ESCAPE VELOCITY

1 - Well, I probably shouldn't tell you, as we are sworn enemies, but I was once an ASW myself. After a while, I evolved (devolved?) into a VRCSW (Vast Reserves of Cash Seeking Whore) and started loathing you ASWs, who are so desparate for attention that you provide solutions to impossible problems for nothing but attention. Since I provide solutions to impossible problems in commercial products for the transfer of RC, or when I am able, VRC, I am always wary of you ASWs who might take the food out of my children's mouths, the clothes off their backs and the airline tickets to exclusive resorts in Italy out of their pockets. So, I won't tell you about unpossible Notes issues, but will let you struggle through on your own until you evolve or devolve eventually into a VRCSW yourself, at which point I will either embrace you as a partner or crush you as a rival, depending on the day of the week and whether I think I can extract more of your VRC than you can extract of mine. That is much more comfortable territory than all this freebie communist stuff, which helps nobody but the hapless consumer.

2 - ROFLMAO!

Y'know, it's not that I'm NOT a VRCSW -- it's just that I've only been partially effective as a VRCSW. You can put emphasis on the SEEKING part there.

3 - First clue: Why pay for the cow when you get the milk for free?

4 - Once upon a time (back in my "long time listener, first time caller" days), I scoured the blogs I was aware of just to keep up. I was duct-taping wheels that others had invented onto apps built in, and not significantly modified since, R3 in hopes of meeting unrealistic timelines that would otherwise have flown by like a hawk chasing a rabbit. As time passed and my participation became more... interactive, the whole sphere of knowledge sensation reared its ugly head. It's been thrilling to see and play some miniscule part in the evolution of various techniques, but every once in a while I suspect that my increased participation was (and is) primarily motivated not by a desire to pad my wallet or resume, or to save the world via pursuit of elegant code, but rather an insecure hunger for validation.

Laura observed a while ago that, given all of my career-driven relocations over the years, many of the folks I now consider my closest friends are bloggers I've never met (although, since then, I have finally met a few of them in person). Perhaps I am an ASW, trying my darndest to push the limits of what various technologies can achieve in the hopes that any response those efforts elicit will mitigate my gradual (but steady) increase in isolation.

Or maybe this is just how I have fun. Who knows?

Something too much of this... you already know my list, but here it is in writing (all of these pertain to LotusScript):
- Method overloaing
- Optional parameters
- Subclassing of Notes product objects; i.e. NotesView, NotesDocument, etc.

5 - Tim, while I know it is not exactly what you want (grin), it is amazing to note that all three are available with the LSX Toolkit. I happen to use all three in OpenSesame right now (and two out of three in our Midas Rich Text LSX), but just a wee bit of C++ development and you could provide all of these as well, since the LSX Toolkit is freely available, and all of it available in LotusScript. I just can't understand why everybody does not use this LSX stuff.

Now, possibly you could create a generalized LSX capable of passing parameters to your classes so you could create all this without any C++ coding (aside from the single LSX), but how would you charge for that? I'll leave it to Nathan, I guess.

6 - I do not think this is a big surprise to people Nathan ;)

But seriously, there is a difference in ASWs ... those that give back get cut some slack. Those that do it just to stir the pot shot be shot dead like a lame horse. Ah ... more right wing conspiracy stuff from me :P

My current todo list of the impossible:

1. do a recompile lotuscript on a target database or template from lotusscript
2. find a way to have tabbed table tab text be computed without having to resort to UI reload tricks
3. someone fix all the mem leaks in 702 in the preview pane
4. world peace

Ok ... #4 will not ever happen, #3 is really a IBM thing (and 703 seems a bit better), but 1 and 2 should be doable.

I think the difference between you and me is that my blog is really just a way to communicate what I am thinking. You use your blog as a way to showcase your skills and almost use it as a sales tool. That also shows the contrast of what we do in our work days ... you are more writing code as I am more managing and selling. Neither is right or wrong, it is just the difference of paths we are on at the moment. That is what makes all of this interesting.

