Pictures of workspaces - an Art Project

Further to the pictures we have all been posting of our workspaces professional and not as the case may be. If may be interesting to note that my Canadian Cousin, Paul Litherland did a very similar think last year. He is an artist of some renown and specializes in photography.

On his last wander around the murky world of McDonaghs, Whites, Pages, Litherlands and other assorted branches of the family tree. He took photo's of our workspaces and plans to present them as a complete work...

To quote Paul ...

Family workstations is a documentary photographic project of how computers occupy space in the home. By photographing my relations computers, my intention is to highlight the durability or ephemerality of different types of networks. The works are titled using the relationship of the person to me, Paul Litherland, as well as the configuration of the computer.As time passes, the work will assume different positions /interpretations as the machines become obsolete, but the familial relationships endure.

The picture of mine was too ghastly to publish :-) he probably has to wait for his "R" rating.

** News ** Ferrari Fire Pit Crew

The Ferrari F1 team have fired their entire pit crew!.

This announcement followed Ferrari's decision to take advantage of the British government's 'Work for the Dole' scheme and employ some Belfast youngsters.

The decision to hire them was brought about by a recent documentary on how unemployed youths from West Belfast were able to remove a set of wheels in less than 6 seconds without proper equipment, whereas Ferrari's existing crew could only do it in 8 seconds with millions of pounds worth of high tech equipment.

It was thought to be an excellent, bold move by the Ferrari management team as most races are won and lost in the pits, giving Ferrari an advantage over every other team.

However, Ferrari got more than they bargained for! At the crew's first practice session, not only was the Belfast pit crew able to change all four wheels in under 6 seconds, but within 12 seconds they had re-sprayed, re-badged and sold the car to the Mclaren team for 8 cases of Guinness, a bag of weed and some photos of Lewis Hamilton's bird in the shower!

Strange Errors from 8.0.1 when creating a document from another document

Today was punctuated by news that the world was broke and the fact that I got the same really strange message twice in the same day from my Notes 8.0.1 client on my laptop. The error in question is "No document found in that direction" and it appeared when I tried to FORWARD a message.

Having just returned from my trip to Paris and being a little tired I took the message at it's most simpilist and tried turning the screen thru 90 degrees. However there was not document there either.

The first message came from my mail file I did a design replace as I like to fiddle with the design and it was very possible that I had broken it myself. I did a design replace and the error went away and I gave it very little more thinking cycles until it was reported at happening again in a very large app that workflows sample requests that we get from our customers and web site from the users I had recently upgraded in Paris. I went and had a look see on the dev server and yes the problem existed there too.

Basically there is a "parent doc" on which is a button that created as "child" response doc that inherits a few fields and presents the user with a new form. The code behind the form was simple.

@command([filesave]);@command([compose];"SampleDetail")

I did some digging about on the web and there it was in the V8 forum sadly there isn't a lot iof detail and it seem that this is only addressed in the V8.5 not 8.0.2. Like the user who reported the problem I got around it by converting the action to LS, thankfully there are only a few inherited fields and they were relatively simple.

What is a tad worring is that the REPLY + FORWARD options in the mail file (the forward one crapped out on me today) aren't ones we as Dev's can get at.. so how did I get the error this morning and what did the design replace do to make it go away? Hmmmmmmmmm

Sneak preview of "The Economist" for next week

My Home Office

As it seems there is a generally "showing off" of our our home geekspaces as evidenced by Theo's Blog where he has two lovely pictures of his Home office. I thought I would show the opposite side of the coin so to speak.









A. Yeah go PlanetLotus!!!
B. O'Reilly (yes really) Definitive Javscript Guide
C. Tigger Coffee Mug from yesterday or the day before
D. ILUG 2008 shiney thingie
E. "Wot do you mean it is bedtime?" verification device
F. Celion Dion CD case (i binned the CD in disgust)




















G. New hard drive screw V1.2.3a Search device
H. iPlod Charger thingie ... (Oh THAT's where it is!)
I. McDonagh Travelling painting kit (or placcie bag to the rest of the world)
J. PADs (Paint Application Devices)
K. Indication of rather too much boredom on a wet winter afternoon
L. Pile of books awaiting full text index creation
M. ILUG Green Hat ontop of ILUG Bag ontop of older Ilug bag

It is my mess and I love it!

