The move of the Notes Client to an architecture based on Eclipse is seen as a good move by most people.  Recently, though, I ran into an issue that you might need to be aware of.  One of the other applications I use to develop web applications is Aptana Studio, which is also built upon Eclipse.  I hadn't been in it recently, so when I fired it up last week, it asked me to download a bunch of new updates.  Halfway through the installation, it failed because it wasn't able to access/update a certain .jar file.  The worst part was that the failure completely hosed my configuration and caused the application to be unusable.

After much debugging, I determined that the install failed because I had Notes 8.0.1 running at the same time.  After blowing away the configuration and shutting down Notes, I was able to successfully upgrade Aptana to the latest release.

So the lesson learned is to make sure all your Eclipse based applications are shut down before you try to upgrade one of them.

I have just posted the 2.0.2 version of the ASND Export Facility.  This version fixes a number of really, silly bugs.  I wish I had more time to do testing the right way, but such is life when you are writing code for free.

There is one bug that is currently unresolved that I would love some help on.  The crux of the problem is this:  When doing sorting a collection by multiple fields, the secondary sorts are opposite what they should be.  For example, if I want to sort the results by Person in ascending order and then by Date in descending order, the results are return with Person in ascending order and Date in ascending order.  This did not happen when I was using a Bubble Sort, so I must have screwed up something in the Merge Sort code.  If you have experience with these things and want to take a crack at solving the problem, by all means download the latest release and take a look at my spaghetti code.

This position will be primarily responsible for all technical aspects of Lotus Notes application development and application support.  The person in this position will work with other departments in the company and the Manager of Web Development to develop and maintain the technical specifications and all appropriate applications in Lotus Notes.  The position may also include development work in other programming languages.

Job Functions:

Functions include developing the technical specifications and implementing the appropriate code to support Lotus Notes development. The person will assist in troubleshooting and debugging issues with existing and developed systems.  This position will maintain all applications so that they function on the most current version of Lotus Notes client and server.  They will maintain proper security and programming best practices when building applications.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Minimum 1 year work experience with development for Lotus Notes client and Lotus/Domino on the web.
• Minimum 1 year work experience in web-enabling existing and future Lotus Notes applications.
• Minimum 1 year work experience in developing workflow applications in Lotus/Domino.
• Minimum 1 year work experience with Domino Designer
• In-depth knowledge and work experience in relevant technical areas such as LotusScript, Formula Language, Java, Javascript, D/HTML, CSS and DB2.
• Knowledge of Lotus/Domino development for mobile devices.
• Knowledge of Notes security model.
• Knowledge and experience in the following: PHP, ASP, XML, VBScript, SQL/Other DBMS.
• Design and development skills working with applications in versions 6, 7 and 8 of Domino.
• Solid understanding of Internet technologies: HTTP, FTP, security and encryption on the Internet, basic networking concepts, etc.

Additional Qualifications:

• Must have good analytical skills, excellent communication skills at all organizational levels.
• Must show initiative, be self motivated and have a willingness to learn.
• Have the ability to work as part of a team and independently.
• Must posses a valid driver’s license.

Working Conditions:

• Physical requirements include finger dexterity, viewing a computer screen, detailed work at close distances, and sitting for prolonged periods of time.
• Office environment with occasional evening and weekend hours.
• Sporadic local and out of town travel.

Hershey Entertainment & Resorts is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

TO APPLY: Please visit HersheyJobs.com to apply on-line or contact Mary Faris at Msfaris@hersheypa.com for more information. We offer Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, Profit Sharing, Competitive Salary, and MORE!

Sometimes, the recruiters are really nice and you just want to help them find a good person.  Which is why the job above is posted here.  Can you imagine how much weight could be gained with all that chocolate around?

I have updated the map for ILUG 2008 with all the names of the people who are staying at the Camden Court Hotel. I have also added names to other hotels that attendees are staying at. If you don't see your name and/or hotel, leave a comment or drop me an email and I will be sure to add you to the map.

Update:  When one person comments, it might be easy to ignore.  When a second person says something, it might be worth making a change.  I have modified the map to remove the room type for the people staying at the Camden Court Hotel.  That was there for me to keep track of more than anything else.  Also, I will be removing anyone who hasn't publicly commented on where they are staying on this blog or their own.  I am sorry if this has caused any inconvenience for anyone.

ASND Designs has released the latest version of the ASND Export Facility on OpenNTF.  Version 2.0.1 makes exporting on and writing reports against Domino databases easier than ever before.  The new release include the following enhancements:

• ASND Web Report Framework - Imagine being able to easily create web based reports that allow users to determine the parameters of the report and even the data returned in the report.  V2.0 includes 3 real world sample reports that combine AJAX and the ASND reporting engine to deliver reports in HTML, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel formats via the browser.
• ASND Name Search - searches all addressbooks on the server for a name or part of a name
• ASND Domlog Report - reports on the activity stored within the domlog.nsf and can be limited to a specific database or set of databases.  Users can choose which fields to return and how to sort the report.
• ASND Sametime Activity Report - reports on either the last time a user logs into Sametime or all of the login failures from the stlog.nsf.  Report can be limited to a specific period of dates.
• ASNDDocumentCollection Script Library - a portable script library that you can drop into any database for collecting and sorting data from Notes Databases without the need for additional views.
• MergeSort Sorting Routine - all sorts will now be done using a MergeSort function.  Performance of existing reports should be exponentially better, especially when sorting large data sets multiple times.
• Full Text Exports - Regular Exports can now be configured to use either Selection Formulas or a Full Text Search to collect the documents.  Both choices can still be done against multiple databases.

