Author: lekkim

Positive, competent, out-spoken, frank and customer focused architect and developer with a strong foundation in web, cloud and product development. I'm a strong advocate for API first and cloud based solutions and development. I have a knack for being able to communicate and present technically complicated matters in conference, customer and training settings. I've previously acted as team member and leader in a product organisation.

Don’t install Notes in the default location if doing Notes plug-in development

A little while back I was contacted by a fellow Yellow-head who had some issues with some plug-in development for Notes 8. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to help him at the time but when he some head scratching time later found the answer he was kind enough to share it. I thought I would share it here in case it can help someone.

From the offset the issue looked simple as it had to do with the good old nlsxbe which is normally caused by the binary Notes directory not being on the path. The issue was however a bit twisted as the error raised complained about the filename or extension being too long. 

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: nlsxbe
   (The filename or extension is too long. )

What our good Yellow-head found out was that the issue was caused by his install location of the Notes client. Specifically he had installed his client in “C:Archivos de programaIBMLotusNotes” which is the default location for his OS. This however means that the path to the notes.jar for plug-ins becomes “C:Archivos de programaIBMLotusNotesframeworkrcpeclipsepluginscom.ibm.rcp.j2se.win32.x86_1.5.0.SR4-200707311521jrelibNotes.jar” which is too long a path (longer than 128 characters). Installing Notes in “C:program filesIBMLotusNotes” solved the issue.

So if you run into weird issues like this check your install path or choose an English copy of Windows! 🙂

Wireless presenting

I’m doing more and more presenting work and being tied to the keyboard to change slides just doesn’t cut it so I have been in the market for a cordless presenter device of some sort. Finally I decided on the Logitech 2.4 GHz Cordless Presenter. Besides the name which is somewhat of a mouthful it’s just stellar! It does exactly what it sets out to do – nothing more, nothing less. It’s a great addition to my arsenal… 🙂

Having freetime for projects

It’s no secret that I haven’t had the time I really wanted to play around with my pet projects over the last months. I start more projects than I have the time to finish, or at least work with, and besides work and family I just don’t have the time. It’s actually quite an interesting thing how one can get stressed over free stuff you put out there and feel like you just got to update and maintain. Maybe there’s a better way to do it…

At some point I had an arrangement with my fiancee that I had every Tuesday for geeking out but for some reason we got away for that. We discussed it again yesterday and it seems like we have a deal! 🙂 That would be nice. I know it’s just as much my own fault but it sure would be nice to have some time to finish some of my geek-out projects.

Google Maps Widget Generator – come grab your own!

One of the coolest and most powerful features of Notes 8 is the MyWidgets sidebar and the ability to link widgets to text selection actions and/or LiveText.

The only thorn in the side is that not all users are capable of doing their own widgets and some widgets cannot be sent to them because they contain custom data. Take a widget that generate directions for instance. Normally the starting address and you choose the destination address but since the starting address it set it makes the widget difficult to share. What to do?

The solution is of cause to generate the widget on an ad hoc basic. Meet the Google Maps Widget Generator. The widget generator works as follows.

You point your browser at the Google Maps Widget Generator. From this page you follow the short instructions and drag the extension.xml to your MyWidgets sidebar. This installs the widget into your client.

To generate a directions widget you right click the widget and choose to open it in the sidebar (it isn’t visible by default).

Now specify the title you would like to see when right clicking text in the client in the top field (e.g. Google Maps from the office) and the source address in the bottom field (e.g. 1500 Epcot Resorts Blvd, Lake Buena Vista, FL‎). Then click “Go!”

From the resulting page simply drag the extension.xml link to your MyWidgets sidebar to install the Google Maps widget.

Now your new Google Maps widget is available in your Notes client. To generate another widget click the “Generate another widget”-button and simply right click the widget header and choose “Close” to close it. You may always reopen it to generate new widgets.

Blog moved

The move of my blog has been completed and the performance is already much improved and it’s now actually possible to perform a search. Nice. If you do experience any problems please let me know. Thanks.

Grown tired of my blog provider

So I’ve finally grown tired of my blog provider. It’s just too restrictive, performance is very bad and the memory limitations means that I cannot even perform a search on my own blog. Very bad. I’m currently taking steps to move my blog to my own server and I hope to have it up and running very soon.

Do not run both the CA process and ID Vault at the same time

Be aware of running both CA process and ID Vault at the same time as the ID stored in the vault hasn’t been certified yet. The limitation is understandable but why it’s possible (i.e. the checkbox is available in the UI) to store a newly registered ID when using CA process can be confusing.

For more info see technote 1367969: ID Vault upload during registration fails when using Certificate Authority

What I’ve been up to

So it’s been very quiet in lekkimworld.com land over the month of May. Nothing much have happened blog wise and with 5 posts including this one I think I’m at an all-time low. So what’s up with that? Well I don’t know; I think I’m just in the mood just now. It’s not like nothing is going on as I’m very busy evangelizing about Notes and Domino 8.5, teaching AppDev stuff to customers and generally a lot on the road. I’m just not blogging. Why? I don’t know. What’s even more wierd is why I want to share that…

I have some cool XPages/MyWidgets stuff I’ll probably blog about soon but except that I think I’m all blogged out for May. I expect normal operations to resume in June.