7 - I probably fall into the ASW category but with hopes of it actually leading to business opportunity. Like John, I don't get to sit down and bang code out all day like I used to, and so the blog ends up serving 2 purposes, developing business opportunity, and validation that I can still work on interesting new stuff.

As for "miracle of the day", I've always wanted an in-memory session that I could use from http request to request and access from Lotusscript. So instead of setting a doc with some data, or having to store all the session data in a user's cookie, I could just do something like:

userSession.cart(3) = "Creatomatic 20 user pack"

of course a php interpreter of tags in my Form or Page would be nice too.

8 - i only blog about pop culture topics for my radio show (which i am a total asw for--sundays 10am to noon on WRUW FM 91.1 Cleveland, streaming and archives on www.wruw.org) but recently i have thought about starting my own professional blog about my (sometimes contentious) relationship with Lotus Notes. then i read a blog like this one and Chris Blatnick's and i feel like a real moron compared to you guys, who have all of these really great and innovative ideas. as matter of fact, my only smart move is in stealing all of your great ideas, so where would be the value of blogging about that?

i'll stick the blogging about pop culture. it's easier to be a wise-ass than a productive member of society...

9 - Feel like writing a mostly-featureful regexp implementation in LS? :)

10 - @9 - THAT I would want money for.

But I'd do it for pay, yeah.

11 - I blog code samples to be sure I stay an active part of the Notes/Domino community. My "unpossible" is something I'm working on (but waiting for Notes 8 Gold) is a modified Contacts template for OpenNTF... there's the "OpenNTF Mail Experience", I'd like to see the equivalent for Contacts.
I don't want to be a one-trick pony, and lately I've been thinking, "what have I done for the community lately?" When I can't think of anything, it's time to start building. I don't want to be a blogger/writer on LUG, and/or a Lotusphere speaker just because I happen to have been around for a long time. I need to contribute. It got tough when I opened Solace, but lately it's been REALLY bothering me that I haven't had time to create anything cool lately.

12 - @6 -- recompile LotusScript, I have an example of that somewhere. I'll dig it up for you.

@9 -- regex, try this:

{ Link }

It's not native LotusScript, but it's probably faster to call Java from LotusScript anyway, since Java is about 1,000,000,000 times faster parsing strings than LS is. And it's certainly feature-complete.

And Nathan, unlike you, I have no friggin' clue why I do it. Boredom? Probably a big dose of self-ego-gratification in there too.

- Julian

13 - This VRC thing sounds good to me.
But I also just like the challenge of an unsolved problem, especially an unpossible one.

14 - @12: Yes, I could use Java/LS2J to get at Regexps - I've done it before. My point is that I want one that's native to LS, and doesn't require an LSX or other plugin. Hell, most problems I've hit that I first think to solve with regexps, I end up coming up with a formula solution for.

But, of course, I haven't had a project that absolutely *needs* it yet, so I haven't written one myself. I just figured, since Nathan was offering... :)

But, he's right - it's certainly not a drop in the bucket, and I'd want to be funded for it, too.

15 - For posterity, here's the recompile LotusScript code:

{ Link }

16 - I used to blog but run out of steam - like alot of people I suspect. I collaborate with Jerry over at { Link } on technical articles now, I find it easier to come up with the ideas and some of the code and Jerry to edit and make sense of it - we have a new one coming out soon which will be worth looking at.

I certainly use other peoples code and examples to make me look good so I feel anything I put out there is hopefully some form of payback. It also helps(forces) me to look at areas of development I might not do in my day to day job.

As for the miracle:

A way for the form name to be available on a new document without having to hard code it somewhere. Would make any generic routines which use the form name as a key a bit easier.

17 - I blog for nothing

18 - Here's my "unpossible" idea. I just thought of it today and haven't done anything about it, so it may actually be possible but I haven't thought of how in the two minutes I've actually spent thinking on it:

Display a frameset with two views from the same database. When a document is selected in one of the views, have the selection move to that same document in the other view. I don't want to open the document, I want to see where it is in the database in the context of the second view.

Also, this would not have to be two-way. Only that the selection in the first view moves the selector in the second view, not vice versa.