scott cochrane

Category 8.5.2
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I'm well out of blogging practice - so I thought I'd start easy...

Installed 8.5.2 yesterday - and its definitely quicker.  Was it meant to be quicker?  Loading and screen rendering has improved - or am I imagining it?

And I like the multi-threaded replication very nice - as I replicate most times when closing down it makes a for a much speedier shutdown as well.

Its great to see features going into "maintenance releases" - they should stop calling it a maintenance release !

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 1:00 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category stuff
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If your not Scottish and don't understand this - I wouldn't worry about it ...

Prince Charles is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one.  The patient replies:  "Fair fa your honest sonsie face, Great chieftain o the puddin race, Aboon them a ye take yer place, Painch, tripe or thairm, As langs my airm."  Charles is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:  "Some hae meat an canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat an we can eat, So let the Lord be thankit."  Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the Prince moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:  "Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty, O the panic in thy breasty,Thou needna start awa sae hastie, Wi bickering brattle."  Now seriously troubled, HRH turns to the accompanying doctor and asks: "Is this a psychiatric ward?"  "No," replies the doctor, "this is the serious Burns unit."

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 2:49 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Life
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Did you know 3.0

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 4:02 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Life
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Was IM'd tonight about the TechJam tomorrow in Edinburgh .. but I've been totally out of Lotus mode for a while .. so I took at look at the Blogsphere account .. got a bit of reading to catch up on!

             

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 11:46 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Security
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I've been looking a port security this morning and I can't claim the quote but I found this quite amusing (its in relation to what ports etc should / should not be open)

"Allowing in minimal traffic that "might" not be a threat is like
trusting Windows Firewall with File/Printer sharing enabled on a
computer directly connected to the Internet with all of your financial
data stored on it in a text file that is name "ALL MY FINANCIAL
DATA.TXT" sitting in the root. "

Now where is that file ...

[ the thread with the quote is here if you are interested ]

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 2:13 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Category LS2009
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I can't believe it, whats wrong with me - complete forgot that LS 2009 has started.  I mean there are news feeds, blogs etc to read - better than real work!

It must be all this .Net stuff - uggh

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 2:28 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (454) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Life
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I hope Xmas was good for all - and that the new year brings health & happiness.

And for me .. I'm going to try blogging a bit more regularly again!

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 1:30 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes
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The second of design basics.. (somewhat later than planned)

Maybe the title says it all, but its important to put the data in the right type of fields.  This may seem obvious but the number of times I've seen a number in a text field - arrgh!.  This most notably applies to dates and numbers.

Why do you want to do this?  Simply because you'll not have re-manipulate the data elsewhere.  So if you want your stored dates on a document to behave like dates in a view - store them in a date field.  This will allow the view to see the data as a date and when sorted will sort it correctly.  If the data is stored in a text field the sorting will operate on the basis that your date is just a bit of text.  

Then if you have to do calculations on the data in either Formula language or LotusScript - you won't have to convert the data first - a number will be a number and a date will be a date.

It is also important to keep the use of correct data types when doing calculations either via LotusScript or Formula.  If using Formula in a calculated field make sure that the return type is correct - if you return a string the field will have a data type of text, if you return a date it will have a data type of date/time - regardless of the field settings on the form.    And the same goes for LotusScript - where is probably even easier to over-ride the field type .. in fact, in my experience this is usually the culprit for data being in the wrong format - someone generates a data string and stores this, leaving you with typically date/time data in a text format.

This flexibility of the data type in Notes fields might be useful in some occasions - but I've yet to find an occasion!  It is great that Notes is forgiving about this at times - but this means you have to watch the data types.

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 12:10 PM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Funstuff
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One for a Friday really...

I'm sure switzerland is still there .. {link}

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 1:50 PM Location Bristol | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Technology
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Just got sent this - the Beeb has picked up on Google launching a web browser the BBC ... as if we didn't have enough browsers to test against ...

Posted by Scott Cochrane At 10:38 AM Location Glasgow | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)