cname records, oh my....

A while ago I grabbed the mvgirl.net domain thinking I'd give this blog its own domain name rather than just be a blogspot prefix. Blogspot has some pretty good instructions on how to send your blog to your domain name, and I figured this would be pretty easy. I did notice that they didn't have instructions for Network Solutions, but I figured it all must be pretty generic.

I am not an expert in cnames and aliases and hosts and all that stuff. Just not enough UI to keep my interest :-) But how hard can it be? Apparently, hard enough.

Armed with the documentation, I went to setup advanced DNS settings for mvgirl.net. It seems I need a CNAME record that sends it to ghs.google.com and then after that works, all I should need to do is a few steps on blogspot.

So I set up blog.mvgirl.net to map to ghs.google.com in their domain management tool. It warned it would take a while to replicate around... A few days later when hitting blog.mvgirl.net still gave an error, I went back and looked.

It was mapped to ghs.google.com. With the period at the end. I edited it to remove the period, and figured I had made a typo. Looked at it again, the period was back.

And I'll admit it, that was months ago. There are too many other things on my plate to spend time on that. But I tried again last weekend. I noticed the UI was different, maybe that bug was fixed. Nope, still there.

Now it might be a bug, and it might just as easily (or more likely) be user error. But at this rate it will be a while before blog.mvgirl.net sees the light of day!

The stove was off...

so we were free to take a walk...

We walked to the lagoon today - a beautiful blue Spring day.  It was too cold for humans to swim, but Wendy and Eve thought the water was just fine...

 

I had wondered where the Cassie had gone - all last summer she was docked with the Grace in Vineyard Haven harbor, but for the past month or so, Grace was docked alone.  Cassie turns out to have been hiding at Sailing Camp Beach!

 

As Wendy and Eve took their swim, a sailing race was beginning.  The season is beginning!

... See my Tabblo>

bug or feature, I can't decide....

Several of the new design elements in 8.5 are variants of file resources. That means that unless I do something, if you open a database with some of these elements created in the 8.5 Designer in the 8.0 Designer, these elements will show up as file resources.

Now from some points of view (including mine on alternate days), this is a bug. And from others, also including mine on alternate days, it's a feature... You can at least look at these elements as text like files in notepad in older versions of Designer.

So should I fix this or celebrate this?

thanks :-)

first light

So yes, I've been quiet on Designer lately. We've been intensely busy transitioning to our proper home in the Notes environment. I must admit, it's pretty! While our initial work has been done on "plain" Eclipse, but we need the Notes framework to have little things like location switching...

We'll be doing further work to customize the look - trying to strike a balance between making it feel like home and exposing the power of Eclipse. I'm proud of what the team's been doing on this - so thought I'd give an early look of its new look, even though it is still evolving :-)

Threads

A peaceful, evening crossing. Dark night on the ocean, empty ferry, quiet night. The ferry is pulling in to the dock at Woods Hole. All relaxed. Then it happens. Did I turn the stove off? I know I did. Yes, I'm sure, really sure. I checked the burners before we left. But did I check the oven?

I remember as I took the last pan of cookies out thinking how on this stove I had to press Cancel...

Steve tells me he's sure it was off.

It's off, I know it. Mostly.

Or maybe I just have to go back to check :-)

Other than that thread running in my head, it was a nice day on the island. Oh it certainly was gray, cold, and windy. But the tulips are coming up in my garden, we got a nice walk before the drizzle started in earnest.

Maybe I do just have to go back to check!

speaking of the world...

do something to make a difference to global warming... Turn out the lights on Saturday 3/29 from 8-9 (your time). Imagine how beautiful the stars could be without extaneous light...

See this link for more info!

and then all was right with the world.....

I am on the island. Evil spirits indeed do not cross the water. My legs are tired from a two mile walk in wind to see the Katama breach. It's almost a year old now, but somehow last summer I never found the time to walk out and see it. It's amazing... The currents are going every which way, and the sand continues to erode - mini cliffs along the water's edge. A seal followed us along the beach, bobbing his head up from the water laughing at the silly humans walking in the wind.

I'm home and it is good.

when you walk through a storm....

I remember my grade school class having to learn that old song for one of spring/fall/concert events... I didn't think it would ever ring so true. It's been running through my head pretty steadily in recent weeks.

