2 Week gap expected cos Im off on my holidays

Gentle readers, fellow GONADS in fact everyone.
There will now be a gap of 2 weeks where I will fall of the map as The McDonagh annual bachanalian orgy of Kelftiko, ouzo and best of all Mythos Beer is sought out and consumed prob in more than generous amounts. So Coatsie, Millsie and Buchan have a reprieve for the now. I slipped under the 15 stone mark yesterday.. YIPEE I am now offically 14 Stone "something" but that is unlikely to last.

I may pass the odd inet cafe on my travels and if I do I will check in , however if the last 30 years are anything to go by i may not be making a lot of sense, but then i never do.

Catch youse all sometime after the 15th

Blackberries (real ones) blossom and Acers (also the real ones)

Now here's a thing I was out for my nightly dander this evening and not only are there flowers a blossom in the hedgerows but the blackberries are in full swing.... This is indeed a funny year and no mistake!

Now this is an interesting thing

I have been following this story for nearly a year and it seems that there may be movement on this. The Air powered car. TATA the Indian company that released the world's cheapest new car are working with MDI from France to put the "Air car" into production

Now the car itself is zero-emission or near as damn it, and topping it up will cost around 50p or $1, it will do 200Km on a tank full with a max speed of around 60mph. A decent compressor and you can fill it at home. Now I am not a dyed in the wool tree-hugging greenie but if the men in the white coats put their big domed heads to it surely something like this would save me a F**king fortune in petrol prices.

A Lazy Dev Tip To Stop M$ LookOut Wrapping Notes Nice long URL links in messages

If you have a project that sends mail to those poor benighted souls that use M$ LookOut for their mail and they are suffering from wrapped and snafued long Notes URL links. Here is a tip that will allow your links to pass into the lands of the Redmond gnomes unmolested with bugger all fiddling about.

Yes I know you can do it with HTML mail, but sometimes life is just to short.

Put your URL in quotes like this "" and M$ will leave it be when it arrives.

Thanks to a very nice M$ techie Eric for the tip!

Getting intimate with Javascript objects part #8 - The Inherited Methods and Properties

Gentle reader,
Back to the wonderful geeky world of Javascript , it has been a while since the last post in this series, I do apologise.. here is a link to the thread in case you missed the excitement that was parts 1- 7,

In this post I am going to look at the sometimes overlooked methods and properties that come as part an parcel of every object you create in JS. As I mentioned before every object you create is a "child" of the Object class and as such in inherits all the parent's methods and properties. Lets look at a few :-

toString() this method does not require any parameters and returns a string that will in some way represent the the type and value of the object. I am sorry that sounds a bit vague, but have a play with it on your own objects and you will see what I mean. You will probably get something like [object Object] which is really not that wonderful. However if you are debugging some code and for the life of you, you can'rt remember what class constructor was used to create and object you can use the toString method to test this, for example if the constructor of an object was the Array class, toString will return [object Array] as a string. This will only work for classes that are part of the JS implementation of your browser. If you try this on your own classes you will always get [object Object]. What the JS interpreter gives the JS interpreter takes away ~sigh~.

Given that it already exists you can create your own customer toString using the prototype defintion, something like this.

GirlFriend.prototype.toString = function() {
return "[The name of this girlfriend is "+ this.name+" and she has "+this.hairColor+"]";
}

Which brings me to something I should have mentioned before ,when we were discussing prototypes. You can still access the original method using the apply(0) method. for example

GirlFriend.prototyle.toString.apply(o)

[Note the 0 is a zero!]

toLocalString() is the next method and it does the exactly the same as toString() except for objects created with the ARRAY,DATE and NUMBER classes which do return values based on the Locale of the client.

valueOf() is like toString() except that it returns a primitive value that is NOT a string. Oddly since a object is an object and seldom has a primitive value this method will simply return the object. However if the object is created from the NUMBER and BOOLEAN have primitive values so these are returned when valueOf() is called.

hasOwnProperty() this can be used to test an object for the possession of a property that was NOT inherited from a parent class. It returns either true or false. For example
GirlFriend.hasOwnProperty("toString") would return false as toString is inherited from the Object Class.
Where as
GirlFriend.hasOwnProperty("hair") would return true because hair is not inherited but defined within the GirlFriend class

propertyIsEnumerable() which is a bit of a mouthful and returns true if you can put the property being tested in a for/in loop, false if not. But beware if the property is inherited then this method always returns false!

isPrototypeOf( this returns true if the object is the prototype object of the object passed to the function. Otherwise it returns false. for example

var GF = new GirlFriend();
GirlFriend.prototype.isPrototypeOf(GF) will return true
GirFriend.isPrototypeOf(GF) will return false

Anyway thats really all I have to say about Objects for the now. So this Thread is closed ;-)

Sometime soon, after my holidays I will take a wander in to the wonderfully indexed world of Arrays!

