Next filecounter
End If

For y = 0 To filecounter-1
sFile = downloadfolder+"\"+extrachar+ filen(y)
SEI.lpFile = sFile
Call ShellExecuteEx(SEI)
Call session.Sleep(2000)
Next

' Delete all files
Call session.Sleep(5000)
For y = 0 To filecounter-1
sFile = downloadfolder+"\"+extrachar+ filen(y)
Kill sFile
Next

'Call TerminateProcess(SEI.hProcess, 0)

Next

Exit Sub

ErrorHandler:
msgbox Error$ & " on line " & Cstr(Erl) & " in " & Lsi_info(12)
Exit Sub

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Shell, Print attachments

Java references

2007-10-13T07:48:00.005+02:00

I decided to create a Java references page as well (see Lotus N/D references for Lotus Notes/Domino and Sametime references) for my own use and possibly for someone else as well. Feel free to leave comments if you have suggestions to other reference pages and I will update this page.
Below is some of what I have come across so far.

Tutorials/References/APIs/Examples:

Java conventions:

Tools/plug-ins for Java conventions:

Certification preparation:

Java and Lotus Notes/Domino:

Java exceptions:

Effective Java exceptions

Eclipse:

Books:

Other:

Various Java links

Technorati tags:
Java, References, Code convention, Development, Certification, Notes and Java

Conventions for Java code

2007-10-12T08:50:00.000+02:00

I like the structure with Java. Although you can create structure with any language it somehow feels as it comes with Java, so it feels easier to accomplish and is kind of satisfying (in a really geeky way). So included in my personal project to be a kick-ass java developer (;-) I am also aiming towards writing nice, readable code that is based on predefined code conventions and guidelines both for the programming part but also for commenting.

You might have heard that really good written code doesn't need commenting. Maybe that's a bit exaggerated but in some sense true. If all variables, methods, classes and so on are named after specific conventions they will be more readable to you and other programmers that might inherit your code some day.

Take a look at the conventions for coding and commenting here:

Technorati tags:
Java, Code convention, JavaDoc, naming, Programming Style Guidelines

XHTML Character Entity Reference

2007-10-11T07:20:00.000+02:00

For all of the web developers out there. Here's an Ajax-based structured reference tool for XHTML Character entities. It lists the allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 as outlined by W3C.

Seems like it could be of good use at occasions!

Technorati tags:
Reference, Character entity, XHTML

Get started with Dojo

2007-10-03T11:50:00.001+02:00

Did you know that you could do this on any web page and fairly quickly? All you need to do is to access some javascript source files and add your own pictures. I might add the fisheye example to this blog later when I have more time.

With Dojo someone else has done the work for you to use for free and it works in any browser (or at least the most common ones).

I am currently looking into dojo and playing with it and I really like the way it's heading. An API (0.4.2) already exists much like Java's although they can't really be compared since the documentation certainly could be better with examples and references and it takes quite a lot of time to understand what to do with the objects if you're new to the toolkit. A really good thing is that you, as in Java, can choose what to include in your webpage. That is you don't have to import the entire library but only for example the widget functionality (dojo.widget.*).

Follow the link to dojo below to get started with several good tutorials and examples. But just to mention it, all you need to do is to download a zip-file and extract it to your file system. Then create a html-file, include dojo javascript source files and you're up and running.

Further on, and this is really interesting, there is a rumour that says that Dojo will be installed by default on the next version of Domino. Now if that's going to happen or not, I don't know, but it certainly gives me another reason to start looking at this.

If anyone knows any other good references or examples that you recommend please leave a comment.

Dojo
The Dojo Project's JotSpot wiki
Alpha API (for Dojo 0.9)
Dojomino: Info and tutorials for using Dojo with Domino
The Dojo book, 0.9
The Lotus Quickr templates contains a lot of dojo code I've been told.

Technorati tags:
dojo, JavaScript, Toolkit, Lotus Quickr

4n0th3r gr8 g33k d8

2007-09-27T09:27:00.000+02:00

Well, I had no doubt about if this was going to be a good one or not, but just to be clear, it was!

This tuesday we had our second g33k date and approximately 30 developers, both customers and partners and actually an IBM:er ;-) showed up to listen to Viktor Krantz and Troy Reimer from Snapps talking about Quickr, dojo, JSON and other stuff. They showed us demos and really good code examples as well.

I have been looking more into the dojo toolkit that Viktor brought up during their presentation and it really fascinates me. It is SO easy to do cool stuff (depending on what you want to do and your level of skills of course). I can't believe I have avoided it before (not intentially though). Viktor explained to us about the pros of dojo and that it most likely will be part of next release of Domino as well, which makes it even more interesting.
Troy seems to be the king of coding structure and commenting just to mention something. A closer look at a lotusscript agent he made was a beautiful sight and I have learned a lot from that too. Thank's a lot guys for a great evening!

Besides this excellent show, we all had the privilege to meet each other and discuss those geeky things we like so much. Can't wait for next time!

Just before and in the beginning of the meeting I got a chance to very shortly show Ekakan's office that I have built in Second Life. I explained a little about what second life is, the purpose, how to build stuff, scripting and business ideas and I hope I am not the only one seeing the opportunities that lies here.

If you are interested in more info about Viktor and Troy, I described that in a recent post that you can read more about here.

And as a last thing I recorded a little piece of video where Viktor talks about Dojo. It's of a horrible quality but you can at least probably here something.

Technorati tags:
G33k, Lotus Notes, Domino, Dojo, Quickr, Snapps, Second Life

New ODS for Domino 8

2007-09-10T08:00:00.000+02:00

The ODS (On Disk Structure) has changed for Domino from ODS 43 to ODS 48. It is not turned on by default though. Add this new notes.ini parameter to either the Domino server or the client and every new application you create will be with the new ODS version:

Create_R8_Databases=1

Upgrade existing databases to ODS 48 by using the notes.ini parameter and perform a copy-style compact (Load Compact -c).

Read more on this technote and on Chris Whisonant's blog who also writes about design compression.

Vince Schuurman writes about compression problems which is caused by the fact that encryption is enabled by default in Domino 8 (which can be read in the comments by Chris Whisonant).

Technorati tags:
ODS, Lotus Notes, Domino, Design Compression

September G33K

2007-08-30T18:39:00.000+02:00

* UPDATE *
Date for september g33k has been changed to the 25th of september

In may 24th earlier this year the first g33k date took off for which the expectations were set high and which also ended up very successfully. Another g33k meeting has been planned for september 25th and you wouldn't want to miss it!!!

This time Viktor Krantz and Troy Reimer from Snapps (US) are keynote speakers and will talk about the relatively new product Quickr and other things I'm sure. Snapps is the official IBM Design Partner for Quickplace (Quickr) and has produced high-quality, free Quickplace and Quickr templates. For the interested you can find templates for Quickplace 7 here and Lotus Quickr 8 templates at QuickrTemplates.com. Snapps are also co-producers of Collaboration University and let's not forget to mention Rob Novak's and Viktor Krantz's very popular session 'The great code giveaway' which is held every year at Lotusphere.

This is a great opportunity to meet other developers working with Lotus Notes/Domino, Java, web etc. and I assure you it will be both instructive, fun and beerish in a comfortable mixture that especially g33ks like us appreciate ;-)

The time for the meeting is set to 06:00 PM and will be held in the center of Stockholm, Sweden also this time at Ekakan's premises. Check here for more details and the latest information.

Sign up here in a comment or send a mail if you would like to join us!

Technorati tags:
g33k, Lotus Notes, Domino, Java, Snapps

Notes/Domino 8 preparation test are out

2007-08-29T11:10:00.000+02:00

IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8 certification preparation tests from CertFX are out:

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Certification, certFX

Java 5 in Notes 8

2007-08-27T13:21:00.000+02:00

Java 5 (Tiger) is included in Notes 8. N/D 8 is backwards compatible though and defaults to earlier API. To make use of the new Java API when writing source code directly in the Notes client some adjustments are needed.

Add the following line to Notes.ini and restart notes:

javaCompilerTarget=1.5

Got this tip from Mikkel Heisterberg on lekkimworld.com.

Technorati tags:
Tiger, Lotus Notes, Domino, Java

"That's not a bug that's a feature"

2007-08-20T20:53:00.001+02:00

feature, originally uploaded by dratz.

Developing Java for Domino in Eclipse

2007-08-16T21:36:00.000+02:00

I try to develop all agents and script libraries in Java rather than lotusscript nowadays. The notes java (from the lotus.domino library) covers many of the functions that lotusscript offers and besides that you have the whole Java library itself which many times makes it more powerful than lotusscript.

The notes client is not the best Java editor though. The type ahead functionality is not there as it is for lotusscript and the lack of color coding makes the code a bit difficult to read. Once you have tried to develop Java using Eclipse you get spoiled and it really is a great thing to be able to develop java applications (like agents and script libraries) for Domino in the Eclipse client.

Here's how to do it:
- Assuming you have a functional Eclipse client, create a new project (for example 'Notes Java') and open the properties for that project.
- Click on 'Java Build Path'
- Click on tab 'Libraries' and press button 'Add External JARs'
- Find 'Notes.jar' and click on open to add the special notes java classes to the build path, which makes it possible to use them in the Eclipse client. (I have the notes 7 client installed and the path was 'C:\Program\lotus\notes\jvm\lib\ext\Notes.jar')

- Create a package in the project and under the package create a class called for example 'JavaAgent'.
- Change 'Superclass' to 'lotus.domino.AgentBase'.

