In Domino Designer 8.5. I do hope that the checkbox always comes up unselected, especially as there is no second prompt....
Mick Moignard July 3rd, 2008 03:41:00 AM
Just started my new 8.5 server for the first time. Had to smile...
Mick Moignard July 2nd, 2008 11:26:29 AM
I've just found a real nasty issue with the Notes 8 client, as a result if a customer asking me about rep/saves. These are atually ones generated with 7.0.3 clients, but we'll come to that.
What I find is this - with the Notes 8.0.1 client - standard or basic - if you open a notes document in read mode by double-clicking in the view, it always switches to any open copy of that document. Good. Now, open a notes document in Edit mode by Ctrl-E opens a new instance of the document. Keep doing it and you can have 10 copies open, all in edit mode. Bad, very bad. It also appears that the standard Notes edit action does that, too. I don't know (yet) if a programmed edit in a view action also causes the issue.
All of which is a great way to generate rep/save conflicts. Lots of them, in fact.
I don't have a Notes 7.0x client to hand, so does anyone know if the 7.0.x client has this problem, or whether it is new in 8.x?
Next, what would you do about it? Raising a PMR isn't going to see a fix anytime soon.
Would document locking work - given that this is two edits by the same person. Would locking stop that?
I can't see an easy way round this:
- make a custom edit action on all forms in the database, which sets a flag somewhere to record that the edit button has been clicked. Check that in both QueryOpen and QueryModeChange check to ensure that if opening or switching to edit that it's done via the edit action, which should let me catch Ctrl-E actions and prevent them
- remove the edit action from the view, so that it can't be pressed twice from the view and which leaves the only view action open to the user beingCtrl-E. Or record, somehow, that the document is already open in edit and prevent another edit by the same person (yech)
Comments (5)
Mick Moignard June 24th, 2008 05:59:09 AM
3 weeks ago I traded in my 3-year-old Golf GTI for a new one; same model, same colour (red) but with leather seats as that's how they come now, and the DSG gearbox. This is the VW automated manual gearbox - two clutches, almost instantaneous gear changes, steering wheel paddles, the full boy-racer stuff. I'd heard good stories about how the DSG GTI is faster than the manual - because the changes are so fast, and so on. I test-drove one before I ordered my new car, and I liked it. But now I like it a lot more - and so does Nikki, who really didn't expect to.
You could say that it's basically a clever automatic with manual override. But, crucially, as it has no torque converter, the engine speed, like a manual, is dependant on the gear you are in and the road speed. It has two automatic modes; regular D mode, and S mode. S mode expects full-throttle work all the time, and changes at the redline. D mode is more sedate, but on fill throttle still changes up at pretty high engine speeds. In both cases you can use the paddles to force an gear change - so long as the software thinks that its safe to make the change. Which means that even in auto mode, you can fly into a corner on full brakes, change down 2 or 3 gears as you go, and be at the apex in the right gear to get out of the corner quickly, and with no hands off the wheel. It then changes back to auto mode when it thinks its safe to do so. The idea of the two clutches and 3 shafts is that as you accelerate or decelerate it can set up the next change that it expects you need on the other shaft, so when it's time for the change, it's ready and pre-engaged, so it just needs one clutch to open and the other to close. You do see that a shift in a direction it doesn't expect takes a little longer.
Manual mode works off the paddles; right for up and left for down; and it leaves it up to you unless you ask it to do something silly; it won;t allow a 5 to 6 change at under about 33mph, for example, and if you brake to a stand from 6th, you see it change down each gear as it needs to. Give it throttle at 35mph in 6th, and it may well change by itself to 3rd or 4th. And you get regular manual-transmission engine braking too, useful for going down hills and so on.
I'm hooked, which I didn't expect to be saying. I've driven old-fashioned automatics, mostly US hire cars, where pressing the gas pedal hard results in more noise for a second or two before anything else happens. In this thing, it reacts like a manual - it just goes. And the gas mileage, if you leave it in D, is about 5-7% better than the old car when driven in a similar manner. Drive it in manual mode, where you make most but not all the gear decisions, and the gas mileage comes down to the same as the manual, which I think I'd expect.
I hate to say this, coming from a country where we expect to drive manuals, and automatics are regarded as motorway barge-mobiles, but I think that this is the future of high-performance cars, especially back-lane blasters which the GTI basically is. Given that VW group made the 1000bhp Bugatti Veyron available only with the DSG gearbox, I suspect I'm not alone in thinking that.
