Category Personal
I took my 13 year old coon hound to the park today.

Posted by Devin Olson At 01:34:42 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Lotus Announcements

I will be presenting at the BLUG (Belux Lotus User Group) 2-day event on Thursday-Friday, March 22-23, 2012 in Antwerp.

Best Practices: Accessibility for Impaired Users

Adding support for Impaired users is no longer just a "nice thing" to have. The various legal requirements, your personal moral issues, and the bottom dollar costs versus benefits reinforce the need to support Impaired Users. This session will help you to understand what exactly is meant by the term "Impaired", the 3 major categories of Impairment, the legal and ethical issues surrounding support, the design considerations you should make, and some development tips to make your applications more accessible.

I hope to see you there!

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 12:47:51 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (5)

Category Announcements Lotus Technical

A while back I bitched about how Using Nested Subforms can Crash Designer and my frustrations about IBM not bothering to do anything about it.

I'm happy to announce that this is no longer the case. A PMR has been opened, and while there isn't yet a solution, IBM has some top men working on it right now. I'm feeling much better about Big Blue.

Now I need to come up with something else for ASK101: Ask the Developers.

-Devin

*Special thanks to Dan O'Connor, David Brown, and Amod Deshpande!

Posted by Devin Olson At 13:07:02 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Personal Help

My buddy Tim Tripcony posted this earlier.

If you have already helped thank you. If you haven't, please read this.

From Sophia:

Our sister and their mom are both servers in the restaurant business. Thankfully, both of their employers have given them the time off they need without their jobs being in jeopardy. However, there is no paid time off and no vacation time in the restaurant business. While they have always been able to just make ends meet, I am concerned about them not being able to spend time with Justin during his last days– either before death, or in the case that his heart miraculously recovers– a liver transplant. If he does recover, he will absolutely be at the very top of the list because he is currently so very sick, so the transplant could happen very soon.

If, he does not make it, then I know that none of us have the means to pay for a funeral. Either way, at this point, I’m looking for one of three things, or all three if you’re feeling generous:

• Can you help with even $5 for my fundraiser?
• Can you please pray, send light, send good juju, good energy, wrap him in healing, or whatever it is that you believe?
• Can you tell everyone you know about this story?

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 11:38:32 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Lotusphere Fun Beer

My sessions were not approved

So while those of you who did get your sessions approved have been stressing out about your slides and presentations, I've been making my own special preparations for Lotusphere 2012.

See you there!

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 14:49:48 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Bitching Lotus Technical

While trying to help me figure out a PIA problem with DDE yesterday, one of my co-workers found this on IBM's site: IBM LO58909.

Yes, you read it correctly. Using nested subforms can crash DDE. Wow. I don't know about you, but to me, this is a big deal. If you think it is a big deal to IBM, and that perhaps they have top men working on it right now, you are sadly mistaken:

Problem conclusion
A programming error was found but will not be corrected. It will be a permanent restriction.

Very interesting. This isn't a big enough deal for IBM to bother fixing. It is their product after all, and they do have limited resources. If they're not going to fix this bug then there must be a simple work around, right? Wrong again:

Local Fix
Do not use nested subforms.

<bitching>

Whaaaat? They can't be serious, can they? Do not use nested subforms.
Wow.......I am just....stunned.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this just isn't that big of a deal. Perhaps I'm just overreacting. Perhaps I'm the only developer out there who uses nested subforms on a regular basis. Perhaps using this technique is a newbie mistake. I've only been a Notes developer for 16 years -weaning myself from nested subforms must be something that just comes with experience.

Effectively ceasing all maintenance development on thousands of production applications can't be that big of a deal, right?

</bitching>
<doing>

For those of you who do use nested subforms, I offer the following options:

1. Freeze the design of all your existing applications. Do not use nested subforms for all future development. Tell your users that their existing applications must remain as they are, and that no future enhancements will occur. Your users will probably complain, but who cares what users want?
2. Migrate everything to XPages. XPages rock and are awesome! Everything else ever created sucks and should be replaced anyway. Start planning your migration now. Your users will love the new UI, and I will appreciate your consulting dollars. --Seriously though: if you are considering migrating to XPages then do yourself a favor and find out how we can help.
3. Do not use nested subforms. This means changing your current development patterns, re-working all templates for future development, and completely re-developing any existing applications you have. I realize this is not going to be popular and may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it is the IBM recommended Local Fix.
4. Use computed subforms. Yes this is a PIA and involves very similar effort to the previous option, but it avoids a complete re-design of pretty much every form and subform in your arsenal. Instead of actually embedding the nested subform(s), use a computed subform formula. The up side of this is that DDE won't crash. The down side is that your application will now run slower than before, but who cares about performance?
5. Downgrade to an older version of DDE. I do almost all of my development in VMs, and very rarely need to "bust out DDE" on my main work environment. So I can use the latest / greatest Notes Client for my non-development work, and then fire up a VM with version of Notes installed appropriate for that development engagement. This allows me to effectively support any client who might still be using older (even really older) versions of Notes. Replication and design refresh still work just fine. The only real down side with this solution is the licensing costs for the various clients and OS installations for all of the VMs. This solution -while not optimum, will work. Unless of course you want to work on an NSF that uses both XPages and Nested Subforms. In that case you're screwed.

</doing>

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 15:56:08 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (27)

Category Bitching Technical Lotus XPages

Wherein I explain what IBM needs to do to make XPINC live up to it's potential

Read this before you go any further. I'll wait.....

Now allow me to make one thing perfectly clear:

thick clients are not going away.

There has been a whole lot of fuss over the last 18 months about "social", "cloud" and "web based" solutions. XPages technology (which is extremely powerful and cool) seems to have been caught up with a lot of this hyperbole, which is a shame because it generates an unhelpful association with these other things.

