scott cochrane

Category Lotus Notes
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The second of design basics.. (somewhat later than planned)

Maybe the title says it all, but its important to put the data in the right type of fields.  This may seem obvious but the number of times I've seen a number in a text field - arrgh!.  This most notably applies to dates and numbers.

Why do you want to do this?  Simply because you'll not have re-manipulate the data elsewhere.  So if you want your stored dates on a document to behave like dates in a view - store them in a date field.  This will allow the view to see the data as a date and when sorted will sort it correctly.  If the data is stored in a text field the sorting will operate on the basis that your date is just a bit of text.  

Then if you have to do calculations on the data in either Formula language or LotusScript - you won't have to convert the data first - a number will be a number and a date will be a date.

It is also important to keep the use of correct data types when doing calculations either via LotusScript or Formula.  If using Formula in a calculated field make sure that the return type is correct - if you return a string the field will have a data type of text, if you return a date it will have a data type of date/time - regardless of the field settings on the form.    And the same goes for LotusScript - where is probably even easier to over-ride the field type .. in fact, in my experience this is usually the culprit for data being in the wrong format - someone generates a data string and stores this, leaving you with typically date/time data in a text format.

This flexibility of the data type in Notes fields might be useful in some occasions - but I've yet to find an occasion!  It is great that Notes is forgiving about this at times - but this means you have to watch the data types.

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 12:10 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Funstuff
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One for a Friday really...

I'm sure switzerland is still there .. {link}

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 1:50 PM Location Bristol | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Technology
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Just got sent this - the Beeb has picked up on Google launching a web browser the BBC ... as if we didn't have enough browsers to test against ...

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 10:38 AM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Linux
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A colleague passed on this today.  A server/client platform that runs on Ubuntu (although client coming soon - so not quite there), does mail, contacts, calendars, IM and has an IP-PBX.  And all for $50 per user per year - not a bad deal.

The overview page and comparison table is interesting in that apparently there isn't a "exchange replacement server" that has a Linux client, offers a one server/client type solution, a PBX and there is a question mark over IM.

Domino?  - Well OK, Domino doesn't do PBX, but can at least be integrated.  Still it seems like a note worthy competitor in the SMB space and interesting that they are punting it on Linux.

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 1:43 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Technology
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IBM have been playing now and built a 4.1 Tb system! {link}

From the article ..

"Compared with the fastest industry benchmarked hard disk drive system, Quicksilver not only improved performance by 250 percent but did this in less than one-twentieth of the response time, one-fifth of the floor space, and with 55 percent of the power and cooling requirements"

So when can I get a laptop with that

Updated:  added the link - doh!  Thanks Yura.

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 10:34 AM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes
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Well the install didn't go too smoothly - mostly because I forgot that the beta's don't support upgrade over a previous version.  So then removing the old version was a pain ... blah blah blah .. then finally got it installing.

Got one error during the install about not being able to unregister a component - probably due to my hacked uninstall .. but otherwise the install was fine..

So then I got the stop watch ready (could have done with a drum roll here) - waiting for the blistering speed of the start-up ... but then it had to run some configuration stuff and my myriad of ids / locations / organisations didn't make things any easier .. but it got there.  So then shutdown and restart - no it wouldn't - hmmm.

So ok, one quick machine restart later and I was starting Notes cold again.  Started ok, but the speed certainly wasn't blistering (over 2 mins)

However - closed it (and I swear it shutdowns quicker - the processes are gone within 5-10 seconds), then hot-start - and damned is that quick.  

I would often have not closed notes because of the time to restart - but if that hot-start is consistently that quick (and it seems to be) then closing it really isn't an issue.  I'm a little disappointed so far with the cold-start - I can't discern any real difference in the start-up time, but I'll reserve complete judgement on that.

I'm off to find some other new features now..

[ Machine is Intel Core 2 1.8 with 2Gb RAM ]

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 11:27 AM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes Design
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There is often a lot of talk around the complicated parts of the Lotus Notes - agents, scripting, js frameworks, OOP etc.  So I thought I'd try and run a few posts on the absolute basics of Lotus Notes development (and for the cynics amongst you, yes your right, it makes for an easy blog topic ).  

So since its the absolute basics I'll probably avoid anything relating to serious web design and maybe only run into LotusScript later on.   And your more than welcome to shoot it to bits as well.

So number 1..

Always use aliases on design elements and reference the alias in your design - not the actual name. You can then change your view names without changing references in dblookups, change form names without changing view selection criteria.  If you don't have tools like Teamstudio's Configurator this is damned useful.

Its often good to name the aliases with that prefix relative to the design element, e.g. viewPeople / vwPeople / frmAccount, particularly as this makes every alias within the application unique.

Despite saying I'll avoid web design .. I'll break that rule straight way:  Aliases allow you to refer to the design elements via URLs without a URL command as long as you name the aliases uniquely within the database (sorry - slap my wrist) - application.  So http;//www.mysite.com/somedb.nsf/frmCompleteMe will open the form frmCompleteMe without using ?OpenForm on the end.

The only place I might break this rule is when importing documents from applications where you are then going to use a copy of the other applications form design .. e.g. the Memo form in the mail file doesn't use an alias.  But equally you could always change the form name on the document and use an alias.

1 down .. next time, fields.

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 11:15 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Category SQL
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Normalisation*  isn't really something you worry about in Notes - although you might look to store data in response documents where you have multiple entities ( e.g. personnel reviews) related to  parent entity (e.g. a member of staff).

In the SQL world normalisation means avoiding redundant storage of the data but you relate the rows of data with keys - similar I guess to the relation between a parent and response document in Notes where the parent document UNID is the key.   In a SQL database you normally work pretty hard to keep your data normalised but I was discussion this today with someone because we have a dilemma around how normalised we should keep the database.  On this front I found this blog entry with a link to a presentation on the Flickr architecture.  The bottom line is that if you are prepared to put up with the down-sides, then go for it just stuff the principal.  This is also backed up somewhat on Wikipedia where it makes the point that for online analytical processing applications denormalised data structures have long been used to improve performance.

In our situation the option before us is to duplicate storage of some order data so that we can to guarantee that we can replicate the order at any point in the future.  I think thats what we will be doing.

So that is an attitude re-adjustment for me today - normalisation is NOT a religion.


* Normalization for the US English folks

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 2:27 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes
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Haven't had it for years and after a few months of use and I thought I'd lost my right arm when type ahead failed to function:

   

A restart did the trick - I hope 8.5 beta 2 will be just that bit more stable (although beta 1 has hardly been bad).  Later this week from what I hear ....

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 4:33 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Blogsphere
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A friend told me that they had commented recently and that the comment hadn't appeared (thanks Matt).  With some investigation today it turns out that with co-comment enabled on the configuration ANY comment was being flagged as spam.  I've logged the bug on OpenNTF but for now the easiest work around is to disable co-comment - does anyone use it anyway?

So for anyone that commented recently, sorry and I wasn't ignoring you - honest

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 12:51 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)