A couple of years ago, I carved a Gollum pumpkin, and the year before I created a stormtrooper pumpkin. For the last few years I did not get around to carve anything, but this year I decided I would do something fun again. I ended up carving two pumpkins, and the result is below.
Earlier today I talked to someone who needed to delete a large number of ToDo entries in his mail file. I suggested to use either Ytria scanEZ or Martin-Scott NoteMan. As he did not have those tools installed on the machine he was working op, he thought about creating a hidden view and simple delete the documents from there.
When he opened up the design, he found a hidden view that would work, but he did not remember how to open it in the Notes client. I use this all the time, as I have several views I use for support or debug purposes, so I could tell him how to do it. I wanted to share that with everyone else, in case someone else need to do this and don't remember.
Open the database and go to any view. This is important, if you are not in a view, you don't have the correct menu items. Then hold down Ctrl-Shift and select "View" and "Go To…". This will open a dialog box that will display all views, including the hidden ones (in parenthesis). Now you can release the Ctrl-Shift keys and select the view.
That's it.
By the way, I highly recommend the tools mentioned above.
NoteMan is just $395 for the whole suite. Any developer not using it should go get it. I blogged about the tool back in October 2010.
Ytria scanEZ is more, they don't post the price on their site but if I remember correctly it is something like $595. I use several of their tools, and they are really helping me keep a consistent look-and-feel to my applications. I mentioned the tools back in April 2010.
Both companies are usually represented at Lotusphere, so make sure you drop by their booths and get a demo.
Earlier this week I had to write an agent to read a CSV file and create Notes documents based on the content. Nothing difficult, this is something most of us do all the time. However, each entry in the CSV file had a producer code. I needed to do a lookup into the database and get the matching producer (also called agency) document and read a particular field from it. This field had to be stored in the new document I was creating, to tie the new entries to an existing producer/agency.
There were 3686 producers in the database, and 47731 entries in the CSV file. In other words, there were several entries per producer.
One solution is to load all agency documents into a list, then perform the lookup against the list using IsElement(). Since the number of producers are much fewer than the number of entries in the CSV file, I figured that I would save some substantial time vs. performing separate lookups for each entry.
I wrote three different version of the importer, as identical as possible.
The first version performed a view lookup for each entry in the CSV file to get the producer. It finished in 520 seconds.
The second version used a NotesViewEntryCollection to loop through all producers and load them into a list, then processed the CSV and used the list to get the producer documents. This one finished in 257 seconds.
The third version is using a combination. I do not pre-load the list with producer documents, instead I use IsElement() on each entry in the CSV file to check if the list already contains an element for the producer. If not, I perform the lookup and store the document into the list, to use next time the same producer is needed. This agent finished in 260 seconds.
The third version is the approach I have been using in the past. The benefit with that approach is that I only load the producers where I actually have data. Suppose only 1000 different producer codes are listed in the CSV file, I will just perform 1000 lookups, instead of 3686.
I use TeamStudio Profiler to time and profile my code, and I noticed something interesting. When the document was loaded into the list in program two and three, the time it took to read the value and store it into the new document was much shorter than when I had just performed the lookup, even if the code was identical. You can see it in the screenshots below. I hope André Guirard or someone else that knows more about the internals of Lotusscript can explain this. See update at the end of this article!
Version one – individual lookups for each entry (520 seconds to execute):
Version two – Preloading all producers before import (257 seconds to execute):
Version three – Lookup once, store in list for later use (260 seconds to execute):
Update: I just talked to André Guirard about this. I isolated the slow code to doc.GetItemValue(), and André explained that the slowness I see is because of how Notes documents are handled. The note is not "cracked open" until an item is needed. So when I store the note in the list (example 2 and 3), it is opened once (which is slow), and then the following times I access the same document it is very fast, as it already is open. In the code with individual lookups (example 1), the document has to be "cracked open" over and over again, as the object is recreated for every entry.
Sony is buying out the Swedish telecom company Ericsson's share in Sony Ericsson, the mobile phone company they created back in 2001. Sony is paying Ericsson 1.05 billion Euros in cash for their 50% share of the company. Reports also say that Sony is planning to change the name of Sony Ericsson in the future.
Press release here.
Update: As the article (swedish only) now has been published, I am re-publishing this blog entry.
At least that is what is indicated if you look at Neil Langston's profile at LinkedIn…
Supposedly it is a mail-only migration (according to my source), they will keep their Notes/Domino applications. So the end result is just the purchase of new servers and additional licenses being paid to Microsoft. I am sure Microsoft will spin this as a win for them and a loss for IBM, but I don't see IBM losing any money. If Ernst & Young is paying maintenance today, they will most probably continue to do that for a while, thus IBM will see pretty much the same revenue stream (minus a few mail-only servers, perhaps). If Ernst & Young are not on maintenance, IBM is already not getting any revenue, so no different there either.
This morning I woke up to the news that Dennis Ritchie died a couple of days ago. Some of my readers may not know who he was, he was never a showman like Steve Jobs, or took part in product launches. None the less, he was one of the big names and early pioneers in IT.
