Reveal the error, for crying out loud!

The Eclipse-based Lotus Domino Designer certainly throws up some weird error messages at times, does it not?

I usually find it best to ignore the message, just click OK and try to get on with life as if nothing ever happened. The errors never have affected any subsequent development work that I’ve done, so “let sleeping dogs lie” seems an acceptable pragmatic approach (though in a perfect world I’d be supposed to spend hours or days trying to establish the nature of each such error and get in touch with IBM to report it and/or get the problem fixed).

Today’s little “Reveal Design Element” gem appeared before me, for the first time ever,  when I launched the Designer:

Crikey! No comment necessary.

As a general observation, I find that the Eclipse-based Designer puts out far too many dialog boxes that display internal workings of the Designer (informational things such as copying this or that internal object) and in my opinion are unnecessarily exposed to you, taking up time, causing the screen to flicker, and then disappearing after some seconds. These are things that the legacy Designer wouldn’t waste time showing you, and are part of the reason for the new Designer being distinctly less snappy.

This is part of what I regard as the lumbering, spasmodic and inconsistent behavior of the Designer (especially in comparison with the speedy legacy Domino Designer).

So according to my own experience the new Designer can be very off-putting and unproductive at times, and this becomes very inefficient especially when in the course of work you have to carry out the same design steps many times in succession. I’ve found that previously simple tasks such as copying forms, views, scripts (and so on) can behave quite erratically, appearing to have happened but not always being accomplished, causing rework. I could say a lot more about this, but will leave it for another time. If anybody at IBM ever wants to discuss this Designer aspect with me I’m happy to oblige.

However, I must be fair and state that some of this erratic behavior might be at least partly caused by the sometimes erratic way that I’ve found Windows 7 to work (with regard to the painting of screen contents, for example). I push my Windows system really hard at times, and it’s far from being as robust and dependable as I’d like. So the fault might lie in both IBM and Microsoft camps. All that I can say is that my overall experience is worse compared with when, prior to August 2009, I used to run Domino Designer Version 7 (or earlier) on good old Windows XP.

Not too encouraging, considering that these days I run 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate on a fast quad-core desktop machine with 8 GB or RAM (which never all gets used up) and multiple disk drives with oodles of free space. Hey, I’ve been a performance specialist (nerd, if you prefer) since the 1970s and should know what I’m talking about.

To continue on my merry theme, I’ve also been big on usability since the mid 1970s, once again courtesy of my time as an IBM systems engineer.

Therefore I’m intensely irritated by the generic “See error log for more details” dialog that the Eclipse-based Domino Designer spits out all too regularly:

In this example, at least there was an attempt made to describe the nature of the error: “Data does not have correct format for type.” But it’s a pretty lame attempt, wouldn’t you agree? There’s enough space in the dialog box to indicate in brief the nature of the “data” and also the expected format and the type, is there not? Knowing this could obviate a visit to the error log, so be more informative in the dialog box itself?

Of course, I’d better add that lots and lots of other software is riddled with shoddy messages like this, I’m only using these two examples from Domino Designer since they happened to me earlier this afternoon.

Don’t make things so hard! We don’t all have to be Eclipse gurus, do we? Since you designed the code that wrote the log file, obviously you know where it’s located, so tell me precisely where it is. Even better, why not provide a button or hotlink which I simply need to click so as to have the log opened?

‘nuff said … Or maybe, too much said by this grumpy old man!

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Domino Designer,IBM Lotus Notes,Eclipse,Performance & Scalability,Error Message,Error Dialog,Usability

NotesTracker Guide Version 5.2 now online at Docstoc

You can now read the Version 5.2.00 edition of the NotesTracker Guide at Docstoc.

Read or download it here:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/49044581/NotesTracker-Guide-Version-52

 

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Usage Tracking,Auditing,Compliance,Asia/Pacific Computer Services

SDMS Version 4.5.10 for Lotus Notes released (03 August 2010)

The very popular free Lotus Notes application SDMS (a Simple Document Management System) was released today (3rd August 2010).

SDMS has been upgraded to incorporate NotesTracker Version 5.2 which itself was released only yesterday.

There’s also a fix for the Category and Sub-Category fields (the drop-down list was being blanked in edit mode).

It was one of those simple bugs that was “staring me in the face” and for some unknown reason I only just twigged to it a few days ago. … Duh!

Go get your free copy of SDMS Version 4.5.10 either here (Dallas server) or here (Sydney server), and ENJOY.

