It's been awhile... Back to Blogger

I feel that I have neglected my duties to this blog and all blogs in general. I, like many of you, felt that blogging is important, but I personally feel a sense of worry that my thoughts and feelings are not generally shared.

But is not blogging about sharing ideas? No matter how strange or convoluted they may be? Yes, I need to write more on here. So I will start doing this again. I just know that in this time of my career, I find myself in the middle of too many technologies. I have a foot in Lotus Notes/Domino, another foot in Websphere and Portal realm, I have a hand in Sharepoint, and I have another hand in Oracle, and if my tongue,lips, and nose were long enough I would add more here.

I think sharing my experiences will at the very least help my thoughts and allow me to look at them and help handle my own confusion.

Bleedyellow.com - Bleedyellow.com

Please follow me to bleedyellow.com

technically that address would be

http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/portaldomosphere

On the way to Lotusphere we come....

Are your answers out of date before you finish asking the question?

LOTUS 911 - Newest Employee Starting 1/25/2008

I would like to welcome Devin Olson to Lotus 911!!! Please read his post here.

More on Portlet Factory and Dashboard

Hey yall - been busy actually sailing through this application. But I hit a bump in the road yesterday. Apparently, IBM states that you should not have more than 50 builders in a model. I was about to have a model with about 70 builders. Mostly because of status indicators. So, what I did was:

1. create a model with nothing but the status indicators and the threshold I was looking for (icons and such included).
   
2. I really need the fields to be dynamic. So I assigned the fields for each builder I want filled in with profiles. Once I created all of these, and saved my model....
   
3. I created a separate model to hold my ONE "Skeleton Builder". This builder is for creating your own builders.
   
4. I was able to select the model with my status indicators, hit a button to pull in all of the profile fields,
5. Rebuilt and Save the Status Indicator Model.
6. Saved the builder model

Now please note, this creates a REALLY UGLY builder but will do the work. I am looking into creating this whole report functionality into its own builder for this client. There is a lot to it and I am using HTML Templates which I plan to eventually store in DB2 so it can be added and changed dynamically without having to change the design of the WAR.

(Sometimes thinking like a Domino developer works when writing portlets)

IBM Funky Releases

I feel it necessary to post about a recent chain of events that caused much pain in my life. (Well, not that much but it was still irritating)

For those of you interested in using Portlet Factory 6.0.2 with your Dashboard Framework 6 - think again. These two release do not work together even if you follow the release notes to Portlet Factory 6.0.2. IBM is currently fixing their issue with these two products but this caused a project I am working on to use Portlet Factory 6.0.1 and Dashboard Framework 6.

The release note does specify a APAR in the IBM system BUT the APAR is still being fixed.... so.... I must apologize that I have been sitting on this for as long as I have but thought there might be some people out there trying to get this to work.

OH - on a separate note - and if you are trying to update RAD 7 using the installation manager, might I suggest you go out to PW Downloads and download the update to (currently as of this writing - 7.0.4) and then point your installation manager locally. It will only take about an hour as opposed to the hours upon hours that installation manager will take to download this stuff.

Shelled Peanuts and Lotus Notes 8

Shelled Peanuts and Notes 8 have one thing in common - I am going to need to break them to get to the good stuff.

I have been feeling frustrated lately trying to figure out how things are working in Notes 8 and Eclipse. I was given a project a few months ago to just look at and backed off from it after about 10 hours of looking at it and coming up with something unstable. For many reasons but I searched inside myself back to when I was a teenager. Back when source code was not needed to get something working. Back when poking through memory registers and making a few tweeks was commonplace.

So what's different? My mind is bound by rules. I should not do this or I could get in trouble or something. At this point, documentation or not I am feeling I should dive in. I am desperate to learn what I can while I have this drive to do so. Just because someone says I can't, does not mean I should listen. Or is this the case. (Can you tell I am confused?). I had no problem disassembling the Microsoft Red Bull crap because I had little respect for Microsoft. And what else does that say about my feelings here. Hmmm... is it lack of respect or is it desperation for the truth? If I take advantage of what I find, is the only problem I face being that IBM will not support some crazy thing I do?

I think I need some feedback on this. I am going to see if I have any response on this and then decide.