Exceedingly random and sporadic musing's

Did anyone take a picture of RobW and I at BP211?

2008-01-28T17:10:11Z

My daughter has an assignment for school (no really she does!) and I have a blog entry to write for my work blog something like a trip report.

I thought a picture or two might be nice if there any were any floating around. I have a couple of the Gurupalooza event (though they are blurred).

Anyway if you know of any and you can point me toward them I'd be grateful

Moving home......

2008-01-28T13:11:01Z

I'm moving to a new blogging home...

The URLs are:

WEB: weblog.jasonhookonline.com/jho/blog.nsf

RSS: weblog.jasonhookonline.com/jho/blog.nsf/stories.xml

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If you've been reading this blog I hope you'll stay in touch and follow me to the next. The old content will remain in situ.

I'm going to make just one final post in this blog...

Jason

...

A small thank you

2008-01-24T19:26:05Z

I'm getting ready to go back to Blizzard Beach parking to collect the car. I'll be skipping the closing session it's always a bit depressing to see everything being broken down. So I'm going to the mac store instead

I wanted to thank a couple of people before I go:

Mike Smith, Tim & Gabriella Davis for letting me hang with them and the rest
Rocky Oliver for the opportunity to speak at the show
Bill Buchan for the counseling
Paul Mooney for Mac support!
My co-presenter Rob Wunderlich @ DominoUnplugged.com
And finally if you came to BP211 - you!

I've read some of the session feedback and a couple things came out - some of you thought it was pitched just right and some of you wanted more technical detail. It was hard to do both in the hour - next year we'd look to do two sessions to cover both (assuming we get through the selection process).

I'm going to write a couple of little articles for NotesBerry.org soon perhaps covering authentication options and setting up a development environment, and I'll finish the one I started on bbMetaBlog

And finally this GoDaddy blog makes everything hard work. So I'm posting the updated BP211 presentation at NotesBerry.org and my final post in this blog will include details of how to find me at my new blogging home.

Bye for now and safe journey home

Jason

I made it to Wednesday

2008-01-23T16:20:02Z

The NyQuil I took last night and the DayQuil I took this morning have helped I still have this rotten cough but I feel a whole lot better (notice I'm going a little native in my speech, at least I think the Americans speak this way).

I made to the "Migrating to ND8" BOF it was good to hear other peoples experiences. BOF are good but may be later in the day when people have warmed up a little. Went to Bruce and Chris's session on UI worst practices, they did a good job. Did you see the SSN slide? 9 drop downs and 18 clicks to input your SSN. Awful but there was worse.

I mentioned a book yesterday called "DOM Scripting" a friends of Ed book about creating Web sites that degrade gracefully. See here: Dom Scripting at Amazon.

Would anybody be interested in a hands on extending domino databases to mobile devices session next year? I'm not saying we'd do it but we might suggest it if enough people said it would be a good idea.

Also I would anybody like to read a short guide to developing Java apps for the BlackBerry and Domino?

I'm in Rocky's session right now

Lotusphere Flu?

2008-01-23T02:38:42Z

Feeling a little rough so I took the opportunity to have an early night. I've taken some Nyquil which seems to being doing the trick. I hope I don't fall asleep and drop the computer before I finish.

If you made it to BP211 sincerely thank you for coming. I know it was early and Rob and I appreciate it. Don't forget your evaluations! If you want the applications I will make them available via openCOD.org soon (couple of weeks) unless your in a hole and need them sooner.

2mrw I'll be at Bruce Elgorts session and RIM at ten and the R8 migration session. Unless anything conflicts in which case R8 Migration will be the thing.

If you wanted to ask a question about the session and didn't please email me: jason AT jasonhookonline.com. I'll post a link to some useful BlackBerry documentation 2mrw and once again......Thank you.... [sound of faint snoring]

Live blogging using bbMetaBlog

2008-01-21T13:11:37Z

http://www.opencod.org/opencod/bsphere3.nsf

If you are looking for me at Lotusphere...

2008-01-20T21:27:18Z

My ADSL has failed at home so currently no BlackBerry mail 02 want to charge me an arm and a leg to switch on my BB so I'm trying not to do that unless I have to.

