Users of the decommissioned Lotus Sandbox need lament no more, it has been brought back to life and is available for downloads once again (no thanks to IBM).
I recently commented about its passing and yesterday there was a reply posted with the good news.
You’ll find that it has a new “banana home” courtesy of Peter von Stöckel and you can see the Sandbox again here.
Go read Peter’s blog posts about it at Notes.Net Sandbox and Notes.Net Sandbox, part 2
Add to the list of unfathomable corporate decisions IBM’s recent making unavailable the much-loved Lotus Sandbox archive, see here, please go read it.
I do refer to the Sandbox several times per year but haven’t visited for a month or two, and was only alerted to this sad action by Thierry Cayla’s R.I.P posting and I agree with him that it’s not one of IBM’s smartest moves.
So I sent of the following via the developerWorks feedback link on the Sandbox page and maybe you’ll consider doing so too if you’d like to see the Sandbox archive revived.
Here’s my developerWorks feedback to IBM (why not have a go yourself?) …
Bring back the Lotus Sandbox. There were still valuable downloads on it that aren't available elsewhere (such as OpenNTF.org). Consequently decommissioning the Sandbox will prove to be a disservice to the Lotus Notes/Domino community. Even if you don't actively maintain but merely leave it there as a "legacy" resource, it will remain of value to the Notes community. Could you not afford the trivial expense of leaving it there? Surely your budget is not so constrained that you can't afford the disk space and download bandwidth?
- - - - - - - - - - -With the boilerplate response: Thank you for giving developerWorks your feedback. Your comments give developerWorks important information that we will use to further improve our design.
Time will tell if they do anything positive about this unimpressive decision.
This reminds me a bit of IBM Australia’s decision, back around 1989 or 1990 -- when admittedly the economy was getting a bit tough, and the usual aggressive annual sales growth targets were being missed -- to stop supplying free biscuits (cookies, if you prefer) in the IBM coffee rooms across the nation. Rumour had it that the biscuits were costing IBM Australia the not inconsiderable amount of some $150,000 per annum (or maybe it was $250,000), so it was probably an understandable decision for the times.
But I can’t see how merely keeping online the Lotus Sandbox could be imposing any such unbearable cost on IBM Corporation.
So IBM, please reconsider, and make available again the “knowledge biscuits” stored in the Lotus Sandbox.
I remain puzzled about the Domino Designer 8.5.2 Help database, which only seems to mention the previous 8.5.1 point release. This is what I found when I opened it:
This is the file help85_designer.nsf that I opened from the Help folder.
Thinking that somehow I might have “stuffed up” the installation (even though I deliberately installed the new release into a brand new folder and not simply overwritten the folder that I had used for release 8.5.1), I contacted one of my clients and he reported the same.
Is this a faux pas on my part, or were there simply no new application design features in the Notes/Domino 8.5.2 release which the IBM information developers found worthy of writing about?
Am I going crazy? … The answer to that rhetorical question is undoubtedly a resounding “Yes!” … But maybe I’m not the only one?
The online interactive Domino Object Maps for versions 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 are very useful Help resources for the for Lotus Notes/Domino developer.
In case you missed it, they’re accessible here:
I wanted to make a offline copy, mainly to get snapper performance, by downloading each of the above-referenced pages and all their sub-pages. But this didn’t work, with many of the sub-URLs pointing to other pages external to the base URLs.
Can anybody provide a method for making/obtaining a working offline copy of each map structure in its entirety?
I’ve been flat out and haven’t had a chance to work on my Searching for Desktop Search blog for ages and ages.
I thought that I’d mention that NetworkWorld has recently published some desktop search reviews:
I’ve tested many (at least a dozen) desktop search programs for Windows over the last five or more years, including X1 and Copernic search, and I could really tell some stories about them!
But at the moment only have dtSearch Desktop installed on my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Currently, I’m actively using only Windows 7 search (when I migrated from Windows XP as soon as Windows 7 was released in August last year, I discarded some of the other desktop search programs).
While Windows 7 search has many good features, one thing that I really dislike about it the ability to readily enter advanced searches (with Boolean search arguments, etc), as you can using dtSearch like this:
All that Windows 7 gives you is this:
or this inscrutable nonsense at the top right of Windows Explorer:
What Windows 7 desktop search badly needs is an approachable query interface, say like Google’s “Advanced Search” form:
But one distinct advantage for Windows 7 is that it’s built in, and the indexer works unobtrusively and continuously in the background. I find its performance impact to be unnoticeable, and due to the continuous “on the fly” indexing you can query documents added just a few seconds ago.
More about this, and the some distinct advantages of dtSearch, some other time when I have a moment or two to put down my findings.
A classical tale of love, hardware-wise, in the French style. … “L’amour toujours” as experienced by two laptop computers.
It’s been out at YouTube for a couple of years, but is quite cute and worth a view. Be forewarned that the tragic conclusion may cause a little weeping!
Catch it here or watch it below:
There’s a “Goldilocks Principle” as Dr. John Sorflaten describes at Human Factors International. [Link corrected, thanks Kevin]
Goldilocks went into the three bears’ home and tested their chairs, beds and porridge, until she found what for her was “just right” (or so the fairytale goes).
