Farewell to the Old Me

I'm a folkie, as far as music goes. And the Dar Williams song titled "Farewell to the Old Me" has been going through my head a lot lately. I have worked on Domino Designer since February of 1997, with the exception of a foray of a few years into Lotus Component Designer. Since that technology ultimately contributed to Domino Designer, it feels like a contiguous 15 year span of time on Designer. I have often called Designer my seventh child, and in many ways it is. I have watched it grow from a few menu items and some extra twisties in the navigator to an Eclipse based product of its own. I've built major pieces of it, and I've given presentations on Designer across the US and Europe. It's been an amazing ride and I have loved every minute of it.

But there comes a time when the baby is ready to go off to college, and mom is free to explore some new things. Designer is now in the capable hands of Dan O'Connor. I've taken a new job in in the ICS Connections organization, exploring some ideas that are really interesting, and where I will learn lots of new things. So while I am sad to leave Designer, I am very excited to be rebooting myself. I firmly believe that it's important to reinvent yourself now and then, and 15 years makes me well overdue for that. I feel energized and challenged, and this is a great way to begin a new year.

I know I'll keep watching Designer (parents never completely let go). I'm just working on a different part of IBM's social story, and am raising a new baby now :-)

Out of the Pink...

This month is of course breast cancer awareness month. Pink has been everywhere... Profile pictures, ribbons, etc. I have mixed emotions about this in the best of times - breast cancer is just one of many cancers, and I am uncomfortable with its more than equal airtime. Taking actions like changing the color of a profile picture, or posting a status "against" a particular cancer (is anyone for it?) just really doesn't make sense to me. I feel the same way about my "own" cancer - the one I survived (merkel cell carcinoma) - so I don't think it's a case of my picking "favorites."

The counter argument is of course the benefit of raising "awareness." For the past 32 days, I have been very aware, and the last thing I have wanted or needed to see is more pink and additional reminders. I have been through a scare; I found a red flag symptom at the end of September. I had a series of all the standard tests - none of which isolated the cause, or even indicated a problem. I've been on a roller coaster of fear/relief/fear/relief... Each time a test showed no problem, I thought I was in the clear, only to learn there was yet one more step to take.

This past Monday, I had a same day surgery that finally brought this cycle of fear to an end. I got the biopsy results a few hours ago - completely and totally benign. In contrast to the day I was diagnosed with MCC, which had a Shakespearean thunderstorm in December, today has a bright blue sky and peak autumn leaves. I have my life back again, except...

I need to remember how totally lucky and special each day is. Scares like this bring that home, but it is so easy to forget when things get back to "normal." Awareness... But for me, the awareness I need is not of all the bad things that might happen, but of all the good that happens every day.

That problems view...

I recently heard from a user who said that it wasn't possible to filter the contents of the problems view, and realized that others may also not realize that this is configurable. If you click on the little arrow that is on the far right on the problems view's title bar, you get a drop down menu. If you choose "Configure contents" a dialog is shown, pictured below.


If you check off one or both of errors and warnings, and then for the Scope setting, choose "On any element in same project," the problems view will only show the errors and/or warnings that apply to the selected project. This is just standard Eclipse function, but is built right in to Domino Designer.

And of course another way to filter the errors out would be to just fix them :-)

the firsts become lasts

Yesterday morning, as I have most mornings over the past 24 years, I woke a child up for school. Counting day care years, this has been my morning routine for 27 years. And I realized that it was the last time I'd do so... Our youngest had his last final in high school yesterday, and all that remains are things like graduation rehearsals (later in the day) and senior banquets, and of course, graduation.

He'll be off to college in the fall, and will have to depend on his alarm clock instead of mom. And I will have to rely on his alarm clock, too, to provide the safety net I've been for years...