Mick Moignard June 13th, 2008 10:34:23 AM
I sat opposite a woman who spent much of the trip chewing gum while working away on her Thinkpad. Apart from the rather sickly minty smell, I wondered if she had any idea just how gormless the aimless chewing made her look. Reminded me of a watching sheep sitting in a field chewing the cud. It's the same when watching football on the TV when they pan in on the managers bench; they're all sitting there chewing gum too; and I have to say that a grown man chewing away actually looks several times more stupid than women. Maybe the Singaporeans have it right; as well as cleaner streets, they also don't sit around looking like farm animals.
Comments (0)Mick Moignard June 11th, 2008 03:05:41 AM
Nikki and I had a good time in Dublin last week, and a huge thankyou to the organising crew. . While I was at ILUG, she explored the city pretty comprehensively, and avoided getting too wet. Saturday's coach trip to Malahide and Howth was a neat way to wind up the proceedings.
But Sunday didn't go so well - but at least the weather was good; warm and sunny We'd heard during the week that Dublin airport's ATC system had failed - apparently it crashed on Wednesday - and there were some issues with getting it all going again. At breakfast Bruce said they'd heard their flight to Chicago was delayed, so we checked with bmi around 10 for our 15:40, no delays reported. We decided to take the scenic 16a bus out to the airport as we had plenty of time. Must have been at least 3 hen/stag parties checking in at various airlines. Then the delays started - first to 16:10, then 16:30, and the pilots turned up in the lounge with us. They were told that the inbound would land around 16:05, so we sauntered down for around 16:15, and it wasn't there - it arrived a bit later. Boarded around 17:00 we then had a slot delay for 45 mins, and finally took off around 18:00.
We had a great view of our house and village from around 5000 feet as we made the initial approaches to LHR, down around 7pm. Then we had to wait nearly 40 minutes for baggage as the handlers had been reassigned to another arival, or something. Finally made it home just before 9pm.
I did, however feel even more sorry for anyone on the 11:40 Air Lingus flight to Atlanta (Julian Robichaux?) which, according to the departures board, had not left and had no posted time by the time we got away.
Mick Moignard June 9th, 2008 02:51:51 AM
I've been developing a form with a multicolumn entry table on it, with 20 rows of fields. To make life easy for me, I've developed and tested the fields in one row of the table, and been careful to do self-adjusting formulas as I go: much use of @thisname and @thisvalue, for example, with all the fields called «name»_1. The plan is then to copy and paste this row to make a "master" row of fields, without the _1 sufix, and then copy and paste the "master" table row into each of the other rows, so that the field rows are named «name»_1, «name»_2 and so on down the table. Formulas then rely on
rownnumber:=@right(@thisname;"_")
to be able to locate fields in the same row; which all works just fine. There is, for example, a category_x field on the row that must have a value if the hours_x field has a value; so I have an input validation formula in each category_x field:
rownumber:= @Right(@ThisName;"_");
@If(@GetField("hours_" + rownumber) != "" & @ThisValue = "";@Failure("You must supply a category for line " + rownumber);@Success)
And that works just fine in each row.
However, I then wanted to add another column called pages_x, and have either that column or the hours_x column hidden per row depending on the category value; you either enter hours or pages but not both, driven by the category value on that row. I have a hidden field on the form (documentcategories, multivalue) that locates the category values that trigger the hidewhen. Unhiding that field shows me that it has the values I expect.
I generated a hidewhen as follows for the Hours fields:
rownumber := @Right(@ThisName;"_");
@IsMember(@GetField("category_" + rownumber);documentcategories)
and for the Pages column
rownumber := @Right(@ThisName;"_");
!@IsMember(@GetField("category_" + rownumber);documentcategories)
Note these are opposites via the "!" at the start of the @ismember on the second formula.
And it doesn't work.
I can get the hidewhen to works OK if I put the actual fieldname (category_x) in place of the @Getfield in the @isMember first parameter. I cannot get the truly portable version with @Getfield to work.
I've tried @getdocfield with @documentuniqueID as the first parameter. I've tried adding the code to field default formulas to see what happend and whether ultimately the @ismember generates 1 or 0, and indeed in those circumstances I get the values I'd expect. I've made triply sure that the category_x field (which, as you might have guessed, is a keyword field) has "refresh fields on keyword change" set (and remember that it works if I don't use @getfield), and I've even tried using OnChange to refire the Hidewhens, and none of those have helped.
