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.

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!

Notes 8(.0.1) against Sametime 7 limited use server

I’m at a customer site today where they are running Notes 7.0.2 but would like to experiment with (the new) Notes 8.0.1 Standard client. The upgrade of select users went fine but the embedded Sametime client was unable to connect to the Sametime 7 Limited Use server. After some searching on Google and in the developerWorks forums the problem was easy to solve thanks to posts there and some additional searching. I simply needed to add the client ids of Notes 8 and Notes 8.0.1 Standard to the sametime.ini and restart Sametime.

The steps are as follows:

  1. Find sametime.ini on your Sametime server – it’s in the binary Domino directory. Open it in a text editor.
  2. Find the line starting with VPS_ALLOWED_LOGIN_TYPES in the Config-section.
  3. Append 1231 and 1233 to the end of the list (that is “,1231,1233”).
  4. Save and close the file.
  5. Restart the Sametime services (tell staddin quit, load staddin).
  6. Happily log-in using Notes 8(.0.1) Standard. In my case it took a couple of minutes for the change to be picked up but as always being patient pays off.

References:

Why you as a Notes guy or gal should care about Eclipse 3.4

First off this is quite a geeky post I suppose but bear with me – there’s a nice screenshot at the bottom of the post…

The Eclipse foundation is busy developing Eclipse 3.4 which is what will form the base for Notes 8.5 Standard. At least that’s what I’m hearing since the new Expeditor platform is based on Eclipse 3.4. Why should you care as a Notes developer? Why because each release of Eclipse adds significant performance improvements and many new features are added to the underlying platform. While we cannot know which features has already been ported to the Expeditor platform which is the base for Notes 8(.0.1) Standard it is at its core based on Eclipse 3.2.2.

Lots of features has been added since Eclipse 3.2.2 was released (Eclipse is currently at Eclipse 3.3.2) and many of them could have big impact on you as a developer or a Notes user. Why you say? Because the features of Eclipse will directly affect the platform support available to you if you develop SWT plug-ins or if you just use Notes 8 Standard (and don’t we all). Below is a sample list of improvements in Eclipse 3.3 I compiled from the “New and Noteworthy” documents for Eclipse 3.3M1 to 3.3M7.

  • SWT on Vista (win32). SWT now gets everything right on Microsoft Vista
  • Faster JPEG/PNG image loading. JPEG images now load from 30 to 70 percent faster, and PNG images load 2 to 3 times faster, depending on the image.
  • New DateTime control. Your users can now enter dates or times using the new DateTime control. You can see the DateTime control in action on the DateTime tab of the SWT ControlExample. The ControlExample is included with the other example plug-ins (see the “Example Plug-ins” section of the 3.3M3 download page).
  • Mozilla everywhere. Mozilla can now be used as the underlying browser control on Windows and OS X, providing that you have XULRunner installed and registered. To use this just create your Browser with the SWT.MOZILLA style.
  • Native features on Vista (win32). SWT is now exploiting more of the native features of the Vista platform. For example, using native double-buffering on Vista win32 makes painting in double-buffered canvases twice as fast.

As you can see some of them could have big impact on you as a developer or user. Everything from better Windows Vista integration to using Mozilla as the embedded browser to just having a DatePicker control could be the difference that makes it worth it.

I’m not saying it is so but that last one could be why I’m having problems with the Sametime screen capture tool on Vista.

As to Eclipse 3.4 I also just perused the “News and noteworthy” documents for the Eclipe 3.4 milestones (M1, M2, M3, M4, M5) and there is some nice stuff in there as well such as the possibility of setting an alpha value for shell (ie. the underlying SWT control for windows). This could make for some killer UI’s. Below is an example screenshot.

Can’t wait to have a much more mature Eclipse platform as the basis for my Notes client.

Sametime screencapture problems on Vista

I’m having major issues with using the Sametime screen capture tool on Vista (I’m on Notes 8.0.1 Standard on Microsoft Vista Ultimate). The tool works but it’s like the cursor is “stuck” somehow and the selection tool is very sluggish. Wierd!

The *very* wierd thing is that it works much better when the tool is started from the sidebar plug-in Connect client than from an active chat. Not perfect like on Windows XP but much better. Go figure!

Update: Now it’s also sluggish from the sidebar…