But I recognize the punctuation mark here. I started having kids pretty young, so it's hard to remember when getting myself up in the morning was the sum of my morning responsibility. I'm returning to that state - a freedom long forgotten, one I wasn't even cogniscient of when last I had it! I can't say I'll miss the not-always-welcome receptions I got waking them up in the morning, but I don't yet know how it feels not to be needed.

home is where the memories are

I'm headed home to Buffalo for the weekend in a couple of weeks, and started thinking about what I wanted to revisit (besides my mom!) and what I wanted to reconnect with in my home town.

There are a certain set of foods for which Buffalo is famous: Ted's Hot Dogs and Anderson's Roast Beef on Kummelweck, and of course I will be headed back to Boston with some Weber's horseradish mustard. But then I remembered a very special pub... One that my first boyfriend would bring me to, with old graffiti-covered wooden booths (I believe our initials are on them!), and delicious frozen drinks with "no filthy dairy products" in them (I don't know what WAS in them, that was a secret, but they were really special!) Last time I was there was probably well over 20 years ago, but the same bartender with the gravelly voice was there, with the same banter about "straw to the bottom of the glass" and the disparaging remarks about dairy products. I really wanted to go back... So I was very sad to discover in a google search that the Rendezvous is no more... And actually that the Rendezvous that I remember has been gone for a very long time.

So I'm headed "home" again soon, but the Buffalo I see will not be the Buffalo that exists today, but rather the one seen by the girl who sipped magical drinks with a boy, holding hands across a wooden booth.

Ireland's Bard

I am so sad to hear of Liam Clancy's passing. He was an amazing musician and a kind man.

Back when music was played on stereos that were French Provincial furniture with embedded record players, my father discovered the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's music. We had all their albums, and it was pretty much all I listened to in grammar school. When I was nine-ish, they played Kleinhan's Music Hall in Buffalo. Somehow, it was arranged that I was to meet the band (how is lost in the fuzzies of childhood). But Liam is the only one who came out to shake a little girl's hand, a hand that wasn't washed for days.

Their music connected me to my identity, my heritage. (And really annoyed my violin teacher when all I wanted to play was Rising of the Moon instead of the assigned etudes.)

The nine year old grew from the girl who wanted to marry Liam Clancy when she grew up to someone who still loves their music. My iPod plays his music today; he lives on in the music he loved and gave the world.

Goodnight sweet bard. Sing a tune tonight with my dad, please (if you can get him to sing, otherwise, just let him listen).

when in Designer...

when editing a composite application design element....

Should the Comp App Editor (if installed) or the XML editor open by default when you go to edit the application design note?

Leaning towards Comp App Editor here, but wondering what others thought!

Thanks in advance :-)

sometimes you second guess yourself...

In Designer 8.5, we thought long and hard about whether or not to allow preview of custom controls. In many cases, it "just works" fine. But then we got a serious case of the "what ifs" - what if the custom control takes parameters, should we just preview without the parameters, or do we have to build a framework for sending parameters on preview (and there was no time to fit that part in)??? We don't preview subforms, and that really isn't possible, so symmetry would also say custom controls should not preview. So not previewing them won (at least so far...)

So now looking ahead, I find myself rethinking that... We've had some recent feedback that not being able to preview them is a problem. It's not a huge code change to allow it (unless we start asking for parameters). Should we allow preview of custom controls? Should we just warn if the control has parameters and allow the user to continue or cancel the preview (that's my current leaning!) Sanity check, please!

long train running

Blueberry (my 1994 camry wagon) hit a milestone today. I wasn't behind the wheel, my son was, but he knew I needed to share the occasion....

She's going strong, and I can't wait til the kids are ready to hand her back to mom :-)

I think I need to read this at least once a week...

thank you ClumberKim for the link. This is just an amazing post on and for mothers!

is it just me?

I hate videos. OK, I guess that was rather general, maybe I should be more specific. It seems many sites are using video for news, product pushes, etc. If I'm on cnn.com, if there's something there that I would normally click on, but I see it's a video, I just don't. I want my news faster than that - I want to just READ it! Maybe it's a left/right brain thing, or maybe I'm just odd, but just because we have the bandwidth for video doesn't mean it is necessarily the best medium for the audience or the message.