- Now start writing Java code in the Eclipse client as you normally would in the notes client. Copy and paste the skeleton code that always comes with a new java agent. Here's a test agent that uses a notes view to loop through all documents and prints a field value for each document.

package com.ekakan.NotesJava.agents;
import lotus.domino.*;

public class JavaAgent extends AgentBase {

public void NotesMain() {

try {
Session session = getSession();
AgentContext agentContext = session.getAgentContext();

Database db = agentContext.getCurrentDatabase();
View view = db.getView("actions");
Document doc = view.getFirstDocument();

while (doc != null) {
if (doc.isValid()) {
System.out.println(doc.getItemValueString("action"));
}
doc = view.getNextDocument(doc);
}

} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

- To run the code, first compile it in the Eclipse client to create a class-file, i.e. 'JavaAgent.class'.
- Import the class file to a new notes agent using the 'Imported Java' option.

- Save and use in what way you would like to. Whenever a change is made to the java file in the eclipse client the class file has to be imported into the notes client again of course.
- Another option instead of importing the class file is simply to copy and paste the code from eclipse to notes.

One thing that you might come across when trying to run the agent in the notes client is an unpleasant error message on the Java console saying something like this:

java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Unsupported major.minor version 49.0

This means that the JDK used to compile with is of a newer version than the version that the application is running against. Which in this case means that your Eclipse proabably uses version 5.0 or 6.0 while Notes uses 1.4. Check on the Domino console for the JVM version running using the command 'Show JVM'.
In Eclipse, open the properties for the project and click on 'Java Compiler'. In the JDK section, set the correct compiler compliance level, in this case 1.4.

Technorati tags:
Java, Domino, Lotus Notes, Eclipse

Gmail Toolbox

2007-08-14T11:59:00.000+02:00

Mashable has listed the Gmail toolbox with over 60 tools for your Gmail.

A must for Google lovers!

Technorati tags:
Gmail, Toolbox, Google

Fun on YouTube!

2007-08-13T16:56:00.000+02:00

This is hilarious!

And this is just so finnish ;-)

Thanks to my good friends Pär and Kristian for this!

Technorati tags:
YouTube, video, Crazy host, Finnish Disco Dancing

Evaluate in Java

2007-08-06T13:47:00.000+02:00

Something I didn't know is that the evaluate function that is used in lotusscript to take advantage of the power of formulas also can be used in Java agents or script libraries in the notes client. There is a slight difference though:

Here's how it's used in Lotusscript. An array of strings is returned:
strArray=Evaluate(|@Unique(@DbColumn("":"ReCache"; "":""; "summaries"; 1))|)

In Java you make use of the session object to get the evaluate function. A vector is returned. Note that you replace the pipes (|) with (").
Vector v=session.evaluate("@Unique(@DbColumn('':'ReCache'; '':''; 'summaries'; 1))");

To loop through the vector and use the values as strings, do something like this:
for (int i=0; i<v.size(); i++) {
System.out.println(v.elementAt(i));
}

Read more and see examples of the evaluate function on notessidan.

Technorati tags:
evaluate, Lotus Notes, Domino, Java

About mail.box

2007-07-27T08:24:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it is desirable to put mail messages directly into the mail box on the server. If the server has one mail box it is called mail.box. But as you might know it is possible to create several mail boxes to increase performance if lots of mail are running through the system. Be cautious here though, 18 mail boxes is not a good alternative but 2, 3 or 4 might really help. Anyway, when telling the server to create several mail boxes the database mail.box will disappear and instead new mail boxes will be created called mail1.box, mail2.box and so on.

Now, if your application wants to create a mail in mail.box based on some form you probably would like to hard code the name of the database, that is mail.box. But what if the server has several mail boxes? No worries, don't change a thing. You still type mail.box and the server/router will put the mail in the mail box which is mostly available at the time.

It might be good to know that this is not supported officially though.

Here's where you change how many mail boxes to use. The command "Tell Router Update Config" should make the changes take effect immediately or you could just wait 5 minutes.

And here's a code strip as an example of how to put mail directly in mail.box.

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim serverName As String
Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Dim rtitemA As NotesRichTextItem
Dim rtitemB As NotesRichTextItem

Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
Set uidoc = workspace.CurrentDocument

serverName = db.Server
Dim mailBoxDb As New NotesDatabase(serverName, "mail.box")
Dim mailDoc As NotesDocument
Set doc = uidoc.Document

Set mailDoc = New NotesDocument(mailBoxDb)
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("Form", "Memo")
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("From", uidoc.FieldGetText("From"))
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("SendFrom", uidoc.FieldGetText("From"))
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("Principal", uidoc.FieldGetText("Principal"))
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("SendTo", uidoc.FieldGetText("SendTo"))
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("Recipients", uidoc.FieldGetText("SendTo"))
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("ReplyTo", uidoc.FieldGetText("ReplyTo"))'
Call mailDoc.AppendItemValue("Subject", uidoc.FieldGetText("Subject"))

Set rtitemA = New notesrichtextitem(mailDoc, "Body")
Set rtitemB = doc.GetFirstItem("messageBody")

Call rtitemA.AddNewline(1)
Call rtItemA.AppendRTItem(rtitemB)

Call mailDoc.Save(True, False)

Technorati tags:
mail.box, Lotus Notes, Domino

Good reading today

2007-07-09T07:10:00.000+02:00

Web developer links:

And some other useful and interesting stuff:

Technorati tags:
web, development, links

Ekakans office in SL is getting its first shapes

2007-07-01T09:00:00.000+02:00

I have started to build an office for Ekakan in Second Life and well... you have to start somewhere ;-)
Here's what it looks like at this very moment. I/we have great plans, ideas and thoughts for this. Although Ekakan doesn't yet have it's own place in SL, it will soon be for real and I'll let you know when that happens.

The idea is to be visible, to show the company and its competence in yet another medium. Maybe to be able to talk to the consultants the avatar way, read curriculum vitaes (resumes) and hire consultants. There are also plans to offer different types of tips and tricks and to be able to assist in different ways. The place to go to when you need to kill twenty minutes or help with techie questions and issues.

Come to the IBM Sandbox and I will give you the grand tour ;-) (if I'm currently there).

View from outside

Inside the office. Photos of some of the employees on the wall which show short presentations when touched.

There's also a window to lighten up the place and coloured sofas.

Technorati tags:
Ekakan, Second Life

LSL-script for a Second Life football

2007-06-30T11:17:00.001+02:00

I have been looking into the Linden Script Language (LSL) to be able to do more cool stuff within Second Life.

Here's a small script for a football. The ball can be kicked by just walking against it. Touching it causes the ball to bounce up in the air a couple of feet. You can also talk to it by saying "kick" which causes the ball to move with a certain vector strength and direction. "High kick" makes the ball going forward up in the air.

default {
state_entry () {
llListen (0, "", "","");
// Make sure that Physical is turned on
llSetStatus (1, TRUE);
}

collision_start (integer total_number) {
// Get the vector that points from the kicker to the ball
vector diff = llGetPos() - llDetectedPos(0);

// Force the z coordinate up
diff.z = .1;

// Scale the vector to a fixed length
vector kick_vector = llVecNorm(diff)*5;

// Apply the kick vector to the ball
llApplyImpulse(kick_vector, FALSE);
}

listen (integer channel, string name, key id, string message) {
if (message == "kick") {
// Get the vector that points from the kicker to the ball
vector diff = llGetPos() - llDetectedPos(0);

// Force the z coordinate up
diff.z = .1;

// Scale the vector to a fixed length
vector kick_vector = llVecNorm(diff)*10;

// Apply the kick vector to the ball
llApplyImpulse(kick_vector, FALSE);
}
else if (message == "high kick") {
// Get the vector that points from the kicker to the ball
vector diff = llGetPos() - llDetectedPos(0);

// Set the z-coordinate high up
diff.z =500;

// Scale the vector to a fixed length
vector kick_vector = llVecNorm(diff)*25;

// Apply the kick vector to the ball
llApplyImpulse(kick_vector, FALSE);
}
}

touch_start (integer total_number) {
// Create a manual kick vector where only the z-coordinate has a value separate from zero
vector kick_vector = <0.0,0.0,0.0>;

// Apply the kick vector to the ball
llApplyImpulse(kick_vector, FALSE);
}
}

Copy/type the script into the script editor pane when creating/replacing a new script for an object. Remember you have to be in a place where scripting is allowed to modify it and see the changes in action. Second Sweden allows it and there are many more places.

Here are a couple of reference pages to get you started:

- This article is good to get you started. I have taken some lines of code from here.
- LSL Portal
- Second Life Tutorials

Technorati tags:
Second Life, LSL, Linden Script Language, Ball, Script

My first iGoogle Gadget

2007-06-14T00:21:00.000+02:00

*** UPDATE ***
I have updated and improved the Gadget some. It got better looking design and also a new view of the latest content from developerWorks, which is also default. If you added the last one, please update!
*** *** *** *** ***

I was inspired by the iGoogle Gadget that Thomas Adrian made.
You've heard of Google Maps. Now Google Gadgets are getting more popular. And as if that's not enough Google Mapplets are coming as well, which is Google Gadgets that can manipulate a map using the Google Maps API. This is cool!

This is my gadget showing the developerWorks technical library views. Default is Lotus, but you can change that to any of the other views and whether you want to see the summary and how many entries you'd like to see. I have uploaded it to the content directory, where you can get more cool gadgets for your iGoogle.

