Monthly Archives: April 2011

Ubuntu 11.04 available for download

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Ubuntu 11.04 InstallerAs of today, the latest version of Ubuntu is available for download. If you alreadyhave Ubuntu runing, the update manager will give youthe option to upgrade your existing installation.
If you want to perform a clean install, simply download and burn the ISO file for Ubuntu 11.04 (with the code name Natty Narwhal) from www.ubuntu.com. As always, you can install the new operating system next to Windows, keeping your existing operating system working.

 

When I tried the update from within Ubuntu 10.10, I was told it would take about 7 hours for it to finish. To download the ISO will take about one hour on the same internet connection… This is of course unusual slow, and can most probably be contributed to everyone downloading the new version today.

 

One of the biggest changes in this release is the new desktop enviromnet called Unity, replacing the traditional Gnome shell. As soon as I have been playing around some more with it, I will report back on what I think about it. The main difference is that commonly used programs can be docked on the left side of the screen. It seems like Ubuntu users either love it or hate it…

 

Michael Brown blogged about how to install Lotus Notes in the (as yet) unsupported Ubuntu 11.04 this morning,so I will not repeat that here. Go read his instructions.

 

IBM Get Social Roadshow in Dallas

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Below is a summary of the event I attended yesterday. It will mainly be quotes from the different speakers.

 

Ed Brill, IBM (@edbrill)
People want to do business with people. They like to know something about the person they do business with. When I started my blog, I had to decide what my online presence should be. Am I Ed Brill the IBM executive? Or Ed Brill the father, traveler and photographer? The answer is all of them.
Historically, many companies (including IBM) had a policy that only the highest executive, or certain people, talked to customers. That policy, one face to the customer, does not work today, in the age of social business. Companies must decrease the distance between themselves and the customer.
It is important that you get a social media policy. When IBM developed one five years ago, we encouraged people to blog, be on social networks, etc. We said "do this" instead of "don’t do this".
According to the IBM CIO study, 95% of standout organisations will focus more on "getting closer to the customer" over the next five years, connecting people – customers, partners and employees – ast networks to drive innovation.
People don’t use the restaurant reviews in the Sunday newspaper anymore. Instead they use crowdsourcing. People go to Yelp and similar sites and read reviews by other people.
Who here in the audience would go to Best Buy and get a new big screen TV or a blue-ray player and trust the sales guy? How many of you would pull out your smartphone, go to Amazon.com and check the star rating and perhaps a couple of reviews right there in the store? (Most in the audience raised their hands at this point)

Marcia Conner, author and analyst (@marciamarcia)
96% of people under 30 are on a social network.
Companies with highly engaged employees have 26% higher revenue per employee.
9 in 10 adults trust recommendations from online friends and total strangers.
Many companies are afraid of social media and block it. People will work the way they need, using the tools they need, with our without you. They will figure out ways to get around limitations. They might just all use their smart phones and bypass any proxies/firewalls, and use the social tools they need.
What are the companies afraid of?
*"People will say the wrong things" – Help them say the right things. Have a social media policy. If someone says something wrong on the phone, you don’t take their phone away.
*"People will do other things" – And they will remain engaged. It is good to decompress, that actually makes them more productive. And giving them access to the tools makes it possible for them to get back faster to the task they are working on.
Link the network of networks together. Link what you know, who you know and who you are.
Give people permission, a path clear of obstacles, and they will participate.

 

Jon Raslawski, IBM
Retaining customers is linked to increased profitability.
2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as cutting costs by 10%. It is 5 times as expensive to get a new customer as retaining an existing one.
5% reduction in customer defection can increase profits by 25-125%.

 

Scott Souder, IBM (@sssouder)
Social business is engaged, transparent, nimble.
Embrace it or don’t embrace it, but social networking is here and will take place despite your firewalls.

 

Jason Dumont, IBM
"Email is where knowledge goes to die" – Luis Suarez
In the old days, some executives asked "why does everyone need their own phone? What’s the ROI on a voicemail system?".
Everyone want their 15 minutes of fame. Let people share their knowledge and expertise. And don’t let the knowledge walk out the door with the retiring employees. They are the experts, keep that knowledge even after they are gone.
Let people air the "dirty laundry", just do it internally, not externally.