SPF Finances part of the Belgian Government Choose Notes! Big Win! Well done IBM! Up your hole Ron Herardian

I see from my news feed that SPF Finances Belgium choose Notes for their messaging infracstructure. 35,000 bums in 6000 sites..Way to go Lotus!..
For the non-Franophones here is my appalling translation ...

With 35.000 “mailboxes” to deploy from here mid-December, the SPF Finances undoubtedly becomes the largest user of the Lotus Notes transport in our country.

It was after having installed 6 years worth of electronic letter-boxes to each civil servant (29.000 people) and offices (6.000 sites), ...[not sure about that bit] that the now delighted Louis Collet, directing ICT, the SPF Finances chose Lotus Notes for the renewal of his infrastructure of transport. The project involves an investment of about 4,7 Euro million for the next 5 years, this amount including/understanding the migration, the licences and maintenance.

It is clearly a victory for IBM vis-a-vis Microsoft Exchange which was credited in 2006 by cabinet IDC on the one hand with market with 51% (- 1%) in the integrated collaborative environment against 40% with Lotus (+ 2%). .....

LOTUS YEAH! WE ROCK!

Reading a CSV attachment in a server agent on Domino running on an iSeries

Oh Gentle readers here is the solution to a bit of a quandary that hit me the other day.

We have and agent that runs on a windows machine that reads a CSV sent out as an email by another system (non-domino) to a Domino mail-in database. A Server "On arrival of New Mail" agent runs , detaches the file, opens it , reads it and acts on the data inside the file on a record by record basis.

Now this all works a treat on a Windows server, but when we tried to move it to a iSeries the agent just grunted rolled over and went back to sleep, no errors but no data sourced actions performed either.

Now an iSeries is a funny if very reliable beast and what was happening was this. The email arrived in the mail box, the agent triggered and the file was saved to the what is known in the iSeries world as the IFS to the same folder as in Winders world. However the file was saved with the Coded Character Set Id (CCSID) that the AMGR jobs were running with when the save took place. For our iSeries this was 37. I could read the file from the IFS from a 5250 emulation screen. I could even drag and drop it from the iSeries to my PC and it read perfectly but the data that was being returned from the file was garbage. Initally I though it might be pure EBCDIC but not putting it through and EBCDIC convertor returned more of the same sort of garbage.

My chum Julian Robichaux wrote a nifty class that reads CSV files line by line and returns a nice easy to use arrays which needless to say I had used to read in the now detached CSV file. After some twittering and being lead down an interesting tangent by Kerr Raniney about reading the CSV directly from the MIME entity. (an idea I may investigate at a later date .. Thanks Kerr) I noticed in the help a section on what not to do in OS400 and was lead from there to the startling discovery that it was the OPEN statement that was at fault, When it changed it from

Open csvFileName For Input As csvFile
to
Open csvFileName For Input As csvFile CHARSET='UTF-8"

then everything started to work again!

What was happening according to the help file was that in the absence of an UTF8 or UTF16 BOM
on the file itself OR the CHARSET setting on the OPEN command the iSeries opens the file with the
CCSID tha tis on the file, in this case 37 so the iSeries was basically taking ASCII thinking it was
EBCDIC and forcing it into CCSID=37. The result was basically crap data. However setting the
CHARSET= parameter did the trick!

For all you iSeries Gnomes like me out there this is a fact worth remembering if you want to do
anything "smart" with attachments in agents.

Bog Snorkeling 101

Gentle reader I was most disappointed to discover early this evening that the ancient and honorable sport of Bog Snorkeling is not more widely known. I suppose I should not really be surprised. Year after year our pleas for inclusion into the summer Olympic Games are met with either a polite "no" or the more usual "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" ~sigh~ but we bog snorkelers are made of stern and hardy stuff and suffer the slings and arrows of a disbelieving public.

So for those of you that do not know what bog snorkeling is here is a a brief introduction.

A 60 yard trench is dug in a Peat Bog the trench is allowed to fill with water and then competitors must complete 2 lengths of this trench in the shortest possible time. They must wear Mask, Snorkel and flippers and cannot use a conventional swimming stroke. Wet suits are optional but only the really hardy do it "skyclad". There are the associated sports of "Mountain Bike Bog Snorkeling" and "Bog Snorkeling Triathalon" but these should only be attempted by the expert Bog Snorkelers.

As I alluded to at the start of this post, bog snorkeling is an ancient sport that traces it's history back to the time of Queen Gwendolyyn the 26th. Now it is said and who are we do gainsay it, they the reason that there was not a Queen Gwendolyyn 27th is because that particular dynasty died out because Queen Gwendolyyn 26th was really really really ugly and had a temper to match her vomit inducing look. Tis said her nose was that misshaped that it curdle any milk in a 200 yard radius. She had one eye that looked at you and one eye that looked for you ... I am sure you get the mental image. Sadly Queen Gwendolyyn was unmarried and childless. (yes I know this paints Irish males as cads and bounders but we have never denied that we are not) On her 40th birthday she arose in a really bad temper and decreed that the women of Ireland should give up sex for the rest of the year. (Her Birthday was in July!) She based this on the fact that if she was the Queen and she wasnt getting any they why the F**K should anyone else.

