Some Friday Miscellany
Two weeks today we move house. So much to do, such little time! I've just cancelled my ADSL connection. I now have two weeks of speedy connection before I return to dial-up for a while. It's infuriating that I have to wait until I move in to the new house before getting the line re-connected and waiting for ADSL to be enabled and setup.
So, last night I left the PC on overnight and downloaded all the most recent 6.x Notes/Domino clients and servers. Today I might even get a copy of Domino 7 beta. Not sure I'm going to have the time to do much with any of them though. Sod's Law has seen to it that, now I am moving house, I have some paying work and deadlines to meet.
At the end of the month you'll probably notice a disruption to the usual service. I've got plenty of draft blogs though, so I should be able to keep some content flowing. Talking of which, I'm sure I'm not the only one missing Mike's regular updates to Notestips.com. I met up with him a few weeks ago while I was in London and it's obvious he's a busy man at the moment. Keeping a blog alive is not easy when life takes over.
Some links that have been building up in my "codestore" folder:
- CollyLogic - How to represent the distinction between visited and unvisited links within our designs?
- Simple Bits - Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers
- SitePoint - 10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players.
- SitePoint - 'Not Found' Is Not An Option: Error Handling and User Experience
- Tony Schreiner - What's new in IE in Windows XP SP2
Lots more where they came from. Just thought I'd off-load some of them...
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Which Company do use for your ADSL connection. I'm using BT at the moment, but they have changed my T&C's. They have lowered the monthly price (29 pounds down to 25 pounds) and have added a 15GB monthy download limit. Next year if you go over the download limit they will charge a service fee.
Pipex. Been with them for a few years now. Occassional outages but nothing that ever made me want to switch.
Hi Jake ..
Just to add something to your items of interest did you see Ben Poole's Blog lately. He posted a definition of a Corporate Developer. I agree with him I find it offensive .. Off topic but intresting none the less.
A corporate developer eats buzzwords for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He/she thinks that wearing a shirt with an IT vendor’s logo embroidered in the left chest is awesome and geeky. He/she never touched a linux box in his entire development career and never heard of Gnome. And normally, his/her language of choice is Visual Basic until Java became so hot, he/she jumped the bandwagon. He believes that good practices aren’t necessary as long as the system is currently working.
I miss Mike too...
Awe come on now... I am a corporate developer...
I eat Eggs for breakfast, whatever is in the cafeteria for lunch and for dinner, well my wife is the chef at our house.
I have had an occasional corporate logo polo, but usually if there is a logo it is of my favorite sports team or my children's school, or maybe a golf logo ;-)
I have built my own home, wired every room with cat5e and setup a small network. I have setup and played with Linux and my team is in the process of moving from HP-UX boxes to clustered Red Hat boxes for development.
I grew up with VI (pronounced Ve I not vie), built apps in Access 2.0 (oh the horror) and then moved to Domino starting with 4.1. In addition to my domino work, I am indeed transitioning to Java as most of our internal development is done with Java.
I do believe that good practices are essential to build robust relatively maintenance free code. I am currently on a project where I need to reuse some methods in a few servlets that were built by a contractor (no offense Jake!) that are simply horse crap. The table structures and code are horrible. To bad our old manager paid them for this stuff that did not conform to the standards that we had in place.
We have since all but stopped using contractors. Most of the 15 developers on my team understand that standards are essential. The rest will, like it or not or we simply won't approve thier code during code reviews! ;-)
Its the butt kissing, squirm their way up the corporate ladder to become crappy managers corporate developers who eat and sleep the buzz words and worship Microsoft that hurt us...
Jake, I wouldn't bother with the D7 beta until beta 2 is out. Beta 1 was more-or-less a proof-of-concept for the DB2 back end, but it doesn't really DO anything interesting yet. Beta 2 will have the Access and Query views to play with. Query views are the real interesting feature, letting you run what amounts to a SQL query against the back-end, complete with joins and dynamic "selection formulas" or WHERE statements. Also in Beta 2 are things like shared columns. Worth the wait. All you get with Beta 1 is the joy of setting up the DB2 bits without many of the other benefits, and installing and setting up for the express purpose of redoing it all in a few days sounds like WAY too much work. It should be out in time for your new DSL service.
Thanks Stan! Saved me some much-needed hours there.
Jake,
is it BT or Pipex that are the monkey-wrench in the virtual continuum ?
The marketing blurb on PIPEX's site says they do a "managed service" where they will move your existing telephone number ... and BT should do this too ...
(No, I wouldn't be surprised if it is all too difficult for BT to manage, but their processes are improving, SLOWLY.)
2. I had a problem with the installation of 7 Beta -- for some reason it ws picking up my Notes Program folder from the last installed version (I have multiple releases installed, all sharing the same data folder) and the path was not editable !
(I tried updating the notes.ini, but this made no difference: perhaps the wizard is reading the Registry?)
Has anyone else lamented the loss of mutiple MDI windows (lsat seen in Notes 4.x) ? First, in Release 5, all the open windows were children of the main Notes instance; now, in ND6.5, even the SameTime (oops, LIM) and QuickPlace (oops, LTW) are in the single MDI, as well! What this means is you can't multi-task by kicking off a process in one window (MDI) whilst tinkering in another -- all window instances are locked whilst Notes does its processing.
Very annoying.
/rant