XPages are web based -but only because CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and other required client delivery and presentation technologies are bundled and integrated into web browsers. The server is like a honey badger; very badass and doesn't care about the client. It processes GET, PUT, and POST requests -nothing more. I'm not trying to minimize the awesome power of XPages here, the processing stuff that goes on and the things you can do are absolutely incredible. But with regard to communication with the client it is an HTTP processing server -period.

Getting back to my point about thick clients, they are going to be around for a long time. The primary reason for this is the same reason they evolved in the first place -local data access. The pro thin client, pro cloud marketing crowd just don't seem to grasp that "always connected" is a myth. There are a bunch of other ancillary reasons for the thick client to stay around (security, encryption, processing speed, etc), but the most important one is local data access.

When the wire breaks or the cloud goes away, people still need to get things done.

Which brings us to XPINC. A critically important business need for running XPages in the Notes Client seems to have been forgotten: getting work done -even when disconnected. Accessing an XPages application on a Domino server somewhere from your Notes Client is fine and dandy, but what about when you don't have access to the server? The Notes Client has it's own internal XPages server (a GREAT start BTW); but until the Notes Client / Local XPages server combination is fully capable it is really nothing more than a fun playground.

In Sean's blog post (you did read it, right?) he talks about the troubles with opening an XPage from another database. The real crux of the problem isn't so much how you get the data as it is accessing the database itself. There is the rub. We need to be able to define RULES for accessing other databases -how to find it, where to find it, and under what conditions should we even look for it.

Dynamic determination of remote data sources is the single greatest XPINC miss

Until we we can programmatically determine at run-time what data sources to use, and where to find them XPINC will languish in the realm of "could-have-been" computer stuff -a world occupied by the likes of the NeXT computer, OS/2, and Second Life.

I'm not trying to belittle the work done so far. XPINC really has come a long way and is getting better with each release -but it is not good enough yet. I want to encourage IBM to keep pushing, keep making this better; because I really want to use XPINC. My backlog of potential projects waiting for a fully functional, fully featured XPINC implementation is huge. It is large enough to keep me billable for many, many years. But until such an implementation is delivered this backlog will remain nothing more than "potential".

Potential doesn't pay the bills.

Posted by Devin Olson At 11:39:54 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Politics

Posted by Devin Olson At 12:46:29 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Economics Politics

United States Debt now greater than GDP

reposted from my buddy Poison Pero. Original post here

Last Wednesday, Nov. 23, the U.S. National Debt officially passed our GDP...I'm betting this is the first you've heard of this matter, because the government and it's media psychophants (spelling intended) don't dare bring it up.

For those who think this isn't a big deal, lets look at a few other 'fun facts' (it might be helpful to go to the U.S. Debt Clock to get the current numbers).

1. As stated above, the National Debt has passed our GDP...It continues to move past it at a ridiculous rate, and will only get worse as we go forward.
2. The State and Local Debt should be added to the National Debt, because the Feds would never let them go 'belly up'...This would add another $3 trillion to our government's OVERALL DEBT. Like the Feds, the State and Local Debts are increasing at a faster rate than the Revenue streams to pay them.
3. The interest on our national debt FOR THIS YEAR ALONE is over $3.7 trillion! That's over 20% of our GDP! And the Feds have only received around $2.3 trillion in tax revenue...It doesn't take a genius to figure this accounting problem: We'll need to increase our taxes by almost 50% to JUST PAY THE INTEREST ON OUR DEBT.
4. Look at those Unfunded Liabilities: $116 trillion...A joke; an impossible figure. But no one wants to give them up.

So, what's to make of these FACTS?

Our elected officials and the geniuses in the media can lie to us all they want, the reality is our nation is bankrupt and no one is going to be willing to do what it takes to solve the problem: Raise taxes drastically, lower entitlements drastically, steal money from the rest of the world (through empire and resource exploitation), or a combination of all three. Americans aren't willing to do any, or all, of these three factors which would be necessary to manage our National Debt...Which is why we have 'Jumped the Shark' as a nation.

As Americans, most are ignorantly cruising through life without a care in the world about this matter, but make no mistake at some point we will ALL have to pay-the-piper...And when that time comes there will be hell to pay.

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 07:14:34 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Working Naked

When a normal office worker experiences an equipment failure (computer dying, desk drawer jamming, network outage, printer failure, etc.) there is usually somebody they can call for immediate help. A well skilled administrator / engineer / etc. can normally correct a problem in under an hour. As a remote worker you simply do not have that luxury. Replacements / repairs can take several days to complete, and this is time you cannot ever get back. More to the point, most businesses consider more than just price when making an equipment purchase -and so should you. Buying cheap equipment is a temptation to be avoided. Always get the very best equipment you can possibly afford.

This includes the obvious things like laptops, routers, printers, etc. It also includes not so obvious things like desks, and chairs. For example, a cheap office chair can be purchased for around $80 -and it will look and feel great for about a year. Then you will find yourself needing a replacement -another $80. Every year you will have to replace this chair. However, a decent mid-range office chair will run you around $300 -which seems like a lot. However, a chair like this will easily last 6 - 7 years. A high-end office chair will set you back $800 to $1000, but will likely last longer than you.

Remember that cheap != inexpensive. If you take your time and shop around you can often get high quality equipment for fairly low prices. You have to be the judge here, use your brains and think carefully before making the purchase. If there is any concern whatsoever about the potential quality or capability of the equipment then don't buy it. Getting a great price on a crappy piece of equipment is never a bargain.

-Devin

Posted by Devin Olson At 00:00:00 Location Cascade Township, MI | Permalink | Comments (1)