Needless to say the situation became bad quite quickly and as a result of extreme sexual frustration men took to looking at sheep for some romantic trysts. Sheep took to standing at the far end of fields and keeping out of the way of people. So to sneak up on the sheep men took to swiming up the ditches on the sides of the field.... and thus Bog Snorkeling was born.

Once a year,in July we celebrate the memory of Queen Gwendolyyn by carrying on the tradition of creeping up on sheep. Happily there are no sheep involved anymore (apart from in Wales)

Norn Iron Bog Snorkeling

and below is the Norn Iron Bog Snorkeling Video from 2006

An Interesting use of the postopen event of the application

I was faced with an interesting programming issue today which was solved with the seldom used PostOpen event that you can find on the database (sorry application). You can find this in the Other section of the application, then the Database Resources and then Database Script .

The event is found inside this section and gets triggered immediately the Application has reached a restful state in the UIworkspace.

This is an event that in our Org is seldom used, so seldom I thought I would blog the fact we used it. Basically we needed a check when the application opened that if it was a local replica that it had been replicated within a certain "window" of opportunity. If the file had not been replicated in say the last 14 days the application would close until the user replicated. If the file had not been replicated in the last 90 days then the file was "locked" and could never be used and the user was prompted to recreate the replica.

As I say this and the other events in the DB script section are often overlooked and when you really need them they can be really useful!

** Update ** Quite a few people have come up with MUCH more interesting uses, I advice you to have a read at the comments.

Useful JS script to get around IE's inability to do getElementsByName properly

If you need to use the JS function getElementsName() which works perfectly in all other browsers except that f**king slough of programming despond that is IE. Try this.

It basically overrides the getElementsById() function with a new one that unlike the spew in IE, works!

if ( /msie/i.test(navigator.userAgent) && !/opera/i.test(navigator.userAgent) )
{
document.getElementsByName=function(str)
{
str=new String(str);
var myMatches=new Array();
var allEls=document.getElementsByTagName("*"),l=allEls.length;
for(var i=0;i<l;i++)if(allEls[i].name==str || allEls[i].getAttribute("name")==str)myMatches[myMatches.length]=allEls[i];
return myMatches;
}
}

Bush and Gates get the LOLCats treatment

Kudos to Vowe!

See the rest here

Because I don't know about it therefore it doesnt exist

Gentle reader I was challenged the other day by a passing "person of faith". In the summer we have have a plethora of missions one of which "New Horizon" had as a guest speaker this year Dr John Lennox Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist. This has had the side effect that we now have "people of faith" who now have a scientist who can be waved at recalcitrant heathens like my self as proof that both god exists and there is a scientist that can prove it.

Now I have no great problem with Dr Lennox he is a fine mathematician, he writes a good book, I may not agree with what he says but he is being horribly misrepresented by those that listened, well I assumed they listened but I feel very probably they didn't. (If you are interested there was a very good debate here between Dr Lennox and Professor Richard Dawkins)

According to the book waver who accosted me as an out an proud atheist, it was ALL explained by Dr Lennox. The world's beginning is explained by the bible Dr Lennox and he is a scientist says so. Evolution doesn't exist Dr Lennox and he is a scientist says so... are you seeing a pattern develope here? To cut a long story short what I was challenged to was "how could the universe be created out of nothing". Now I have no answer for that but I do like to keep my finger on the pulse of what is going on, but for some time there has been head scratching about virtual particles, quantum perturbation, Willis Lamb in 1955 proved the existence of virtual particles that appear out of "nothing" (He got the nobel prize for it) He was able to show that matter in the form of "virtual particles" pop in existence and whilst cannot be observed directly their effects can be seen and measured. These virtual particles appear because of quantum perturbation. Now there is a theory that posits the "big bang" was in fact a massive quantum perturbation where there was more virtual matter than virtual antimatter created so there was a "bang" of sorts and because there was more matter our Universe was the matter that was left behind. I am not pushing this as truth, the maths that promotes this is very hard and I don't pretend to understand all of it. However I have given it the time of day and as we as a species learn more and do more experiments the balance of probability will push one theory of what happened more than another and I will watch this with interest. But there is very little to gain in the static world of the supernatural explanation. I have no interest in a following a supernatural reason because it never changes.

But I was told this is totally wrong and instantly dismissable because "Dr Lennox didn't mention it at all and he is a scientist and nobody I know has heard about it but you" Now to me this means "because I don't know about it therefore it doesn't exist" and this is meant to convince me?