You can mail me: jason AT jasonhookonline.com unless you're just another spammer in which you cannot mail me, thank you.

I'm currently in Susan Bulloch and Paul Mooneys session from 4pm to 6pm and after that it's the party.....

I'm wearing a checked shirt (cream with blue and brown vertical lines), cream cord trousers or "pants" (but only of you're American (anywhere else those are blue). My shoes are black and I'm wearing glasses. I have a wedding ring on.

It's to dark for me to take a picture using the mac but I'll update this page with a picture after 6pm.

2mrw I'm allocated the first OGS.

Rob - I tried calling you a couple of times and couldn't get through I'll try to find you tonight at the party.

Lotusphere: I'm here

2008-01-20T16:53:47Z

I've arrived in Davenport where I'll be staying for the week. It's been a long journey which didn't get off to a great start but has come to a triumphant end

Along the way I spotted John Vincent Silk, Stephanie Heit of Teamstudio and a bunch of other people I see every year and have never spoken to (yet).

Had a very interesting conversation on the plane with a guy called Charlie who wasn't travelling to Lotusphere but now lives in the town I grew up in (I've since moved away), Eltham in South East London. It's a very small world. Charlie has a big house (16 people size) in Kissimmee which he rents out. So for next year if you wanted to reduce hotel costs by putting together a group take a look at www.usvillas.com.

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Much as I'd love to keep typing I have now been up for 24 hours and I can't stay awake anymore. 2mrw I need to do the registration thing and find Rob Wunderlich, Bill (has anybody seen what he's done to his hair/face this year he hinted but wouldn't tell me), and the guys from Turtle.

Loving the MacBook in general but not liking the keyboard so far.

Over and out zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

Macbook is updated, VMWare installed

2008-01-17T23:41:52Z

It can't have taken 45 minutes to get this mac setup including installing VMWare and very painless too.

It could have almost justified an early night and yet that nagging voice in the back of my mind is driving me to read some more tech stuff that I think I ought to know

Safe journey Bill et al see you very soon.

It could have been worse I suppose.....

2008-01-17T23:10:26Z

Just as I'm winding down or possibly up my trusty old Dell decides it wants to give up the ghost!

The onboard mouse has decided to stop working, the power button needs massaging to start and crucial bits of software won't work properly. Pants!

What do I do? There's nothing for it but to get a replacement.

So firstly I test the patience of everyone who'll put up with my hand-wringing. "What machine will I buy - a mac would be nice but it seems expensive...." Bill offers to lend me his, Paul Mooney the same. Very very kind but probably not practical.

The bank manager in my mind decides on a Windows PC. It's cheaper, I have all the software in the world to run on it. Ah, but then I realise anything I buy today will have Vista on it. There's no time to downgrade.... So now I'm Mac owner! Boo hiss Mr Gates but you did it to yourself you did!

I'm setting up the new machine and have just taken a picture for my account, I look so rough right now I grab a cat and hide behind her to take the Photo (thanks Dora!)...

I'll be making my debut as a first time Lotusphere speaker and switcher. So do, please, come to BP211 where with luck my Java app, RSS and BB Push Demos will all work first time!

BBMetaBlog v1.2.2 and Blogsphere Tandem Release

2008-01-14T18:27:27Z

Hello Again,

A busy weekend just gone and the last one at home before Lotusphere. Is it just me or is time racing by? Anyway Declan and I have been working to bring you updated Blogsphere and bbMetaBlog releases.

You can get Blogsphere V3.0.1 Beta 8a at openNTF.

You can download bbMetaBlog v1.2.2 OTA (it'll replace any previous version you have). I suppose technically it's beta but there are a few people using it and I'm expecting feedback anytime now. I'm also using it on my curve and it seems to work fine.

The Blogsphere upgrade though as it has important fixes to it's MetaWebBlog support. The new bbMeta handles categories better (including multiple selections), and it allows to specify a location for your posts (for Terri).

What's next for bbMeta? A better title bar with Network status information, multiple blog configs, really simple discovery (for Terri too). All post Lotusphere I suspect.

