Category: February 2005
Much of this week's time at home has been spent at work anyway. Virtually speaking, that is.
Our R6.5 client rollout approaches, and the fact that we're replacing an antiquated manual "roaming" system makes it a complicated operation.
But I want to get it right first time. And to that end, much of my development over this past weeks has been focused on a database I call "Automated Client Fixes". This database can:
- Reset client's network address cache and delete/rebuild all connection documents at the press of a button
- Automatically delete the standard location documents that we don't want, and rename the ones that we do to the names we want
- Add bookmarks in a bulk, automated fashion
- Rename the dreaded "Workspace Tab 1" bookmark folder to something more... Homely
Nothing much to tax the development muscles there, you'd think. And some of it was ridiculously easy.
The first two, for instance, were quick and easy. But bookmarks?
Ah, bookmarks. IBM want us to use them. We can create them automatically with Setup Profiles (R5) and Policies (R6). We can roam our bookmarks with R6. We get nice ways of looking at our bookmarks, and in R6 they even tried to make them look like the workspace... You get the feeling that bookmarks are definitely where the future is, these days.
But can you deal with bookmarks programmatically? No. Not very easily, anyway. We still have ways of adding workspace icons and selecting them. But the only way you can add a new bookmark is via @Command([AddBookmark]). Nothing via script - you can't Evaluate @Commands, and the various options which say they'll add a bookmark as they add a workspace icon were... Unreliable.
Or, in other words, I couldn't get them to behave consistently. Especially not if there already was a workspace icon. As the Automated Client Fixes database will be used to support users after the rollout - in a "Go here, click this, it's fixed" manner - I need something that works every time. If a user deletes their Bookmark but still has the workspace icon, I need it to create a bookmark anyway - not just select the workspace icon and forget to create the bookmark. Which was not exactly documented behaviour, I might add...
In the end, I rolled out my Formula skills from the dusty corner I keep them in, and forged ahead with the @Command. It was either that or spend a while reverse-engineering the bookmarks database and tinkering in it directly with LotusScript.
(OK, I admit it. I half-tinkered anyway, and now understand how the bookmarks database works - hence we gained the renaming tool for the ugly "Workspace Tab 1" default folder. But I decided that it was better to go with the supported method and use the @Command, as we're on a tight time constraint right now. We can't afford to call up IBM and say "Hey, we've stuffed up 1000 bookmark databases." We can afford to call them up and say "Hey, @Command([AddBookmark]) stuffed up 1000 bookmark databases." Sometimes, the decision is just that easy to make, no matter how much you may feel that there's a geekier solution available...)
So what's bugging me now is the programmatic support for bookmarks - the feature we should all be using, or so it seems. After some work, we now have a database which shows a list of databases of our choosing, and from which the user can pick databases and we'll then add bookmarks for those databases for them.
Why did it take me almost three hours to get that working, and yet it only took me five minutes to add some security to the database definition documents, so that not all users can see all databases?
I think this is why some developers have a love-hate relationship with Notes & Domino. In any other system, that apparently simple UI feature would be the easy part, and the security of the system would be hard. But in Notes, the amazingly easy and the infuriatingly hard are not always what you'd think they'd be...
(Or maybe I'm just very, very rusty at development these days...!)
Comments (0)Philip Storry February 24th, 2005 21:14:03
Many things attracted me to Notes at first, as a product.
Although I'm an Administrator by trade, the rapid application development aspect of it was one of them. It was the one I took the longest to figure out, but it's also the one that suddenly made me appreciate what Notes was all about.
In this age of wonder, we're used to seeing apps that do all sorts of things. But to see a WYSIWYG form designer and a quick view creator that can build a whole application back in 1995... That was something special. That was Notes R3.33.
Notes R4.0 brought LotusScript to the fore, and as I'm a BASIC man I loved it.
But I always stuck to Administration when it came down to the choice. Mostly because there's more control over my own work there - development is very hard to manage, and there are precious few good managers in the software industry. So I always felt under more pressure to hit impossible deadlines on projects that had no research or planning behind them, and it was a fairly easy choice in the end.