My vent for the day :-)

Wendy-Woo: 1/27/2001-6/10/2009

The euphemism would say she is no longer with us, yet she will always be with us. Wendy, aka Weaverwood's Winsome Wendy went to the Rainbow Bridge around noon today. I held her as she took her final breaths and her spirit was set free. She didn't have the longest life - she was only eight and a half - but she was clearly dying, and we had tried all reasonable medications to help her.

Her four field spaniel friends surround me, and I think they miss her, too. I will remember her swimming in Sengekontacket Pond, pulling us on the leash the entire way there because she loved it so much. And I will always hear the echoes of the WOO she would always greet me with when I arrived home. And how the sound of a whipped cream can could get her to the kitchen in record time.

Thank you, Wendy, for eight years of love and fun. Wait for us by the bridge, it won't be heaven without you.

best of times, worst of times

So I've been quiet for a while. In many ways, the time since Lotusphere has been very nice. We spent a week in Germany for Entwicklercamp, giving some talks and touring Heidelberg, Trier, Strasbourg, and the Black Forest. Lots of good feedback from the Notes developers there (I was told Entwickler is developer in German!) and a very nice and well run conference.

Next week I'm off to Prague for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then I'll be home for a bit...

In the meantime lots of work on Designer 8.5.1, which is progressing. With the LotusScript and Java editors under control, I've been focusing on core usability issues (UI *is* my favorite thing!) and searching for the most important things for us to improve *first*. Working sets are on that list, as is improving the creating a new XPage experience. Plus some smaller things that don't feel so small when you run into them (like disambiguating the Remove Database from Navigator function from actually deleting the database!)

So lots of goodness going on, yet there's been some background stress with Steve job hunting. Though he is finding that in spite of all the news reports, there actually is a job market out there, with some interesting things going on. Change is certainly stressful, but sometimes it does bring good things, and I am looking forward til then.

And since I returned from Germany with a very nice viola bow that I found in a shop very serendipitously (there are those who believe there are no coincidences, and many times I agree with them!), I am taking some time to learn how to play my viola. And when I can play music, all is right with the world.

Year 10

When Bob was handing out Lotusphere buttons Saturday night, I started counting and... this is my tenth Lotusphere! There have been so many changes in those ten years - but Lotusphere is a thread that links it all together. Yesterday I co-presented an XPages Jumpstart with Maire Kehoe, for whom this is her first Lotusphere. Walking around she remarked that I seem to know everyone here... Now I don't really know everyone, but I do know enough faces and people to make this feel like a reunion. A Domino reunion.

So I'm now compulsively preparing for my next session (Domino Designer 8.5: A New Beginning) that is at 2:15 today. There's lots to show, and only 60 minutes, so I'm still tuning it. It's interesting to think of how much Designer has changed in the last ten years! And me with it. It feels in many ways like Designer and I have changed and grown together.

Back to prep for now, but after the session stress is done, I can focus on the reunion (and catch a replay of the OGS!)

a new track!

Earlier this year, I read a book that was recommended to me: Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. The book was a bit dry (in my opinion), but the points it made were spot on. From the first page, my feelings and experiences were validated. I love what I do - I love to build things and make them work. But I have always felt more insecure/less confident than at least most of the men around me appear to (and maybe the key word is appear...). I *feel* like my lack of interest in dissecting my laptop makes me less serious an engineer. And I feel like my desires to read novels, knit, and other outside interests make me less serious an engineer. And of course I am a perfectly serious engineer, and even know it on other levels - but it's about how I feel inside. This book made me realize - it isn't just me!