His article fits in very neatly with the theme of my “Leave good enough alone” blog. Go take a read of it there, and find out how to apply the Goldilocks Principle to design.
So, you might implement a cloud computing solution based on the two premises that it would firstly save you money and secondly be faster to implement than an on-premises, or in-premises, solution (one located on your organization’s data center, for example). But it would be incorrect to say “on-premise, or in-premise” solution.I’m a bit disheartened when I hear the incorrect ‘premise’ usage so often. But on the other hand I’m heartened by IBM peoples’ proper usage. for example in the announcement IBM LotusLive 1.3 adds e-mail services for both new and existing Notes Domino customers and Ed Brill’s blog posting LotusLive Notes: Open for business! … However some very naughty people commenting on Ed Brill’s posting used the incorrect ‘premise’ attribution.
Premises are land and buildings together considered as a property. This usage arose from property owners finding the word in their title deeds, where it originally correctly meant "the aforementioned; what this document is about", from Latin prae-missus = "placed before".
In this sense, the word is always used in the plural, but singular in construction. Note that a single house or a single other piece of property is "premises", not a "premise", although the word "premises" is plural in form; e.g. "The equipment is on the customer's premises", never "The equipment is on the customer's premise".
Australia’s NBN (National Broadband Network) has just had its first point-of-presence officially opened in Tasmania, with the chance that the whole NBN visionary infrastructure project might be canned by the Coalition (Liberal-National) parties if they assume power after next Saturday’s federal election.
There have been many threads or streams of discussion about the politics, business case and technologies of the NBN. One of the various threads argued by the politicians has been about the link speeds involved: Why we need a uniform 100 Mbps network (and in the last couple of days, the fact that tests have shown the NBN will actually support 1 Gbps, which is no surprise to anybody up with technology but caused appalling incredulity on the Coalition leader).
Anyway, a little to my surprise,The Australian newspaper had this article by Sturat Kennedy the other day: Ultra-fast broadband will be slow on overseas links which will be news only to the naive, but I suppose for their sake is worth an airing.
Then across at the NBN Australia group at LinkedIn there was this commentary on the above article. This article won’t be publicly accessible, I guess, so I thought that I should repeat my contribution to this NBN group discussion below, for public view.
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I’ve been closely following IT technical issues, such as systems performance and communications technology developments, with all their twists and turns, for decades during my career at IBM and afterwards as an independent consultant.
It's been well understood for decades that the overall performance of a service (such as accessing a web site) is dependent on the individual performance of each of the sometimes many steps that contribute to that service.
In this case, the performance of the local device (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, or whatever), the various communications links (wired, wireless, satellite), and the remote-end service (usually a web server). Understanding and correcting or tuning performance can be a very complicated art.
Queuing theory can be applied to the individual steps an you can come up with a good estimate of the overall performance behavior as well as that of each individual step (each "link" in the chain). There's a queue at each step, and the overall total service time can be estimated by summing the service times of all the individual steps.
Behavior of queues at times can be rather strange and unexpected, such as on a freeway at certain busy times of the day -- see a fascinating "shockwave" queuing example at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13402-shockwave-traffic-jam-recreated-for-first-time.html (and be sure to watch the video).
It's been well understood for decades that the overall performance of a service (such as accessing a web site) is dependent on the individual performance of each of the sometimes many steps that contribute to that service.
In this case, the performance of the local device (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, or whatever), the various communications links (wired local wireless, satellite), and the remote-end service (typically a web server). Understand and fixing/tuning performance can be a very complicated art. Queuing theory can be applied to the individual steps an you can come up with a good estimate of the overall performance behavior as well as that of each individual step (each "link" in the chain).
For a specific session (such as connection to a local or overseas newspaper web site) it's not much use having one very fast link unless the other links are similar in performance, so a balanced series of steps is optimal for both performance and cost reasons. Or, looking at it in reverse, it's not much point having lots of fast and expensive links if even one link is much slower (and some local country sites can be poor performers, it's not just overseas links and web sties that are slow).
Coalition leader Tony Abbot says that Labor's NBN is like getting a Ferrari when a GM Holden Commodore is all that's needed and affordable.
This affordability argument is oversimplistic. A better analogy would be a fleet of ambulances that, suppose, is measured over a period (weeks or months) to be running at an average speed of 55 Km.hour. It'd be a false economy to purchase a fleet specifying that ambulances only need a top speed capability of, say, 70 Km/hour since much higher speeds are often needed.
Russell Yardley [a respondent in the LinkedIn group’s discussion] mentioned other reasons for having high speed, such as for cloud services. Consider one such service, off-site backup. You might have tens of Gigabytes to be backed up regularly, perhaps daily. What broadband characteristics make this feasible?
Currently most Australian ISPs don't offer high enough upload speeds for such backup to be realistic even if carried out entirely with the country, much less across the Pacific where there are many providers of such a service. Very high speeds for upload -- as well as download, for the recovery phase -- are essential, and it's here that the Holden Commodore analogy breaks down. (Not to mention that Australian broadband plans all count traffic, making such a backup/recovery service unjustifiable in terms of cost as well as performance.)
I could go on and on ...