 

Domino Designer for Eclipse

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For the last few weeks, I have been working full-time in Domino Designer 8.5.2, the version based on Eclipse. I had previusly just been playing around some, but as we are upgrading to the latest version of Notes and Domino at work, I am now able to use this version almost exclusively.I am currently still doing only Classic Notes development, as we still have some users on Notes 7.0.2. Also, from what I understand, the performance of Xpages in the client is not fully where one wouold expect it. So I am holding off on putting Xpages into production for a little bit longer.
So what is my impression of Domino Designer for Eclipsethis far?Both good and bad, but the good is far outweighing the bad.Let’s look at a fewkey points.
 
Performance
I went from a3 year old Core2 Duo @2.0 GHz and 1 GB of RAM running Windows XP to a Core2 Duo @3.06 GHz and 8 MB of RAMrunning Windows 7 (64-bit). Performance is obviously better, partially due to more memory and partially from the new computer being a clean install, but honestly it is not a huge difference.
 
Stability
I recently switched from 7.0.2 to 7.0.3 on my old system. I am not sure if it was because of that,because the computer needed to be rebuilt (I saw a lot of other issues) or because of the code I wrote,butDesigner kept crashing fairly frequently. I still manage to crash Designer 8.5.2, but not as frequently (unless I do really weird things with lists).
 
Functionality
There are a few things I love about DDE, and a few things that really irritates me.Let’s start with the negative ones.
You have to double click on design element groups in order to see themin the right pane. For example, if you want to see all agents, in earlier versions of Designer you simply clicked on "Agents" and they were displayed in the right pane. In DDE you have to double click. Very annoying, and slowing me down.
 

 

I love the working sets. Using them makes it much easier for me to organize databases applications I work on, for example for different departments. If you are not using this gem, take a look at it right away!
There are several other little gems, like the asterisk (star) in the tab when adesign element is dirty (has been modified) and need to besaved. I like the tabsin the bottom pane, with properties, events and problems. And one of the features i like the most is the real-time compilation and that errors are being displayed at once. I like the popup help in the Lotusscript editor when I hover over a function, but I am not happy with how F1 works, it usually just opens a generic help page about the editor.
Also frequently the code completion tooltip is not showing up. I am not sure if this has to do with the fact that I (like probably most developers these days) use two monitors side-by-side.
 
Conclusion
Maureen and her team has done a good job, and I enjoy using DDE on a daily basis. Sure, some things are a bitcludgy, but I amd sure 8.5.3 andlater versions will fix most of that, as well as adding more functionality.
 
 

 

Import CSV from Excel into Notes documents

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The other day there was a post on LinkedIn regarding importing Excel data into Notes documents.
Someone suggested to save into Access format, and then export from there intosome 1-2-3formatthat Notes can read.
I suggested to save the Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file, and then import it. So I decided to write a small generic importer.
I built a class called “csvFile”, which I put in a script library called “Class.ImportCSV”.
Below is the code for the actual import agent. It creates a new csvFile object, which load all the CSV data into an array in memory. Each array element is in turn a class, containing a list of entries. This is because you can not create arrays of arrays or lists, they have to be in another object/class.
If you know the row number and column label (the first row in the CSV file will be considered the column labels), you can address the value like this: csvfile.row(r).entry(“ColumnLabel”).
Option Public
Option Declare
Use "Class.ImportCSV"

Sub Initialize
  ' *** Import CSV file and create matching documents in Notes
  ' *** By Karl-Henry Martinsson, April 8, 2010
  Dim session As New NotesSession
  Dim db As NotesDatabase
  Dim doc As NotesDocument
  Dim csvfile As csvFile
  Dim rowcnt As Long
  Dim r As Long

