YAHOO! Pipes

I have nothing against Duffbert – really! I think he’s a stand-up guy. I appreciate his interest in doing book reviews but I really only want his posts on everything else. To make it possible I created my very first YAHOO! Pipe. It’s so very cool it’s almost indescribable. What I did was to add a feed component with the URL of Duffbert’s main feed, added a filter component to block all items where the title contains “Book Review” (the filter component understands that it is filtering a RSS feed and gives me the fields from the feed to filter by) and pipe that to the output (see below). Simple and effective.

Once the pipe had been created I simply subscribed to that feed instead. What’s really cool is that if I would rather have a JASON feed to include in the web-page I simply have Pipes change the output format for me! Sweet!

If you haven’t looked at YAHOO! Pipes yet you really owe it to yourself to do it.

Eclipse 3.3 is here – what does that mean for Lotus Expeditor?

As you might have heard version 3.3 of the Eclipse platform has been released under the codename of Europa (Eclipse 3.3 Europa) and is now the preferred version of Eclipse for new developers. With the new Eclipse release I’m wondering where that leaves us developing for Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5. Will development for the IBM Lotus Expeditor platform be supported with Eclipse 3.3 or will we need to stay to Eclipse 3.2 to be supported?

I’m just curious. It isn’t too much of a problem for me right now as I’m already running both Eclipse 3.1 and Eclipse 3.2 on different projects so adding a third to the mix shouldn’t be too much of a hazzle. I’m just curious as I think it will set a precedence as to how IBM Lotus plans to keep up with the ongoing development and evolution of the Eclipse platform.

Another reason why it isn’t too much of an issue for me is that I’m on Windows XP. One of the noteworthy features of Eclipse 3.3 is the support for Mac OSX on Intel. This is interesting since we as Notes/Domino developers are extending our reach into the Mac market and hence this kind of support is required.

RFC821 address functions in Notes – are they working properly?

I have been trying to use the built-in RFC821 address functions in Notes recently but has given up since they do not work correctly in my mind. A RFC821 – or an internet address – is in my mind composed of a local part (the part before the @-sign) and a period separated domain component (the part after the @-sign). A valid RFC821 address must contain both parts. Valid examples could be:

  • jdoe@example.com
  • john.doe@example.com
  • jdoe@sales.example.com

Notes/Domino has functions in @Formula, LotusScript and Java for working with and validating RFC821 addresses and none work as expected (probably because they all use the same C code). For example all functions will accept “jdoe@example” as a valid RFC821 address – an address which is my mind isn’t valid at all. This fact is further aggravated by the fact that I would expect to use the functions to distinguish between Notes addresses and RFC821 addresses. When the functions “work” as they do I cannot do that since jdoe@example could just as well be a Notes shortname followed by a Domino domain.

Below is a test case for LotusScript (non-blank value should indicate a valid RFC821 address).

Dim nn As New NotesName("jdoe@example.com")
Print nn.Addr821
>> jdoe@example.com
Set nn = New NotesName("jdoe@example")
Print nn.Addr821
>> jdoe@example

The help states:

The RFC 821 address is a name followed by an at sign followed by an organization, for example, jbg@acme.us.com. In an RFC 822 address, it is the part enclosed in pointed brackets.
This property returns an empty string if the name does not contain an RFC 821 Internet address.

In my mind this is just plain wrong.