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Archive for the 'Cool Tools' Category
Today I have a question for the community. Actually, the question came from my boss with my current customer. As always, the simplest questions seem the hardest to resolve :-). The problem is: there are a number of agents that should run on a daily basis, but every now and then, it happens that something goes wrong (f.e. a design update with an id with insufficient rights) and the agent don’t run.
Of course it is possible to do some agent logging, send mails if an agent ran or gave errors, but is it possible to do the opposite? Receiving messages when an agent DIDN’T run? Are there any agent monitor tools or techniques? Or am I missing something very obvious here? Any ideas?
- I normally (like in: it depends on the project/wishes of the client/company standards) try to test in/support the following browsers:
- Firefox 2.x (this is my default, because of supported standards and web development possibilities)
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 6
- Safari (if I can plug in my Mac)
But if you’re a poor little self employed person like myself, you can’t afford to have x machines to make all these test possible.
If you installed IE7 on XP, it installs on top of IE6, so normally you can’t test for IE6 any longer without the need of a virtual/another machine.
But there’s a neat program that deals with this, so don’t worry!
Remember last week’s Notes Mail Database Size Indicator? Mike O’Brien and John Head referred to Notes 8.01, where this will be included. I liked my solution, but after seeing the screenshot, it looked a bit pale.
The new challenge was to give it a more graphical look. So I created another version, still very easy to implement, but with a better look. It conditionally displays an image of the total and used space:
- A green bar for used space less than 70%
- An orange bar for 70-89%
- A red bar for 90-100% (and up)
- A gray bar if no quotum exists.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have this in your mailbox?
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Our local admin asked me if this is doable, and I thought it was a brillant idea and a very practical example on how to use this tip: A progress bar in Lotus Notes
It’s an indicator that, eh, indicates how much space you’ve used from your mail database size quotum.
I needed some way of listing all design elements that have the property “Prohibit design refresh or replace to modify” enabled. Instead of doing this manually, I created a little agent that does this for me.
It’s not that they really changed the forums, but I found a very interesting tool after posting this threat about the lack of user friendliness of the Notes.Net forums.
There’s a Greasemonkey script out there that makes it possible to open replies in the main document of a discussion, without having to move to the responses. Open the screenshot below to see what I mean by that (but you should see it in action to see what’s so great about it).
My very first article here was about how to create good looking charts from your data.
I found a tool that produces even better looking results in the browser. Take a look at this:
There seems to be a function on Notes.Net that sends you e-mails whenever something was added to your selected posts in the forums. Also, that function doesn’t seem to work. This is annoying, because you have to scan all your posts manually and see if somebody answered yet.
That’s why I made a little tool for myself this weekend that automates the checking. A little warning though: I just created it for myself, so it’s a rough version, I didn’t test in different Notes versions, behind firewalls, against proxies, enemies and terrorists.
But it can be of some use for you too and it won’t destroy your computer. I guess the worst thing that could happen, is that your Notes crashes. Or that it doesn’t work. So give it a go and let me know what you think, if there’s enough interest, I might have some extra ideas to make it better and stronger.
My OpenNTF project Viewnify is growing up! For those who don’t know it yet: it’s a tool that makes it possible to change the design of all views of a database with one single configuration document. So it can save you a lot of work if you’re in a redesign process.
A day after I discussed how to manually add this for IE7, I figured out how to do this automatically.
So, because you’re all lazy, here are the links for the 2 most important forums. Click them to add Notes.Net to your search bars.
You know how it is to develop stuff that is only seen by a couple of people, right? To create things that are very specific to one company? And you too must have felt the urge to create reusable solutions that can be useful for a lot of customers or developers?
UPDATE: I found a tool that produces even better looking results and included a demo database for it. Check out this article.
How many times somebody asked if it is possible to pour some results into a fancy looking chart? Ok, you could create it in some graphic tool or Microsoft Excel, then paste it into your document. But what if you want to use dynamic data, perhaps as a result of some inquiry? As a result of a form that was filled out?
What do you do? Use JavaScript for it? Let some gnomes draw it for you? An applet that takes minutes to load something your son of 5 could have done better?
Or do they look like this?
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