If you are using bbMeta thank you very much but don't forget to let me know what you think good or bad @ jasonhook[at]openCOD.org or here......

BBMetaBlog update

2008-01-10T16:51:03Z

You may have noticed something strange about Bills' Blog post "My first Post from BBMetaBlog". When that post is viewed on the home page you see the content fine. However when you open that post directly via the permalink the content doesn't render. Something is breaking the rendering engine.

I chatted with Declan about it yesterday and after he very kindly debugged it we now know what's happening.

The MetaWebLog agent (xml-rpc) when it's called by any MetaWebLog client (inc bbMetaBlog) to create a new post calls the Document "compute with form" method for the new blog entry. This has the side effect of converting some rich text fields it adds to the document into text fields. When the rendering engine then renders the post it tries to render the "$BS_Attachments$" tag expecting it to be a RTF and when it's not it breaks.

Declan suggested two workarounds although he hinted at a possible Blogsphere v3 Beta 8a release with a fixed up xml-rpc agent. In the interim if you are interested in the workarounds they are:

Edit the affected story with your Notes client or
Remove the "$BS_Attachments$" flag from the layout document

For now that means if you are a user of more recent versions of Blogsphere v3 you can use bbMetaBlog for creating draft blog entries (not ideal I know but still useful) or you can do the workaround thing.

All my fault really whilst i tested against my own BlogSphere blogs I hadn't upgraded them in a while and so didn't spot the problem. Can't praise Declan enough though. He was tremendously helpful yesterday. Thanks Declan!

BBMetaBlog v1.2 for download

2008-01-07T17:49:51Z

Dear all,

BBMetaBlog v1.2 is available for you to download! I'm reasonably pleased with it and the time has come to share it and make it better

Before you download it I want to draw your attention to a couple of things:

Being paranoid some unavoidable caveats:

BBMetaBlog is supplied free of charge to you and you're downloading the software at your own risk. I'm taking the same risks as you as BBMetaBlog is running on my BlackBerry! I've installed and un-installed and updated a few times without a problem

The software uploads and downloads information to and from your Blogsphere blog (normally small text files in XML format) this may incur a financial cost to you which is entirely yours. This is particularly true if you are roaming. I won't take responsibility for costs that you incur downloading and using BBMetaBlog.

It looks to me like Blogsphere may not implement categories or tags in it's MetaWebLog implementation. This means that any stories you create or update will have a category of "None" when they are procesed by Blogsphere even if BBMetaBlog passes the categories to Blogsphere.

Limitations of the device and the MetaWeblog API might generate some issues so I'd recommend you only edit stories with BBMetaBlog that you created with BBMetaBlog but it's entirely up to you.

Avoid using the "ampersand" or "&" character in your stories use and or "&" instead

If you find any bugs please let me know at jasonhook AT openCOD.org.

How to get it:

To download BBMetaBlog to your BlackBerry OTA point your BlackBerry browser to http://www.opencod.org/opencod/ls2007party.nsf/bbMetablog.html.

To install using your desktop manager save the attached files to your computer and install using the Application Loader tool.

To run in a BlackBerry simulator you can drop the .cod file into your simulator directory e.g. C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Device Simulators 4.2.2\4.2.2.67 (8300-O2).

Once installed your BlackBerry may decide it needs to reboot. The same is true if you were to uninstall BBMetablog.
After installation you'll notice a new icon on your applications page:

BlogSphere Configuration:
You will need to confirm that your Blogsphere blog has a username and password for MetaWebLog blogging. So open the Blog configuration page and check the "interfaces" settings. You need to set "Blogger API username" and "Blogger API Passcode" values. Make a note of the "Blogger API Endpoint" value.

BBMetaBlog Configuration:
Run the application and choose "Open Config" by pressing the button or 'o' on the keyboard. Fill in the details for the Username, Password and Access URL fields.

Now click the "Get Categories" button. The device will prompt you to allow a connection to your server you should allow it or allow all. The status field will tell you the outcome. If that succeeds close the configuration screen otherwise act on the error message. Typical errors will be username/password or access url values.

