[~Off topic~ just noticed this is the 400th blog posting since I started this one. That has to be a milestone and a surprising low one given the levels of gobshitery I aspire too]
Back on topic again ... OK I upgraded my development server and home boxes to V8.5 almost as soon as it was available and I could actually get attached to the Passport Adv download site and to date I have been impressed. Which in itself is odd because I am starting to hear people get quite cross with DDE in particular both on their blogs and twitter. It is odd because I have very little negative news to report.
Well apart that is from a couple of occasions when I got a "Platform Command processor has encountered an error" when trying to open the designer client. The extra details on the error were abbreviated to a parallax of brevity in that they comprised of the single word "error" and it was not even capitalised! Sort of the error equivalent of the Gallic shrug so beloved of my French colleagues.. "it is fubar, c'est la vie ~shrug~"
Must ferkling and swearing later, DDE would not arise from the grim depths of whatever the "error" was. I would get the splash screen, the sign on and then 10 mins of the status bar moving really slowly and then .. the status screen disappeared and .... nothing.
The problem is something to do with something in the /data/workspace dir which shoots from a normal 50-80mb to 770mb during the problem. The more you try to open DDE the bigger the DIR gets and oddly it is not the /log/ dir? On the first occasion I eventually gave up looking for the problem and just renamed and deleted the directory it had reached 1.9Gb! There is obviously something amiss there.
However it has only happened three times(twice on Vista and once on XP) and I have been using it daily. I now have a .bat file that renames the /workspace/ dir and then deletes it. Hmm I wonder do DOS skills date me?
Those 3 occasions have been my only major problems to date.
The only other thing of note is a problem that I had in V7 and earlier V8 DDE and that is with the JS complier which remains ... hmmmm ... very like a grounded teenager on a Saturday night ... it sulks a lot when there is a problem, doesn't give you any idea of what the problem actually is by saying "Error compiling script" and then hides the cursor to spite you. The only way out is to close the element you are editing without saving and then re-open it.. and then 9 times out of 10 the change you made HAS been saved and there is no problem.
I have yet to see the problems of the load times in DDE, it remains satisfying brisk on local and on servers in VMs, on local LANs and even on remote access over a VPN is fine, well within workable limits but then I have over the years taken to doing a full re-compile on an NSF when I open it in a different version of the designer than it was designed in. I got caught badly in the V4.5 -> V5 world by not doing this, so I may have inadvertently missed the problem John Roling had here and that John Head describes here in point 3.
All in all I like 8.5 both client and DDE better than I liked 8.0.*. (Which is not to say I disliked 8.0*) every seems smoother, faster and more managable.
I could kiss the person that put CSS as a direct edit in DDE, that alone was worth the wait. The number of times I fecking forgot to refresh CSS files after edits in V7 and V8!
I do not seem to have been affected by the DDE slow loads reported by other colleagues, but then I am not dev'ing on a mac in a windows VM which does seem to be a common thread in the reports of sluggish load times. My Windoze boxes are either XP64 (4gb with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set) and on VISTA HP64 with 16gb.
I have run up XP SP2 in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu with 1gb of ram and a 4gb virtual disk and DDE can be a bit chuggy on the initial load of a new NSF, but the waits are not of the "go away and make a coffee, smoke a cigar and arrange a romantic assignation with Sandra from Quality Control" variety.
All in all, I am happy with 8.5 so far it is a 8.5 outa 10
Now it is getting near supper time and the McDonagh Horde is getting restless and hungry so I had better be off
ILUG countdown widget
Sun, Aug 22nd 2010 1:30p Steve McDonagh If you would like an ILUG 2010 Widget like the one on the left just copy this code into a convienent HTML/JS widget enclosurer on your blogbr /
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pre style="font-family: Andale Mono, Lucida Console, Monaco, fixed, monospace; color: #000000; background-color: #eee;font-size: 12px;border: 1px dashed #999999;line-height: 14px;padding: 5px; overflow: auto; width: 100%"codelt;script language='javascript' src='http://slightlydoolally.com/ilugcd.js'gt;lt;/scriptgt;lt;div id='ilug'gt;lt;/divgt;lt;scr [read] Keywords: ilug
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Help required with Duffy The Opera (An Idea waiting for a very drunken party)
Wed, Aug 11th 2010 8:27a Steve McDonagh It has been suggested by Mike Smith that we make the "Duffy" epic into an opera.. and tentative work has begun.. picture the scene.. duffy in a cubicle with the lights subdued and a general air of saddness fills the stage.. Duffy takes a deep breath and start to sing....the Duffy Aria ....br /
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blockquoteIm being swallowed by a sharepoint migrationbr /
I'm being swallowed by a sharepoint migrationbr /
I'm being swallowed by a sharepoint migrationbr /
And I don't like it very muchbr /
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Oh [read] Keywords: blogger
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Single authenticated point of entry to iNotes for all your users
Tue, Aug 10th 2010 10:27a Steve McDonagh It has been a while since I did a Domino Geek posting, however I came across this today and thought I would share it. Basically you can if you know the URL get into your Lotus Notes eMail via a browser. The problem is that most users can be .. well .. forgetful and having to remember a big long string of characters is a bit of a pain that and we wanted a single URL that would (a) authenticate the user and (b) open the mail file so we came up with this solution.br /
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A single NSF with a short [read] Keywords: agent
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Offical Minutes of the ILUG oganising committee - 9th Aug 2010
Mon, Aug 9th 2010 7:31p Steve McDonagh i**** Names, locations and proclivities have been redacted to protect the guilty ****/ibr /
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ILUG 2010 is now so certain to go ahead that Celine Dion is penning the lyrics to the theme song and even as I write the organisers are throbing with preternatural wibbliness for tonite was one of the famed ILUG 2010 skype calls.br /
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div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"span style="font-size: small;"Date : 09 August 2010/span/divdiv style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" [read] Keywords: administration
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Duffy the Banana Slayer - Chapter 3 "Is this your Ewok?"