Technorati tags:
Google, iGoogle, Google Gadgets, developerWorks

Domino Designer in Eclipse

2007-06-13T16:43:00.000+02:00

If you have tried Eclipse for regular Java programming you know how comfortable it is to work with. As you might know there will be a Domino Designer in Eclipse released sometime in the future and Maureen Leland has posted a couple of screenshots on the new progress on this project. Especially the Java editor is beautiful ;-)

Technorati tags:
Domino designer, Eclipse, IBM, Java

Summary of Lotus Nordic Meeting

2007-06-06T22:23:00.000+02:00

Yesterday the Nordic Lotus Meeting was held in Second Life. Thomas "notessidan" Adrian hosted the meeting and although the number of attendees weren't that impressive (approximately 15?) it was in my opinion successful. It was a mix of people from different Nordic countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Norway and with different Lotus skills and experience with Second Life.

The discussions were mainly about Second Life and only brief about Lotus products at this first meeting. Notessidan showed us the stage that he had built for the location and also his Second Life office. We were all impressed and at least I got a bit excited about the possibilities that I can imagine when seing what can be done and when talking to all this people that were there.
We are building relations that seamlessly spans over countries, cultures and different humans with a variety of skillsets.

I can see a small problem with these meetings though that needs some improvement. Although there is an agenda it always turn out to be a slight chaos. People talk at the same time which causes some questions to be mistakenly ignored, someone starts building a big sphere or someone decides to pick up a giant aircraft from their inventory or suddenly someone starts dancing. All this causes some distraction which is completely understandable. Who wouldn't be if it took place in real life?

This is not at all wrong, it is rather amusing and funny actually but when it comes to the point when you would like to have productive and efficient meetings with results something has to be done.

Maybe some sort of guidelines needs to be written for meetings with an intended agenda on how to act to get the results wished for? What do you think?

Some snapshots from the event:

Thomas Adrian, Johan Känngård and me are dancing. Don't remember the other's names.

My first object, a Lotus Notes 8 bench. Do you want it? Contact Nicolas Paravane in SL

Yup, there was beer too...

Technorati tags:
Nordic Lotus Meeting, Lotus, IBM, secondlife

I love my Weber!

2007-06-03T08:47:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I bought a new outdoor grill, a Weber One-Touch Platinum Charcoal Grill, Black. And today I'm a very happy man :-)

When doing the research for which grill I should buy, many people have been into the buy-and-throw philosphy - buy a cheap grill for like 200 SEK (approximately 30 US Dollars) in the spring, throw it when the autumn comes and then buy a new one for the next spring. I am not very fond of that. I think it's better to buy something really good that will last for many years.
And if you take care of it I think it will last, especially if it's a Weber since it won't rust standing outdoors.

Take a look at the product features and technical data here. There is a warranty for 10 years on most parts.

Technorati tags:
Grill, Weber, One-Touch Platinum

Nordic Lotus meeting in Second Life

2007-06-02T10:10:00.000+02:00

On tuesday, 5th of June 2007 at 9PM GMT+01 there will be a Nordic Lotus meeting held in Second Life. It is Thomas Adrian, hosting Notessidan.se, who has taken the initiative to this independent event.
Anybody with a great interest in Lotus Notes/Domino and/or other Lotus software are welcome to exchange their thoughts and idéas and to take advantage of each other's knowledge and burning desire to share their competence and perhaps to make new contacts.

The agenda for the first meeting is:

Questions for people new to Second Life
Tip from everybody on places, activities and what can be done in SL
Open discussions on IBM/Lotus software

We will meet in the IBM Sandbox. Take a look at the community event on secondlife.com about this to easier find your way.

If you're new to Second Life or just want to know a little more there are several tutorials:

Please feel free to contact me when you get there if you need any help. My Second Life name is 'Nicolas Paravane' and Thomas Adrian's is 'notessidan Yao'.
See you there :-)

Technorati tags:
Nordic Lotus Meeting, Lotus, IBM, secondlife

Short summary of Swedish g33k date

2007-05-25T12:23:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-23T18:33:00.001+02:00

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

2007-05-09T14:40:00.000+02:00

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!

2007-05-09T10:28:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-06T07:31:00.000+02:00

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:

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

Domino Best Practices Guides

2007-05-06T06:33:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-03T07:44:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-01T10:38:00.000+02:00

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

Charity fund raising for children with cancer in Second Life

2007-04-25T08:01:00.000+02:00

On April 28th at 1900 hours GMT+01:00 there will be a charity fund raising held in Second Life by the Children's cancer fund and Second Sweden.

It is the first swedish charity fund raising gala in Second Life and artists, both from real-life as well as established artists in SL like Natalie Moody (Therese Åhs) will be performing to raise money for children with cancer.

I'm sure this will be a really great evening, be sure to be there and buy a teddy bear and/or give some money.

Read more at Barncancerfonden's homepage. There's been an interview in swedish television about this as well, take a look at it on youTube.
Here is the location for the gala.

Technorati tags:
Second Life, Second Sweden, Barncancerfonden, children, cancer, charity

Get ready for G33k date!

2007-04-24T13:59:00.000+02:00

Finally there will be an opportunity for some serious geeking IRL!

On thursday, May 24th 2007 a first g33k date will be held in the center of Stockholm, Sweden.

This is an independent forum and not a sales seminar or something like that. Come and join us and listen to interesting speaches, hook up with other people interested in the same things you are and just be yourself... and why not have a beer? Few things match like g33k talk and beer.

On this first meeting sponsored by Ekakan Joachim Dagerot and Johan Känngård will be the main speakers. Hopefully this will be the first in a long row of successful and popular g33k dates.

The subjects to speaches and to the g33k meetings will be a wide variety of interesting topics - from Notes/Domino and Java to Web technologies. You have a voice, make it heard!

Everyone who is interested in Notes/Domino development and administration combined with Java, web and whatever are most welcome. It doesn't matter if you're a consultant or a regular employée as long as you have a burning interest [geek].

However what we would like you to do is to announce your wish to join us so that we can plan for food, beverages and premises. Send us an email or post a comment!

Welcome!

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

My first Sametime 7.5 plugin

2007-04-17T18:20:00.000+02:00

This is funny and opens up a lot of opportunities.

All you need is Eclipse, a web server and a Sametime 7.5 connect client. I used Apache Tomcat 6.0.

I read and followed the steps in this article from developerWorks and it was quite easy to create and deploy.
The plug-in is the picture of myself in the image below. When the mouse hovers the picture the text 'A nice little Sametime plug-in' pops up. There is also a Click-handler connected to the picture which opens an alert window with some text.

I found two issues that didn't match the article from reality though:

When you want to update the plugin (change text, image or something else) you need to (among other steps) synchronize versions of contained plug-ins and fragments with their version in the workspace. The article says "Click the Versions button" in feature.xml in the overview tab. This button doesn't exist in my Eclipse. Instead click the link "Synchronize".
Another thing that didn't work was when I was going to do "Build All" to build the updated plug-in in "site.xml". This raised an error message "Unable to find plugin: com.ibm.example-iu_". To solve this open the site.xml tab to look at the xml code. Change the version to the new correct version since this has not been updated as it should. It's in two places in the following row.
<feature url="features/com.ibm.example.feature.iu_1.3.0.jar" id="com.ibm.example.feature.iu" version="1.3.0">. Now Build All and everything will work.

Technorati tags:
Sametime 7.5, , Plug-in, plugin, Sametime, Eclipse

Enable the business card photo in Sametime7.5

2007-04-05T15:12:00.000+02:00

I thought it would take a mouse click or two to turn on this feature. It actually takes more than that. You have to be a designer and an administrator but once that's fixed it is done in 5-10 minutes.

I found a complete and very good tutorial at Bingham's blog.
When the Domino 7 server was new and no one really thought about the coming Domino 8 server, the idea was to add a field in the middle of the person form in which the photo would be inserted. But then someone clever thought about the possibility that the template pubnames.ntf might be changed on regular basis and thereby the changes would be wiped out when upgrading to the next server version.

Therefore a similar solution has been recommended by IBM. An empty subform called "$PersonExtensibleSchema" will instead be used to add a rich text field, in which the business card photo should be inserted. This subform is inserted in the Person form on the Other tab. So once this change is made by a designer on the template and the design has been refreshed on names.nsf, each user can add their own photo in their person document.

Before this works a little configuration is needed on the sametime server that is done via the web browser (stcenter.nsf). And finally a restart of the sametime server.

This is how my business card looks like when I have made all the changes.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, , Domino, Sametime75, Samtime, Business card, photo

Faster database copy with CL COPY

2007-04-03T11:04:00.000+02:00

This is a tip that I heard on the Taking Notes podcast, episode 57.

Bruce Elgort has with some help from Thomas Gumz found out a way to copy databases via the console directly on the server instead of through the notes client. This is really good stuff since you will gain lots of time. If I remember correctly from the podcast there was a copy of a database on about 5 GB that took several hours to copy through the notes client but by using this console command it only took about 4 minutes. You can use it to make copies in clustered as well as non-clustered environments and to make replicas, non-replicas and templates.

Thanks Bruce and Thomas for this one, I'm sure many admins are happy now. Read more on Bruce's blog for detailed info on how to do it.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, , Domino, CL COPY, Admin

A Web Service consumer

2007-03-30T11:58:00.000+02:00

Thomas Adrian aka Notessidan has written a small web service for which he provides code to consume it. I had to try it so I did both with the suggested way in an agent using Microsoft's SOAP client and it works fine.