Technorati Tags: SDMS,Simple Document Management System,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Freeware,NotesTracker

NotesTracker Version 5.2 released (02 August 2010)

NotesTracker gets even better with the release of Version 5.2 and you can find out where to download the evaluation edition and the NotesTracker Guide Version 5.2 from the companion blog:

NotesTracker news and tips

One of the new features is the ability to track attachment changes (filenames and sizes), for example:

This example shows that one attachment was removed (circled in red) from the Notes document, and one was attached (circled in green).

So read all about it at NotesTracker news and tips

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,Usage Tracking,Usage Metrics,KM. Knowledge Management,Compliance,Auditing,Privacy

I’m an old Old Spice man! ... And Oh Yes: NotesTracker version 5.2 is imminent

One of the few things I have in common with Old Spice man is that I happen to use Old Spice deodorant. But I don’t have a horse or a yacht.

As an old codger I can attest that my Old Spice stick does keep that “old man’s smell” at bay! It keeps me fresh -- and even perhaps pleasant to be near -- as I struggle and sweat to keep abreast with what’s happening in the IT world, while trying to maintain a mastery over a tiny little portion of it, in this my 41st year in the game.

This includes further refining and tweaking NotesTracker (see links at right) including combing through the NotesTracker Guide and making changes here and there with a view to improving NotesTracker’s ease of use even further.

Also, I’ve finished functional and regression testing of the next release, and am happy to tell you that NotesTracker Version 5.2 is now ready for final packaging and imminent release (in just a matter of days, I expect).

The major new function in NotesTracker v5.2 is the option to log the names (and sizes) of document attachments as they are changed. The attachments themselves are not logged, since this would add vastly to the log repository disk space usage.

I’ve also tested and highly recommend the excellent Notes Reconn freeware (from OpenNTF.org) -- and have expanded the final section of the NotesTracker Guide, describing how simple it is to use Notes Reconn to produce very nice-looking and informative charts.

These give you even more ways to comprehend and visualize the usage of your Notes applications. Here’s an example:

The single-character legends on the right correspond with the NotesTracker action types, which are: C = Create a document, D = Delete a document, F = Failed document deletion attempt, G = Generic NotesTracker action (these can be any activities that you designate, such as pressing the Send button), P = Paste a document, R = Read a document, U = Update a document, X = Create a document via a Web browser, W = Web Read, Y = Web Update. (There are other loggable application actions that don’t appear in this example: V = a View is opened, O = Opening of a database, E = a document deletion attempt was indeterminate, and M = Mail-in of a document.)

Watch this space for the NotesTracker v5.2 software release announcement.

Meanwhile, you can download the NotesTracker Version 5.2 Guide from here or here.

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,Asia/Pacific Computer Services,IBM Lotus Notes,IBM Lotus Domino,OpenNTF,OpenNTF.org,Notes Reconn,Applications Usage,Database Usage,Metrics,Old Spice,Old Spice Man

Lotus Knows? … Not all the time!

I’ve been using IBM Lotus Domino Designer a lot recently, after quite a few months of irregular use.

I often wonder what IBM’s usability specialists are doing with their time when they allow certain things to go feral and linger on to cause us continuing pain.

Perhaps a lot of the IBM/Lotus people who, over the decades, have developed Notes don’t actually use it much in the manner that we practitioners out in the field do. They do it in spades for Notes Mail and the like, but seem to have forgotten to do so for the Domino Designer product.

I’m got a toothache today, and am not happy about having to visit the dentist again! I had hoped that last month’s visit was the last time I’d have to see the insides of a dental surgery for a good while. So maybe that’s the reason behind my rant today, I’m usually much more affable!

Anyhow, I’ve been using the application “Refresh Design” function quite a lot of late, perhaps dozens of times per day, and I’m getting totally annoyed by the following dialog and extremely tired of having to click on the Yes button time after time:

What is patently missing is the “Don’t show this again” or “I know what I’m doing” option that I’ve suggested, highlighted in yellow. This option is a common feature of similar dialogs in all sorts of software, even in other parts of Lotus Notes, so I’m not asking for too much am I?

And of course I’m asking the Notes design team to make this available in Domino Designer as soon as possible, and to systematically review other dialogs that we weary end users are presented with many times per day, and ensure that the same option is present in them.

IBM continues to invest in Lotus Notes, they assure us, so why not divert a very modest amount of time and people resource to do this streamlining? I’m pretty sure it will generate a big payback and a ton of appreciation from us!

Please add your own similar requests below, for IBM’s consideration …

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Notes,Domino Designer 8.5,Usability,Efficiency,Payback

TIP – Another way to recover from Lotus Notes 8.5.1 replicator failure (“Unable to invoke program”)

I was just cruising along, using Lotus Notes 8.5.1 for development, and wanted to replicate a database with a client’s server.

Rather than business-as-usual replication, out spurted the error “Unable to invoke program” …

A bit of searching around the IBM support knowledgebase, various Lotus-related forums and community web sites led me nowhere.

