Its been over a month since i last blogged, but I have a good reason, I have been given an amazing opportunity (given the current financial climate), and my working skill set has taken a amazing leap, I am now working on FLEX 3, Proper Java (with Spring, Hibernate and very serious web services) in addition to Domino, and all with those tight times that make a project fun, its been disturbing my sleep but i wake keen to be at work (always the best way to be), but time to get some useful blog entries out.
Author: Mark Myers
A decent domino calendar on the web
We all know that Domino should been good at calendar apps but sucks balls in reality, so i quietly poo’ed my self when a manger says “could we have something a bit like google calendar”, however flex comes to my rescue, now i cant claim any of this is mine its just gluing other people work together so first take Quietly Scheming’s Calendar UPDATE: the app is much newer than the blog posting would indicate, as it keeps being updated
sexy isent it?, now this takes an ical format as its data source, which in case anyone was wondering is just a vcalander file with some extra bits stuffed in (which we wont need), so to get to that data source, enter Jake Howlett’s excellent series of articles, in particular Flex with Domino Quick start, go pinch his example database for the ‘simple view’ stuff, you will want to butcher that to output your data as a ical text file (the download for Quietly Schemings flex apps has examples of what they should look like in the “data” directory of the zip file.),
One snag here is that the Adobe parser for icals is REALLY picky, there must be no extra white space in your file, and every line must finish with a proper Carriage return and a proper line feed (i ended up with computed text of “@Char(13)” at the end of every line in the view template and “@Char(13)+ @Char(10)” after every field in the view, so be careful, but other than that it works like a charm!!, and my manager thinks im a coding god (well he doesn’t because he knows me, but never mind)
there you go, if this dosent make sense just put a comment and i will explain more
Auto Update to Ubuntu 9.04
Just a quick note to the people out there taking advantage of the one click update from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, make sure you don’t have “auto logon” enabled, if you do, you stand a huge chance of happily screwing up your install (you will get lots of permission denied errors against /dev/null when you launch a xsession, even if your ctrl-Alt-F1 in and reset the security to “666” from “600” the darn thing resets on reboot (and anyway you just get a blank screen even if you get it (ie by ctrl-Alt-f7) to get back to xsession login,
….so careful careful party people
.. P.S. to the Mac boys out there laughing, i rebuilt in 14 mins (after backup), and i did not have to go to a “genius bar” to fix my problem…so RASSSSSSP!!
zazzle customer service
You hear from everybody these days that the art of customer service is dead, this is apparently not so with www.zazzle.com and Disney, in an effort to get a T-shirt done in time for lotus Sphere, i ordered it and had it emergency ups’ed to the hotel in Florida, alas it did not arrive in time (to be fair i only gave them a couple of days), i gave a mental shrug and counted it as a lost gamble, a couple of weeks later i get a email from zazzle customer service saying that they had had the T-shirt returned, and that i had been given a full refund including postage, a complete surprise (if one that makes me feel slightly guilty)
Changing your perspective
Been watching all the “sticking with notes”/”moving on” talk on all the blogs, and only just realised that i was one of the offenders, the reason why i only just realised is not simply because im dumber than a sack of bricks, its because i have taken the domino 8.5 splash screen to heart, it says “built on eclipse”, just as the flex splash screen says “built on eclipse”, and the myeclipse screen (well duh!)
When you realise that, the reason for conflict just seems to melt away, your an eclipse developer, Domino is suddenly a back end and a UI interface, just as flex is, and hibernate, etc etc, you may have a STRONG preference for one toolset, but your core is eclipse (providing you are on a modern version of notes), so we can just write amazing apps, why make life complex (shrug).