I also had to try using the new consumer service in Notes8. This works very good as well and this is how I did it:

Download the WSDL-file that describes the web service you want to call
Create a script library (LotusScript)
Press the WSDL button and import the WSDL file. When doing this on Notesidan's WSDL file my script library looks like:

%INCLUDE "lsxsd.lss"
Class Notessidan As PortTypeBase

Sub NEW
Call Service.Initialize ("UrnDefaultNamespaceNotessidanService", _
"NotessidanService.Domino", "http://www.notessidan.se:80/A55B53/blogg.nsf/_
notessidan?OpenWebService", "Notessidan")
End Sub

Function GETSIZE() As XSD_ANYTYPE
Set GETSIZE = Service.Invoke("GETSIZE")
End Function

Function NUMBEROFDOCUMENTS() As Long
Let NUMBEROFDOCUMENTS = Service.Invoke("NUMBEROFDOCUMENTS")
End Function
End Class
Now create an agent and use the script library. Type 'Use "scriptlib_name"' in the (Options).
To show for example the number of documents in a message box, use the following code in initialize:

Sub Initialize
Dim ns As New Notessidan
Dim numbDoc As Long
numbDoc = ns.NUMBEROFDOCUMENTS
Msgbox "Number of documents: " & numbDoc
End Sub
Run the agent from the Notes client or from an application in where you want to use the data.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, , notes8beta, Web Service, Consumer

A look at Domino Web Access 8 (beta 2)

2007-03-29T20:22:00.000+02:00

I took a quick look at the new DWA för notes8beta and compared with DWA7. Although the design of the interface are quite similar there are a few obvious differences. Since this was done quickly I am sure I have missed several new features or design differences. Please feel free to add what you know in the comments.

In the mail frameset the 'All documents' link have been moved out from 'Views'. There is also a new "Open mail for..." which allows you to open someone elses mail in DWA as you have already been able to do in the Lotus Notes client for quite some time. Actually it's not just mail. Calendar, To do, Contacts and Notesbook can all be opened for another person. The contacts are now replicated with the mail application in Lotus Notes 8 so true replication occurs and their is no longer any need to synchronize manually from the Lotus Notes client.

There is a new 'online' category link at the top right of the DWA window. The online means that you're connected to the network and working on the server copy. To create a local copy, use the 'install subscription', which is used for offline use.

The little green arrow in the image above also existed in DWA7 although it was blue and slightly different. By clicking the arrow you can filter and search for mail by entry name and column.

There has been a few additions in the preferences as well.

Message Marking. Quickly identify mail that is important to you based on the recipients in the To and cc fields.
Rooms Resources. Allows you to have default settings for scheduling rooms and resources in meetings
Shortcuts. Provide shortcuts to other peoples mail file if you have been given access to it.

Also some facts from the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Reviewer' guide:

DWA8 offers a new preview pane for horizontal och vertical use.
Presence awareness icons are automatically refreshed in the inbox view.
Server-based mail thread are supported. DWA8 mail threads are resilient and can include Internet mail messages.
Support for dynamic view column updates
There is a new ability to publish the inbox through an RSS or Atom feed by clicking an icon.
New calendar filter

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, notes8beta, DWA

A trip to Thailand

2007-03-26T09:23:00.000+02:00

Me and my family just came home from a trip we took to Thailand for two weeks for sun, bath and relax. We stayed at the Dolphin Bay Resort in the village Pranburi, near Hua Hin on the east coast. We took a few trips to other sightseeings and to Bangkok for shopping.

I recommend this place although there might be better beaches. Take a look at the hotel's homepage for more information.

I have uploaded some photos on Picasa for anyone interested.

Technorati tags: Thailand

In need of an interesting 404 page?

2007-03-05T09:20:00.000+01:00

Take a look at 404 Research Lab. You should be able to find something there :-)

Technorati tags: 404

Lotus Notes and Domino references

2007-02-23T14:10:00.012+01:00

References/guides/tutorials:

Wikis:

Code/Libraries:

LotusScript JSONReader and JSONWriter

AdminP resources:

Notes.ini resources:

Education:

Product information:

The basics of Notes view index refreshing

Composite Applications:

Articles:

Debugging LotusScript Part 1

Interesting technotes:

Interesting redbooks:

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide

AJAX problems in Firefox

2007-02-01T10:19:00.000+01:00

I have been writing an AJAX-application that calls one or several SOAP web Services and presents the result on a single web page in different div tags. Due to some css-functionality a really nice look and feel can be accomplished similar to a portal site with many different portlets. In this case each porlet would consist of a div tag. This is all done in Lotus Notes/Domino but can be moved to any system (!?). I will present it in more detail here later on but for now I'd like to share a limitation that bothers me with Firefox or Mozilla browsers in general, maybe others as well.

If you're using AJAX where the requesting page and the Web Service resides on the same domain it works in any browser since the XMLHttpRequest object is univeral to any browser. However if the requesting page and the Web Service resides on different domains you'll find that it will not work in Firefox. An error will be raised looking like this:
Uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open

The error is raised because of security concerns. Appearantely most web browsers (IE excluded) is restricted by default to interact only with resources and services hosted by the same domain. The reason is to keep potentially malicous code from accessing information it shouldn't have access to.

However, as I see it there is an equal need to communicate with Web Services that is not located on the same domain as Web Services located on the same domain. There are two ways to accomplish this:

Digitally sign the Javascripts. Read more about this on Mozilla.org. I started digging into this but got really tired and sick of it since it is required by me to:
1. Download a sign tool and learn how to use that. The sign tool creates a jar-file when executed to point to.
2. Add specific exception handling functions
3. Get a certificate and pay for it
4. Whenever I change my javascript I have to resign it to create a new jar-file to use.
Use a proxy. I don't know how this is supposed to work but the point is that it will work if all requests from the XMLHttpRequest object is passed through a proxy resource located on the same domain as the requesting page

Anyway, I guess it has to be done if you want your applications to work on anything else than Internet Explorer 6, which is what I have tested this on together with Firefox 2.0.

My resources recommendations are:

W3 Schools
The article series 'Mastering AJAX'
The article series 'Call SOAP Web Services with Ajax'

Technorati tags:
AJAX, Web Services, XML, SOAP, Lotus Notes, Domino, portlet

General Opening Session from Lotusphere 2007 in Second Life

2007-01-23T22:54:00.000+01:00

In Second Life it is possible to watch the general opening session in the IBM Theatre. It's pretty cool. Many people are gathered in front of the big screen to see what Mike Rhodin and all the others are saying.

Technorati tags:
Second Life, General Opening Session, Lotusphere 2007

Torture is...

2007-01-22T14:57:00.000+01:00

being at home in the snow and cold when your colleagues contact you in the middle of the general opening session all excited. Damn you Emil... and thank you for the photos ;-)

Appearantely Neil Armstrong is the secret guest this year. IBM was showing there presence in Second Life as well during the general session and I guess that Maureen will tell us some news... At least that's the impression one get's when looking at her latest blog post.

Right now I am following the opening general session in two ways, through Lotusphere Live and Flickr. Here's a photo of the general opening session taken by Emil Wessberg, Mandator.

More about Lotusphere 2007 can be found here:

Technorati tags:
Second Life, IBM, Lotusphere 2007

More on Second Life

2007-01-15T09:01:00.000+01:00

It's addictive!
Thomas put a picture on Notessidan from last night where we're standing next to a bench on an IBM island talking about Notes and other stuff. Later on Alan showed us the Sear's building. Take a look below ->

In Second Life it is possible to buy Linden dollars for real money. Once you've done that it's possible to build your own buildings and other stuff. I have not done that yet but maybe that's the next step to make it even more funny. For example if you're interested in poker there are dozens of islands where you can play poker. I have not tried it myself yet but I'm sure it could be pretty advanced and useful and if you make Linden dollars you can make real dollars out of it.

So far I have spent my time in SL just trying to figure everything out. I have had conversations with people I don't know, people I know of but don't know and a few people I know well. Two days ago me and a good friend of mine, Erik, spent some time there and found a dance floor. In real life I really suck, in second life I rock ;-)
Have a look ->

Technorati tags:
Second Life, Virtual world, IBM

Second Life - a virtual world

2007-01-12T21:11:00.000+01:00

I read a posting on Alan Lepofsky's blog about Second Life. Shortly after that another posting on Notessidan by Thomas Adrian. Both of them seem to enjoy it and I have heard many others saying the same thing. It feels like this topic is about to explode with currently 2.5 million residents and counting.

I actually entered the virtual world second life myself two or three month's ago and had quite fun. I started changing my appearance, tried driving a go-cart, flew around and chatted with a lot of nice people. It is really funny to be there. But you need a computer with som power as in grapics and RAM. Mine can't quite handle it and it takes away some of the fun with it.

I was just in one of IBM's islands, following Thomas' tip. Unfortunately there was almost no one there. Probably because most residents in these islands are from US and they are either working or sleeping when I'm there. I'll keep trying!

Anyway my name in Second Life is Nicolas Paravane and here is a picture of me in the air next to IBM Theatre:

In the mid of november I attended the IBM Software Day in Kista, Sweden. One of many speakers was Torbjörn Johansson. He is swedish but works in New York (I think) close to the management team with strategic issues. He is currently working as the technical assistant for Irving Wladawsky-Berger who is manager for technical strategy and innovation at IBM. It was very interesting listening to him and one of many things he talked about was second life. IBM is as you know very active in this world. He compared second life today with what Internet was in 1994. That says quite a lot about how at least IBM sees the importance of this area.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Technorati tags:
Second Life, Virtual world, IBM

Simple AJAX/SOAP application

2007-01-10T11:07:00.000+01:00

I wrote a simple application that builds an xml-structure, packages it as a SOAP-message and sends it to a web service in another domain. The web service in the other domain handles the response and sends back a SOAP-message that is received, parsed and printed to output. The web service in the other domain in this example is made and hosted by someone else. The client-side code all resides within a Lotus Notes Form.
I apologize for the bad formatting of the code below which makes it more difficult to read. I have to blame the blog tool for this. It's all XML and Javascript.

