Stupid shaky hands. How am I supposed to drink my tea?
Sep 112007
Sep 092007
Opening the store at ten, but not actually opening the checkouts till eleven. Awesome. Thanks, Tesco!
Aug 302007
Lotus Domino. Making some stuff easy, and some fairly obvious stuff stupidly convoluted.
I have a subform which has a version number in it. It’s in the subform so it only needs to be changed in once place to show up in all of the site design where it needs to be, and it’s not in a document because they don’t travel with the design. So far so good, you might think.
Pages do not support subforms. Or shared fields. Or any other way of incorporating reusable design elements. So I’d be better off using a form. But I can’t use a form, because you can’t specify a form as the default element to open when the application is opened, and short of reconfiguring every other bit of the intranet which links to all the deployed instances of this app, the only thing I can think of to do is put a redirect into the onload event of the page so that it redirects to the form version, which has the subform on it. This is a nasty hacky icky brittle way of doing it but I cannot think of any other way.
Sometimes being a programmer can be immensely rewarding. This is a million miles away from being one of those times.
EDIT: Thanks to Matt for pointing me in the right direction for the Notesy workaround for this. It’s still a bit of a hack but less so than redirecting via javascript in the browser. I feel slightly happier now.
Aug 232007
It’s about as much fun as it sounds.
Aug 172007
The interview meme. Questions posed by Felinitykat.
1. Have you ever had a burning desire to live somewhere specific? A country or town you’ve never lived in before?
I was going to say “no, but I have occasionally had a burning desire to live somewhere other than where I was (for example, when I was in Middlesbrough)”, but then I remembered the long weekend I spent in Cannes. For some time after that I had quite the burning desire to live there. Lovely place, warm, nice food, boats. Even the occasional film star, although I wasn’t there for that particular weekend. It was all very nice.
2. When you lived in Spain, what did you miss most about the UK? And what was best about living in Spain that you wouldn’t get over here?
I missed my friends and family. Corny, I know, but true. Also, tea.
The best thing was probably all the great pig-based food and how cheap it was. And proper tapas, as in tapas that you just get given when you order a drink in a bar. That was fab.
3. Who do you admire the most?
Tricky question. I can’t really single out any one person, which is a bit of a cop-out, but there you go. Anyone with great talent, or who not only has principles but stands firmly by them, grit, determination, combinations of the aforementioned.
4. What’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for you?
Again, tricky, particularly as with my awful memory I may forget nice things that people might have done, which is terrible of me, but unfortunately true.
However, my brother let me live with him for a while when I was forced to move out of my flat, and he has also helped me move house on several occasions (including helping me hump my stuff back from Spain). That was nice.
5. Are you good at keeping secrets? What’s the best one you’ve ever been told? (ah ha ha, see what I did there?)
Oh, you cunning devil, you. I like to think I am quite good at keeping secrets, partly because I try and keep my word wherever I can and partly because I just forget a great deal of what I’m told.
Best one ever? Not telling.
Aug 102007
Because I am bored, and still in the office rather than going out and drinking with my mates before going for a curry like I damn well should be, I have been browsing the intarwebs.
A colleague sent me a link to James Henry’s blog, for the toy-fu cartoons, which are funny. And then I saw that he was a writer on Green Wing, and thought that was quite cool. So I read some of his blog, and thence also started reading Patroclus’ blog, and I’m ploughing through the archives when I see a link to Longcat, and I think “hang on, I know him” and investigate further, and yes, it’s the same Longcat who is the brother of the lovely FelinityKat, and what this long and rambling sentence adds up to is the fact that I am less than six degrees away from Hilarious Telly Comedy People.
Which is nice. Makes me feel a bit better about still being in the sodding office.
Jul 032007
This is my newest toy – a mighty 1W practice amp. And it sounds pretty good, particularly for thirty quid. And, as you can see, it is very very small.
Jun 202007
According to the Quackometer, simes.org warrants (or at least warranted at the time of posting) two Canards:
This web site is using alternative medicine terms. It shows little or no critical thought and so should be treated with caution!
No critical thought, indeed. Were it possible for one web site to slap another with some kind of Internet Glove, simes.org would be doing so right now.
Jun 052007
Today is actually day 2 of being ill, as yesterday was so bad I spent the entire day in bed with a headache the size of Nuneaton.
Now, you may be thinking, “Nuneaton only has a population of just under 71,000, it’s not that big.”
Well, I think you’ll find that if you tried to cram it into your skull, it would ache quite a bit.
In summary, being ill sucks. We now return you to your regularly scheduled internets.
Mar 092007
Sometimes when you’re working on a Domino web app, you need a NAB picker to help your users fill in name fields. At such times, you scour the web because you know that clever people like Scott Good and Matt White are out there and have probably done it already. And you find that they have, and you grab that code and use it. And it’s all fine for intranet sites.
And then, as happened to me this week, you find that you need to use your name picker with a NAB that normal users are not allowed to read, such as corporate sites which face the Internet. The picker I’m using, Scott’s, based on Matt’s, uses ReadViewEntries to get its data. Without user-level access to the NAB, it doesn’t work.
So, ideally, in this situation, what you need is an agent which can be run from the web and does essentially the same thing as a call to ReadViewEntries, because that way you can use the same name picker at the front end. And that, dear reader, is what I present to you today.
Again, the first thing you do in this kind of situation is hit Google to see if anyone’s done it already. And so this code is mostly from an agent at Vince Dimascio’s site which presents Full-Text Search results in a ReadViewEntries-like form. All I did was pull out the FTSearch stuff and put in support for start, count and startkey values. I’m quite pleased with the end result, though – it’s pretty nippy, certainly still fast enough for the typeahead lookup to work.
Source is here. Enjoy!