Calling any French Notes Geeks around Paris

Next week Mon-Thursday I will be in Les Ulis in Paris. Now geography is not my strong suit but I know it is near Massy on the south side of Paris and it is far enough away from CDG airport that it scares the SHIT out of me going all that way on the "peripherique".

So if any French Notes Geeks want to get together with an Irish Notes Geek some night next week drop me an email (see the "Getting my attention" section on the left) or Twitter me and lets arrange a time to have a spot of Domino Fraternité :-)

New Blog look 'n Feel

Well it is autumn (or fall if you prefer) and as the seasons change so doth my level of "comfyness" with my blog design. Having b**GG*red up the last one and succeeded in totally wrecking it I was pushed into getting out the CSS guide (thanks 2 Duffbert who pulled my name outa the hat during his session at ILUG 08) and I now have a CSS that is perhaps more ... professional.

For those of you that are wondering what the spirally shape is called a "triskele" there are plenty of reasons I could give for why i like it ... the proposed theory that it represents the tides of breath, the tides of life and death or the sea's restless toing and froing. Alternately very near where I learned to fish for Salmon, the "bann disc" was discovered and early iron age artifact that still has amazing grace and beauty even after 1000's of years. If you ever visit Belfast you can see it in the Ulster Museum which a pleasant diversion on a wet day!. Whatever the reason , for me it is a reassuring shape and as the world apparently slowly spirals down into chaos there is the home that like the Triskele we will all get would back up again for another go ;-)

Wot I done on my holidays

Hello again gentle readers both great and small!
I have returned from my holidays, well you will have probably got that already as I have done a couple of post. So there you have it! I am back in god's sod and like all good A+ students I have the "Wot I done on me holly dayz" 500 word essay ready and I am prepared for the start of the new autumn/fall term/semester. Which means I am basically on the wind down to Xmas.

Last year our outward journey to the land of Homer and Euclid was a complete FUTILE invested disaster. So collective breaths were held, fingers, toes and all bendable appendages were crossed and it WORKED for this year was a breeze! A quick hop from Belfast to Birmingham (UK) then a very pleasant evening with my middle sister and then a 5am flight to Skiathos in the Sporades island chain in Aegean.

View Larger Map

Now I don't want you all going and booking holidays there next year so .... it is really a horrible place, ghastly truly horrible you cannot adequately describe the levels of awfulness that are reached ... OK have you turned off.. good :-)

So for anyone who has kept going, Alonissos is a what we in "Norn Iron" call "Toetee" , or in the more common parlance, "very small" island.There are no big discos, no noisy bars and most of all no northern european arseholes demanding Pukka Pies and cheap cider .. absolute bliss!

I am a simple man and have simple tastes and requirements for my vacations. I want to be able to paint, eat , drink and sleep but not necessarily in that order. Alonissos delivers all that and more.
I stayed in the Paradise Hotel which hangs on the edge of a cliff about 10 minutes stroll from the harbour in Patitiri town. Bessie and Kostas the owners run one of the most wonderful hotels in the world. I, through work, travel all around Europe with occasional trips to the US and Asia and I would gladly mark the Paradise higher than many of the 4* hotels that I have stayed in. They only have 2* at the minute but on the McDonagh Scale they score 10 out of 10 .. yes I do think they are THAT good!

I did some painting every day, it is the only part of the year where I can spend several hours painting and not let the 1001 other things slide. You may notice that I don't paint on paper, this is in fact not as it has been spread around because I am so "tight" that I won't spend money and buy paper. This is NOT TRUE.

There is a long story that explains my stone decorating issues. A story that involves dolphins, gypsies, sunburn, boredom and leaving a little bit of yourself behind when you leave. Perhaps I will fill you in on it one of these days.