Here is the example xml-code packaged as a SOAP-message to send to the remote web service:

<soap:envelope xsi="'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'" xsd="'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'" soap="'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'">
<soap:body>
<loginnfo xmlns="'http://remotehost/'">
<signatur>login</signatur>
<password>password</password>
<regnr>1234</regnr>
</loginnfo>
</soap:body>
</soap:envelope>

Here is the the SOAP-message received from the remote server:

<soap:envelope xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<soap:body>
<responsetag xmlns="remote_server">
<responsetagresult>This is the response from the web service</responsetagresult>
</responsetag>
</soap:body>
</soap:envelope>

AJAX-code used to send and receive the SOAP-messages:

var xmlhttp
var url;

/* Create xml http request object */
function createXMLHTTPRequest() {
try {
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (trymicrosoft) {
try {
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (othermicrosoft) {
try {
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (failed) {
xmlhttp = false;
}
}
}
if (!xmlhttp)
alert("Error initializing XMLHttpRequest!");
}

/* LoadXMLDoc function sets and loads parameters and functions for AJAX calls to the remote server using the POST request method. LOADXMLDoc is called by the send button in the form. */
function loadXMLDoc() {
// Create XML HTTP Request
createXMLHTTPRequest();

// Build the url using field values
buildURL();

// Build xml-structure
var xml = createXMLData();

// Set function to wait for response
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=xmlhttpChange;

// Open connection with POST
xmlhttp.open('POST', url, true);

// Set request headers for message to send. Depends on the web service
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('Man', 'POST remoteAddress HTTP/1.1');
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'text/xml');
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('Content-Length', xml.length);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('SOAPAction', 'dependsOnTheWebService');

// Send request using POST
xmlhttp.send(xml);
}

/* Build the URL to the remote server */
function buildURL() {
// Get field values
var sAddress = document.getElementById('sendAddress').value;

url = sAddress;
}

/* xmlhttpChange function listens for a response from the remote server. The response can be either text or xml. If xml is received as below the tags are being parsed and presented as needed. */
function xmlhttpChange() {
// if xmlhttp shows 'loaded'
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
// if 'OK'
if (xmlhttp.status==200) {
// Code block for receving text via HTTP, looking at it and printing to output.
/*
var response = xmlhttp.responseText;
document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML = response;
*/
// Code block for receiving XML code via HTTP, grabbing it and printing to output.
var response = xmlhttp.responseXML;
var x = response.getElementsByTagName('responsetagresult');

for (var i=0; i<x.length; i++) {
var result = x[i].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
if (i==0) {
document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML = "- - - - - Svar från " + document.getElementById('host').value + " - - - - - - ";
document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML = document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML + "responsetagresult: " + result + " ";
}
else {
document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML = document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML + "responsetagresult: " + result + " ";
}
}
document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML = document.getElementById('updateWithResponse').innerHTML + " ";
}
else if (xmlhttp.status==404) alert("URL doesn't exist!")
else alert("Problem connecting to server. Status is "+xmlhttp.status)
}
}

function createXMLData() {
var xmlStructure = document.getElementById('XMLExampleSendCode').value;
return xmlStructure;
}

Currently this doesn't work with Firefox due to some security aspects. That has to do with the fact that it is done over separate domains. I don't know if it is considered as a bug but I do hope so. The error message returned from Firefox is "Uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open". However using IE6 works fine.

Learn more at W3Schools Online Web Tutorials. They offer excellent tutorials that's great as either reference material or as getting started guides. Here's the AJAX tutorial and the SOAP tutorial. I also recommend an article series published at IBM DeveloperWorks by Brett McLaughlin, auditor and editor at O'Reilly Media Inc. about AJAX called Mastering AJAX.

Technorati tags:
AJAX, XML, SOAP, Lotus Notes, Domino

Trying NOMAD

2007-01-04T13:49:00.000+01:00

I have heard about Nomad for some time now, ever since LotusPhere 2006 in Orlando in fact. Nomad is the feature that makes it possible to bring Lotus Notes on a USB stick where ever you go. I was wondering how this would work so now I have finally tried it and it works GREAT!

I read a blogpost on Chris Whisonant's blog where he has made a review of NOMAD that comes with the Lotus Notes & Domino 7.0.2 release.

Chris and Susan Bulloch both recommends that this is only to be used with the Single Notes client install, not the full client. I had at the time testing this only access to the full client so that's what I was using.

A short summary of steps to install NOMAD on an USB stick:

Extract C94QIEN.exe or C94QAEN.exe to some folder. The purpose is to unpack all files and get to the setup.exe file.
Open a command prompt and get into the directory of the extracted files (the location of setup.exe). I don't know about this, but if you have a CDROM ready to be installed with setup.exe you should be able to put yourself into that directory aswell.
Put the USB stick into the computer and note the drive letter (ex. E:)
Type setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=F:\ /qb+" in the command prompt
Use autostart.exe to run Lotus Notes

If you're using the full client package doing this (on a simple install, no roaming) you will get access to both working admin and designer clients. Then just simply create different location documents for different Domino environments. You could for example point out your ID in the location document (advanced tab) for each domino environment and have your different ID's stored on the USB stick. Suddenly domino developers and administrators are no longer bound to specific computers!

Chris suggested as optional to remove some files to release memory, which I did. Remember however that if you are doing this with the full client you need some templates to be able to run the different clients. I had problems with the administration client. Some templates needed (but probably not all) were events4.ntf, domadmin.ntf and log.ntf. The admin client uses these templates on installation to create the corresponding nsf's. So a better thing to do is to remove the templates after installation.

To use admin and designer using only the single client installation, do as Chris suggests, follow Declan Lynch's advice.

Great feature! Could this be a competitor to the roaming functionality? (since this in my opinion has had some functionality problems and probably was released to soon).

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, 7.0.2, NOMAD, USB stick

Plans for next year

2006-12-31T08:16:00.000+01:00

Last year (2005) I was certified as an IBM Certified System Administrator for Lotus Notes and Domino 6/6.5. This year (2006) I was certified as an IBM Certified Application Developer for Lotus Notes and Domino 6/6.5. My plans for next year (2007) will include the update for Notes Domino 7 Application Development and Notes Domino 7 System Administration.

But most exciting is the leap I will take into the Java world by certify as a Sun Certified Java Associate (SCJA) and/or depending on how it works as a Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP). This have to do with me moving on to be a Notes/Domino consultant at Ekakan next year.

Since Java is being used as a programming language in Lotus Notes but mainly because the new products and frameworks of IBM are built on Java and builds in Java it really feels like the right time (could have been sooner) to get great knowledge in these areas as well. I believe that a Notes/Domino developer with J2EE competence is an even better developer. I am very excited about this and will tell you more later on.

As you might have noticed there has been a discussion going on about Java and IBM, about how important it is for Notes developers to learn Java and if the needed Java competence is an Akilles heel for IBM. Take a look here at the discussions:

It has been a great year and I hope for 2007 to be even better.
Happy New Year to you all!!!

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Certification, Java

The Notes.ini Reference

2006-12-13T17:01:00.000+01:00

This was news to me!
I have been wondering for quite some time if there is some kind of library somewhere that lists all the available notes.ini parameters. I haven't got an answer to that so far. Then I ran into The Notes.ini Reference, which lists a very long list of ini-params. I don't know if the list contains ALL available parameters or just the one's that people together have collected with their common knowledge.

If you click on a parameter a new page is open that describes the purpose of it, how long it has been valid, additional information like if there is a need for a restart and so on.

Great Page! Hope it stays free!
Take a look at my personal reference page for Lotus Notes and Domino references where you can find more links to other notes.ini references.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, The Notes.ini Reference, Notes.ini

IBM Lotus Expeditor

2006-12-06T09:22:00.000+01:00

Now, what is this new stuff? Probably something that you really need know and dive into. What's the connection to Lotus Notes, Domino, WebSphere, Workplace, Sametime and so on?
Well, at least for me the questions are many. Although I have been reading quite a lot I still don't get it all. And what can you do except keep reading and testing, after all that's one of the fun parts ;-)

Here is a short explanation from the article 'Developing an OSGi service as a Web Service in IBM Lotus Expeditor', there is a link to it below.

IBM Lotus Expeditor (formerly IBM WebSphere Everyplace Deployment) is a client middleware framework and tooling platform that enables connection, independent delivery, and management of applications and services.

From what I have understand for example 'Hannover' will consume services from the Expeditor platform. Here are a few good links for more information. A good guess is that more information is coming up on Lotusphere this year.

Lotus Expeditor documentation
Lotus Expeditor Forum (currently 3 posts ;-)
Lotus Expeditor product page
Developing an OSGi service as a Web Service in IBM Lotus Expeditor

Three really good blogs that will in some or many ways discuss the Lotus Expeditor:

Jeff Eisen (Chief architect for Lotus Notes)
Mary Beth Raven (Lead project designer for the 'Hannover' project)
Composite Applications for people

Technorati tags:
Lotus Expeditor, Hannover

A success concept with company blogs!

2006-11-19T07:39:00.000+01:00

I believe that it is hard in many companies to make managers and decisionmakers to understand the possibilities and value that company blogs can bring.

I have where I work introduced what blogs are and the businessvalue of them. This lead us to starting company blogs in august this year. Currently there are three employees blogging on working time about their interests which coincides very much with the company’s business concept.

The company is an animal insurance company called Agria Djurförsäkring. One blog is about horses and IT where the author is the CIO of Agria with deep interests in both areas. The second one is about dogs where the author is working for Agria as a handling officer. On her sparetime she work as a breeder and has a kennel. The third blog is about hunting and football, two interests of the third author.

