Its the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
Today is the last day of trading for Dominux Consulting. Finished, done, shop closed, shutters down.
I started with Notes back in 1995 age 20 at my first job. I was doing general IT support and one day I was given a box with some floppy disks in it (Notes 4.0 I think) and told to install this thing on a server, roll it out to 80 people while relocating the company to a new office 40 miles away, the final instruction was “When you have done that, tell us what it is”. Very quickly I realised that it was not just an email platform. I had it doing web browsing (we didn’t have a TCP/IP network so it was a great way to get web pages over a Netware IPX network) and NNTP news fairly quickly and then the company bought in a Quality Management System, which we customised quite heavily. After a while I figured that programming was much more fun than answering the phone (I am still pretty dreadful at answering the phone) so moved on to work full time as a Notes programmer, I then spent 15 years working for various companies including Dominux Consulting, my own little one man band. That brings us to today, in 2010 and the end of the line. I have now dissolved Dominux and I am now working full time on Free and Open Source software at The Open Learning Centre. The work is very much like it always was, writing great applications, on a solid and professional platform to solve business problems. The platform has changed somewhat though, I now use Alfresco for document management, Joomla! for web content management, Wordpress for blogs and blog-like websites including the very cool votegeek.org.uk with all these running on the Free and Open Source Ubuntu operating system. I think in future I will end up doing more work on applications based on CouchDB which is installed on Ubuntu by default and rapidly becoming the preferred back end for opportunistic application development, the type of little application that Notes gets used for. I find it interesting that for many years I have been told I use the one crazy database in the world that doesn’t even support SQL, but we now have a crop of NoSQL databases with a reputation for simplicity and scalability. The “Not a Real Database” marketing problem has been solved in style by the likes of CouchDB, but Notes and Domino are just acknowledged as something people used to use that has a NoSQL architecture. Notes might not be dead yet and this might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but both are coming close, it is pretty hard to be certain about either.
Windows isn't done until Notes won't run
just read an email published on Groklaw from Bill Gates
From: Bill Gates
To: Bill Bass; Bob Muglia; Brad Silverberg; Brad Struss; Brian MacDonald; Chris Guzak; Chris Peters; Darryl Rubin; Doug Henrich; Erik Gavriluk; Jim Allchin; Joe Belfiore; Kurt Eckhardt; Leif Pederson; Mike Koss; Paul Maritz; Russell Siegelman; Satoshi Nakajima; Steve Madigan; Tom Evslin
Cc: Brian Fleming
Subject: Shell plans – iShellBrowser
Date: Monday, October 3, 1994 5:18PMIts time for a decision on iShellBrowser.
This is a tough decision. The Chicago team has done some great work in developing a user interface that will be a big step forward for millions of people. The explorer is an important part of this because it provides a neat paradigm for finding interesting information. The shell group did a good job defining extensibility interfaces. It is also very late in the day to making changes to Chicago and Capone.
It is hard to know how much actual market benefit iShellBrowser integration would bring. I believe Chicago will be very successful either way. Unfortunately I don’t think the integration will have a marked effect in terms of Capone competing with cc:Mail, so that battle will have to be won on other grounds. This is not to say that there was anything wrong with the extensions – on the contrary they are a very nice piece of work.
On the other hand, we are in a real struggle vs. Notes and the Office/REN team needs to move as quickly as they can to deliver really rich, unified views of information and to provide and exploit storage unification as systems makes that possible, and we need as clear as path as possible to allow them to do that. The Ren team has a lot of challenges and compatibility would be an extra effort for them of at least 5 men years. If we felt we could expand this team easily to help Office, beat Notes, be a source of future shell technology and be compatible then I would say the extensions are ok. However the Ren team will find it tough to deliver on all of these even without compatibility.
I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. This means that Capone and Marvel can still live in the top level of the Explorer namespace, but will run separately. We can continue to use the iShellBrowser APIs for MS provided views such as control panel, and can use them for other MS-provided views that don’t create a large compatibility or ISV issue.
I would also like to add a few words about the recent Shell re-organization. We have done from three centers of UI innovation to two. There is a lot of pain in doing this. All 3 groups were doing excellent work and I hope the Cairo shell and Ren can come together to provide the best of both. I think there will be real benefits to be reaped. Having the Office team really think through the information intensive scenarios, and be a demanding client of systems is absolutely critical to our future success. We can’t compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this. Our goal is to have Office ‘96 sell better because of the shell integration work, and to have the Ren/Office effort yield technology that can be an integral part of the shell in Windows ‘97. I look forward to the Office team getting excited about using Component Forms, OLE automation, OFS, etc. in the future – and pushing systems much harder than before.
The Personal Systems team has many challenges ahead of it – they need to remain focussed on overall systems ease of use, and on being the conscience of the individual/home user – on thinking through integration of new opportunities opened by the Internet, by CD-ROM titles, etc. This means that we are going to have to work together and deal with tensions as they arise, but we can’t give up on either market, and there is a huge amount of creative work to be done. We need to allow for innovation in both Office and Windows, even if this makes the line between them hard to draw.