~sigh~

Pleasantly Poetic Spam

It is not often you get a bit of spam where you look twice this one did. The bot that wrote this deserves a prize for pseudo creativity!


You are quite a Mephistopheles, Will--I say it to my sorrow.

Would that I were in your place.

Would that you were. Fifteen years ago I might have called the chance a magnificent one.

JJOTD (Jolly Jape Of The Day)

Oh this is priceless!
Somerset council have paired up with IBM in a $400m outsourcing contract. One of their stated, on paper, there in black and white tasks is to understand the use of jargon and acronyms used by IBM.

I was once been told by an IBM HW engineer that one of our System 38s "had ceased to be operational because of an AMD failure"

"A what?" i replied
"An AMD failure" He restated
"Woz that?" I asked
"An Air Movement Device" He said
"Oh you mean a fan" sayz I
"No I mean an AMD, Fans just blow air, AMD's move air in a predefined and expected way"
I beat him soundly with a dead haddock sadly this only resulted in yells of
"Hit the BRS!"
"What is the BRS?" I enquired as the haddock once again smacked up side his head
"The Big Red Switch" He replied spitting scales from between his teeth
"The Big Red Switch? What Big Red Switch would that be"
"The Big Red Switch that stops you battering me on the bonce with a dead haddock"
"Oh" I said continuing to belabour him with the haddock only stopping when he promissed me a boondoggle, mind you he did have to explain what that was aswell

I wish Somerset Council the Best of Luck but I suggest that they have a reasonable supply of dead fish!

Yellow day Panic!!!

Bum bugger blast and shite!
It is yellow day tomorrow well today actually (it's 00:08 here) and I don't possess anything that is remotely yellow in colour. To late to panic now i suppose but it does feel like I am letting the side down I may have to resort to pretending to be yellow... hmm or perhaps eat alot of bananas.... bananas oh yeah memories of saturday mornings when my little sisters would be wathcing this lot.... they are not yellow but they have 2 levels of separation from yellowness.


Ohh well hey ho. Day of the Dead is on BEEB 2. ZOMBIES Yeah! I will get all yellow later :-) In the meantime happy yellow days to youse all!

Another SciFi tale of strangness on my other blog

I have just written another tale of quarks and large hadron colliders and Ireland on my other blog... if you fancy a quick tale of strangeness you can read it here

Now this is quite odd and it came (sorta) via Ed Brill's site

This arrived in my mail today, snuck in under the spam radar so to speak now normally I wouldn't even give this a second thought. But look were they found "my profile". Ed are you running a dating site now? If you are I prefer blondes ;-) Click to make it bigger.












PS I KNOW they just harvested my mail address and I should be more careful ;-)

Dieting Is Fun - My ARSE! (or Standing on Scales Tension Syndrome)

Now I am fairly close to what used to be called a "new man". I am in touch with my feminine side. I cry at some DVD's, I can iron my socks I can throw together a dinner party for 6 on the way home from work. What I am not is one of those men to whom dieting comes naturally or easily.

I started on this particular spree of under-indulgence a month ago and the exercise is OK. I didn't go all out mad and join a gym. No %^$&ing chance of that! Too much damp lycra riding up the sheughs of my portly colleagues collective arses for a gentlemen of my taste and refinement. For my increased calorific duty I walk and I believe the correct term is "briskly" around the highways, byways, beaches and forests of my locale. That bit is fine, tis a manly thing to tramp around wondering if there are fish still in that stream, rabbits in that field and convent girls playing tennis down at the sports ground.

BUT and tis a major BUT I have started to read the contents and nutritional tables on the back of consumables. I wake in a cold sweat most nights should they every start this nonsense on pint glasses. Here in the UK/Ireland it is even worse that just the figures.They have this sort of traffic light on the values just you know that 195g of lovely tasty fat laden calorie rich pre processed weapon of mass constriction is not good for you it appears in sudden aortic aneurysm red. Where as a packet of wholesome, fibrous and totally taste free natural recycled bran cardboard is in a nice summery green. Basically you aim at getting as much green and as little red as possible.... B**T**Ds! That makes it to easy!! There is no excuse anymore!

I really don't mind some of the stuff "Weetabix Oatie Flakes" are ace with ice cold milk and a glass of green tea really does hit the spot. But I ask you when the very core of your being screams out for some deep fried goodness and then to be presented with reconstituted seaweed and soya goop on Ryevita just skunders my pish!

I know! I know! smoker for all those years, overweight, out of condition, a heart attack waiting to happen yada yada yada. I know! I am trying , the ciggies are a thing of the past, I am exercising, I am forcing down my 5 a day fruit and veg portions. I am avoiding cheese like Liam Gallagher avoids Head and Shoulders. My cry is WHY OH WHY AM I SO FECKING HUNGRY ALL THE FECKING TIME? When does the urge to eat one of our cats (with a nice hot salsa) disappear. When passing a field of cows when does the "will they miss one and is raw cow without horseradish tasty?" question stop jumping to the front of my mind?