Thee were some pretty drastic solutions, including uninstalling and re-installing Notes client, which I didn’t want to have to do. Others like this that talked about disabling the Multi-user Cleanup service (in Windows) but this didn’t apply in my case because I’m running a single-user Notes installation.

The folks at Badkey Corner had the following post: Unable to invoke program and Lotus Notes which included the advice: “Re-running client setup to generate a new names.nsf, desktop6.ndk, and bookmark.nsf resolved the issue.”

Rather than doing this (it’s a pain to delete the desktop8.ndk file because then you have to spend ages setting up your Notes Workspace again, which has lots and lots of database icons for all the applications that I work on).

It was my birthday yesterday -- and let me tell you that I’m two or three times older than many of you – but there must be a few parts of my burnt-out grey matter still working, because I got the inspiration to delete the Cache.NDK file and to my pleasure this solved the problem, as I had guessed that it might. Replication was back to normal again.

The beauty of this solution is that (a) it’s quick, and (b) you don’t lose as much as you would if you followed other suggestions. I hope that this tip works as well for you some day and saves you some sweat and tears!

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Notes,Replication,Replicator,Unable,Invoke,Cache,Cache.NDK

How to get Notes/FX working in IBM Lotus Notes 8.x - UPDATED

Here’s an easy way to update your Windows registry so that Notes/FX (field exchange) will work under Lotus Notes 8.

I’ve written previously about how a client of mine who’s long-time user of Lotus Notes was held back from upgrading to Lotus Notes 8.5 (from 6.5) when he discovered that Notes/FX no longer worked. This meant that automatic generation of  Lotus WordPro documents,  used pervasively throughout his Notes apps, could no longer be generated from Notes data.

Refer to my older postings for background on this issue. IBM Support didn’t ever come up with a solution to this bug. Apparently no IBMer could be located who knows about Notes/FX, or was willing to admit it!

Luckily I eventually stumbled upon the solution back in February this year. What I didn’t do then was pass on to you a tip that enables you easily to roll out the fix to across all of your Lotus Notes desktops.

So here’s that simple fix, better late than never!

• STEP 1 - Using a text editor such as Notepad, enter the following (without the green line numbers). Please note that line 2 was updated to remove the spurious string “_catch22” at the end, which I used during testing and forgot to delete in this example: 
  
  01 REGEDIT4
  
  02 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Notes.link\Shell\open\command]
  
  03 @="C:\\Lotus\\Notes\\notes.exe -defini %1"
  
  
• STEP 2 – Save this text file with a name such as NotesLink_command_adjust.reg or NotesFX_fix.reg (the important part being the .reg file extension)
  
  
• STEP 3 – Mail this tiny text file out as an attachment to all your Lotus Notes users, telling them to double-click on it and allow it to execute.

In my case, Notes 8.5.1 is installed on the G: drive in the Notes851 folder, so that line 2 becomes:

@="G:\\Notes851\\notes.exe -defini %1"

After this, Notes/FX should start working again under Notes 8, that’s all there is to it.

DISCLAIMER:
The above tip is provided on an “as is” basis. I don’t claim to know all that much about registry files. If you don’t either, it’s probably wise for you to take a look here or here or here or here (or elsewhere) to find out a bit more about using them and the implications of altering the Windows registry.

Technorati Tags: IBM Lotus Notes,Notes/FX,Lotus WordPro,OLE,Windows,Registry Editor

Feeling blue and brotherly in Chicago, 30 years later

For some months now I’ve been receiving the Chicago Tribune daily newsletter, out of interest to compare how the goings-on in that windy city compare with what’s happening on the opposite side of the globe here down under in Melbourne, Australia.

The similarities and differences are quite intriguing. Similar problems with public transport, traffic congestion, rates and taxes, parking fees, speed cameras, waste management, and all that sort of thing. (If any one thing stands out, sadly it would be that we don’t have anything like as many shootings here.)

But an article today caught my intention and I’d like to point it out to you for your appreciation. Go read:

Remembering 'Blues Brothers' 30 years later - 30 years ago [on 16 June 1980] 'The Blues Brothers' hit the big screen, crashing their way through Chicago. In the process, they cleared a path between Hollywood and the city.

The story has some fascinating insights, for movie buffs and Chicago citizens alike.

Technorati Tags: Blues Brothers,Chicago,Melbourne,Movies

Notes turns 50, platonically-speaking

Read this.

Enough said! … I do remember reading about Plato during its earlier days in the 1970s (my first decade with IBM), but wasn’t too sure what it all signified -- certainly very novel way back then.

Technorati Tags: Plato,Notes,Lotus Notes,Collaboration,Education