More stats and thoughts
Today was a little more lively than yesterday on nakedcomputers.org. So far there have been 2698 unique visitors (nearly 4 times the highest count I have ever seen on any planetlotus.org entry), most of them arriving from the home page of Linuxtoday.com so again a non-random sample. There is clearly a lot of windows XP still out there, but Ubuntu is close behind, with about 4 times the Vista numbers. I also had several people asking for their stores to be listed.
Firefox continues to be the leading browser by a country mile at 75% market share. IE7 and Iceweasel have been trading places for 3rd and 4rd with it being a draw at the moment.
So what does this say? Game over for Microsoft? Well not really. This is a really skewed sample. I think what it tells me is that I am talking to a bubble again. The Software Freedom bubble. Thats OK, I am used to operating in a bubble environment. This is just a much bigger bubble and it is growing fast.
| Visits | |
|---|---|
| 5192 |
69%
|
| 1380 |
18.3%
|
| 555 |
7.4%
|
| 399 |
5.3%
|
O.S.
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1978 |
31.4%
|
|
| 1674 |
26.6%
|
|
| 1273 |
20.2%
|
|
| 444 |
7%
|
|
| 297 |
4.7%
|
|
| 256 |
4.1%
|
|
| 173 |
2.7%
|
|
| 77 |
1.2%
|
|
| 54 |
0.9%
|
|
| 34 |
0.5%
|
|
| 17 |
0.3%
|
|
| 9 |
0.1%
|
|
| 7 |
0.1%
|
|
| 4 |
0.1%
|
|
| 1 |
0%
|
|
| 1 |
0%
|
Browser
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 4723 |
74.7%
|
|
| 244 |
3.9%
|
|
| 212 |
3.4%
|
|
| 212 |
3.4%
|
|
| 173 |
2.7%
|
|
| 167 |
2.6%
|
|
| 128 |
2%
|
|
| 123 |
1.9%
|
|
| 92 |
1.5%
|
|
| 65 |
1%
|
|
| 59 |
0.9%
|
|
| 38 |
0.6%
|
|
| 24 |
0.4%
|
|
| 17 |
0.3%
|
|
| 16 |
0.3%
|
|
| 13 |
0.2%
|
|
| 6 |
0.1%
|
|
| 3 |
0%
|
|
| 2 |
0%
|
|
| 2 |
0%
|
|
| 2 |
0%
|
|
| 2 |
0%
|
|
| 1 |
0%
|
|
| 1 |
0%
|
more stats
overall a much quieter day today, but I think it will ramp up again.
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1380 |
59.7%
|
|
| 534 |
23.1%
|
|
| 399 |
17.3%
|
O.S.
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 672 |
39.9%
|
|
| 348 |
20.7%
|
|
| 206 |
12.2%
|
|
| 183 |
10.9%
|
|
| 107 |
6.4%
|
|
| 84 |
5%
|
|
| 41 |
2.4%
|
|
| 15 |
0.9%
|
|
| 14 |
0.8%
|
|
| 6 |
0.4%
|
|
| 6 |
0.4%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
Browser
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1281 |
76%
|
|
| 67 |
4%
|
|
| 65 |
3.9%
|
|
| 58 |
3.4%
|
|
| 45 |
2.7%
|
|
| 36 |
2.1%
|
|
| 31 |
1.8%
|
|
| 22 |
1.3%
|
|
| 21 |
1.2%
|
|
| 20 |
1.2%
|
|
| 20 |
1.2%
|
|
| 10 |
0.6%
|
|
| 3 |
0.2%
|
|
| 3 |
0.2%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
Todays stats for nakedcomputers.org
Well today and yesterday cumulative. There was a traffic burst from stumbleupon and from Groklaw. IE 7 was at one time browser number 5 after Konqueror, Chrome and Firefox 2 and 3. A late surge saw it creep past FF2 into a distant second place. Interestingly the operating system has still got XP in the lead, followed by Ubuntu then Vista.
Top days
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1332 |
76.9%
|
|
| 399 |
23.1%
|
O.S.
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 539 |
42.4%
|
|
| 228 |
18%
|
|
| 184 |
14.5%
|
|
| 120 |
9.4%
|
|
| 78 |
6.1%
|
|
| 52 |
4.1%
|
|
| 40 |
3.1%
|
|
| 12 |
0.9%
|
|
| 7 |
0.6%
|
|
| 6 |
0.5%
|
|
| 3 |
0.2%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
Browser
| Visits | ||
|---|---|---|
| 992 |
78%
|
|
| 48 |
3.8%
|
|
| 45 |
3.5%
|
|
| 37 |
2.9%
|
|
| 31 |
2.4%
|
|
| 28 |
2.2%
|
|
| 20 |
1.6%
|
|
| 19 |
1.5%
|
|
| 17 |
1.3%
|
|
| 12 |
0.9%
|
|
| 8 |
0.6%
|
|
| 8 |
0.6%
|
|
| 3 |
0.2%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
|
| 1 |
0.1%
|
Self selecting sample, but Firefox dominates
I am not sure this means a vast amount, the sample set is just “the first 66 people who give a toss what Alan says”, but I was struck by the total dominance of Firefox. The numbers don’t add up because of search engine spiders.