~sigh~ I suppose I will continue on this road to wellville if for no other reason than I don't want the other NotesTubbies to beat me (Chris Coates, Bill Buchan and John Mill) in the diet contest.

**PS** yes I know i had a bit of a binge last Friday, but pint glasses don't have the contents stickers on them so it must have been OK??? Right?? ~sob~ Plllleeeeeassse make it right!

The 10 office commandments

Came across this the other day in an email from a chum on the interwebthingie.
It is probably so old it has hair whiter than my own. But it was the first time I have seen it and it made me smile. PARTICULARLY VIII! I had to be very nice to stores for my postits so keep your F***ing hands off!

I. Thou Shalt Have No Other Life Beside Work

II. Thou Shalt Not Download Any Craven Images

III. Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of Thy Manager in Vain

IV. Remember the Sabbath Day to Work and Keep it wholy for productive and billable endeavours.

V. Honor Thy Punctuality and Confidentiality Agreements

VI. Thou Shalt Not Kill Time

VII. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery On Office Furniture or Equipment

VIII. Thou Shalt Not Steal Thy Employer's Yellow Sticky-Notes

IX. Thou Shalt Not Wantonly Xerox Thy Posterior

X. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Cubicle, Nor His Stapler, Nor His Three-Hole Punch

GONAD News

GONAD has just passed the 100 member mark!

We now have members in the following countries
America, Anguilla, Australia,Austria,Belgium,Bosnia&Herzegovina,Canada, Czech Rep,Denmark,England,France,Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy,Malaysia,Mongolia,Norway,Portugal,Scotland,Spain and Switzerland.
and we have over 100 members!

It is with great pleasure that I can let you know that our 100th member was a Honorary Membership afforded after due consideration by a quorum of Worshipful Grand Dragons to Mr Alan Lepofsky. Along with membership Alan was the first ever inductee into the "Teamroom of Fame" for services to collabortation. The Certificate was presented at the Lepofsky-Palooza
last night in Boston.












The council of WGDs will take any nominations for inclusion of others to the TeamRoom of Fame at any time you can nominate by email to me or comments on a GONAD news post.

To be serious for a moment. I was challenged both by comments on other blogs and by email that GONAD had no benefits, rules, objectives or rationale. Hmmmm there is some truth in that, the constitution of the order was lost (hidden) during a SOX audit some years ago and even if we could find it it probably needs to be updated. So I humbly put this forward as a prototype Mission statement for GONAD. Please feel free to come back with additions and or corrections or amendments.

*************************************************************************
GONAD exists because Lotus Notes/Domino exists and we all use it on a daily basis. Most of us love it, a few loath it. We all turn up every day to keep servers running or write code to keep our users happy. We all get through the day in our own way but once in a while we all need to let our hair down and be silly with the people who share our world. GONAD is growing out of the fun that can be had doing that. Our fraternal Brothers in LotusBeer(tm) do exactly the same sort of thing . GONAD is just another one of a hundred thousand ways of having a bit of a laugh. Our objective is to have a laugh at ourselves, our users and the "opposition" and if we manage to raise a smile in others once in a while, well ... we GONADs think that is a benefit worth pursuing.

When any GONADs get together socially in real life or online their one objective, rule and rationale is to have a bit of fun and enjoy the fact that the world of Lotus from America to Australia and all points between is filled with good people willing to help each other at the drop of a hat.

GONAD encourages all members and non-members to find the time just once in a while to let themselves be a wee bit silly. If you can't make the social events at Lotushpere, ILUG, UKLUG, SNUG DKNUG etc why not make contact with other Lotus Folk in your own area and have your own 2 or 3 hours of geeky relaxation.

GONAD will never have another agenda nor an axe to grind other than the pursuit of a bit of a laugh. We all work in a serious world but it doesn't necessarily have to be serious when you leave
the office.
**********************************************************************

Anyway there you go, thats as far as I got. Oh yes there are LotusBeer(tm) events semi-regularly in Scotland and England, and we have just started in Ireland too, if you are local you are very welcome to come join in most of use don't bite :-) So keep an eye on the blogs and on Planetlotus's events widget. If you want to have one of your own, put the word out and see who turns up. If you don't have a blog, let me or one of the other GONAD or LotusBeer(Tm) bloggers know and we will be only to happy to put the word out for you!

Finally I have found a badge company that is willing to do GONAD badges for members, something like Brother Theo's "Read My Blog" badges that went down a storm @ ILUG this year. More on that later but if anyone wants to submit a design.. feel free to send it to me :-)

Having read the above if you want to join in drop me an email or leave a comment.

