Mark Barton

Currently working on a personal project which involves Adobe Flex and Lotus Notes and I have become slightly paranoid with regards to backing up my source files.

I have to admit I can be a little slap dash with backing up my data so I needed something to do this automatically and ideally in real time – rather than a scheduled backup.

The solution I came up was to use a combination of Drop Box and the Link Shell Extension.

Drop Box is a free (max 2Gb – paid accounts available) cloud based synch tool.  You install a small utility which adds a folder to your operating system.  Anything placed in that folder is automatically synched to the Drop Box servers, it evens stores previous versions.

Drop Boxes main limitation is you can only synch one folder, in my case I wanted to synch my Flex Project folder and the Notes Database.  As a Windows user the way around this is to use Symbolic Links (symlinks).  Similar to a shortcut but these links provide a direct access to the linked document.  Installing the Link Shell Extension makes it easy to create one of these symlinks.

After installing the extension you right click on the source folder and select Pick Link Source and then navigate to the Drop Box folder and then right click and select Drop As Symbolic Link.

I did this for both directories I wanted to backup.

I came across a great free utility which is probably the fastest tool for finding files on your PC and its free and lightweight.

Unlike desktop search utilities like Google desktop this tool does not index the content of the files, only the filename.  But more often than not I know at least part of the filename and this tool fully support wild card syntax.

Another amazing thing it can do is run a local HTTP server which allows anyone who has access to perform a search across the network (again very fast) and then download the file – it also has an ETP/FTP server.

Windows only I am afraid but its so much better than the inbuilt windows search mechanism.

http://www.voidtools.com/

Sorry couldn’t resist the title

The chickens turned up this weekend and have settled in fine. There are 4 in total – 2 brown ones.

We haven’t thought of names yet – my suggestions for food based like “Chinese” and “Stir Fry” have been rejected.

They have settled in so well we got out first egg yesterday.

Normal service will now resume – got a little blog / article on using JQuery as the basis for a Domino Login box – basically an enhancement on the original article I did with Jerry.

After Bills comments I have decided to give up Notes development and become a Chicken farmer

The new bits and pieces for the Chicken run arrived over the weekend.

So far so good.

The chickens + house turn up next weekend.  Lovely fresh eggs.  Anyone buying?  Got a mortgage to pay.

Whilst trying to determine if this blog was performing badly (or not) I came across this great site – monpage.com

Its free to use and will provide a graphical representation of the availability of servers and the responsiveness of webpages.

I configured it to monitor this domain, another domain hosted with the same provider and the same virtual machine which is also a Wordpress blog but not using a cache plug-in – markbingley.com who’s a friend of mine and then for comparison I added Jerrys site which is a Domino blog hosted by prominic.net.

Here’s the results for yesterday (22nd February 2009):

Performance graph for http://www.datatribesoftwerks.com

Performance Graph for http://markbingley.com

Performance Graph for http://markbarton.com

As you can see having a Cache plug-in for Wordpress is definitely a requirement  

I am not sure the Graphs tell the whole story, when I navigate Jerrys site it seems allot more sprightly compared to this site so YMMV.

A bit of an odd one this and it could be specific to the way mailboxes are configured in our environment.

I started to play with the new Calendar feature in 8.5 which allows you to subscribe to other peoples calendars including Goggle calendars. In this instance I was overlaying a colleagues Notes calendar and just to see what happened I attempted to delete one of his entries. NB Our production environment is still 6.03 hence the need to change versions.

Lo and behold I managed to delete his meeting from his calendar from within mine. My first reaction was to see how much havoc I could cause to his week ahead

ACL

I want to point out this is not a bug with 8.5, it just highlighted the fact that his ACL was not correct. Even though his default access was set to No Access, he had the write public documents enabled.

To prove the point I opened his calendar from within my 6 client and deleted another entry. At this point he asked me to think about deleting old meetings not future ones

This seems to be a historic problem as recent mailboxes have the ACL correctly set.

One more task for the 8.5 migration project.

It just goes to show you what great new features may impact in your enviroment.

Let me start by saying I know the best version control software for Notes is Teamstudio’s CIAO, but in a large corporate environment there tends to be a standard for software version control.

Now if your like me and you want to try and encourage senior management to view Lotus Notes development as part of the Enterprise (rather than an oddball tactical development solution – not my opinion) then we need to play ball with these other Enterprise tools.

We had a demo yesterday of the 8.5 Designer from IBM – well a presentation and I posed the question about using Perforce within the Designer client. The reply was – “what’s Perforce?“.

Ok – note to IBM, if your pushing the benefits of moving to an Eclipse client and your talking to an Enterprise client, push the non Notes Enterprise advantages as well. Because believe me we need as much ammunition you can give us.

I also wanted to point out that it wasn’t a great argument to state that now we have the same IDE as Java developers they also would be encouraged to take up Notes development.  A better argument would have been to state that the Designer IDE has moved to an Enterprise standard.

To be fair it was a presentation to Domino Developers so the focus and probably the expectation of the presenter was different.

So the question was – anyone using Perforce integration with the 8.5 Designer client?

Where in the World are you coming from?

Got a website?

Want to restrict / customise your site based on where in the World they have come from?

Don’t want to pay or host your own IP / Country database table.

Then maybe this is the solution for you.

(more…)

Well the novelty is truly starting to wear thin.

Yet again got up this morning to try and get to work, which involves a 20min ride on my scooter to the train station.

There’s one drawback living here in the North Cambridgeshire Fens – they don’t bother to grit the road and its a mile to the end.

Aerial Shot of Bleak House

It was only after I got out of bed put on all my biking gear did I realise it was sheet ice. Oh well another day working at home.

After putting it off for too long I have decided to restart my blog.  My previous blog was built using Ferdy’s Domino template but this time I thought I would give Wordpress a go.

So far it seems impressive.

This blog will cover technical stuff – mainly around Lotus Notes, Domino, Adobe Flex and other web stuff but will occasionally include some personal stuff – to stop it becoming to dry.

I hope to produce some more articles in collaboration with Jerry as our last ones seemed quite popular.