Naked Computers
We have a policy at our company to only purchase computers that come without Windows. We don’t like it, we don’t need it, we don’t want it and we certainly don’t want to be forced to pay for it. This restricts the vendors we can purchase from down to a very short list. Plenty of other people are in the same position as us, it is really quite hard to find a good selection of vendors who will allow you to just buy a computer. I am not interested in the whole refund malarky, I don’t want to jump through hoops to get a refund on something I don’t want to buy in the first place.
To help the community find and purchase these scarce pure and unadulterated computers we have started a directory of suppliers at nakedcomputers.org. If you know of any supplier, small or large, who will sell a naked computer then let us know about it, or register on the site and add them yourself.
If you are a supplier and want to get on the list it is very simple, just add a naked computer to your range and tell us about it, there is no cost to a normal entry on the list but we might add some kind of enhanced sponsored option at some stage.
Quickr #fail with dd/mm/yyyy
The latest Quickr bug I hit. posting here because I think more IBMers read Planet Lotus than the partner forum.
Steps to Reproduce:
- Set up server and client correctly running in dd/mm/yyyy date format, as per normal in the UK
- Create documents in a Quickr place at various dates in the month, some before the 12th, some after the 12th.
- Observe correct creation dates for all documents in the view.
- Open the documents and observe apparently correct dates for dd<=12
- Observe incorrect dates in 2010 or 2011 for dd>12 such as 25/03/2009 turning into 01/03/2011
in the URL bar type
javascript:alert(QuickrDateUtil.convertStringToDate(“25/03/2009″)
and in the alert box you will see the wrong date.
Now, to shift the blame away from Quickr for just a second (don’t worry it will go back), try this one
javascript:alert(new Date(“25/03/2009″))
So Javascript itself is generating the odd date. There is some logic to it, but not much. If you consider 25/03/2009 to be in mm/dd/yyyy format then it is interpreting this to mean the third day of the twenty fifth month of 2009. Which is January 2011.
So the Quickr code in QuickrCommon.js QuickrDateUtil.convertStringToDate starts by passing the date as a string to Javascript to parse by creating a new Date object. If the returned object has a year component then convertStringToDate just returns the date that javascript parsed, even if it is mad.
So why do dates dd<=12 seem to work? Well they hit exactly the same bug when Javascript mis-creates the date object. For example if the document created date is 09/03/2009 then at line 7110 of the document opened through the qpbase form dCreated will be set to something like Thu Sep 03 2009 18:34:41 GMT+0100 (GMT) as it interpreted the date backwards. Then we move on to QuickrDateUtil.getDateTimeString which then uses DoJo to format the date in mm/dd/yyyy format thereby swapping it back again (two wrongs make a right). Quickr passes the locale of “en” to DoJo but not the date pattern of dd/mm/yyyy therefore DoJo uses the default locale date pattern for en which is mm/dd/yyyy (in something like /dojo/trunk/cldr/nls/en/gregorian.js)
So Javascript new Date(string) does not use the locale information, it uses ISO date format and others including mm/dd/yyyy, it will never use dd/mm/yyyy because something formatted as dd/mm/yyyy can always be interpreted as mm/dd/yyyy if mm is permitted to be more than 12.
Quickr javascript fails to account for this and also uses DoJo to format the displayed date in mm/dd/yyyy format thereby masking the problem where dd<=12.
(whilst you are on a tour of Quickr Javascript libraries be sure to visit qp_write_html.js and check the comment on line 491)
Work Around:
maybe patch the QuickrCommon.js file to correctly parse the date, that would leave everything in American format though. At least the dates would be understandably wrong. One could then patch the DoJo en locale file to put it in dd/mm/yyyy format. Really IBM need to recode it to correctly parse the date and correctly pass the date pattern to DoJo’s gregorian calendar handling routines.
This would appear to be a regression introduced between QPBuild=20080317.1550 and QPBuild=20080407.1630
I was gone and now I appear to be back
The Dominux domain kind of changed into a scummy link farm for a month or so. Sorry about that and I hope nobody clicked any links. I have no idea why it happened, or why it has come back, I am not entirely certain my ISP is still in business and I am struggling to contact them and transfer the domain elsewhere. This has just been a surprisingly minor irritation to me and further underlines the point that I don’t really do Dominux stuff any more, The Open Learning Centre is where I have to spend my time and energy now.