Life has been feeling like quite a test. Our peacable canine kingdom has suffered from the decision of two of the spaniels that they really hate each other. They're fighting over dominance - and we are the focus objects. We've had three emergency vet trips, several scheduled trips, and a trip to a behavior specialist... Two of the crew had surgery today - one scheduled for a lump removal (unrelated to the combatants), the other needed emergency repair to the first repair of the fight that happened a week ago. I'll spare any readers the details as it's just been awful, but the canine behavior specialist did have some good suggestions that seem to be working so far.

Long ago (but well after they made me learn that song), I learned that when things get really awful, it's best for me to just keep going no matter what. Maybe that's because when your kids are little, mom has no choice, regardless of what's going on, you just have to keep everything moving forward. Life goes on, nothing is permanent, no point in dwelling on what's going on, just keep moving ahead. Sometimes I think it makes me feel like I'm ignoring the issues, but it beats dwelling and drowning in them.

And code is a great place to hide... Let's just say I've gotten a lot of code written this week!

when a hard disk dies...

it's odd what you want to recover most.

I should have known - I was in denial, for sure. Even during Lotusphere, there were some unexplained events with my laptop, but denial is a very powerful force. Since Lotusphere, with increasing frequency, my laptop would misbehave. An error on boot... Access Connections disappearing from the toolbar... But I circumvented each obstacle... If I can get by it, it can't be that serious, right?

Last Thursday, when IE suddenly refused to connect but Firefox was happy, I decided it was maybe time to heed Steve's advice and do a chkdsk, which of course involves a reboot. Blithely I tried it. Reboot, chkdsk successful, but as it launched, blue screen... Tried it all again, not a fluke. Tried it again in a different T60 shell, same thing. Dead disk.

Then the panic starts.

Source trees - ok on that count, submitted my code a few hours ago. Work mail - all on the server, no problem, can always make another replica. Presentations - ouch. But if I have to write them again, I still could. Personal email - now THAT is only on the machine as I so neatly remove it from the server... That's a real problem. My history is in my email - it's a journal of conversations, and I felt its loss deeply.

I actually felt kind of disoriented. It's probably pretty unhealthy for a laptop to be so much a part of one's comfort zone.

But there is a pretty happy ending. Someone was able to put it in a drive tray, and if you don't try to boot off of it, the data is accessible. My personal email has a new home on my home machine. My presentations have been preserved. A new disk is on its way from the mothership. All's right with the world again.

Album Craze

After seeing Pete's and Brian's album covers, my curiosity got the better of me...

Here's mine!



A Chestnut Mare... Ironic, as that song will always be close to my heart. It is my song, from long ago, but will always make me smile.

Change of Seasons

As soon as I returned from Lotusphere, I felt spring on its way. This contrasts sharply with the reality of New England winter, but I can't help it, I feel it. It didn't make sense to me until I realized why I was feeling the seasons were changing - Lotusphere is a season unto itself. When it's over, it must be the next season, which if you blur it with reality, the season after winter is of course spring....

You can start feeling Lotusphere in the air when the call for abstracts go out, but it doesn't truly arrive until you start getting notices for slides being due... Once the presentations start taking form, the season is in full swing... It continues til you arrive home from Orlando. November, December, January... Lotusphere Season.

And now it is Spring. No matter what the groundhog said today.

a few thousand words....

or a few pictures... I was so happy to be able to show not only the work to put Designer in Eclipse at Lotusphere, but also to reveal the new XPage design element that we've also been working on. In a way similar to how reworking the Designer UI lets us address longstanding issues in the Designer client, the XPage design element gives us the freedom to create a new way to render Domino data in a modern way, taking into account all that we've learned along the way...

And I said pictures not words, so here are some screenshots from Lotusphere for the curious...

bonnie & clyde

Bonnie & Clyde's first picture :-)

at the airport, looking back....

I'm soaking up my last view of leaves on trees, green grass, and warm skies.... The past week at Lotusphere has been amazing - insanely busy every moment, but so nice to get the validation that Designer is on the right path. I've been in Orlando since the 16th, first preparing for the OGS and my Designer session on Monday, then preparing for the app dev mini main, and in between doing my best to answer customer's questions in lab. Missed the Wednesday night party this year in favor of minimain rehearsal and preparation, but I must admit the quiet on the Swan/Dolphin campus on Wednesday evening is a breath in a busy week....

Soon the warmth will be replaced by New England winter, and the peace I feel at the moment will be replaced by the intensity of building the product.

When I was in school, I never would have imagined that I would ever stand up in front of 4000 people and get any words out of my mouth. It's still not easy, as the shy little girl is still inside, but it is getting a little easier...

totally addictively evil

http://www.chainfactor.com/

the cards not written....