All of this is to avoid editing 40 (20 rows, 2 affected fields/row) hide-when formulas, and it's really bugging me that I can't get it to work. Any ideas as to why it doesn't work? The Designer help says that @getfield is OK in Hide-when formulas, but that is the thing that appears to be the issue. I'm annoyed that I'm stumped by this one. By the way, I'm using Notes client and Designer 8.0.1 for this. If anyone has any ideas, I'd really appreciate them.
Mick Moignard May 30th, 2008 03:44:25 AM
It's reported in a number of places that MS gave announced support for ODF 1.1, to come sometime next year. There's been a number of comments from various people about that - Ed, quite enthusiastically, Nathan, less so, and plenty of others, and questioning what MS's motives are for making this announcement. Is it because they've seen the inevitable, as Ed implies, or is it the start of an emasculation attempt as Nathan and others suggest?
Here's my spin on this. Whenever a new standard is proposed (in any industry), the proponent spends a lot of time and effort pushing the standard, because they know more about it (and its pitfalls) than anyone else, at least for a short period. They see that as competitive edge, with everyone else having to play catch-up for a while. The loss of proprietorial interest is worth it for the short-term gain. For everyone else, particularly those who have a competitive "standard", this new standard is a disaster, unless of course they can fight it off. If they can't, there comes a time when they have to engage with it, or lose their market share to those who do support the new standard. And when that happens, they'll embrace the new standard as though they have all along, but with sometimes less than perfect implementation, because, after all, their own one is "better". Ever seen that before?
So what I read into this announcement is this:
Firstly MS have admitted to themselves that ODF might not be as good as their file formats, but it is here to stay - they aren't going to defeat it completely. There are mainstream products out there supporting it, and they'll have customers start to ask them about interoperability. However, they're going to support ODF 1.1, not 1.2 - read into that what you may. And that is generally good news, unless, as the cynics say, support is the best way to undermine.
Secondly, MS must be worried about what appears to be IBM's marketing strategy for Symphony, if I read right the various clues that I've heard and seen. This appears to be that IBM offer Symphony for free, so that all that license money that's spent now on Office license renewals doesn't get spent on Office renewals. That money is then available for new sells, with the added incentive that as it's IBM who has made that money available there's a hope that it gets spent it with IBM rather than competitors on new stuff to help your enterprise do this or that better than it is done now?
MS must be hoping that if they can say "we do ODF too" that they have a valid counter for that approach. After all, the thrust of Symphony against MS products is 1: free, 2: support MS file formats and 3: ODF as well which is the new standard blah blah blah (as well as native generation of PDFs). MS aren't going to do anything much about the free bit, so their tactic will be 1: we do MS file formats better than anyone else, OOXML nothwithstanding, 2, now we also do ODF and PDF and 3: no it's not free but then neither is moving to Symphony. What they must fear though, is the suggestion that the first-year costs saved by not renewing MS licenses more than covers the transition to Symphony, and then after that, Symphony is free.
Mick Moignard May 22nd, 2008 02:42:18 AM
Amex sent me a mailer jointly with Swissotel, last week, puffing their new hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, including an online raffle for a weekend break there, via a web page, which gave a 404 error. Normally I'd then have binned the mailer, but this time I decided to persist.
The mailer had a mailing address for Swissotel Global sales, so I googled it for a phone number, and called. Not too unexpectedly, they had no idea what I was on about, and kept offering me an email address to try instead!
Amex were much better; their operative was very smooth, and said that he was sure that the Swissotel site was down for maintenance; given that the rest of it was working fine, I gave him 0/10 for accuracy, but 9/10 for customer service. That was Friday. The web page is still 404 today. So what I see as the whole point of the mailer, in driving me to a specific place on their website, has totally failed.
Now, even if the mailer was the winning one - matching a number, there's still the obstacle of claiming - the mailer has to be sent to Swissotel Global Sales at the address given (and with no receipt, of course). Given that when I called they has no idea what I was on about, sending the dinning mailer, even if I had it, might not actually generate any results. And then, given the ineptitude shown so far, would one actually want to go at all?
Mick Moignard May 19th, 2008 07:55:32 AM