But that doesn't stop me from developing. I'm one of those strange people who feels that a good administrator can look at a problem and know that one of three things will get them the information they need - a by-hand count, a full-text search, or building a custom view. A great administrator knows which one is the most time efficient for their current problem. And a really great administrator has templates full of the design elements they need!
I lack the templates, but I'm slowly building them up now. I have a few projects I'm working on, and I hope to be posting something that's approaching finished soon. None of it is stellar - it's all "scratch-an-itch-ware" - but I'm going to GPL it and donate it to the wider world, in the hope that it's useful to someone.
Of course, first comes the mandatory tidying up. And that's what this is really about - I want to use tools that I was happy enough with that I could say to the world, "Hey! You can use this too!".
My current schedule? Ship code by next week.
Ship documentation by 2010.
Ship bugfixes before Longhorn arrives.
*grins*
Comments (0)Philip Storry February 22nd, 2005 21:27:48
A while back - before LotusSphere - a call went out for some examples of Notes being blamed for things it's not actually at fault for.
My entry went in, and I thought nothing more of it. Work continued to go more and more nuts, and it's only recently that I've gotten back into the land of the active, so to speak.
So I started to catch up on things. I'd been meaning to read some of the LotusSphere stuff, as I missed it except for headlines and summaries. A natural place to start was Ed Brill's sit, where he'd posted two PDFs of the presentations he did.
And here's my infamy - page five of the How To Sell Notes Internally PDF.
Wow. It's me alright - loquacious as ever, taking up a whole slide to say "Notes didn't print, but then neither did anything else." Nobody can fake that kind of blathering, in my experience!
Oh, how I wish I could have been there. To be at the 'Sphere as my words are pushed, by means of bright projection units, directly onto the retinas of a horde! It's just like a scene from all my world-ruling fantasies, you know!
With less whips and leather, obviously.
Anyway, this should show you all how far behind I am - I'm only just now catching up on LotusSphere.
So, to wrap up: Big thanks to Ed and Libby for picking me from a crop of fine, fine quotes.
Congratulations to Declan and Mick, who were also credited with quotes on this issue. They've also earned a slot on my private list of competitors for world domination, and will therefore be crushed underfoot by me when they least expect it...
I'm presuming that Libby or Ed are the source of the final quote, as there's no name there. They escape the list, because I never add someone to it without proof.
But they'll be scrutinised closely from here on, I assure you!
Comments (0)Philip Storry February 21st, 2005 20:08:18
Many of my recent troubles have been caused by GroupShield, a product I'm steadily beginning to loathe. It even seems unable to shut down properly half the time - if I issue a quit command at the server, I end up with a hung server that never quits. So I restart the machine, and get a fault recovery email from my server when comes back up, because the last shutdown wasn't clean. Which I then have to explain to my boss, who takes great interest in these sorts of emails...
So, does anyone have a recommendation for any antivirus products for Domino which aren't GroupShield?
Preferably one which works, does both on-access and on-demand scanning, and rarely - if ever - marks all my mail as dead for the fun of it, or decides to use up all the handles on the server because the name of the day has a vowel in it... Comments (9)Philip Storry February 15th, 2005 23:52:29
Recently, work has been bad. Very, very bad.
Not the people, or the politics - just failure after failure in the systems.
The Domino infrastructure is a little creaky. And recently we've suffered everything, from antivirus software playing up to a two-disk failure state in a RAID 5 array. Which, for those of you who aren't aware, is also known as a "dead RAID array". Or plain bad luck.
(Shared nothing clustering is great, by the way.)
It's all been somewhat stressful, and it hasn't reflected on Domino/Notes very well in the organisation. A string of bad luck, and worse it endangers the rollout of the R6.5 client. My main worry is that I won't have enough time to ensure that the rollout goes well. Which would be the icing on the cake - whilst everyone in the Lotus Blogsphere seems to have been living it up learning how to sell Lotus Notes internally, I feel like I'm losing that sale. Which is ironic - Domino has more than proved its resilience in this situation, by picking itself up and dusting itself down after each and every problem.
So I've seen my doctor about stress, and I'm taking a break for a while. But not from this blog, which I'm now going to make time for. I hope to tread the line between carthesis and dissection of disaster, and there are some nice positive things that are coming out of these trying times as well...
Comments (2)Philip Storry February 8th, 2005 22:01:28