We believe that this is a winning concept, when our employees are our customers sharing their professional skills and interests on their blogs.

Take a look here:
- Horse blog by Pia de Gysser
- Dog blog by Sofie Lönn
- Hunt blog by Mattias Wallman

By the way, the blogs are developed in Domino of course, based on the open source template BlogSphere that you can find on openntf.org.

Technorati tags:
Company blogs, Agria Djurförsäkring, Horse blog, Dog blog, Hunt blog

Introducing the new composite applications blog

2006-11-17T12:53:00.000+01:00

Mary Beth Raven introduces on her blog the new Composite Applications Blog. It is the WPLC Composite Application Team that has decided to start this blog. The team explains the purpose of the blog like this:

It brings together all the key technical architects and user experience design professionals for the major products from the IBM WPLC division (fka Lotus) that provide support for user facing composite applications. These products include IBM Websphere Portal 6.0, IBM Lotus Notes 8.0, IBM Lotus Domino 8.0, IBM Lotus Expeditor 6.1 and future products to be named when they are announced.

I have for some time now been reading information about Hannover thanks to Mary Beth Raven and Jeff Eisen and I think this is a great initiative.

For anyone not knowing what Lotus Expeditor is, here is some information. Jeff has been mentioning it on his blog as well.

Technorati tags:
WPLC, Composite applications, Lotus expeditor, IBM, blog

Compact mail database on client side and transactional logging

2006-11-16T11:38:00.000+01:00

It used to work for our employees to compact their mail databases. They actually got smaller and they got rid of the warning and/or error messages as it is supposed to work.

Then suddenly we experienced an increased amount of people that had problems with the mail database in that they got warning and error messages, they compacted it but the problem was the same.

As any other company we have a lot of things do to and different priorites which resulted in a solution that administrators started to, as people screamed, run "load compact mail/xxx.nsf -B" on the admin console, that is compact database with file size reduction right now. What actually happended was that documents were deleted when the users compacted their mail database but the mail file was not reduced and it should not be either. What should happen is that the server should ignore the white space that still causes the database to look as it is as large as it was before the compact while waiting for the server to perform a real file size reduction. This should be setup as a program document to run once a week or so.

So now everything seemed to work and yet not. Then I came over an article on developerworks that solved our problem.

Some months ago we started using transactional logging, that is we enabled transactional logging. Suddenly the server does not treat white space the same way, you have to force the server to ignore white space by choosing the option 'Check space used in file when adding a note' in the Quota Enforcement field in the server document under tab 'Transacional logging' on the server(s) where the problem is.

Our default option (Quota enforcement field) looked like this:

And we changed the 'Quota enforcement' field to look like this:

Restart the server to make the changes take effect. The outcome/result of this is that users can compact the mail file on their own and get rid of the warning/error messages the way it is intended.

*** Update ***

The reason for this behaviour can be found in this short technote.

If the Notes database is not logged (Transactional Logging disabled), an in-place with file size reduction compaction will be performed (equivalent to -B).
If the Notes database is logged (Transactional Logging enabled), then a simple in-place compaction will be performed (equivalent to -b).

So for the second option the fix described earlier has to be done to get file size reduction.

Note that for version 7 and later releases the functionality to compact a database is handled by the Update task.

Technorati tags:
Lotus Notes, Domino, Compact mail database, compact, Transactional logging, White space

Google acquires YouTube

2006-10-10T02:47:00.000+02:00

Google will buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

"Combination will create new opportunities for users and content owners everywhere."

When the acquisition is complete, YouTube will retain its distinct brand identity, strengthening and complementing Google's own fast-growing video business according to the presscenter on google.com

As always when it comes to Google it is the question and issue of monopoly and if Google is getting to big. But I think that this is great to have all content on both the existing Google Video and soon YouTube indexed on the same search engine. Maybe Google has new exciting plans regarding this?

Technorati tags: Google acquires YouTube

A guided tour onboard Östanå I

2006-09-17T09:47:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I was on a guided tour in the swedish archipelago outside Stockholm on the boat Östanå I from Strömma kanalbolaget. It was a 2,5 h trip and the weather was sunny and warm.

It is only a few minutes by boat from the central of Stockholm to reach these beautiful areas.

To the left I caught some sunrain with the camera.

To the right a big ferry that goes to and from Sweden and Finland. Those ferries are a great party place for one or two nights.

Islets and rocks. We are in the inner Stockholm archipelago and don't get very far on a little more than an hours boatride out. When you get to the outer areas the environment of the archipelago looks quite different.

In Sweden we have something called "Allemansrätten", which means that everybody have the right to and access to walk on all land or
islands even if it's private. You must not however destroy and missuse anything. As long as people don't missuse this it is a great thing we have. I can whenever I want to go or sail anywhere I want to and sit down and eat a meal or watch some birds or whatever.

The inner of Stockholm is also beautiful itself with a lot of water and trees.

To the right is a photo of a part of Stockholm harbour. The land in the back is Djurgården where an amusement park called Gröna lund is located and Skansen which is a miniature of sweden.

For more photos from this occasion visit http://flickr.com/photos/waller

Technorati tags: Swedish archipelago, Stockholm

Lotusphere 2007 getting closer

2006-09-14T10:26:00.000+02:00

In January 21-25, 2007 it is once again time for Lotusphere. I was there last year and had a really good time. It was my first time as well but from what I've read it was the best lotusphere so far and I understand that because it was a great arrangement with a lot of exciting news both on the notes/domino side but also for websphere and workplace and for me it was the start to get to know web 2.0. I wish I could go again this year, but that's not possible. Maybe 2008, we'll see.

Anyway, take a look at the registration page if you have got a chance to go. Also take a look at my lotusphere photos from lotusphere 2006.

I was google earthing a bit a and zoomed in on the swan and dolphin building. It looks familiar but different.

Technorati tags: Lotusphere
Andra bloggar om:Lotusphere

Blogging with Flicker from my cell phone

2006-09-11T08:18:00.000+02:00

Blogging with Flicker from my cell phone
Originally uploaded by Niklas Waller.

It's so easy and funny. Not any breaking news but still...

My laptop and a coffe on the balcony a sunny morning at home with my kids. Ah, that's life!

The web of tomorrow: summary

2006-09-05T20:02:00.000+02:00

I have been at the conference "the web of tomorrow" or "Morgondagens webbplatser" as it is called in swedish. It was held on the 5-6 september in Stockholm, Sweden. The person that was leading the conference and presenting all the speakers is Fredrik Wackå, web advisor on his company W PR & Information. He is also running a successful blog in sweden in where he among many other things lists company- and co-worker blogs in Sweden. I would like to call it the accurate list of serious company blogs in Sweden.

The first day began with a lecture by Fredrik about the social web. A brief introduction to rss, blogs, wikis, tagging, podcasting, ajax and more which leads to more participation for visitors and customers and less control for the one's providing the services. Fredrik and the rest of the speakers together gave us some great and useful links to sites that each and one is a good example of the social web or web 2.0 in some way or that it provides news about it. I will list some of them in the end of this blogpost.

There were many good speakers but I will only talk about a few of them, some people that presented something extra that made me think.

Neville Hobson from ABC was the keynote speaker. Neville runs his own website www.nevillehobson.com but also a site called 'For Immediate Release' together with Shel Holtz, where they publich podcasts twice a week about public relations and technology. Neville has been working with podcasting for a long time and was presented as one of the world premier authorities when it comes to podcasting and blogging.

Mr Hobson spoke about communication of the future. He showed us some research about companies and blogs. It was interesting to find out that blogging still is such an unknown area. Many companies and people still don't have a clew what it is. Appearantely France are more aware than other european contries about blogs, while in Netherlands and Germany many executives still find blogging a mystery.

Neville also showed us how different languages are divided among the current 53.4 million indexed blogs on Technorati. It was surprising to me to see how large percentage that was written in japanese and chinese. English is most common but if you put together japanese and chinese then that's the largest group. Swedish wasn't even listed.

I asked Neville and Fredrik if they could estimate how many blogs there might be worldwide, but as I suspected it is impossible. We know for sure it is more than 53,4 million. Probably around 200-300 million blogs, also depending on the definition of what a blog is as Fredrik pointed out. Sweden proabably doesn't go above 100.000 if you count them all, but that's my own personal estimate.

Mr Hobson also came to the issue of trust as we tend to do when speaking about blogs. The conclusion was that we trust 'someone like me' and not companies and authorities which one might think.

There were lots of other great things about podcasting etc. that I will not go further into here.

Eva Beckman from Bolagsverket told us a great story of their mission to build a site for a public authority in Sweden, Bolagsverket. They had 3 months to build two sites with 5 resources, two informers and 3 system developers. She learned quite a lot during this journey and told us about it. Great speech!

Pia de Gysser from Agria Djurförsäkring (pet/animal insurance) was speaking about adaption for target groups on the web together with participation on the web and the fact that Agrias web is and in greater scope will be the customers web. It was a fascinating 50 minutes about how Agria relates to and communicates with its customers. Agria is in great deal working with its customers, loyal customers, through a social web. Some services for the customers are the image gallery, the company blogs (Pias and Sofies) and some recently released AJAX-based services for presenting popular names of dogs, cats and horses.

Neville also did a podcast with Pia during the conference and posted it on his blog.

Ralf Larsson from Electrolux told us about E-gate, an amongst employees popular company intranet which they have built and now use worldwide. They work hard on this intranet and among other things are many internal blogs. E-gate was ranked as one of the world's best intranet by Nielsen Norman Group in 2005.