I started my Christmas cards this morning. Very late, I know, but got a good start.

I go through my address book, writing out the cards pretty much alphabetically (somehow my mom's card is always first!) But this year, I paused when I got to two names... My Aunt Carol, who died too young at 71 in August.... One of the sweetest ladies to ever inhabit this planet... And Steve's grandmother, who died in April at almost 103... An amazing lady! I felt their absence as I wrote the cards out... I send them Christmas wishes in spirt, if not with cards and stamps...

database properties on my mind....

I'm looking at the database properties infobox, looking to move it to a property panel in Designer. When I say property panel, I mean putting properties in an Eclipse view at the bottom of the center of the screen, underneath the active editor. Like the infobox, this panel tracks the current selection. Someday the client may share this work, but for now this is for Designer.

The paradigm for changing properties in Eclipse is different from Notes. Both ways have their advantages... The non-modality and the volume of modifiable information available is a real benefit for the infobox.

But as I look at the db infobox, I see two kinds of information. One kind is informational or a launch point for a dialog (think archive settings, etc), and the other is actually editing the design. If I look at the same infobox for a db for which I don't have design rights, it's all mostly greyed out information.

So I'm thinking of a divide and conquer approach. In the Designer navigator, have a pseudo-design element, probably right under the database name, that lets you launch a database property editor. This editor would let you edit the stuff currently on the design tab, the advanced tab, the launch tab and a few strays - all very much part of database design. The properties box becomes more informational (and support the copy command for things like replica id!!) Things like size/archive settings stay in the property panel with buttons to change them today as they are discrete operations, not really design operations and are also allowed for nondesigner users. Header/footer stuff probably needs to stay in the property panel if the client will ever share this work, but would show the current settings (for BOTH header and footer) and then to change, you'd probably press a button that popped up a little dialog.

At first I was quite resistant to this train of thought - I like how the infobox works! But it's been growing on me (badly enough I woke up thinking about it), and I think should the client ever borrow this work it could greatly simplify the interface for the client, and that it gives a more natural editing experience for designers.

So was this a dream or a nightmare?

proposed UI change for agents, etc....

In Designer today, you can change your mind about what language you are writing an agent, web service, or script library in. (On button events, etc., too, but we're not going there yet!)

Would it be a huge hardship to lose that? Do you really change your mind about what language you're writing something in? If you do, would it be horrible to have to go create a new agent or whatever in that case? (Bonus - you wouldn't have to live through the "Are you sure/all existing code will be lost" message, and actually you would no longer necessarily be losing anything unless you chose to delete the item you were in!

It is a simpler design (that's what's in it for us!)

We made a similar change to script libraries in Release 6, and I didn't hear any issues, but taking it this much farther bears a question...

and then there were five.....

Our stairway has six picture frames, as does my office shelf. Each year in the fall, there's a ritual - open up the back of each picture and put in the new school picture for the year. It is a nostalgic moment as each picture frame holds all the previous years' photos. As time goes on, it can be quite a struggle to close the back of the frame again.

It started with one frame, when my oldest had his first school pictures taken. It built up to six picture changes for the years when they were all in school. Then there's senior year in high school... Time freezes for four years until the college yearbook picture (or longer if said son doesn't believe in such things).

The frame for my oldest son contains the picture from his college graduation day, walking down the steps with his diploma in hand. The next three have been frozen in time as high school seniors as they are still in college or working.

Today my fifth son's senior picture went up on the wall. We went through each of the pictures in the back - a frame by frame documentary of his metamorphisis from day care to almost eighteen year old man.

I likely won't see Tom's grade school pictures again for at least four years. Next fall, we'll only go through Rory's pictures. And the year after that, this moment repeats with Rory.

The fall after that... I have to believe I'll just open up all those pictures and remember anyway.

does anyone use the Tools menu?

In Release 6, we added a feature to allow people to add their own menu items to the Domino Designer tools menu. It would allow you to set the contexts in which these tools should run, and you could specify a formula or a simple executable to be available on the menu in these contexts.

This is different from how one would normally extend Eclipse so I'm not convinced it's a good fit with the new Designer. It's "just code" so we could bring it over, but is it worth the effort? Is it helpful to allow users who may not yet be Eclipse savvy enough to extend it with another mechanism, or is it just confusing to have more than one way?

Inquiring minds want to know first if anyone ever used this function, and second, what to do with it now?? thanks :-)