mattwhite.me

I stayed down in London last night for the first of many similar stays over the next couple of months. My usual season ticket on the trains has been suspended in preparation for the engineering works on the trains with start in a couple of weeks.

With some fairly lengthy negotiations I have arranged a good rate at a hotel in the Barbican for the duration so I’ll be doing ttwo nights a week in the city and working two days a week at home.

It’s all working out rather well, we have a lot of coding to do and I find I am far more productive at home anyway. And we won’t mention that if the weather finally turns good again then I can work in the garden rather than inside a stuffy office 🙂

We had a new tester start today so I set up his machine and he started working through one of our admin databases – the access requests. Unfortunately I forgot to switch the mail location in Lotus Notes so as the tester was merrily rejecting and approving test access requests, e-mails were being sent out to end users informing them that their request was unsuccessful.

Most embarrassing. Luckily the support team saw the funny side of it and know how to deal with mystified users asking why they have been rejected for something they didn’t even request in the first place.

Rocky has inadvertantly started a fairly heated discussion about whether to allow Domino to generate HTML or whether to hand roll it yourself.

Well to throw my hat into the ring I fall into the second category. These days it’s more habit than anything. When I first started developing web apps in Domino (back in 1997) the tables and specifically hide formulae in tables were so flaky that I stopped using them.

Since then I have just got so used to writing HTML that I find it quicker than buggering around with Domino tables on forms. And as we have progressed into a CSS world I just find divs etc much easier, clearer and quicker to write directly onto the form.

As Ferdy was saying the reason Domino is so fast to develop is, in my view, not the HTML but everything else which is built in for you – security, e-mails, workflow, searching etc.

Here is another reason not to use IE unless you absolutely have to. Hopefully a patch will come out soon but in the meantime you really should be looking at another browser

Well I suppose it had to happen. A flaw was found in Notes security (6.0.3 and 6.5.1) which allows a hacker to execute arbitrary code under the rights of the notes.exe program.

Simple answer – upgrade to 6.0.4 or 6.5.2.

Most interesting about this was the response time. Pretty impressive in my view to go from report to public release in less than 8 weeks.

You can’t be and Englishman without a well honed ability to take defeat on the chin. We got another lesson last night in how to do so.

All the elements were there… the nail-biting defence of a one goal lead, the oh-so-certain equalizer, the blatant goal which was disallowed (this gives so much future moaning opportunity and makes the whole thing worthwhile) and finally, as night follows day, the penalty shoot out which we lose.

Really it’s all so predictable and yet every time it happens everyone is still shocked and desolated the next morning. At least Portugal looked quite good and may well have a chance of winning and somehow this offers comfort.

Following the server upgrade I thought I’d take the time to upgrade the design of this (aging and rather crappy) blog template.

I’m not sure on the colour scheme yet… let me know what you think. Also if you spot any bugs please give me a shout.

Spurred on by Jake’s superb photography, I thought I’d try and filter out wheat from the chaff in my photos. As you can tell I am nowhere near as talented as Jake but hopefully I can improve as I have bought a couple of introduction books which go through how to frame photos, think about light etc. You’ll have to judge for yourselves how successful I am!

My front door has finally been fixed which makes me feel slightly more secure. I have also been holding off cutting the grass as I didn’t want to break the one remaining pane of glass and leave my house completely open so I had better get on with that.

The rugby was equally disappointing this week as last. Hopefully we can recover quickly as I am not sure I can take all the Aussie crowing if they beat us as well.

Things at work feel like the calm before the storm, the trip to Amsterdam earlier in the week is likely to cause a huge influx of work but we can’t start any of them until some decisions have been made. The best we can do is prepare the environments etc so that when the go ahead is given I can hit the ground running.