Month: December 2005

After upgrading my Firefox to 1.5 I have been unable to run Domino Web Access through Firefox. The inbox and and calendar displays just fine but I am unable to write new e-mails or reply to received e-mails. Basically everything that requires me to write in the “Body”-item is “broken”.

As you can see from the screenshot it looks like Firefox is unable to start the component it uses for “rich text” editing. The page finishes loading but no errors are displayed in the JavaScript console or via LiveHTTPHeaders.

Bummer…

UPDATE: Another guy at my office run iNotes under Firefox 1.5 – maybe it’s just my copy…

Well the customer is one of those that are a little slow in the uptake so they are still mainly running Notes 5 on the clients. The IT department is also using Notes 6.5 and 7 clients apart from the internally supported Notes 5 client. Most servers are however on 6.5.4FP1 due to a recent ugrade.

When I do the design refresh I normally borrow a Notes client on their network and do the signing, refreshing and (re)scheduling of agents. Normally this works just fine. I didn’t however consider the ramifications of the client I borrowed recently being upgraded to Notes 7 (used to be a Notes 5 client). After the design refresh the application was running very slowly and all views were constantly refreshing (flickering) with the resulting loss of performance.

After some poking around I decided that the only difference to the last time I did the design refresh was the version of the Notes client used. I switched to a Notes 5 client and repeated the entire procedure which solved the problems just like that. Hmmmm – try that one on for size…

The really funny part was that my big brother was at a christmas lunch yesterday with some former colleagues from his time at IBM and one of the guys is the head of IBM Lotus Software in Denmark. In a discussion about the release of Notes 7 he apparently told my brother, that there are a number of cases out there with the compability issues with the Notes 7 client. The issues IBM are seeing has to do with view indexes taking up double the space, and views having some refreshing issues. Whether this is “official” or not I don’t know, but it sure sounds like what I was experiencing. Very interesting…

I guess that mixing versions is okay but that you will have to be vary for possible consequences. Anyone experiencing similar things?

Working with the new version of the MySQL database I saw that it supports regular expressions in the WHERE clause of SELECT statements out of the box. This is totally cool and has the posibility of seriously simplifying complex WHERE statements. Previously I have opted to a simpler condition and then filter the rest in the application, but having regular expressions in the database allows me to keep the filtering as close to the data as possible. Cool.

Since we are an IBM shop at the office we run DB2 internally so I searched for a way to do this in DB2. It isn’t natively available but so is the next best thing – as a UDF (user defined function). I even found an article on developerWorks describing how to do it using a UDF in the C-programming language: Bringing the Power of Regular Expression Matching to SQL.

I haven’t tried yet but it looks very promising though I might consider doing the UDF in Java which will be easier, at least for me, being more comfortable with Java than C. Doing it in the C programming language you would need a C-compiler though I think you would do it using cygwin instead of Microsoft Visual Studio.

…is up and I’m starting to get really excited – I almost can’t wait.