Not long ago, I spent several days working
with an administrator at a very large bank.
In his cube, he had a mirror, similar to
the ones you see in convenience stores, that are designed to show activity
in areas of the store that are not fully visible from the front counter.
The administrator had his mirror trained on the entrance to his cube farm,
so he could have a clear view of who was coming and going.
About halfway through the first day, he
glanced up at the mirror, and suddenly told me that we had to leave his
cube immediately. He told me to keep my head down below the top of the
cube walls so we could make our escape undetected. And, he assured me that
if I followed his lead, there would be a cup of Starbucks in it for me
down at the cafeteria. I had my doubts that they served Starbucks in a
corporate cafeteria, but I was proved wrong. For the duration of my visit,
these episodes happened day in and day out.
After a couple of days of this, I had to
ask what exactly we were running away from. He told me that it was audit
time at the bank, and that the people he was dodging were department heads
who were coming to find out who had access to all the Notes databases used
by their respective departments. While this might sound like a simple enough
request, it's actually very difficult to fulfill, because of the way Notes
enables what can seem like bottomless nest groups in your NAB.
The administrator knew that if he were
caught, he would have to go through each database, manually write down
all of the ACL entries, and finally go to the NAB and break down all of
the groups until he got to the final users. This was obviously a mundane
and tedious task that this guy wanted to avoid like the plague. Needless
to say, I was a bit jittery--not so much from the covert actions we were
engaged in, but from the amount of coffee I was consuming.
Fortunately, the administrator was not
caught while I was there, but when I talked to him a couple of weeks later,
he told me he'd been cornered twice the week after I left. As you might
imagine, he was not a happy guy.
So, how do you go about getting to database
access information? Do you have an easy way of doing it, or do you avoid
it at all costs like our friend above? Post your comments below!
Unplugged for iOS is now available
Mon, Mar 5th 2012 11:13a Karen Frasca With the Unplugged XPages Engine and HTML5,
we’re introducing a simple yet powerful way to extend your Lotus Notes
and Domino apps to iOS devices!
Unplugged works with Domino Designer
to create mobile apps for iPhones and iPads, which update via mobile sync
to Domino servers.And,
the HTML5-based architecture of the Unplugged XPages Engine unleashes the
full creativity of the mobile user interface designer – so you can create
touch-optimized, visual, customized mobile apps for iOS [read] Keywords: domino
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I will show you mine if you show me yours
Mon, Feb 13th 2012 11:12a John Kingsley I'll show you mine if you show me yours...
Okay, I'll go first. This code
is so bad I had to share it. And let me be clear - this code is from
R3 days. But that means it may have been looked at many times AND
LEFT ALONE! We can all help Notes suck less if we stamp out code
like this whenever we see it.
In this first example, the only line
in this entire block that did anything IS COMMENTED OUT! Just delete
the entire block.
If
oppDoc.iprgWonPercent_SS(0) prv [read] Keywords: notes
application
241
There is more than one way to skin a cat
Thu, Feb 2nd 2012 11:11a John Kingsley Americans sometimes use a funny little
expression: There's more than one way to skin a cat.
This is a (kind of creepy) way of saying
that there are several different ways to accomplish a given task. And this
is my challenge. My developer side says to do it one way, but my admin
side might have a different perspective. In the end, a decision must
be made one way or the other. Case in point:
Recently, I completed the first part
of a source code control and build process managem [read] Keywords: admin
agent
interface
server
twitter
217
My 2 Cents on Lotusphere 2012
Tue, Jan 24th 2012 3:10p John Kingsley This year marked my 8th or 9th time attending
Lotusphere (if only I had a backpack to commemorate each one!).
I've always attended as an exhibitor.
Back in my Digital days, the senior management always wanted the full conference
passes, because in the early days exhibitors got boxed lunches and full-conference
badge holders go the fine dining hall.
Anyway, here's my personal take on the
show:
1. I got a nice surprise when someone
stopped me and asked if I was from Teams [read] Keywords: lotusphere
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xpages database
development
facebook
mobile
357
Developers, like lawyers, should not ask questions they do not know the answer to
Fri, Dec 16th 2011 10:09a John Kingsley I recently inherited responsibility for
maintaining some applications. At the same time, we happen to be
decommissioning a server, so I needed to change the Server to Run On for
the agents. And, for some reason, I had to ask: "What does this
agent do, anyway?"
Turns out, this was the agent that runs
once a week against all documents in the database. Well, first of
all, it doesn't *really* run against all documents in the database. I don't
think it matters much, but target of [read] Keywords: agent
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development
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A development tip, and more
Tue, Nov 8th 2011 3:09p John Kingsley I recently inherited an application from
someone who inherited it from someone else.
It reminded me of something I discovered
back in the R4 days: When you copy and paste a field multiple times, Notes
takes the original field name and then adds an underscore and a sequential
number (as in Product, Product_1, Product_2, etc.). The problem comes
when you have to loop through each field -- and who hasn't had to do that?
What you get is something like this:
For x = 0 To 15
[read] Keywords: agent
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database
development
241
Teaching an old dog...
Mon, Sep 12th 2011 9:09a John Kingsley I'll admit to using punch cards during
my college programming years - and this was at a world famous engineering
college in IBM's back yard. Those were the old days... But it still takes
me awhile to try new things. Only recently did I create a list where each
entry was an object - my first class and my first list all at once.
I'll also admit that a lot of my programming
bravado comes from the guys down the hall here at the Teamstudio office.
You see, I don't consider myself a d [read] Keywords: ibm
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office
201
A word on our recent twitterstorm
Wed, Aug 17th 2011 4:09p John Kingsley (As if "twitterstorm" is a word).
We recently sent an email to our mailing
list that raised a few eyebrows and caused a bit of a ruckus on Twitter.
There were a few reasons for this, the
first of which was that, due to an email glitch, half of the emails arrived
in the recipients' inboxes as blank messages. Because of that, we
had to send the message a second time, which was probably annoying enough
in itself. But it was the content of the message that really got people
ta [read] Keywords: adminp
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notes
application
applications
development
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microsoft
server
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The Same... Only Different
Wed, May 25th 2011 9:10a John Kingsley I was traveling recently, and had the opportunity
to stop and spend a night with one of my brothers and his family in Longmont,
Colorado.
On the way to his house from the airport,
he was complaining to me about a new nightly build process that they implemented
at his office. Apparently, it resulted in every developer having
a complete copy of all the modules in the build, not just the ones they
were working on. I chuckled and told him, "I sort of know what you're
talking about - [read] Keywords: notes
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openntf