Urban Lindstedt from No Digit Media, was talking about search engine optimization. I've heard him speak earlier and read his blog uppkopplat.se and it is always interesting to hear about SEO and Urban has quite some knowledge on this subject.

The last speaker was Jakob Palme from Stockholm university, professor in computer science. He told us about the project Web4Health, a site which has in three years gone from 0 to 500.000 visitors/month without paying anything for advertising. It is not a well-known site by name, but due to the excellent work that Jakob and his associates has put into this site optimizing it, it ranks very high and gets a lot of visitors. One of many interesting things that
Jakob told us was that 72% of all their visitors come from search engines. It must be a very high number. Urban said earlier that 30-40% is a good number. This site is probably one of the best examples of how to SEO your site. I got lots of ideas from Jakob as well.

So summarized it was a good, interesting and educational conference and I am quite satisfied. I can't say that their were any big news for me other than perhaps a short definition of web 3.0 which shortly were described as the semantic web. I will dive deeper into that later on.

Some useful links provided on the conference:

Technorati tags:
Web conference, Web of tomorrow, Web 2.0

Design change in the mail template for Hannover

2006-09-05T19:46:00.000+02:00

Mary Beth Raven says that "Unread messages are now BOLD, not red!" about the mail template in the Hannover client. I find those small changes amusing and I think I will like it better.

Technorati tags:
Hannover, mail template

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Hannover, mail template

Morgondagens webbplatser

2006-09-04T06:11:00.000+02:00

Imorgon tisdag och på onsdag, 5-6 september hålls webbkonferensen Morgondagens webbplatser av IBC Euroforum i Salénhuset i Stockholm.

På konferensen Morgondagens Webbplatser får du lyssna till svensk/internationell expertis och prisbelönade företag och myndigheter. Genom paneldiskussioner och frågestunder är målsättningen att måla en bild av webben 2.0.

Programmet hittar du här.

Ordföranden är Fredrik Wackå. Intressanta talare är bla Neville Hobson från ABC, Pia De Gysser från Agria Djurförsäkring, Urban Lindstedt, journalist och författare och många fler.

Jag går dit med höga förhoppningar om en spännande konferens och hoppas ha något intressant att berätta om efteråt. Det jag är mest nyfiken på är hur mycket nytt det är som jag själv inte sett, tänkt på eller vet om ännu.

Technorati tags:
Morgondagens webbplatser, web conference

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Morgondagens webbplatser, web conference

wink - The Social Search Engine

2006-08-28T02:46:00.000+02:00

wink is a social search engine powered by the people. It indexes tagged content from Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Slashdot and other social bookmarking services and displays them on search result pages.

Create your own account on wink. Search, tag, vote and block as you please.
If you like a page (a search result), then add it to your favourites by clicking on a star. If you don't like it, then block it by clicking in the blocking symbol and you won't see it again.

wink also synchronizes will del.icio.us and it is also possible to edit wiki entries inside wink. An explanation and a reference to wikipedia is presented for the meaning of the search word.

A search plugin for Firefox can be installed.

Next version, wink 2.0, is launched next week.

Read more on Techcrunch for a more detailed description.

Technorati tags:
wink, social search engine

Andra bloggar om:
wink, social search engine

File sharing in Firefox with AllPeers

2006-08-25T22:03:00.000+02:00

I read a blogpost on Webbomedia by Per-Åke Olsson about a new firefox extension called AllPeers. It is a cross-over between instant messaging and file sharing. Files are shared by drag-and-drop to your friends and family.

It is using Bit-torrent technique but no uploading is required. The data is being loaded directly from each user's hard drive and there is no size limit. It is only possible however to share and upload with users on your contact list.

Seems like a great and useful application. Haven't been able to use it fully yet though due to few people in my contact list.

Take the tour and learn more.

Technorati tags:
AllPeers, Firefox extension

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AllPeers, Firefox extension

ScrapeTorrent

2006-08-25T09:19:00.000+02:00

Now, where can I find the latest firefox 2.0 release candidate?
I was thinking about that the other day and don't think it's trivial to find it on the firefox homepage.

There are several options. Search for it on Google or Technorati, read some blogs or post a comment and ask for it. And there's another way, use a torrent site. There's always someone who has already uploaded it.

ScrapeTorrent lets you search 4 different torrent sites and presents the results from each and one of them on the same page with torrent links.

This link searches for everything uploaded about Firefox on:

You can filter zero seeders which is a great feature.

Technorati tags:
ScrapeTorrent, Search torrents

Andra bloggar om:
ScrapeTorrent, Search+torrentsh

The real Firefox

2006-08-23T07:57:00.000+02:00

Look at the real firefox I found at AndreaHarner.com.

I wonder if Mozilla knew about this beautiful animal when they created Firefox?

Technorati tags:
The real firefox, Firefox

Andra bloggar om:
The real firefox, Firefox

Google MP3 Player - a new GMail feature

2006-08-22T23:32:00.000+02:00

I read the Google Blogoscoped and found a blog post about Google MP3 Player. Appearantely Amit Agarwal on Digital Inspiration has been digging into the GMail code and found a MP3 player. It is actually the Google Video Player that can be used to play any mp3 file even without having to login to GMail.

I have followed Philipp Lenssen's advice and put it into an iframe. This way we get a Google-like interface with a progressbar and sound adjustments.

Below is the latest episode from the Taking Notes Podcast - Taking Notes Episode 28:08.17.06 - Sametime on Linux, DominoWiki, Lotusphere 2007, OpenNTF Update, Online Meeting Tips and News.

Now sit back and enjoy this great podcast for Notesoholics from Nick's corner!

or... try it yourself. This is the secret URL -> http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL

Take a look at the source code for info on how to put it into an iframe.

Technorati tags:
Google MP3 Player, Google Video Player, GMail feature, Taking Notes Podcast

Andra bloggar om:
Google MP3 Player, Google Video Player, GMail feature, Taking Notes Podcast

Each week's most popular online video clips

2006-08-20T20:03:00.000+02:00

Lifehacker reports about The WorldTV Internet TV Charts site. It keeps track of the most popular videos from 4 services and updates every Sunday at 7pm:

Here's the current number one from Google Video:

Also see popurls tracking the most popular urls from digg.com, del.ici.ous and reddit.com

Technorati tags:
video, popular online video clips, Google Video, YouTube, popurls, Digg

Andra bloggar om:
video, popular+online+video+clips, Google Video, YouTube, popurls, Digg

Time magazine lists 50 coolest websites

2006-08-19T21:55:00.000+02:00

Time magazine has published a list of the 50 coolest websites. It should have been a list of the 500 coolest websites if you ask me. There are so much going on on the Internet right now and we are experiencing an exponential growing of new cool sites and features following the trends of web 2.0.

On time.com we can read the following:

Many of this year's choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips.

Take a look at the full list.

Technorati tags:
web 2.0, 50 coolest websites

Andra bloggar om:
Webb 2.0, 50 coolest websites

Plans for 'Locations' in Hannover

2006-08-16T19:54:00.000+02:00

Mary Beth Raven, the lead project designer for the Hannover project has in a posting on her blog mentioned the plans for 'Locations'.

The old concept of 'Locations' from Notes will be kept but reduced:

Office (network) -> Online
Island (disconnected) -> Offline
Travel (notes direct dialup) -> Travel (to remove?)
Home (notes direct dialup) -> Home (to remove?)
Home (network dialup) -> remove
Internet -> remove

In Hannover it will be possible to see all old locations from Notes 7 and to manage locations. When managing locations and choosing to create a new or to edit an existing one the following dialog box will appear:

Read more on Mary's blog and the comments she has received.

Technorati tags:
Hannover, Locations, Lotus Notes, Domino

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Hannover, Locations, Lotus Notes, Domino

NeoWORX blog counter

2006-08-14T21:53:00.000+02:00

Maybe you have noticed my new counter further down to the right on this blog? I found it on Paul Mooney's site. Go to NeoWORX homepage and you can try three different applications:

NeoCounter

It shows the number and nationality of online and past visitors.
Here's a screen shot from this blog:
NeoEarth displays your online and past visitors on a choice of 12 zoomable maps in 4 different sizes.
NeoBoard helps you to establish a community feeling by discussing with your visitors online.

Registration offers a premium version for 14 days and after that it's your choice to choose the premium version or the free version. The free version for NeoCounter offers a basic online display without past visitors information and unable to customize looks. I think I will go with that one though. We'll see after 14 days.

Take a look at NeoWORX for more info about the counter.

Technorati tags:
NeoWORX, counter, blog counter

Andra bloggar om:
NeoWORX, counter, blog counter

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-14T16:43:00.000+02:00

Microsoft has just released Microsoft Live Writer, a tool following the trend of web 2.0 making it easier for us to share information like blogging and photo publishing. It's a beta and some of its features are:

WYSIWYG Authoring (blog authoring)
Photo publishing
Map publishing
Writer SDK

The .NET framework is required.

In a former blog post I was writing about a new web browser called Flock. Using flock I can publish posts to different blog services and publish fotos to both Flickr and Photo bucket. I am sure Windows Live Writer is a great tool although I haven't tried it yet.

Read more on Lifehacker and on Beta Alfa 2.0 (swedish).

Technorati tags:
Windows Live Writer

Andra bloggar om:
Windows Live Writer

Web Operating System

2006-08-11T12:38:00.000+02:00

So now something called a web OS has come and joined the world of web 2.0.

At Desktoptwo you can register to use an online web based desktop. It is built in Flash and offers a feel of a regular PC desktop with 1GB space for free and applications and features like e-mail, address book, blog publishing, IM client, MP3 player, Program editor, Acrobat reader, Open Office, Browser and more.

