Real World Computing

I'm a big fan of RSS and I think that it's something that people running extranets and other sites should try to incorporate as much as possible. Recently I decided to try and add RSS to a Domino Database manually. The steps are below. I've simplified them to make this more suitable for "beginners", and you can add other RSS Fields as you see fit. PART 1: The VIEW Create a view for your database with a selection criteria similar to the following; SevenDaysAgo := @Adjust(@Now ;0 ; 0 ; -7 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0) ; SELECT ((Form = "Document")& @Modified The Form would obviously point to the type of form that you use in your database. Column 1: The first Column in your database would probably be the date (@Modified) You should make it sorted in Descending order to put the recent items to the top and you should make it hidden. Column 2: Here is what I have in column 2 - I'll explain it below... NOTE: I can't use HTML Codes Here, so I've replaced the bra...

I'm in danger of spending too much time praising google and no enough time on Notes/Domino, but here goes anyway. The Latest Google Toolbar I'm currently testing the latest google toolbar. There's a lot of new features in this one which are really quite useful. Bookmark Wonders This has to be my favourite part of the new toolbar. In fact, I think that this could well be my favourite computing enhancement in a long time - but.. since I've blogged about it before, I'll just shut up about it now. The Buttons Sure, the toolbar has had buttons on it for a long time - what's a toolbar without buttons anyway? These buttons are different. 1. Anyone can create them. 2. They can be hosted elsewhere and updated with a couple of clicks. 3. Google is building a library of them (they're not creating them, but they are testing them). 4. The buttons aren't simple one-click items, they work off the search field and can include RSS Feeds. I'll post a lot more about...

Last week, we needed to set up a secondary web site hosted from the same server. We did this by migrating from the standard Domino web setup to a configuration which used site documents. All worked well... Mail routed successfully, the old and the new web sites worked and everyone was happy. This morning, I applied the Microsoft Updates. Now these, being Microsoft products, required a server restart, so I dutifully complied. When the server came back up, no mail was routing. The Culprit After a bit of searching around (not very much searching really because I now tend suspect the Symantec MailSecurity services FIRST), I found a message saying that; "The Symantec Premium Anti-Spam service could not be started because you are using a site document". I rang Symantec and following a relatively quick game of telephone lotto, I got transferred to the right person. Yep, they confirmed it... Sorry - It's not supported. End of story. I disabled the service, but still mail did ...

Google Toolbar I'm sure that most people are well aware of the google toolbar by now. If not, you should certainly give it a go. You can access all of the google tools here (note that this is the Australian site, and that you may be better going to the google site for your country and clicking tools on the menu if you live elsewhere). You can download the the google toolbar by clicking the large button on the download page but did you notice that there's a smaller link underneath it which allows you to download the beta version of 4.0.629 . I've been running this for weeks now, and I've had no problems. The best bit though, is the new "bookmarks" feature. You can bookmark a page from the menu (as you would adding it to favourites). At the same time, or later if you wish, you can allocate categories to it. For example, my favourite online DVD shop is under DVDs and Shopping, while other things may just be under shopping. Effectively, this causes the bo...

These days it seems that Microsoft simply can't keep up with the competition, though I think they've simply been making too many enemies recently. I suppose that if I were to compile a list of the top competition for MS, it would look something like this (in order of danger); Google All those little niche things and web applets are really starting to take their toll. Google's desktop search is much better than the Microsoft Windows search and it beat their new search engine (coming real soon - on day - sigh) by a couple of years. Google's Gmail is heaps better that hotmail and beat the Windows Live Mail service (almost live now - sigh) by over a year. IBM (including Lotus) One of the worst things that Microsoft has done lately has been to annoy IBM as it has caused them to embark on a series of quite damaging "Move to Lotus" and "Move to the Penguin" campaigns. IBM is the second largest software developer in the world (after Microsoft) and their ...

Recently an old keyboard overuse injury has flared up again. Aside from the the exercises that I need to do to overcome it, the other thing that seems to be helping is that I have installed Dragon simply speaking. I remember trying out an IBM product called "VoiceType" some years back. That product was quite good although it did tend to confuse my voice with that of the dog. Strangely enough, it would never listen to anything my wife said - possibly a bit like myself :-) At the time I installed Dragon, my hopes weren't very high. I figured that if things had changed drastically in the industry, I would know about it. Dragon still isn't perfect, but people can come up and bother me at work and their words are not recorded. I still need to correct Dragon quite frequently, but it gets it right more often than it gets it wrong. I'll post and update after I have been using the software for a bit longer but you may be happy to know that this blog was written using ...

A quick recap If you remember, last time I blogged about this software we ended up turning it off because it was causing a lot of problems with a particular regular correspondant. Well... We turned the service back on after about a week because we were getting a lot of spam. I changed the settings to notify us if an email was blocked, but not to delete/quarantine it. We were notified of the spam, but were never notified of mail from the "offending" mail system (and mail from that system was not being delivered). Clearly the problem was much more than a simple mis-detection issue. The Real Culprit After doing a lot of searching, I eventually found the answer. It was that Microsoft, being unsatisfied with using the industry standard 7 bit MIME format, decided to implement an 8 bit version. Out of the box, Notes/Domino has compatibility with this format turned off (after all, it isn't the industry standard). Normally what would happen is that; An Exchange server would con...