IIS fronting one of my web servers - Thanks to all who helped!!

When Isaac Newton quipped that he was "standing on the shoulders of giants" he was pretty close to the mark when it comes to the Lotus network of folk on the Internet. Ask a question and within the day a problem that had caused me major indigestion and irritability was gone., all because we are a community that takes the time to help each other. This isn't the first time it has happened but each time it does makes me proud to be part of a group that is so open to helping each other!

A big Thank you to all who suggested things, each suggestion took me further down the road to understanding and eventual resolution of the problem You are all GREAT I salute you!

Fireman Sam will save the universe at CERN

Gentle reader I was browsing TWITTER and came across this link from fellow GONAD Simon Scullion. They are really amazing piccies from the building of the biggest geek toy every made The Large Hadron collider. This will allow men in white coats to play sub atomic "Conkers" with itty bitty pieces of matter! Now the chaps that suck their pencils and do very very hard math assure us they know what they are doing and I am sure they do but when you get this close to the edge of what we as a species know there will be those who get worried. Now I am not in the least worried but there are some nay sayers that argue that the LHC should not be turned on.

However should a runaway black hole, stranglet or magnetic monopole develop NEVER FEAR , for this chap will rush to stop any nastiness spreading and destroying the universe!


*** Disclaimer *** I am not taking the piss out of fire and rescue people who do a dangerous and are heros on a daily basis. However you would think a project the size of LHC with all the funding they have would have given him something ... i don't know... less like a TONKA toy!

HELP ! where are the WAS plugins for domino in Version 8.0.1?

Any gurus out there lend a hand please.

Where have the following gone cos I cant find them on our 8.0.1 servers

c:\\data\plugins\plugin-cfg.xml
c:\\data\domino\\w32\

has the WAS plugin ceased to be for notes.

The reason I ask is we want to run one of the servers behind an IIS server and use it as a front end server on the dangerous outside the firewal and the plugin used to relay the data back and forth to the domino server. Anyone done this any tips traps redbooks etc you can point me at would be gratefully received! This is virgin territory for me.

GONAD News - GONAD fame spreads to Australian pastry makers

Thanks to Brother Kipil in Australia for this :-)

GONAD News - More and More countries join the flock.

GONADs all be upstanding! We have some new O's to welcome to the fold.
India
Malaysia
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Czech Republic
Scotland (home of NotesBeer(tm))
Italy
Mongolia
All now have their Worshipful Grand Dragons!

The keyboard has been red hot here in GONAD Central compiling lists and getting Certificates out to new members I do apologize for any delays but the response has been startling!

I would also like to welcome associate member Kitty Elsmore who was by popular demand inducted into the sisterhood for services to GONADs above and beyond the call of duty, that and an endless supply of Kola Bottles and Flumps!

It should be noted that the ancient and much respected motto of the Order has just been discovered in a pile of parchment from the dark ages (ie made up or found in my sock drawer)
"Erectus ilico fortitudo tumulus administratio Migrus-mollis solo flange!"
Which may or may not be something entirely unlike Latin.
It means "Standing on the moral high ground giving Microsoft the finger!"

Please be aware that I can't fiddle with GONADs during work so if you want to join it will be the evening before I can get around to it. BTW there isn't a closing date, membership is open to all notesy domino folk and they can join whenever. If you are worried about reprisals from ARSE (Acolytes of Redomond's Sharepoint and Exchange) , your membership will remain secret unless you tell me otherwise. So tell you friends, your colleagues we are officially a world wide network of GONADs!

"Keep 'em Snugg and free of FUD!"

GONAD Application Processing temporarily suspended

To all my GONAD readers that have applied for membership today Monday. I do apologise, your membership will be processed as soon as I get home this evening (I am in the BST time zone). This hiatus is caused by my bosses not allowing me to administer my GONADs during working hours.

GONAD news and a poll for the brothers and sisters!

Here in GONAD central, affectionately known as the "Jock Strap" it has been busy busy busy over the weekend with applications flooding in from all 4 corners of the globe. There are now O's in:-
Anguilla
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
England
France
Germany
Holland
Ireland (both North and South)
Norway
Portugal
Switzerland
USA
Welcome to GONADs one and welcome GONADS all!

It is early days and I am hoping for a O to start in Scotland, one in Wales and one in Italy we can then arrange a 6 Nations Tournament of some description (server disk arm wrestling perhaps) any suggestion that it will be heavily weighted so Ireland or Italy might actually win it is MOST strenuously denied!

There was a suggestion in the Convocation on Friday in Belfast of the Elders of the Order that we should, if the membership be so desirous, organize a convocation at LS09. I would like to formally propose this and ask the membership for a suitable name for this event.

Please note "A crush of GONADS" has already been declined because it made Paul Mooney's eyes water at the very thought!