I registered but had some connectivity problems so I didn't get a chance to provide a review. Take a look at Go2Web2 for a good review with more screen shots.

Technorati tags:
Web OS, Web operating system, Desktoptwo

Andra bloggar om:
Web OS, Web operating system, Desktoptwo

Lotusscript version of the @Middle formula

2006-08-10T10:08:00.000+02:00

Here is a lotusscript function for the @Middle formula function.

Function Middle (fullString As String, startString As String, endString As String) As String

Dim startposition As Integer
Dim startlen As Integer
Dim endposition As Integer

startPosition = Instr (fullString, startString)
startLen = Len (startString)

If ((startPosition > 0) And (startString <> "")) Then
endPosition = Instr (Right$ (fullString, Len(fullString) - startPosition), endString)
If (endPosition > 0) Then
Middle = Mid$ (fullString, startPosition + startLen, Instr (startPosition + startLen, fullString, endString) - ( startPosition + startLen ) )
Else
Middle = Mid$ (fullString, Instr (fullString, startString) + Len (startString), Len (fullString))
End If
Else
Middle = ""
End If
End Function

Use:
midStr = Middle("This is a wildcard _ and this is what you get +", "_", "+")
Msgbox thestr

Result:
and this is what you get

*** updated 10 aug ***

or make it easier as Thomas Adrian suggested in a comment:

middle = Evaluate(|@Middle("| + mystring + |";"| + startString + |";"| + endstring + |")|)

Exempel:
Dim middle As Variant
middle = Evaluate(|@Middle("| + mystring + |";"| + startString + |";"| + endstring + |")|)
Print middle(0)

***************

*** updated 14 aug***

Here's another approach by Sean Burgess suggested in a comment and it works fine as well.

Dim tmp As Variant
Dim FullString As String
Dim StartString As String
Dim EndString As String

FullString = "This is a wildcard _ and this is what you get+"
StartString = "_"
EndString = "+"

tmp = Strright(Strleft(FullString, EndString), StartString)
Msgbox tmp

***************

One could say that the script I posted is somewhat unnecessary ;-) when it could be done in these ways. Or... you could call it ambitious. Anyway now I would say we've covered the middle function! But please feel free to post other solutions and I will put them up as updates.

Technorati tags:
Show-n-Tell Thursday, sntt, Lotus Notes, Lotusscript

Andra bloggar om:
Show-n-Tell Thursday, sntt, Lotus Notes, Lotusscript

Chat client for multiple instant messaging services

2006-08-08T12:28:00.000+02:00

Do you chat?
Well, I use MSN Messenger for private use and Sametime for work related chat. I also have a Google Talk account but there is not much activity going on there, I guess it's too early.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice to use only one client for all the instant messaging services you use? Hardly any news that it is possible. I tried to make it work with Trillian a year ago, but it failed for sametime. Now, I have found Kool IM.

It's a web-based client and you need to register on the site to start using it. It's very easy to start using. The following clients are supported:

AIM
Google Talk
ICQ
IRC
Inbox
Jabber
MSN
RSS Channel
Sametime
Stocks channel
Yahoo

For those of you who don't know what Sametime is, I can very briefly explain that it is a chat client that connects to a Sametime server or actually it is a Domino server with Sametime functionality add-ons. Sametime can connect to the server via a web browser, a desktop client or through Lotus Notes. It's primarily used for work and not for private matters like MSN.

Technorati tags:
Kool IM, Chat client, Instant messaging

Create your own digg feeds!

2006-08-04T13:09:00.000+02:00

Have you visited digg.com? If you haven't, take a look at it!! It's a great place to find news in the world and on the Internet. I keep an eye on the Technology topic from time to time.

Now it's possible to create custom digg feeds on DiggFiltr.

I have made a custom digg feed for the Technology topic and put it into blogLines.

Here's the subscription.

and here's how it looks as a feed in bloglines.

Technorati tags:
DiggFiltr, Create a custom digg feed, BlogLines

What's new in WebSphere Portal 6 ?

2006-08-02T21:42:00.000+02:00

Websphere portal 6 was released on july 26th.

Some of new the features are

improved user experience
additional personalization capabilities
composite application capabilities
Simplified portlet creation (websphere (bowstreet) portlet factory)
Multiple LDAP support

Websphere portal 6 comes in three editions; WebSphere Portal Server, WebSphere Portal enable and WebSphere Portal Extend.

IBM has published an article about it. Read more here.
Also try a demo of it here.

Technorati tags:
WebSphere Portal 6

Change the Windows XP Boot Graphic

2006-07-31T22:22:00.000+02:00

I read an old post on gHacks Tech News about how to change the windows XP Boot Graphic. I tried it and it's pretty cool so I have to write about it for those of you who haven't seen it before. Follow the intructions by downloading bootskin and get more skins at winCustomize. It's freeware and it makes only temporary changes. According to gHacks the default settings are back when uninstalling bootskin.

I downloaded and tried one with a Superman Returns theme. Take a look at it here:

Unfortunately I couldn't find a lotus related bootskin, other than the car ;-)

Technorati tags:
Windows XP Boot Graphic, Change boot graphic

Install your Lotus Notes client on a USB key

2006-07-19T08:14:00.000+02:00

Declan Lynch reports on his blog that in IBM Lotus Notes Domino 7.0.2 Beta the feature Nomad is available. This means that the entire Lotus Notes client can be installed onto a USB key and startup will all your settings on any windows machine. It will take up approximately 340 MB.

Declan writes...
I could quit notes and move the USB key to another machine and everything worked as if it was installed locally. I also had the full notes client installed on one of the machine I put the USB key into and the Lotus Nomad install did not interfere with the installed client in any way. It was also nice to see that nomad worked perfectly when I plugged the USB key into a Windows Vista beta machine.

It will only work for the Lotus Notes client though. Here's how to make it work for admin and designer clients. He continues...
To turn your recently installed Lotus Nomad client into a Lotus Admin Designer Nomad client you just need to copy over 4 files to the USB Key :

admin.exe
designer.exe
events4.ntf
domadmin.ntf

This can be done by any user since Nomad requires only standard privileges. It only writes to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry key.

Technorati tags:
Nomad, Notes on USB key, Domino, Lotus Notes

Google's list of domain names

2006-07-17T11:44:00.000+02:00

Neil Patel on Pronet Advertising has by searching the web and using a domain lookup tool gathered a list of Google's domain names, currently 520 of them and increasing with the incoming comments on his post.

The most amazing and unexpected one's (if this is true) must be googlemotherfucker.com and googleporn.com but I guess (hope) that's because no one else should get that domain name and associate with Google.

Technorati tags:
Google domain names, Google

Flock

2006-07-15T10:53:00.000+02:00

Have you seen the new web browser Flock?
It has similar features as Firefox with downloadable themes and extensions. It's currently a beta and you can either take the tour or download it.

The different features that are most obvious is the integration with Flickr or Photobucket and blog services like blogger.com. It's possible to write blogposts from the browser.

Look at the integration with Flickr in the browser window. It also has drag-and-drop features.

Technorati tags:
Flock, Web browser

Custom Google / Custom Yahoo

2006-07-14T11:48:00.000+02:00

Change the Google logotype when using Googles search engine, like this:

or Yahoo's:

The logo does not follow the search results to the next page though.

A funny little feature. Try it yourself here!

Technorati tags:
Custom Google, Custom Yahoo

Google Suggest

2006-07-13T09:40:00.000+02:00

Hardly any breaking news, but for anyone who haven't seent it yet.

Google Suggest gives suggestions to search words along with the hit results as you type them into the search field. This is done with AJAX. Take a look at these screenshots:

Try it yourself at Google Suggest!

Technorati tags:
Google Suggest, AJAX

Trace server

2006-07-12T16:37:00.000+02:00

Maybe some Notes users or IT-support personal come across this blog. Here's a tip for you.

In some organizations their are sometimes problems to connect to domino servers for a whole lot of reasons. One thing you can try is to trace the server.
If the client has lost its route to the server the trace makes the client "find" the server again.

Here's how to do it:

Chose File -> Preferences -> User Preferences in the Notes client and select 'Ports' in the box that opens up
Press the trace button to the right and the following box opens up

You can type in the server's name in the destination field. Either you just use the common name that is 'Server1' or the full hierarchical name. Press 'Trace' and a trace is made. If everything is going well it should look something like this when searching for the common name:

Determining path to server Server1
Available Ports: TCPIP
Checking normal priority connection documents only...
Allowing wild card connection documents...
Checking for Server1/OU/O at last known address 'Server1' on TCPIP...
Connected to server Server1/OU/O

If this doesn't work try tracing using the domino servers IP address. When doing so:
1. You're not dependent of the DNS to work
2. A connection document is created in your personal addressbook

Technorati tags:
Trace, Find server, Lotus Notes, Domino

Compare two databases to check for differences

2006-07-11T12:20:00.000+02:00

I am using a tool called Teamstudio Delta when I need to compare two different databases by design or by data. I use it either to compare two replicas or to compare a database with its template.

Choose server and database and then the option on whether to compare design or data.

Using the smart filter I can look at the differences between the two databases.

Since it's not freeware it limits the use to the number of licenses you or your company have bought.

-> Read more at Teamstudio

Technorati tags:
Teamstudio Delta, Lotus Notes, Domino, Compare design

IBM releases Lotus Notes for Linux!

2006-07-11T08:51:00.000+02:00

crn.com says:
"A Notes client for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3, will be available on July 24."
"Technically the Linux client is a Version 7 release"
-> Read more

More on edbrill.com

Technorati tags:
Notes For Linux, Lotus Notes, Domino, Linux