I had dinner with Kristin Keene at DNUG when I was reading this book, and was talking to her about it and how I felt. And she had this eureka moment - and decided that we should have a Lotusphere session on this! And a BOF! So if you're going to Lotusphere, on Tuesday, from 11:15-12:15, in Swan Mockingbird, some of us will be participating in GEEK102 "Nerd Girl" Panel: Making Geek Chic! The BOF is on Wednesday, from 5:45 to 6:45 pm, in Swan Toucan 2. The experiences of women in computer science affect all of us - male and female - let's see what we can learn when we share our thoughts!

Christmas card musings....

I'm (finally) writing out some Christmas cards. And hitting a dilemma. I've always signed our cards with my name and Steve's, followed by those of all the kids. As I started out signing them that way this year, it occurred to me that the first three kids are quite solidly adults, living in their own apartments, and maybe it isn't right to include them on our Christmas card. After all, my mother no longer includes me on hers... Yet the youngest of the six still lives at home as he's still in high school, and the next older two live at home when not at college. It doesn't feel right to name three of six kids, and it doesn't feel right to name all six at this point, either. But I'm also not sure I'm ready to let them go... So, for this year anyway, all six will still be on the card...

New Domino blogger

George Langlais, who has worn many hats on the Domino programmability team, has started a blog - aptly named George's Blog. It should prove an interesting read, I encourage you to keep your eyes on it!

And I promise to get back to blogging here, too. With 8.5 finishing up, power outages, Christmas, birthdays, it's been more than a bit hectic around here...

those other files....

Anyone who has looked at the contents of an NSF in one of the Eclipse navigators rather than Designer's navigator knows that we've added a few extra files (stored as hidden file resource design elements) to make each nsf a good Eclipse citizen. And if you've worked with xpages and have wanted to include some java classes, you've discovered that you can just add in files to the nsf in the projected hierarchy through standard Eclipse mechanisms.

Which leaves me with a dilemma. These extra things really are file design elements, except that their path is not relative to the Resources\Files juncture in the virtual file system. They are also something that not everyone wants or cares to see. I'm worried that users who have worked with "traditional" file resources might be a bit annoyed to see stuff they didn't create show up there.

I'm leaning towards adding a separate category called "Project Files" (or something like that) that contains these other files, so they'd be accessible from the Designer navigator. And I believe whether or not that category is presented in the navigator ought to be controlled by a preference. These files would have paths relative to the project root - so if you wanted to add a file there, you would just type the relative path you wanted.

But others have said we should just dump them in with the other file resources. A file is a file, so why make an artificial difference?

I could use a sanity check here to see if I'm making an artificial distinction or a helpful separation - please let me know what you think (and an answer of it doesn't really matter is also helpful information!) Thanks!

sugar mountain

On my twentieth birthday, I listened to Sugar Mountain all day. Today, on the freight boat back to Woods Hole, watching the dark blue ocean, and the bright blue sky, it came on again, uncommanded, as if it knew it was that time again.

I'm an unspecified number past 20, and I was definitely leaving the island too soon...

It feels like I've gotten away with being 20 on Sugar Mountain for a long time - every day remains a new adventure, even a few decades later :-) Maybe someday I'll grow up, but not this year.

fresh eyes

It's funny, sometimes things are so much a part of the UI that you are accustomed to, that you just no longer even see them. As we brought Designer over to Eclipse, many pieces of UI moved over almost exactly as they were in the "old" Designer. But thanks (really!) to a customer who talked to me after a demo a little while ago, now every time I look at this very old piece of UI design, it drives me crazy. So not long after deciding to just "look around," I found myself actually changing some code - and those design doc properties, that have looked like that since before I started working on Notes, now (I hope) make a little more sense! The old way was designed for the space constraints of the infobox! And the most likely significant piece of information (the note ID) was last, and the UNID was spread over two lines.... I'm thinking this design is better, but I have a few questions.... (And to be clear, it's not even checked in yet, so surely won't be in 8.5, but rather in whatever number comes next!)

Does anyone even need to look at sequence time and number? Is this a better order? Do you really need to see the database replica id on every design element doc id panel? Does anyone really need the old way of presenting this in that form?