Month: March 2008

Watch wikis

Bob Balfe just blogged about how you can access the underlying data model for Composite Applications and how he wrote up a page on the Composite Application wiki. This is great but did you know that you can subscribe to the wikis and be notified when new content is added? Also without Bob blogging about it. One option is RSS and another is by e-mail. While I prefer RSS the wikis doesn’t allow that since the wiki (Atlassian Confluence) throws an exception due to a missing class.

caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
com/sun/syndication/io/WireFeedOutput
 at com.atlassian.xwork.results.RssResult.doExecute(RssResult.java:41)

My guess is that the wiki is run on an IBM JVM and hence doesn’t have the referenced com.sun class. Any way it’s really bad form relying on classes in the com.sun namespace as they are not part of the official API so shame on Atlassian in this case.

Any ways for now e-mail notification is the way to go.

Contributing to a developerWorks wiki

Today I entered the IBM wiki world by contributing to the Composite Application wiki over at developerWorks. It all started with me having to figure out how to add menu items to the menu of a sideshelf component. I found the answer in the wiki (for those interested it’s quite easy using the org.eclipse.ui.viewActions extension point). What I didn’t find was an example of how to programmatically add actions which I also needed so once I figured it out I added the information to the wiki. Programmatically adding actions is useful if you don’t know which actions to add at compile and/or deployment time.

So if you go to the page on creating sideshelf components you’ll find a section on programmatically adding actions.

I really like the idea of the wikis and I really feel good after having contributed. Get some, give some.

P.S.: I know I’m still way behind blogging on my holiday compared to Ed Brill… 🙂

Time Management

Ever since start of the year/Lotusphere I have been reading books and generally studying how to make better use of my time and better manage my time. I find I have an increasing number of things going on and an increasing number of things I want to have going on, but sometimes I run out of mental resources to manage it all. Part of this process has been thinking about what I do and how I do it. Part has been reading books like “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. This is a great book IMHO and it’s dead on in many respects. While it’s also available as an audio book I think it is worth the extra money of getting both.

Last night I watched the Randy Pausch lecture Time Management after it being recommended to me by a coworker. Besides being a brilliant lecture by what appears to be a brilliant man and gifted lecturer, he’s also dying from cancer in 3-6 months which makes the topic of time management quite a paradox. Something to think about right there.

P.S.: There’s also another lecture by Randy Pausch available on the web called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. While I haven’t watched it yet I’m definitely gonna do it. Soon.

Re: (y) becomes _

I think it’s a bug in the chat window display since inserting a space after the emoticon once you have written some more text displays the emoticon.

I did a video of the bug but for some reason Youtube wont convert it so please download it here.

(y) becomes _

Am I the only one where typing (y) in the Sametime chat windows doesn’t result in the yes-emoticon but an underscore instead? We’re seeing this across the office on Notes 8.0.1 Standard.

Update: Now 😀 also turn into an underscore instead of a grin-emoticon and apparently it happens in both ends of the conversation. Restarting the chat doesn’t solve the problem.

Bad news for extst.ibm.com users

After reading about the current state of affairs for the extst.ibm.com Sametime community at Adam Gartenbergs and Chris Pippins blog I must say that I’m a bit disappointed. How can it be that IBM choose not to support the latest and greatest of their flagship collaboration client on extst.ibm.com? Of cause it will happen at some point in time but why the wait? Simply get going, edit those sametime.ini files and while you’re at it add the client ids for 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.5, 8.5.1…

I’m baffled!