Lately I have been marked as a ‘reinventing the wheel’ guy. I don’t object to that. After all, when I see this cool new feature, I just need to see how it was made. And since I am there, I can also test my skills and rewrite it. But is it really that bad to reinvent the wheel?
Ending up a big project, I was brimming with confidence. The code was well structured, it ran fast despite using external web services and on top of that, it worked on test system. Oh boy, did it work. I should have seen a warning sign there. But no. I let my vanity kick in and enjoyed the good times. Yes, everything worked. Until…
Recently, I was working on an agent that used a web service to export data. Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but for some reason, consuming services is way easier in LotusScript than it is in Java. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, you need to import Axis in Java to do anything with a Web service consumer.
Recently, I had a “privilege” to acquaint myself with numerous small business applications for Windows. First, I would like to state that there is some good software out there and kudos to all of you who deliver it. Unfortunately, such software is in wast minority. However, you can quickly detect such software. Installation process is full of unreasonable demands, requests and limitations.
Recently we experienced an interesting issue with Sametime Business Card. There was a couple of our users for which business cards stated nothing more but their respective names. Not even an online status.
As upgrading to Domino 8.5.1 went so fine, it is time to upgrade our only Sametime server. Yes. Only Sametime server. We are a company of 80 and there is really no need for something more. Specially as we use WebEx as a meeting and conferencing software.
… and a happy New year 2011.
This concludes my posts for this year and see you all in next one.
Come end of last week, we started upgrading our servers to release 8.5.1. I did test upgrade of our development server couple of days back and find it incredibly easy. All test servers were installed in some 15 minutes. Without a glitch. Yeay for us and let’s go upgrade our production servers.
Quick tip. Trim and FullTrim functions in LotusScript don’t know how to trim Unicode strings correctly. Non-breakable spaces (Unicode &160; characters) are not trimmed. Which is annoying to say the least
And while we are on subjects, they don’t trim tabs as well.
I have already posted this on IdeaJam, so if you feel you should have that functionality, feel free and vote for it.
There is a new player in town, and Stackoverflow is his name. This might sound like a commercial, but it is true. How many times have you searched for a problem / solution and you got zilch, or in best case got a link to well known site that requested you pay for the answer that wasn’t even there? I know, I have many times.
Stackoverflow doesn’t know all the answers. Far from it. However, it is used by so many great developers that there is bound to be someone that knows how to answer your question(s). Voting mechanism is similar to the one at IdeaJam and makes sure that good questions and good answers are always at the top. And it is FREE. Really, the best thing to do is to go and check for yourself.