Tuesday, February 24, 2004

San Diego California, weather

Here is a very cool use of RSS. Subscribe to this weather service and get up to date weather information via your news aggregator. Go to the site and go to the top of the page to do a search for your zip code. Looks like it suppors world weather as well as US and Canada. After your page loads your see a link to the RSS feed on the left if you scroll down a bit.

Trying out a new aggregator

I'm trying out a new news aggregator called SharpReader. PC World seems to like it ast they gave it 4.5 our of 5 stars. It works on windows XP and you need .NET framework 1.1. That is a pretty hefty requirement (a 20GB+ download if you don't alread have it) yet I suppose that isn't much different that having to down load a new JRE.
I just started using it so we'll have to see how it goes. So far I like it. The interface is pretty intuitive and you can import/export your feeds. This was handy for setting things up on my laptop and transferring them to my home desktop. I like how you can easily pop up a properties pane for your feeds and change the settings fo rhow often (on a feed by feed basis) it refreshes. You can also set how the program Auto Purges you old feeds. This you can set to how long and or how many items and if is should purge unread items. You can also organize your feeds into folders. One nifty feature there is that you can click on the folder name then select mark all read.The latest version is 0.9.3.2 so I suppose it is still considered beta. One drawback so far is that is does not work with Atom feeds. Another good reason to use a service to convert my atom feeds to rss :)

Updated: Feb 26 I had the link to PC World wrong. I've fixed it.

Look Away by Harold Coyle

I finished Look Away by Harold Coyle last night. It is a novel about 2 brothers durning the American Civil War. The novel starts just before the war and takes you through the battle of Gettysburg. If you want to learn what life was like during the war this is a great introduction. One of my favorite things is that the auther mixes fiction with real people. After each chapter you can turn to the epilog and he has written which bits are fiction and which true. I recommend that over saving the epilog until last as it makes for a mini history lesson. There is a follow on book called Until the End that covers the rest of the war. I've got it on my list but I've got other books in line ahead of it.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Changed RSS feed provider

I changed my RSS Feed provider to 2RSS.com. They use RSS 2.0 and it is a much faster and easier implementation.

Which Peanuts character are you?

Found this on Vowe's blog. Try it yourself and let me know!
Franklin
You are Franklin!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Cool blog buttons

On other blogs I've seen these cool little buttons like RSS Feed and so forth. I think they are kind of cool and I wanted them for this site. Then I though it might be cool to someday create my own if I need them for something new. Since I suck at graphics I hunted around the web and found this site . The buttons you see at the left for RSS Feed and Atom Feed are built with pure CSS. Very ingenious. They have the added benefit of being easily modified if In the future I want to build my own. I've uploaded a file that you can see here if you want to see all of the code for my buttons.

Thursday, February 19, 2004

No clear roadmap for Notes users?

Just got done reading this article in Computer world: Microsoft fires salvo at Notes users.
I had trouble making sense of it. The article interviews a Microsoft integrator in Austrailia named Rita Seroski. She says in the interview:
"Customers want a secure product roadmap so they are putting Lotus Notes development on hold; the forced migration to WebSphere has made organisations reconsider their platform because it is just as easy to move to Exchange as it is to make the forced leap to WebSphere,"
Didn't IBM just give us a solid road map at Lotusphere '04? I remember seeing lots of exciting things in Domino 7 and 8. Including the ability to, when the time comes and if you want to surface Domino apps in Workplace. When did IBM say we are forced to migrate to WebSphere? I don't remember hearing that at all. Yeah, there is Workplace and as we move forward that will be big but I don't see that as any kind of forced migration path.
She also mentions:
"Moving to WebSphere means training developers in J2EE, but it is actually easier to move from Lotus to Visual Basic and .Net and if your company uses SQL Server or has deployed Active Directory you are ripe to make the change to a single Microsoft platform,"
Hmmm... replumb everything with Active Directory, get new MS back end SQL servers, learn .NET and VB or learn Java. Ok, maybe I'm being harsh and AD is getting to be ubiquitous and VB isn't too far from LotusScript. I still don't see that you have to learn Java work in Notes/Domino!
Should you learn Java? Well, that is entirely different. I think anyone serious about writing apps for the web should learn it. And XML. And CSS and every other standard. I'd even say that .NET should be part of your bag of tricks as well.
So what about Workplace? This LDD article from November '03 talks about Workplace product announcement. Dr. Goyal talks about the future:

...collaborative computing built on:
A choice of clients from mobile devices to browsers to Notes to a new Eclipse-based rich client (read "Linux")
Portal-oriented UI that provides single sign-on ease of use with a high degree of security
Development that goes beyond hand coding to drag-and-drop "programming by assembly"

Line 1 you'll notice contains Notes continuing into the future as a client as well as a myriad of other devices including browsers and moblie devices. Did I miss something or is that not a clear roadmap?

Monday, February 16, 2004

Longhorn may incluse Biztalk

This week's eWeek has an article about Longhorn and the potential inclusion of BizTalk:

"We are also looking at common workflow services, where, say, we take workflow services delivered today in BizTalk Server and essentially bake that into the platform so that workflow is an inherent part of what customers get right out of the box"

I think we have yet to see the final version of what is to be Longhorn but it's an interesting development.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin Hawaii News

Bush and Kerry are cousins! 16th cousins, three times removed, to be exact.

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Lotusphere session slides

Ben is putting together a db of all slides form Lotusphere '04. Thanks Ben!

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Reading material survey results

Last month I asked several people at work what they read to stay current. I've posted the results on an internal site but I thought I'd make them available here as well.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

VisiBone Webmaster's Color Lab

Handy site to help choose the Hex values of colors for web site.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Digital Secrets: How Spirit Makes Great Photos

Digital Secrets: How Spirit Makes Great Photos:
"Anyone who has ever agonized over whether to buy a 3-megapixel or 4-megapixel digital camera might be surprised to learn that Spirit's stunningly detailed images of Mars are made with a 1-megapixel model, a palm-sized 9-ounce marvel that would be coveted in any geek's shirt pocket."
"

Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0

Google chose Atom as it's default syndication format. The Atom/RSS argument is the latest rage in blog circles. Personally I don't much care at the moment. My only trouble with it is that I don't think all news aggragators use Atom yet. I found a cool site that will convert the Atom feeds that Google Blogger provide into RSS 1.0. So, at least until bandwidth gets to much for the guy hosting the service, I can provide syndication in RSS as well. Very cool. Here is a link to the converter for Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0

Monday, February 09, 2004

Road Squadron - Ship Reference

Is this cool or does this this guy have too much time on his hands? I lean toward the latter but the RD-D2 in the back will turn some heads I'd expect.

Computerworld | Country Energy bets business on open source

Country Energy likes open source and loves Domino on Linux:

"We have now been using Linux for email for about two to three years and have been gradually replacing Windows," he said. "We use Lotus Domino on Linux for email as we use it for all sorts of databases and forms. It would be difficult for an open source application to have the functionality of Notes and we are happy to pay to use it, as the vendor will support it on Linux. There are definitely fewer problems with Notes on Linux than on Windows."

Thursday, February 05, 2004

Interesting e-Pro Magazine article

Preparing Domino Shops to Fight Off Exchange will help give you some ammunition against a proposed migration form Notes/Domino to Exchange. It does require a log-in but that is free.

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

News:END OF LIFE FOR NOTES/DOMINO 5

Cool Stuff for Notes reports on the end of life for ND5

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Lotus Notes 6.5.1 on Linux and Wine

Sweet. By way of Ed Brill and VOWE : How to run Notes 6.5.1 on Linux under WINE.

Update 18 Aug 06: One of my readers points out that there is now an official page for Lotus Notes on Wine over at WineHQ: http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes
It's much more up to date (and easier!) than the above how-to link.