ESCAPE VELOCITY

Mea Culpa

I had made the argument several times on this IdeaJam thread that I simply never encountered Notes crashes that failed to invoke the NSD cleanup process. Well, I encountered one today. I tried to Redim an array at runtime outside of the allowable boundaries of an array in the Notes 8.0.1 client. The Notes C++ client crashed mightly, but the Eclipse context kept running until I forcibly shut it down with the Task Manager.

This is the first time I've encountered such an error since I began beta testing Notes 8.0.0 at the end of 2006. But in the interest of fairness to the other commenters on that thread, I have now seen the Notes 8 client crash in such a way as I had to shut down individual processes.

Note: this in no way changes the fact that I think people get puffed up about this issue needlessly. You really should be fixing the things that CAUSE crashes, rather than worrying about whether Notes crashes gracefully or not.

/me gets back to his script to do some proper bounds checking.

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Phrases I am truly tired of

I would so love to ban these particular phrases from my hearing...

Perception is reality
At the end of the day.
Loosely coupled
Believe me
Emergent phenomenon

Have any you'd like to add to the list?

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99 Ways to Die: Searching your Notes mail

Some recent articles at Ed Brill's and Steve Castledine's have centered around the difficulty some people have searching in Notes. Two main themes seem to be emerging: 1) it's easy to search your Notes mail; and 2) people need more training on the product.

I'm going swim against the stream here a bit (surprise, surprise) and make the claim that it really isn't easy to search your Notes mail for the first time. It's not easy because there are simply too many vectors to do it. Many years ago, I thought that multiple vectors for a task was cool. If you could come up with 14 different ways to skin a cat, then nirvana was to implement ALL of them. But I've since learned that what makes a lot more sense (besides letting the poor cat keep his skin) is to come up with a single way to do a thing, and make it as obvious as possible.

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More CSS Resplendence

Details on how this was accomplished tomorrow, but basically, there's exactly one table and absolutely no hide-when or border settings to turn this...
Naked Form

...into this in read mode
Clean Read

...and this in edit mode!
Breathable Edit

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Awesome Notes Fieldsets

Over at Interface Matters, Mr. Blatnick completely rips me off by rehashing an article I wrote over a year ago...

I'm kidding, of course. Chris points to several ways to emulate fieldsets in the Notes client, and gets some interesting results. Patrick Kwinten responses with a rather surprising remark.

an excellent demonstration how BAD the support for CSS and HTML in the Notes client is.

Au contraire, quintessens! CSS can be used for this purpose quite nicely in the Notes client! All you need is a bit of class!

Here's a form I created in Designer...
Two nested tables and a couple of layers. No big whoop.

Two nested tables and a couple of layers. No big whoop.

And when I render with Notes client...
BOOOOOORRRRING!

Yuck, right? But keep reading...

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Web of Deception - Chapter 9

Finally! Sorry for the delay, everybody. You can read the story from the beginning here...

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The Masters of Derision

My step-father, Ken, called me Saturday afternoon, all excited about something...

Ken: "I'm watching The Masters, and did you know that IBM is practically sponsoring the whole thing?"
Me: "Yeah, I heard about that."
K: "There's an IBM commercial at pretty much every break."
M: "Really? So, what did you learn about IBM?"
K: "Heh... that they do business."
M: "Was that news to you?"
K: "No."
M: "Did they show anything that IBM actually did?"
K: "I think they showed a server at one point."
M: "Then what did you take away from the advertising blitz?"
K: "Ummm... that people are stupid about computers."
M: "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

So, putting aside my issues with whether IBM should run brand-specific advertising, or target an end-user audience, or show actual business tools on the screen -- I think it's interesting to look at the subtext of the IBM message in ALL of their ads -- both TV and online. I put together a list of YouTube links in the full post that go to just a smattering of IBM ads that I could find on the web, mostly recent, but some going as far back as 2001.

They all have one common theme: Gawking at mistakes.

Out of a dozen ads I selected, only TWO actually put forth real business ideas that would be useful to people. And in both of those cases, the ad emphasizes that these are what people do NOT have. They don't say "IBM can make you more successful." They don't even say "IBM stuff is smart." They say "Things other than IBM are stupid." What kind of message is that?

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