Briefly this is a daily routine - I get up and have a long brekkie and a bit of a chat with the other guests. Then go for a wander before it gets to hot. This walk is usually down to one of the beaches on a hunt for material for that day's painting. I have to pass some tavernas (lucky that) which at that time of day are full of Greek gentlemen fiddling with their Komboloi (Worry beads) drinking Greek coffee and watching the world go by. Sometimes I join them on the way to the beach, sometimes on the way back. So it is nearly dinnertime or there abouts when I get back to the hotel. The sun is high in the sky and the temperature is in the high 90's. As I get sun-burnt under a naked 40W bulb I head for the shade somewhere near the bar and get out my paints and ... paint until it is safe to venture out into the sun on late afternoon.

One of the benefits of painting in public is that it is a great ice breaker. People come over to see what I am doing and you get talking and soon you are firm friends. [ Hi Bert,Ria, Roger,Anne and all the other others I met under the trees :-) ].

You may be wondering what happens to the stones (I do 2 or 3 a day) No I don't take them home, I give them away to folk that say they like them ... LOL ... I will never make a fortune but I have met some amazing people and have made some great friends so it is good karma if nothing else.

The food is uniformly excellent in all the Taverna's I have frequented. It has to be said that Roger and Anne [who have been coming to the island for many years cos it is a fantastic place to walk] were of great assistance here as they know everyone and can point you to the best kitchen for lamb/goat/fish or the amazing "Alonissos Cheese Pie".

I do have to add at this juncture that "We don't like Skopelos" a phrase often repeated when Cheese Pies are mentioned. Skopelos is the island next door [and was the location for the MamaMia film of last year] and they are alleged to have "stolen" the recipe and shape for Alonissos cheese pie and made it their own! Should you ever be in the Sporades please do sample the cheese pie on any of the islands ... BUT do not expect to be able to move afterwards if you buy one just for yourself - they are ENORMOUS!

I could go on and on and on boring the pants of you about how drop dead gorgeous the Hora up on the hill is, how wonderfully clear the sea is, how even though the rough guide and lonely planet say Patitiri is not pretty that I beg to differ ... I think it is. Give me the Patitiri harbour any day of the week but then I am probably biased. I can get a coffee, retsina , ouzo or a bite to eat with the minimum of exertion or fuss I even got the share of a coffee and a shot of Tsiporo from a fisherman at 5am when I wandered by looking for somewhere to sit and watch the sunrise.... but i won't drag this on any further.

Oh I have to mention Kostas' and Bessie's daughter Nicholetta and her friends who quite happily played tabli (Backgammon) with an aging Irish hippy without any of that reticence that teenagers feel around adults. Thanks for letting me at least 1 game :-) !

So if you want to experience a "real Greek island" and promise not to ruin it, go to Alonissos, tell them Irish Steve sent you :-) on the other hand perhaps not...LOL...

So to Kostas, Bessie, Nicoletta, Kostantina, and all the locals that made it a holiday to treasure... a great big THANK YOU! You had better prepare for another Irish invasion next year :-)

LotusBeer Ireland II (now its personal) 26th Sept The Crown Bar Belfast 6pm onwards

*** UPDATE *** THIS HAS BEEN POSTPONED FOR NOW ***

Ladies gentlegeeks and GONADs all.

You are all cordially invited to an evening of quaffing and the sipping of whatever takes your fancy in The Crown Bar Belfast on Friday the 26th September starting around 6pm ish and ending when the beer runs out or the last bus leaves.

You don't have to but it would be good to know if you are coming so drop me an email and let me know so we can lay on extra chairs for the chair throwing. Oh and we may have a Keynote drinker this time :-)

So if you fancy a few beers to end the week in the company of some geeks from the North you are more than welcome to come and join in!

Best Taverna Joke 2008

In the last 2 weeks I have fraternizing with the nicest people on a totey (small) island in the Aegean called Alonissos (of which more later) much good food was eaten, drink drunk and jokes told. The best by a fairly wide margin was this one.. Ladies, Gentlemen geeks and GONADS let me introduce "The Baptising an Irishman" joke