Using BBMetaBlog:
Now go ahead and create a new post at a minimum you should create a story with a title and some content. You can add some html tags either by typing them or using the menu.

You can make the entry draft which means it's Blogsphere draft. Currently I'm not storing any story information in your device. We might want to change that after Lotusphere.

Anyway Post the story. If the status field reads success go to your blog with a web browser or Notes client and you should see it. If you want to continue editing the stories keep the "New Entry" screen open on your devices and keep editing and submitting.

You can edit other posts in your blog by selecting "Edit post" from the Main screen and clicking on the "Get Recent Posts" button. All being well it should pull down some recent posts and present you with a list, select one from the list and press 'e' or the "Enter" key or the "Edit Post" menu item. You can also delete the post from the menu.

That's pretty much it. You can also watch the little video I mentioned in an earlier post. I'd be interested in learning from you how to make it better but in the interim I have a couple of ideas:

Work with Declan to implement categories (unless I'm wrong about them), getPost() and MediaObjects (so you can take a pic and post it to your blog).
Save as draft feature on the device
Handle use of & characters better on the device (I made a start but it needs more work)

Well there you have it. Many hours of work and testing. I'll be publishing the source code initially at Lotusphere (BP211) and thereafter via openCOD.

In the meantime if you do happen to try BBMetaBlog - thank you very very much (and I mean that) for your interest and participation.

BBMetaBlog.alx
BBMetaBlog.cod

Blogging from your BlackBerry (no not email)

2008-01-05T02:40:39Z

I've been working on a new BlackBerry application (you'll know this if you read the MetaWeblog API post last week). For now I'm calling it "BB Meta Blog".

What is BB Meta Blog for BlackBerry
BB Meta Blog allows you to post to your Blogsphere weblog, edit delete posts directly and easily from your BlackBerry.

Another Video Demo:
I thought it was worth posting another small video of the application in action and let you know what my plans for it are. I'm not sure if it's very good form but I've embedded a video of me using the application to edit a test blog on Bill Buchans' server. If the embedding doesn't work for you try this link here.

Plans:
You may know that Rob Wunderlich and I will be presenting BP211 (Extending Domino applications to mobile devices) at Lotusphere. I hope to talk a little about the application during that session. I'm halfway through writing a paper on the design which I'll post here and at NotesBerry.org. In addition I intend to make the source code available (via download) to attendees of BP211 first. After the Lotusphere I'll intend to post the source on openCOD.org.

By this Monday evening I plan to make the application available to install over the air (I'll post the url here when ready). I'll also post the .cod file here too. So if you don't have a BlackBerry but have a BlackBerry simulator and MDS simulator installed you can still play with it.

Why am I using the simulator in the demo?
Just because it is more responsive than using the Idokorro (Rove) BlackBerry Viewer or Mobiola's screen capture program to record my real curve. I have BB Meta Blog running on my BlackBerry and it works a treat. BTW In case anyone's worried the credentials in the demo have been changed .

How you can help:
I'm keen to hear what you think about it so comment away....and if you got this far - thanks!

And a new site is born.....

2008-01-03T13:32:14Z

Mike Smith, Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney have created a new Domino and BlackBerry site and have generously allowed me to contribute. The new site is called NotesBerry - and it aims to provide for people who want know more about what BlackBerry and Domino can do.

Quoting Mike for a second "The idea is to share views, knowledge and experiences within the BlackBerry and Domino community so we can all get the most from combining these great technologies. The plan is to use the site to publish white papers, technical studies, comments, best practice, analysis and 'tips'."

So if you have BlackBerry and/or BlackBerry Connect ...

In between the two Bens

2007-12-24T09:53:45Z

See Ben Pooles Blog for context

Apparently I'm only 20% addicted to Apple. I've had three iPods, I owned an AppleIIe once and I have an Apple sticker on my Dell laptop

I had a look at a friends iPhone yesterday, much smaller than I expected lot's of fun but I'm sticking with my current phone.

20%

Looking for x-ray technician school?

What do Blogsphere, MetaWebBlog and your BlackBerry have in common?

