LotuSphere 2010 notes pt1

LotuSphere Disclaimer: I have no intention of giving you any serious or useful information this lotusphere (well while not while im actually here at least, as there are too many people doing that already, go to planetlotus to find them

Now sharing a room with someone is a fab way of cutting the old LS costs down but after 2 days of sharing a room with the wretch, the cracks are showing,

what has he done you ask, well i tell you, he is tidy and reasonable, which is as far as im concerned is a crime against all that’s conference!!, i present exhibit A:

look at this bed!!, it has been slept in by a drunk person!!, where is the vomit, where is the ripped sheet and pillows on the floor, it a travesty, but there is worse to come:

he folds and lays out T-shirts before passing out, its wrong i tell you, tomorrow night i would not be surprised if he started hoovering, now THIS is how a hotel room should look

somewhere between a nest and a pit, with the sheets on the floor, socks should craw around the fetid air, growling gently.

P.S. I also attended a very good session Mr Tim Davis on blackberry and IPhone apps, but i turns out that i committed a number of terrible faux pas, that include asking question during the session and sliding out once i had got all the info i wanted, (i feel shamed)

UKLug Virtual views Flex download

This is terribly late, but I needed to just blog it before lotusphere. Earlier this year the Poole and myself presented at UKlug, my part of the presentation was a way of doing a few thing that we take for granted in the notes client but done on the web with flex, this included Formula validation, design information and private views

The only complex part was the private/virtual views, which while not hugely fast still gave us private views back in a easy way (it builds documents that flex then renders back as views), and permits full use of formulas, variable columns, column titles and does not require view or full text indexes

You can see it in action here (for some reason the source server it on is being REALLY REALLY slow at the moment and as the demo app was designed to be pre-loaded for a demo its load time sucks anyway, just wait till you see the “$$viewField” appear in the dropdown). there are already 2 prebuilt views.

 

However this is more of a ‘take it apart and see how it works’ thing so the flex source code is here and the whole app is here also Mr Poole’s code can be found here

You may wonder why the column and view selection formula is built so clumsily, well partly it is to give an excuse to show the formula validation, but mainly its because a perfect formula builder already exists, by Jake Howlett which can be found here

Oh. Next week I will be skulking at stand 622 at Lotusphere, where i will be fighting a hangover and writing an air app so you can have Elguji’s ‘Jam’ products on your desktop (well actually i was supposed to have already written it, however I’m a work shy sod, but bruce has forgiven me out of the kindness of his soul), so drop by and if you feel like a bit of free flex/air/webservices how-to. 🙂

2009 review

After my first full year of proper blogging I feel justified in doing a review

1) I no longer class my self as a pure domino person, Im a Java person who does domino (and flex and other stuff).

2) I have discovered what both true beauty of the soul and self destructive evil looks like (Personal).

3) The blogging and Notes community stuff has paid me back the effort I have put into it more than I could have ever hoped. (with particular thnks to Matt White, Bruce Elgort, and that wretch Poole)

4) I now know the person I want to be (still a long way to go).

5) The people I work with now (in the lotus Community) are the best.

6) Just about everyone out there is brighter than me, but I’m not going to let them get away with it for long 🙂

7) The future is bright.

nuff said

 

why IBM why

Now I’m not a big ranter at IBM (after all it has helped me keep bread on my children’s table these many years), but this small thing is simply totally stupid!

As a flex developer, I was well aware of ILOG and their famous Elixir product that has some of the best Visualisation stuff (Gantt charts, Dials etc) that you can get, but I did not have a project I could justify buying it with, but suddenly I had one which I could use the calendar element for, so off I go to the companies website credit card in hand, only to discover that IBM have purchased them, “cool” I go, “better integration with domino etc etc, now where’s the ‘buy now’ button?, it used to be around here?”,

Colour me surprised, but its gone!!, replaced with the stock IBM “We’re here to help”, if you click on the “Request a Quote” you are submitted to the normal questionnaire, that basically says “we only care about big corporations that we can fleece”, I cant even find out how much it costs anymore as the “pricing information” link does not give you any information of the prices (or in fact any prices at all)

“but wait!” I hear you cry, ILOG used to be a small company, so its easy for them to do small sales, its different for big companies, well fair enough, I wonder if there is a small company still selling the product on line, and their is, their name is ADOBE (Ooooooo Tiny!!)

Mine got!! there is a price

When I click on this link I’m taken to a normal e-commerce site, with purchase options, licence types, and a variety of payment methods (including even paypal), nice and easy to use and not hard to do

come on IBM sort it out, your embarrassing us here!!!!!

 

Mobile wifi

I use one of those 3G datasticks (mines a t-mobile) one, but alas its a usb one so i cant share it with multiple people at once, it also does not officially support linux and the best hack requires that you have to have it plugged in before you turn the laptop on or it wont work (and some programs can be a bit picky about it), so when the first “mifi” portable hot spot providers came out i thought they would be fab, the early ones are a bit picky on their compatibility, but the latest ones such as the Novatel 2325 look perfect and have very good reviews (‘3’ also do a mifi but it does not look as good), so off i tootle to try and get one (im well out of contract),

To cut a long story short, it turns out that i cant (well not for free anyway), because my data plan is ranked as “un-upgradable”, (well thats not how it was explained to me by t-mobile) I finally got this info from a sane man at carphone warehouse (god i love independent shops), who explained that as i had got my data plan when they were first introducing them, i got a REALLY good deal (10Gig per month for £44, where as 5Gig for £30 is the highest they will go nowadays and they its charges charges charges ), and in this situation he would buy one direct ( Amazon does them for £209) as it would be cheaper in the long run, but that’s a bit steep, but again the internet comes to my rescue in the shape of JoikuSpot which allows you to use a 3G capable phone for the exactly the same thing, back home i dig up my old N81 (they have a full list of compatable phones and there is always ebay) jam in my 3G sim card, and for the princely price of 9Euro i get an amazing bit of software that does the job perfectly (in fact better as it has a great “link status” page that tells you what’s going on your connection)

there is always a way.