  Set db = session.CurrentDatabase  
  Set csvfile = New csvFile("c:\Book1.csv")
  rowcnt = Ubound(csvfile.row) + 1
  ' *** Loop through the rows and create a new document for each
  For r = Lbound(csvfile.row) To Ubound(csvfile.row)
    If (r+1 Mod 10) = 0 Then    ' Update status bar every 10 documents
      Print "Importing " & r+1 & " of " & rowcnt
    End If
    Set doc = New NotesDocument(db)
    Call doc.ReplaceItemValue("Form", "MyFormName")
    ' *** Loop though entries for the row and populate corresponding fields in doc
    Forall e In csvfile.row(r).entry
      Call doc.ReplaceItemValue(Listtag(e), e)
    End Forall
    Call doc.Save(True,False)
  Next
End Sub
Here is the script library. Simply create a new script library, call it “Class.ImportCSV” and paste the code into it’s Declaration section:
' *** Created by Karl-Henry Martinsson on 2010-04-08
' *** Email: TexasSwede@gmail.com
' *** Blog: http://blog.texasswede.com
' *** ----------------------------------------------------------
' *** You are free to modify and edit this code, but please keep
' *** all comments intact, and publish any changes you make so
' *** the Lotus community can benefit. You are allowed to use
' *** this code in commercial/closed source products, but are 
' *** encouraged to share your modifications.
' *** Disclaimer: Use this code at your own risk. No warranties
' *** what so ever. Don't run code you don't know what it does.
' *** ----------------------------------------------------------

Class RowData
  Public entry List As String
End Class

Class csvFile
  Public row() As RowData         ' Storing the rows in the imported CSV file
  Public column List As String    ' List containing column labels
  Private fileno As Integer       ' File number

  Public Sub new(filename As String)
    Dim temprow As String
    Dim temparr As Variant
    Dim fixedarr() As String
    Dim i As Integer
    Dim flagQuoted As Integer

    fileno = Freefile            ' Return an unused file number
    Open filename For Input As fileno
    Redim row(0) As rowdata
    ' *** Get column header
    Do While Not Eof(fileno)
      ' *** Read row and split into cells.
      Line Input #fileno, temprow
      temparr = Split(temprow, ",")
      ' *** Commas within quoted values will cause the value
      ' *** to be split across array items, so we have to fix this.
      flagQuoted = False
      Redim fixedarr(0) As String    ' Size array to just one element, has to be done
      For i = Lbound(temparr) To Ubound(temparr)
        ' *** Check if value start with quote
        If Left$(temparr(i),1) = |"| Then  
          flagQuoted = True
        End If
        If flagQuoted = True Then
          If Left$(temparr(i),1) = |"| Then  
          ' *** For first item, just set array item to value, remove leading quote
            fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)) = Right$(temparr(i),Len(temparr(i))-1)
          Else
          ' *** Append value to previous array item with a comma to replace the lost one
            fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)) = fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)) & "," & temparr(i) 
          End If
          ' *** If it end with a quote, reset flag, rmove trailing quote and increase size of array
          If Right$(temparr(i),1) = |"| Then
            flagQuoted = False
            fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)) = Left$(fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)), Len(fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)))-1)
            Redim Preserve fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)+1) As String  
          End If
        Else
          ' *** Set array item to value and increase array size by one
          fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)) = temparr(i) 
          Redim Preserve fixedarr(Ubound(fixedarr)+1) As String  
        End If
      Next
      temparr = Fulltrim(fixedarr)    ' Remove empty items in array
      ' *** Check if this is the first row (index 0), i.e. the column header and no object exists  
      If Ubound(row) = 0 And (row(Ubound(row)) Is Nothing) Then
        ' *** Loop through temparr and build list from labels
        For i = Lbound(temparr) To Ubound(temparr)
          column(Cstr(i)) = temparr(i)
        Next
        ' *** Create an object so the code above will not be true again
        Set row(Ubound(row)) = New RowData
      Else
        ' *** Create new row data object, populate with data and increase size of row array
        Set row(Ubound(row)) = New RowData
        For i = Lbound(temparr) To Ubound(temparr)
          row(Ubound(row)).entry(column(Cstr(i))) = temparr(i)
        Next
        Redim Preserve row(Ubound(row)+1) As RowData
      End If
    Loop
    ' *** Remove the last row, as it is always empty
    Redim Preserve row(Ubound(row)-1) As RowData
  End Sub
End Class