Please attach suggestions here or if Shy send me an email :-)

So get your Notesy chums to sign up ASAP! A convocation is no fun without loads of GONADs
and if they are shy they can become a secret GONAD if they so desire.

The Chronicles of GONAD - The degrees of GONAD

I have been asked by the recently joined members what the hierarchy of GONAD is and were they fall in it. Well it is like this.
The 3 Sections
There are 3 sections to the Order.
An OU is the lowest section where the general membership exists and they are grouped together by location. For example I am in the Belfast OU of the Order.
OU's cluster together into O's For example the Belfast OU is in the Irish O of the Order. O's then are clustered in the Global GONAD Domain.
This can be expressed as Belfast/Ireland/GONAD

Everyone in the order is at a "degree" this defines your level in the craft.
The OU Section has 7 degrees of the craft starting at 01 as an "Undoubtedly Worthy Acolyte of the Oblate Yellow Sphere" you then move up one of the two ladders of skill. One for Developers one for Admins to the 07th degree. for a developer this would be "Worshipful Code Commander" for an admin it is "Worshipful Certifier Authority". These degrees are attained by raw ability and the support of your peers.

Once a 7th degree GONAD your time has come to move up to the management level of the order as a 8th to 12th degree GONAD you help run an O. Movement thru your chosen O is attained by the advanced craft skills of bum licking and toading to those that are above you.

Having achieved the 12th degree you can then gaze up and the heady level of the domain managers
who run the order as a whole. There are some particularly difficult rites and extreme bribery to pass but if you do then degrees 13-17 open up to you.

Here is a list of the degrees (Click on it to get a bigger image)

I have another wee story over on my t'other blog

Just case you haven't noticed :-) I have another blog just for short stories... and I have just posted another one here. This one is about the dangers of pissing of one of the Irish mythological races, the Kelpies.

People who aren't me

AS part of the whiole Cuil nonsense once again I made the mistake of looking for myself I have and I have found a new someone that isn't me .... this is him, he is an "account executive" and younger and better looking than me....(B%^$&*d!)

So far I have found

(a) A German porn star that looks very very like me, so much so I have been asked for an autograph at the Ocktoberfest.
(b) A celebrity chef on the Food Channel in the US one of the "Hearty Boys"
(c) A film Star of some note ... (Deeply Cool!)
(d) An Analogue Design Engineer ... (now thats impressive)
(e) A Sinn Fein member of the Irish parliment ... (That isn't impressive at all!)
(f) A Hurler (irish sport like field hockey but with less teeth)

Perhaps the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill, but squirrel! Why do they all seem to be younger better looking, more successful than me and mores to the piont higher up on GOOGLE?

The Chronicles of GONAD - The begining

Gentle reader now is the time, here on Dominoyesmaybe, to buck the trend and for one of the most secret of secret societies to come out of the closet and take it's rightful place in the world. Unlike Opus Dei, The Illuminati, The Microsoft Discount Hit Teams or even them Dharma project folk of "Lost" members of GONAD have a long, illustrious and coffee filled (or whatever stimulant you choose) history.

For too long the good folk of the Geeky Order of Notes Administrator and Developers have hidden their lights under a bushel. Now is the time to take our rightful place in the world! This is the GONAD story (part 1) ....

Long long ago

in a server farm

far far away

the dark FUD encrusted mists parted and a ray of sunlight cracked the gloom. The Ray is question was of the Ozzie variety and the sunlight was the appearance of Lotus Notes as an inkling of an idea, of a thought, of a "thats a good one" sub-type.

Mr Ozzie's glasses steamed up with the heat that this idea generated in his frontal lobes,as as result he did not see the spiral bound folder as he rushed from the now legendary and revered "lavatory seat of Oz" so that he might write down this idea for his genre defining collaborative tool. Alas and ALACK! he didst trip over the afore to mentioned spiral bound folder and went sprawling full length.

Yeah verily and thrice verily this was but the first time that Microsoft would cause pain in the realm of the GONADs for the tome in question was the MS-DOS Verion 3.1 User guide! A hated and yet strangely compelling list of eldrich and arcane commands for the taming of the silicon beast.

In the next installment of "The Chronicles" read in wonder about the birth of GONAD as it struggled to be formed in the fires of collaboration and tempered in the smithy of the mighty IRIS.

If you are or have been a Notesy geek you can now take you place as a proud GONAD without fear of persecution or molestation of any type. Laugh at your M$ colleagues secure in the knowledge that you have a lot of GONADs behind you and they do not!

Simply send me an email and you will receive your membership certificate by return.
This offer is open to lady and gentlemen geeks from around the globe and any offworld planets that pick up my RSS feed.

As time marches on GONAD will have it's own website and if I can find a company brave enough TeeShirts and for the gentlemen specially branded GONAD athletic supports!
Brother McDonagh from the USA branch has had similar thoughts we may even form a COMMITTEE. Look out for our stand at LS 2009. We will be wearing our GONADs with pride!