2007-12-21T19:48:03Z

Hello,

At Lotusphere 2007 Bill Buchan said "Do you think you could write a BlackBerry app that would post new entries in a Blogsphere database?" I think I said "probably" and then merrily ignored it for a year. Well, Bill reminded me recently. So I have been working on "BBMetaBlog" which uses the MetaWebLog Api support in Blogsphere.

It's currently hovering between Alpha and Beta but more B than A (all of the functions actually work the ui needs fixing). There are some limitations and if they persist I'll disclose them nearer the time.

I'm hoping to have it ready for Lotusphere 2008 and maybe use it to illustrate some ideas from our BP211 presentation. I expect to release the source through openCOD.org.

Just in case your reading this from an aggregator this post contains a few png screenshots and a little (2mb) wmv movie...

Screenshots:

Movie:
BBMetaWeblog

That leaves one more application to tell you about (assuming all goes well). But for now Christmas begins

Merry Christmas to you && and your families!

Is the Domino server setting "Make this site accessible to web search site crawlers" still relevant?

2007-12-19T12:16:46Z

Hello,

A quick admin entry for a change.

Imagine you are running IIS with the WAS Plug-in and serving content in Domino databases. You have some links that contain a query string e.g. "?openview&category=monkeylegs". You want web crawlers to follow these links so you enable the setting "Make this site accessible to web search site crawlers". So far so good.

That setting applies to the Domino Web Engine and substitutes a url's usual query string delimiter "?" with an exclamation point (!) in urls that it generates. So "http://blah.talk.com/topics.nsf?category=politics" becomes "http://blah.talk.com/topics.nsf!category=politics".

IIS restricts the number of characters in a part of a path ("/.../" or "/.....?") to something like 260 -270 characters. When that limit is exceeded IIS returns a 400 invalid url error.

IIS knows that the exclamation point denotes the start of the query string. Apparently IIS doesn't know that "!" could be being used instead of "?" to denote the query string. And what IIS appears to do is treat the "!" as any other character in a path.

So IIS + Domino + "!" + looong query string = Error 400 Invalid Url

Obviously you have choices to avoid this problem:

Use Apache instead of IIS (though I haven't tested this behaviour in Apache)
Shorten the query string
Put your parameters in the form and use POST instead of GET
Avoid using "!" and use "?" instead

The sticking point is can Google and other crawlers follow "?open..." links nowadays? I think Google can which would mean that the "!" setting is largely redundant and if other crawlers can it's completely redundant.

Fortunately Domino allows "?" and "!" to be used interchangeably regardless of the server setting (it only seems to affect urls that are generated by Domino) so bookmarked urls will work either way.

I hope you've been able to follow my logic, do you have an opinion/insight?

BTW I've got a terrible headache right now which is not directly linked to this post but might affect it's clarity

TTFN

Fun: Time breakdown of modern web design

2007-12-13T10:22:31Z

Thanks to my friend Chris ( Matoke) for finding the following link and sharing it with me.

The link below is to a pie chart that contains a couple of swearwords so if you're concerned about that kind of thing be advised. Otherwise go right ahead, it seemed to strike a chord with us how about you?

http://humor.beecy.net/geeks/web-design/web-design.gif
...

I've been quiet sorry......

2007-12-07T14:06:00Z

I've been preparing the presentation with Rob (now complete and submitted) and doing some new development work two: new Domino/BlackBerry Applications.

The first one is basically finished and being peer reviewed and I've started the second one. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more early next week.

In the meantime here are the details of BP211 for your diary....

Session track Track Four:             Best Practices

Session id                                       BP211

Session date                                   01/22/2008

Session time                                   08:30am - 9:30am

Session location                             SW Osprey

Session name                                 The Return of Delivering IBM Lotus Domino Applications to Mobile Devices

Session abstract
Hear from two seasoned pros at delivering Lotus Domino databases to mobile devices. Updated from last year's popular session, this session will cover everything from syncing applications to browse to RSS as means to enable mobile devices. There will be lots of demos to show how it all works, so don't miss it!

Speakers Rob Wunderlich & Jason Hook