The Jagular

One reason I haven't posted in while is the trip my wife and I recently took to the Galapagos islands and to Machu Picchu.  In addition to all the travel and trip preparations,  I managed to get access to a photographic device for taking large panoramic images that's not yet on the market.  It's called a Gigapan (short for gigapixel panoramic), and it can make some amazing photos that contain a wealth of detail.

You can see the results below the fold.


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Update: this technique works in two databases and fails in two others.  I have no idea why.  I think "Enforce Consistent ACL" is being used in all cases.

I spent more time than I'd like this week figuring out how to set a replication formula via the Notes C API (but calling the C API via Lotusscript).  The basics were done for me already, but there were a couple of weird gotchas that made setting a selective replication formula useless till I figured them out.

Here's the summary.  To make the code below work, you need to have your server explicitly in the db's ACL.  Having the server name in a group (such as LocalDomainServers) doesn't seem to work.  Your ID needs to have a minimum of editor access.  NoteDatabase.Replicate(<server>) needs the canonical server name.  If you don't get these details right, you'll see a replication occur, but the selective replication formula won't take effect.

Note:  this is tested on Notes 6.5.4.  I don't think it can work on versions earlier than 6 (NotesReplicationEntry came in with 6).  If you happen to try it on 7 or higher, let me know what happens.

Technorati: show-n-tell thursday
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The FooPlot site allows you to plot stuff on a web page. It's a useful gadget.



Supported Functions:

abs,acos,acosh,acot,actoh,acsc,acsch,asec,asech,asin,asinh,atan,atanh,ceil,cos,cosh,cot,coth,csc,csch,exp,floor,ln,sec,sech,sqrt,sin,sinh,tan,tanh

Coming soon:

fact, gamma, erf
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In my last post, I mentioned an error in BetterListStr, a class I've been using for nearly a year now. Jens Augustiny of LIGONET has kindly pointed out a fix which I have (finally) incorporated. That, along with a few other small improvments, can be seen below.



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Some work I did on a potential open source project turned up a problem in the BetterListStr class I posted a while back. Turns out there's a flaw in my "double-indexing" technique. Why didn't it crop up before? Because I used the class in a new way. Or, put another way, there wasn't a test plan or a unit test for the class. It was just a little class after all...



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Fortran was the first computer language I learned and the first I got paid to program in. It's sad to see its creator go. His reason for creating Fortran? Lazyness. He said he didn't like writing programs, so he wanted to make the process easier.

IEEE obituary
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Google has a beta application called Notebook that works with selected blocks of text in the browser window. You right click on the selected text, and one of the options is to direct the text to a notebook. The text is copied, with any links intact, to the end of the current notebook. The web page that the text came from is also recorded with the selection. Notebooks can be divided up into sections, and It's possible to have many notebooks and to share them. I think I'll be using this quite bit.

For me, this solves the annoying problem of how to keep track of useful web pages when I work on multiple machines. Yes, I could export/import bookmarks, but I'm lazy. This is even easier.
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In pursuit of my Lotusphere resolutions, I've been trying out VMWare (VMWare Server) on my laptop as a means of testing Notes 7 without affecting my current development environment. I have no revelations, but I have noticed several things. I couldn't find an obvious way to copy a file into my VMWare guest OS other than to put it on a CD. The VMWare forums seemed to suggest that newer/more advanced versions of VMWare would make this possible. I suppose I can't complain too much. VMWare is free after all. The other thing I noticed is that after shutting down VMWare, there is sometimes a 512 Meg process (named something like VMWare.exe) hanging around. I don't know if that's due to my not knowing how to properly close VMWare or if it's some sort of bug. Not a huge problem as the Task Manager can kill that process without complications.

Next step, try a Notes 7 server installation on a server with spare cycles.
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