An Irishman, is stumbling through the woods, totally drunk, when he comes upon a preacher baptising people in the river.
He proceeds to walk into the water and subsequently bumps into the preacher.
The preacher turns around and is almost overcome by the smell of alcohol, whereupon he asks the drunk,
'Are you ready to find Jesus?'
The drunk shouts, 'Yes, OI am.'
So the preacher grabs him and dunks him in the water.
He pulls him up and asks the drunk, 'Brother have you found Jesus?'
The drunk replies, 'No, OI haven't found Jesus.'
The preacher shocked at the answer, dunks him into the water again for a little longer.
He again pulls him out of the water and asks again, 'Have you found Jesus my brother?'
The drunk again answers, 'No,OI I haven't found Jesus.'
By this time the preacher is at his wits end and dunks the drunk in the water again ---
But this time holds him down for about 30 seconds and when he begins kicking his arms and legs he pulls him up.
The preacher again asks the drunk, 'For the love of God have you found Jesus?'

The drunk wipes his eyes and catches his breath and says to the preacher, 'Are you sure dis is where he fell in?'

the credit crunch (some scarey reading)

I am going to do a "What I did on my holiday" post in a wee while but this is way more interesting and much, much more scary , even more scary that me in my swimmers!

I asked a chum of mine, a geek that works in a bank, to explain to me what all this credit crunchiness was about and some background into what was going on and he sent me this there is loads of it so


*** START EXCERPT ***
The Credit Default Swap was invented a few years ago by a young Cambridge University mathematics graduate, Blythe Masters, hired by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank in New York . The then-fresh university graduate convinced her bosses at Morgan Chase to develop a revolutionary new risk product, the CDS as it soon became known.

A Credit Default Swap is a credit derivative or agreement between two counterparties, in which one makes periodic payments to the other and gets promise of a payoff if a third party defaults. The first party gets credit protection, a kind of insurance, and is called the "buyer." The second party gives credit protection and is called the "seller". The third party, the one that might go bankrupt or default, is known as the "reference entity." CDS's became staggeringly popular as credit risks exploded during the last seven years in the United States . Banks argued that with CDS they could spread risk around the globe.

Credit default swaps resemble an insurance policy, as they can be used by debt owners to hedge, or insure against a default on a debt. However, because there is no requirement to actually hold any asset or suffer a loss, credit default swaps can also be used for speculative purposes.

Warren Buffett once described derivatives bought speculatively as "financial weapons of mass destruction." In his Berkshire Hathaway annual report to shareholders he said "Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses -often huge in amount- in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)." A typical CDO is for five years term.

Like many exotic financial products which are extremely complex and profitable in times of easy credit, when markets reverse, as has been the case since August 2007, in addition to spreading risk, credit derivatives, in this case, also amplify risk considerably.

Now the other shoe is about to drop in the $62 trillion CDS market due to rising junk bond defaults by US corporations as the recession deepens. That market has long been a disaster in the making. An estimated $1,2 trillion could be at risk of the nominal $62 trillion in CDOs outstanding, making it far larger than the sub-prime market.

No regulation

A chain reaction of failures in the CDS market could trigger the next global financial crisis. The market is entirely unregulated, and there are no public records showing whether sellers have the assets to pay out if a bond defaults. This so-called counterparty risk is a ticking time bomb. The US Federal Reserve under the ultra-permissive chairman, Alan Greenspan and the US Government's financial regulators allowed the CDS market to develop entirely without any supervision. Greenspan repeatedly testified to sceptical Congressmen that banks are better risk regulators than government bureaucrats.

The Fed bailout of Bear Stearns on March 17 was motivated, in part, by a desire to keep the unknown risks of that bank's Credit Default Swaps from setting off a global chain reaction that might have brought the financial system down. The Fed's fear was that because they didn't adequately monitor counterparty risk in credit-default swaps, they had no idea what might happen. Thank Alan Greenspan for that.

Those counterparties include JPMorgan Chase, the largest seller and buyer of CDSs.

The Fed only has supervision to regulated bank CDS exposures, but not that of investment banks or hedge funds, both of which are significant CDS issuers. Hedge funds, for instance, are estimated to have written 31% in CDS protection.

The credit-default-swap market has been mainly untested until now. The default rate in January 2002, when the swap market was valued at $1.5 trillion, was 10.7 percent, according to Moody's Investors Service. But Fitch Ratings reported in July 2007 that 40 percent of CDS protection sold worldwide was on companies or securities that are rated below investment grade, up from 8 percent in 2002.