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of UNIX alongside Ken Thompson has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.
Source: Wikipedia
I remember when I started learning C, back in 1989. I had already been exposed to first Basic and then Pascal earlier, and until I understand the beauty of C, the whole thing with pointers confused me to no end. But eventually I got pretty decent at writing C code. I also started using Unix (HP-UX) about the same time. A couple of years later, I wrote a couple of small Windows program, again using C. Back in the early days of Windows, C was the only language you could use to write Windows applications.
It is amazing that a person who created some of the most widely used products is not more well known. Dennis Ritchie is at least as important in the history of computing as Steve Jobs. C and Unix may not be as sexy as iPhones, iPods and Macintosh computers, but they are probably more important if you look at the big picture. Apples OS X is based on Unix, and developers use Objective C to create programs and apps for OS X and iOS. Without Dennis Ritchie, the world would probably look very different.
Dennis Ritchie
1941 – 2011
Additional details about the upcoming release from Samsung of the Nexus prime, the first phone with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) have been published on some websites.
The new phone, which is expected be be unveiled next week, has a 4.65" display with 1280×720 resolution, a 5MP camera, 1 GB of system RAM and 32 GB of built-in user memory. The dual-core processor is running 1.2 GHz or 1.5 GHz (according to what source one listen to). Reports claims that it is an LTE (Long Term Evolution) phone, and that it will be available only through Verizon, at least initially.
The Nexus Prime will probably be called Droid Prime when it is sold by Verizon. AT&T is also working on it's LTE network, but the two carriers use different frquencies, so they are not compatible with each other. The question is how the Nexus Prime will work overseas, where LTE networks are also being built right now, using different frequencies. Some reports say that Nexus Prime will support HSPA or HSPA+, but what about GSM/3G support, for fallback internationally? And will there be quad-band GSM support? Hopefully those questions will be answered next week.
I have never owned a Macintosh, iPod, iPhone or iPad. I have however used different products from Apple over the years. I have even used the NeXT.
Back in 1983 (if I remember correctly), I spent a week in a German school (my mom had this idea about sending me to Germany to stay with relatives or friends for a few weeks every summer to improve my German), and in their computer room they had Apple IIe that I got to play around with a little. I was programming on a similar computer (the Swedish ABC 80) at my school, and I found them fairly similar. About the same time, I started hearing about Apple Lisa, and a year or so later I saw my first Macintosh at a computer trade show in Stockholm.
But it was not until a few years later (I think in 1987) I got to actually use a Macintosh. My godmother's husband owned a printing business, and he — like so many others in the graphics industry — used Macintosh. As I "knew computers", I was called in to figure out a few things and teach him. I think it had to do with sending files through a modem or something, on his Macintosh II. At this time I was using another Swedish computer at school, the CP/M-86 based Compis, and the graphics environment on the Macintosh was very impressive.
Then in 1988 I started working at Microsoft, and I was assigned a Macintosh SE (in addition to an IBM PS/2 Model 60). Now I got to use it a bit more extensive, but when I started looking at buying my own computer a year later, the higher price and fewer choices when it came to software made me choose the DOS/Windows platform.
In 1992 I got to play with a NeXT at the place I worked, and it was way cool. I was not able to spend much time on it, but I could see that this was a totally different version of Unix compared with the mostly text-based systems I had used before. As we all know, NeXT was purchased by Apple and became the foundation of OS X.
In 1993 I started my career as a journalist and technical writer. All the desk editors used Macintosh (and Quark Xpress), and a few times I got to actually edit my own articles on them. Once, I believe some time in 1995 or 1996 I even filled in as a desk editor for a day, creating a page or two. This was the last time I actually used a Macintosh.
I have since played with iPhones (my son got one, while I am still on Blackberry), iPad and iPod. All great products, easyto use and powerful. But for me, as a technical person, I am willing to give up some usability and ease of use for a more open and flexible environment. That is why I have a Cowon A2 as my MP3 player. When I got it, it was technically superior to anything Apple had, with a 4 inch widescreen display, built-in speakers and microphone and video in and out. It also supports AVI, Divx/Xvid, Flac and many other formats that iPod did not support without converting. I could also copy files to it directly by connecting it through USB, without having to use a special program like iTunes. But it is bigger, bulkier and heavier than an iPad. The user interface is not nearly as developed. It simply lack the sexiness everyone associate with Apple products.
Steve Jobs was a visionary. Using the words of the Swedish criminal writer Leif GW Persson: "He could see around corners." Steve Jobs could see the future, and managed to deliver products that shaped the future. New products are measured againts the Apple products, and even if they technically may be better, they fall short in sales. This is not just due to the marketing, but also because the Apple products are such household names. Today many people say "iPod" instead of the more generic "MP3 player", and "iPad" is on the way to head that way as well.
The software industry has lost one of it's pioneers and biggest leaders. Steve Jobs family has lost a husband and father, and Apple has lost a visionary.
