I am in the middle of a weeklong training course called Developing IBM Lotus Domino Applications: Foundation Skills. At the end of this week, assuming that I pass the exam, I will be a Certified Notes Specialist. I don’t expect to have any problems - the course is not difficult, possibly because the general concepts are not new.
If you don’t know, Lotus Notes is a software system that runs on servers. It can be used for e-mail, but also as a database and you can even write programs with it. It is universally hated by users. Notes ‘programmers’ and administrators are fanatical about it, and that is why it still exists. One of the selling features of Notes is that you can rapidly develop an application for your business, to fill a business need, and it doesn’t take much skill. This is true. It is just that the applications created in Notes suck.
As you may already know, I am back at uni. This course counts towards my degree - it is an elective and was chosen against my will. My company needs me to have Notes skills and so it was strongly suggested that I take this course when I discussed my study with The Boss. This was actually a good move, as everything I have learned in the course can be applied immediately to my work.
Popularity: 2% [?]
If you have a problem with your mouse in the game XIII, then this is what worked for me:
Change your mouse settings in windows so that it is at its minimum possible sensitivity. To do this, go to Control Panel | Mouse | Pointer Options (tab) | Select a pointer speed. Move the slider to the absolute left, so that it is as slow as it can get. Then crawl your mouse over to your XIII icon and play. The game should be fine now. This obviously doesn’t solve the problem, since you have to change the setting back in order to use windows, but it is certainly a work around. After changing this one setting I was able to play XIII.
I don’t know if this makes any difference, but some people suggest that you turn off ‘Enhance pointer precision’. This alone made no difference to me.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Written on 21 April 2004
by darryn under
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Tagged with games, tech
I just spent more than 20 minutes with a user at work solving numerous problems. They are:
- When the computer is SHUT DOWN at the end of the day, it is no longer usable. There is nothing on the screen.
- After shutting down the computer, if the user wants to use the computer, the user has to press the power button in order to turn the computer on.
- When the user unplugs the network cable and takes the computer home, and does not connect to any other network, the user is no longer able to access network resources.
Apparently these are new problems, they have only popped up recently.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Written on 21 April 2004
by darryn under
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Tagged with tech
I lost all of my hard disk data due to a power surge in December. On Wednesday the data recovery man who had supposedly been working on my disks for over 3 months informed me that he had given up. He has returned the disks and now I am back to square one. Mostly. I have from time-to-time made backups of my data and so have recovered all of my documents pre-July 1998 and ~1500 of my photos from 2001-2003. As I restore data I have been going down memory lane and looking at some of my past work. Here is a gem, my fantasy computer wish list from 27 January 1996:
| Description |
Price |
Tax |
Price |
Essential |
| Pentium 133 |
1645 |
22 |
2007 |
* |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD |
315 |
22 |
384 |
* |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD |
315 |
22 |
384 |
|
| 32Mb RAM |
1020 |
22 |
1244 |
* |
| 64-bit VGA card w/MPEG |
39 |
22 |
47 |
* |
| Upgrade to 2Mb Video |
60 |
22 |
73 |
* |
| Philips 17” MM Monitor 1280×1024 |
1200 |
22 |
1464 |
* |
| Sound Card, 4xCD-ROM, 18 CDs |
315 |
13.2 |
357 |
* |
| Upgrade Sound Card to 32bit PnP |
70 |
11 |
77 |
* |
| MS Office Pro 4.3 CD-ROM (OEM) |
65 |
0 |
65 |
* |
| Adobe Photoshop 3.0 NFR CD |
172 |
0 |
172 |
* |
| Adobe PageMaker 5.0 NFR CD |
161 |
0 |
161 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5377 |
|
6435 |
5890 |
Check out that price!!
Popularity: 2% [?]
I am slowly moving towards .text, eventually I will extend it to the point that it replaces the white.darryn.net interface and moves from blog.darryn.net to www.darryn.net. I have exported all my blog data to the .text format, and I am currently working on an app to export all the photo data. After that I will write the necessary stuff to add to .text the features that I want. Which creates a problem.
I want to add features to .text to satisfy my requirements. I need to make changes to the database. I am not a Real Programmer, I am an infrastructure/networking type of guy. I cannot contribute code to the .text project, because my code is shit, it does the job in the right conditions but real programmers would die of fear if they saw my actual code. If I don’t contribute code I risk breaking my extensions every time a new release of .text comes around. I will email Scott and ask him what he suggests.
Related is that there is no winforms photo management tool for the .text photo albums AFAIK. Photon is a great tool for the darryn.net engine, but only two sites use it and I am moving both of those to .text. So I need to write Photon v3 to work with .text photo albums. There is definitely a market for this as there are thousands of .text blogs out there. There are two problems. .Text does not have the web services to support Photon, and I am not a Real Programmer (IANAP). I can write a Photon 3 that will work for those of us who have direct access to the SQL server, but I imagine that most will not, and I am over my head when it comes to helping them.
Comments?
Popularity: 2% [?]
Written on 23 March 2004
by darryn under
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Tagged with tech
I have succumbed. I am now using the .text database for darryn.net, and the .text interface for actually writing posts. I am not actually going to use the .text interface for the foreseeable future as it does not have the features I am after. Maybe I will write what I want and contribute it to .text.
If you want to add comments, etc. my .text interface is here.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Written on 17 February 2004
by darryn under
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Tagged with tech
IF you are using cmd.exe, here is a tip. Press F7. A menu pops up with your history. Cool.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Written on 10 February 2004
by darryn under
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Tagged with tech
At work we have a license for Adobe Acrobat, and it is my machine that gets the honours. This is not much of a problem as we do not produce PDF documents too often. When we do, we basically use Acrobat as a printer, we do not create fancy forms or anything like that. Acrobat has a lot of features, a lot of settings that you can tweak. Too bad the images always look like crap when it recompresses them.
At home I do not have an Acrobat license, yet I sometimes want to make PDFs. I have tried messing with GhostScript before but it was too complicated. Today I did a search and found CutePDF Printer. It is an awesome freeware app that does all that I need, i.e. it prints to PDF files. As far as I can tell it has only one setting: the file location. It produces much better quality images than Acrobat, it doesn’t seem to recompress the images at all.
Verdict: If you want to produce the occasional small PDF file and don’t need the fancy features, get CutePDF.
*I just read the help file, and apparently CutePDF uses GhostScript, just in a user-friendly kind of way.
Popularity: 7% [?]