A surge in corporate defaults will now leave swap buyers trying to collect hundreds of billions of dollars from their counterparties. This will to complicate the financial crisis, triggering numerous disputes and lawsuits, as buyers battle sellers over the technical definition of default - - this requires proving which bond or loan holders weren't paid -- and the amount of payments due. Some fear that could in turn freeze up the financial system.

Experts inside the CDS market believe now that the crisis will likely start with hedge funds that will be unable to pay banks for contracts tied to at least $150 billion in defaults. Banks will try to pre-empt this default disaster by demanding hedge funds put up more collateral for potential losses. That will not work as many of the funds won't have the cash to meet the banks' demands for more collateral.

Sellers of protection aren't required by law to set aside reserves in the CDS market. While banks ask protection sellers to put up some money when making the trade, there are no industry standards. It would be the equivalent of a licensed insurance company selling insurance protection against hurricane damage with no reserves against potential claims.

Basle BIS worried

The Basle Bank for International Settlements, the supervisory organization of the world's major central banks is alarmed at the dangers. The Joint Forum of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, an international group of banking, insurance and securities regulators, wrote in April that the trillions of dollars in swaps traded by hedge funds pose a threat to financial markets around the world.

``It is difficult to develop a clear picture of which institutions are the ultimate holders of some of the credit risk transferred,'' the report said. ``It can be difficult even to quantify the amount of risk that has been transferred.''

Counterparty risk can become complicated in a hurry. In a typical CDS deal, a hedge fund will sell protection to a bank, which will then resell the same protection to another bank, and such dealing will continue, sometimes in a circle. That has created a huge concentration of risk. As one leading derivatives trader expressed the process, “The risk keeps spinning around and around in this daisy chain like a vortex. There are only six to 10 dealers who sit in the middle of all this. I don't think the regulators have the information that they need to work that out.''

Traders, and even the banks that serve as dealers, don't always know exactly what is covered by a credit-default-swap contract. There are numerous types of CDSs, some far more complex than others. More than half of all CDSs cover indexes of companies and debt securities, such as asset-backed securities, the Basel committee says. The rest include coverage of a single company's debt or collateralized debt obligations...

Banks usually send hedge funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors e-mails throughout the day with bid and offer prices, as there is no regulated exchange to prices the market or to insure against loss. To find the price of a swap on Ford Motor Co. debt, for example, even sophisticated investors might have to search through all of their daily e-mails.

Banks want secrecy

Banks have a vested interest in keeping the swaps market opaque, because as dealers, the banks have a high volume of transactions, giving them an edge over other buyers and sellers. Since customers don't necessarily know where the market is, you can charge them much wider profit margins.

Banks try to balance the protection they've sold with credit-default swaps they purchase from others, either on the same companies or indexes. They can also create synthetic CDOs, which are packages of credit-default swaps the banks sell to investors to get themselves protection.

The idea for the banks is to make a profit on each trade and avoid taking on the swap's risk. As one CDO dealer puts it, “Dealers are just like bookies. Bookies don't want to bet on games. Bookies just want to balance their books. That's why they're called bookies.”

Now as the economy contracts and bankruptcies spread across the United States and beyond, there's a high probability that many who bought swap protection will wind up in court trying to get their payouts. If things are collapsing left and right, people will use any trick they can.

Last year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange set up a federally regulated, exchange-based market to trade CDSs. So far, it hasn't worked. It's been boycotted by banks, which prefer to continue their trading privately.

*** END OF EXTRACT ***

.... Hope you read all that ... or the next bit doesn't make much sense
Sorry for the language but what the f**K?

This is just stupidity stacked up with greed, iced with incompetence and decorated with dick heads in striped shirts. Whats worse it is it seems going to leave a $62 trillion dollar hole in someone's pocket and I have a feeling that some of it it going to from my fecking pension!

"Un-regulation works" does it indeed Mr Greenspan? My fat hairy arse it does! Who needs international terrorism when you have twonks that can come up with a wizzard wheeze like CDS and even bigger wankers that think it is a good idea to let it run?

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 :-)