Mon, Aug 9th 2010 3:30p Steve McDonagh iWhere we are introduced to a Pseudo French Inspector, Mistress Marybeth of the "Never used Vista Virgins" and the difference between Dastard and Bastardbr /
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/ibr /
He looked around the room surrounded by the detritus of a party. Half eaten pizzas beer bottles by the dozen, an unturned bottle of diet Coke in a ice bucket, a dart board with a picture of Bill Gates on.. the picture was more hole that picture. He stooped and picked up a crumpled flyer "Sharepointless Summer Party" .. yes they [read] Keywords: connections
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Duffy the Banana Slayer - Chapter 2 "The Journey Home"
Thu, Aug 5th 2010 8:31p Steve McDonagh iIn which we do not meet Nigel the out of work sarbannes oxley auditor and bus shelter attendant, Duffy has a Beatlemania flash back, Bill Buchans Knees make an appearence and we meet Gladys from the Sharepoint Coven/ibr /
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The group had been partying in the tea shops of south central Portaland. Tonight was the re-opening of the hottest geek club in town. The owner had completely remodelled the club in yellow and renamed it "Banana Daiquiri". No one actually knew who it was that now [read] Keywords: admin
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Duffy the Banana Slayer - Chapter 1
Thu, Aug 5th 2010 5:29p Steve McDonagh iWhere Duffy and his sidekick Privet are introduced to the reader and Matt White gets Dissed/ibr /
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"Are you sure this is a good idea Privet?" Duffy asked, peering at the screenbr /
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Privet laughed at the concern in his friend's voice. "It'll be fine, Duffy. It's a very simple xPages App. I won't mess it up."br /
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"I don't know," Duffy said, unconvinced. "I'm just not sure you should be using fancy coding tricks to spice up your life." He thought for a moment, then chuckled. "I'm sti [read] Keywords: ilug
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Irish Notes Geek in Israel - Jerusalem for a week any notes folk fancy a pint?
Sun, Jul 18th 2010 7:30p Steve McDonagh I will be finding myself in Jerusalem, Israel from the 25th-29th July and I seem to remember that there is an active Notes/Domino community in Israel. So if anyone wants to accompany a very pink (people tell me Israel is warm this time of year) Irish Notes Geek for a pint and a bit of a geek chat on one of evenings while I am there, drop me a line at mcdonaghs (at) utvinternet (d0t) com and lets collaborate socially :-)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger. [read] Keywords: domino
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NotesMan Saves the day AGAIN!
Wed, Jul 14th 2010 7:25a Steve McDonagh It is nice to give a product a "call out" once in a while and today is one of those days.br /
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I had an app today where a unintentional download FUBARed exchange rates over a large number of records. Now I could have written an agent and fixed it that way however in my essential notes tool box I have a copy of a href="http://www.martinscott.com/Site.nsf/ID/Noteman"NotesMannbsp; /aand I was able to go into the app, created a collection of docs that needed changed , did the change, a quick "Co [read] Keywords: agent
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Nerd Vs Geek a Taxonomy
Sun, Jun 6th 2010 7:57p Steve McDonagh Twas only last weekend when thwe Arch Bishopess of ITIL a href="http://www.eileenfitzy.com/"Ms Eileen Fitzgerald/a and her chums Clara and Máireád plodded 22 miles around the north coast of Northern Ireland. Many and various were the topics we covered in those miles. One of said topics was the great Geek Vs Nerd debate. Both Clara and Máireád mistakening thought that Eileen and I were nerds ... OH how we laughed at that one. br /
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Eileen deffered to my age, experience and abilty to gesti [read] Keywords: blogger
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