Oh an news just in... Acolyte Brother Robert Baehr is off and running with this .

So Brother and Sister GONADs remember the orders motto this Saturday Night- "Keep Them Snugg!"

Calling all Notesy folk - you are entitled to be a GONAD and can join today!

To all of my notes and domino readership you may not know this, but you can become a real and fully accredited member of GONAD (Geeky Order of Notes Admins and Developers) today! You get a lovely certificates of membership! Current Members include me and Paul Mooney and an application has flooded in from Norway no less!

Don't be left out become a GONAD today! Drop me a mail to get a personalized Certificate of membership, it is that simple and best of all it's free :-) so become the envy of your M$ colleagues become a GONAD member today!

** Update #1 ** GONAD is open to ladies as well as gentlemen

** Update #2 ** There has been a brisk membership uptake and now you will find GONADs chapters in the following countries. America, Austria,Ireland,Germany, Portugal, Holland, England, Switzerland and Norway. I am off to bed now so any one wants to be a GONAD send me a mail/comment (don't forget to tell me the country you are in) and I will process you tomorrow (Sunday) :-)

First Northern Ireland LotusBeer(TM) an unqualified success

Ah now gentle readers it is with very very very quiet keypresses that I type this post!

Myself, Mr Paul Mooney, Mr Geoff Higgins were joined by 4 other dedicated notes professionals, who I neglected to ask if it was OK to post about (best to be discrete in case they had said they were "working late" or other subterfuge)

The main order of business was the launch of the Northern Ireland lodge of GONAD (the Geeky Order of Notes Admins and Developers). All attendees of the inaugural meeting received a certificate to mark the occasion. (click for a bigger image)

Mr Mooney was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that on all those occasions when he had been referred to as a GONAD (he hinted that this may have been much more than once!) was in fact some fellow brethren of the Yellow Box trying to make contact. He wishes to send an apology to all those he may have ignored or growled at. Sadly this "Damascus Road" moment did nothing for his stature ... he is still officially "not tall". Mr McDonagh modeled the official GONAD dress shirt which Mr Mooney took a iconongraph of on his iPhone you can see it here.

It was generally agreed that the Notes 8 family should be recognised with the highest honour GONAD can bestow so the "Dog's Bollocks" award will be dispatched to MaryBeth and her team by first post on Monday.

Apologies were heard from Mr Buchan, Mr Coates,Mr. Quaresma, Ms Fitsgerald and Mr. Pereira who were unavoidably detained and the assembled Brethern and Sistern did clink several glasses of ceremonial cordial in the honour of all absent GONADs.

It was suggested that we co-ordinate with our brethern and sistern in the London and Aberdeen lodges to have a Notes Beer "GONADs on tour" weekend at some time in the future. Heads will be scratched and a report will be forthcoming in due course.

Sadly the hoped for video link was not possible as The Crown Bar is a very very efficient Faraday cage and I couldn't get a fecking signal. A suggestion for wifi access has been passed to the management of the establishment on the back of a beermat, a crisp packet and a receipt for a Subway Sandwich purchased in Gatwick Airport in 2005. We hope they read the message in the correct order.

This being the first meeting there were no minutes of the previous meeting to be read into the record so we swiftly moved on the official chair throwing, which was particularly good. Mr Higgins scoring an all time record 21 points after the perfect execution of the the "Excuse-me-that-IS-my- hair-you-twonk-Buchan" 360 with 2 inward twists. Mr Ben Poole's previous record of this 9.997 rated throw was 16.916 but that was both altitude (standing on the bar) and wind (he had cabbage for lunch) assisted.

The naked dancing was called off because of (a) the sudden thunder storm outside and (b) the presence of a naked Mr Mooney would constitute a clear and present danger to the sensibilities to the many innocent non GONAD young ladies who happened to be present in the bar at the time due to the double booking of the front bar for GONAD and The East Belfast Ladies Van Morrison Appreciation and Pole Dancing Club.

There being no other official business the GONAD song was sung with gusto, the remaining ceremonial cordial was quaffed and the first ever GONAD Norn Iron Meeting was declared closed.

The next meeting will be held towards the end of September in a location yet to be announced.

PS .. Membership of GONAD is open to all current and past Domino Notes professionals both Admin and Dev. Drop me an email to receive you membership certificate.

I have started a new blog for my creative side

I have, after much ferkeling and a spot of winkling, decided to get creative on another blog... here. This blog will house my creative stuf paintings, stories, poems and the like. Not that I put that many of those on this DYM, but it should reduce some of the "noise" I create on PL a little.

If anyone is interested I have plonked a short SciFic story up there tonight it is very rough and probably derivative but it has Aliens, pulse rifles, Belfast and lots of swearing so prob not "Safe for Work"