mattwhite

New Toy

I went to the pub with some friends last night (not a big change from normal there), but when I got home, slightly the worse for wear, a new toy was waiting for me. So really, I ask you, who needs sleep? I just sat there for a couple of hours playing, getting all of my music, photos and video across onto it, using the Wi-Fi. In the cold light of day I feel pretty terrible, but I can assure you that’s entirely due to the beer and lack of sleep. Full review of the Touch coming when I am fully compus.

October 3, 2007 by 4

Back from UKLUG

Well I just got home from the hotel in Hatfield where we had the drinks reception last night. UKLUG seemed to go very well, the attendance was excellent with the keynote session from Kevin Cavanaugh being completely packed out. And then right through the day each session was well attended. The lab seemed to do well at the break times as people checked out Notes 8 (some for the first time).

The actual setup of the day was very simple, two rooms, plus the lab which was where I spent most of my time. We did have a minor panic setting up the laptops which IBM had kindly loaned us as, once they were all plugged in we discovered that noone knew the passwords to get in! So we were rushing on Wednesday morning to get the VMWare images installed for the servers and then setting up 10 client machines with Notes 8 clients. In the end we managed to get the whole job done in just 90 minutes which was pretty good going.

Hopefully everyone enjoyed the day and got something useful out of it. I certainly met a lot of interesting people and the general feedback I was picking up was very positive for future events. There were a huge number of people helping out, but most thanks should go to Warren and Kitty who put in a truly staggering amount of work to make the day run smoothly.

Now I have to admit my head’s a little sore this morning as we had a few beers after the drinks reception but the break was well deserved after a hard day’s work. So I am just going to chill out for the rest of the day. Then back to the real world to catch up on work. So while I head off, I’ve uploaded a few photos to Flickr

September 27, 2007 by 1

London Domino Meetup

Don’t forget that this Thursday a whole group of us are meeting on New Oxford Street from about 7pm. The details are here. If you’d like to come along, even if you don’t know any of us just turn up and say “Hi”, we promise to be polite as long as you get a beer! (Only kidding). If you have any questions then feel free to drop me a line.

September 17, 2007 by 0

Generating Word Documents from a Domino Form

A web application I am working on at the moment needs some reports that can be generated ad hoc by the users. Normally I’d do reports in PDF format using FOP, but the requirement this time was for Microsoft Word documents to be produced. So after a little bit of reading and playing around I found what I think is a neat solution. (Because of this I’m sure someone has done this before so forgive me if I’ve stolen your idea!)

So I have a web application, I created a new view of the documents I want to be able to report on and set a form formula to override the default form when they are opened through this view. Then I created a new form, and this is the key bit, set the content type of the form to Other, “application/msword”. Then the actual Word document can be generated using plain old HTML, but the nice thing is that when you open the document with a browser it will be treated as though it was a “proper” Word document.

Notes Form outputting Word.jpg

That was really badly explained, but you can see a demo here. And if you want to play then feel free to download the NSF from here.

September 11, 2007 by 2

New Toy Ordered

Given that I am a sucker for all things Apple, the announcement of the new iPod Touch which is basically an iPhone without the phone bit (I guess an “i” then?), had me running to the online store to order one. It won’t arrive untilthe end of the month but I can’t wait, it looks so shiny 🙂

September 6, 2007 by 6

Blogpshere Upgraded

I’ve just upgraded this site to use the latest Blogsphere release (3.0.1 b7). As always a fairly painless affair so thanks to Declan et al for a product which continues to be one of the best OpenNTF projects around.

September 5, 2007 by 1

VMWare Fusion

I’ve been using Parallels for over a year now and generally I’m very happy with it. But a few people recently have said I should check out VMware Fusion. It’s a direct competitor for Parallels with one obvious selling point, that you can use VMware images created on other operating systems on your Mac. So I built a new XP machine and have been using it instead of Parallels this weekend. Overall the two products are almost exactly the same. I have had a few problems with VMware in single window mode where I can’t use the keyboard so I have to use the Unity mode (the equivalent of Coherence mode in Parallels) but Unity actually seems better to me than Coherence anyway so that’s not a big problem. There’s no appreciable speed difference which would be my main requirement at this point. My MBP is getting on for 18 months old now and the 2gb memory and slower hard disk are beginning to be bottlenecks for my system’s performance.

I think I’ll probably stay with Parallels for the moment, but it’s nice to know that if necessary I can run a VMware image as well on my Mac as I could on a Windows machine.

September 2, 2007 by 0

ideaExchange Beta

One of the things I’ve been working on over the last month or so is helping Bruce with his new idea exchange site. It’s really starting to come together, to the point where Bruce is now looking for Beta testers. So if you feel like you could help us to make this a really useful site for the Lotus community, then please drop Bruce a line to get set up.

August 31, 2007 by 3