Update:  2.0.1 has been released to fix 2 major bugs in the sorting routines and include the image used in the web reports.

Here is the current list of people that are confirmed to be staying at the Camden Court Hotel:

1. Sean Burgess
2. Jamie Magee
3. Theo Hesselmans
4. Tormod Svendsen
5. Bjorn Erik Lilleskare
6. Rune Stromme
7. Chris Miller
8. Libby Ingrassia
9. Bruce Elgort
10. Mick Moignard
11. Duncan Bradley
12. Christian Hero
13. Elisabeth Samsonen
14. Benedict Poole
15. Julian Robichaux
16. Per Erik Nyrud
17. Thomas Bahn
18. John Head
19. Odd Åge Skogheim
20. Bjørn Thommasen
21. Stig Erik halvorsen
22. Declan Lynch
23. Rob McDonagh

If you do not see your name on the list and you sent a reservation in, they did not receive it. Don't feel bad cause it happened to me a number of times. They seem to be having an issue with their mail/spam server eating emails.  Worst case scenario is that you have to fax it in, like I did.

I will update the ILUG Map later today with all the names.

So who in our group is Tequila? My vote is definitely for Nathan!

Flagg was a sight to behold barreling down the 2 lane blacktop at better than 100 miles per hour. The first thing you might notice was the color of the Bentley Arnage T he was driving.  To say it was white would be a great understatement. At a final cost of just over half a million dollars, it was a minimalists' wet dream.  The entire car, save the tires, brake lights, and light blue digital displays, was bright white. It had an almost ethereal glow about it, which is why the cult members referred to it as the Ghost.  Sound dampeners inside and out reduced the engine noise to a barely audible whisper even when pushing 9000 rpms.  Unlike the current street racing crowd that favored those annoying super loud muffler systems, Flagg didn't want to advertize his comings and goings, especially since the FBI had him under constant surveillance.

The second thing you were sure to notice was the striking contrast of the driver.  The only child of a psychiatrist mother and pharmacologist father from the central region of Africa, Flagg was as black as a pool of crude oil.  His pearly white teeth were the only part of his body that didn't seem to absorb all light. His skin was flawless and his smile had the ability to disarm his detractors with little effort. In short, he was a walking ebony god.  He was wearing the all black robes of his position of the leader of Le Église du Papillon Blanc Albinos. As a legally registered non-profit church, Flagg's cult was his personal army with which he waged war against his enemies and the authorities were unable to do anything about it.  Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t trying their hardest to catch him doing something illegal.

His parent's most important contribution before leaving their home country was to develop a method for brain washing people through a combination of drugs and psychological tactics.  The dictator in power, with the help of CIA advisors, was using their procedure to keep the armed forces loyal to him.  Unfortunately for him, his wife wasn’t in the program and had no qualms about stabbing him 25 times after she caught him molesting their daughters.  After his death, they were able to escape the impending civil war by bribing a seat on a freighter bound for Miami.  They were able to smuggle all of their research on a microchip embedded….well, let’s just say that no one looked there.  Unfortunately for them, they both died tragically in a car accident on the night after his 18th birthday. 

The investigators concluded that the husband fell asleep while driving, which caused the car to careen off the cliff and onto the rocks below.  Since there was no reason to expect foul play, the coroner did a cursorary autopsy and sent the bodies onto the crematorium.  Once the bodies had been turned to ash as their recently changed wills expressly proclaimed, there was no way that anyone would be able to find the Obedience in their system.

Unbeknownst to them, Flagg had uncovered their research early in his teenage years.  A genius on any scale, he understood immediately how he could put the methods they developed to good use.  Slowly over the next couple of years, he had implemented the process on them to the point where they would do anything that he asked and think it was their idea.  Like the idea of taking out a $5,000,000 life insurance policy on each of them.  Of course, the policy would pay double in case of an accident.  They both named each other as the primary beneficiary and listed their darling son as the secondary beneficiary on both policies.  When he instructed them to drive the car off the road the day after he turned 18, they had no understanding of what they were really doing.  Even when they were about to hit the jagged rocks at the bottom of the cliff, they had the look of Golden Retrievers who had just been told how good they were.  The money from the insurance policies gave him the nest egg necessary to manufacture Obedience on a much larger scale.

With the increase in purity levels, Flagg was able to grow his empire at a fantastic rate.  After working with a brilliant chemist he “recruited” at college, he was able to turn the oral drug into something that could be administered via aerosol spray.  This way, he was able to convert large number of followers who attended his free seminar entitled “Get Rich Using the Money You Already Make”.  The attendees were administered Obedience from the overhead misting machines that kept the mid-summer’s heat at bay.  After the morning session on the second day, their minds were pliable enough to start indoctrinating them into the cult.  After 3 more days, some were sent back into the world to spread the gospel to their friends and family.  Others simply contacted their company’s and tendered their resignations over the phone or via email.  Then they contacted the financial institutions and transferred all of their worldly possessions over without batting an eye.  Once that was complete, they moved in to one of the ever growing number of cabins and set about providing for Flagg’s every need.

Of course, none of this was on the mind of Flagg at this very moment.  There were only 2 things that occupied his thoughts.  The most important being how to get back his property that was stolen from him.  That’s exactly how he thought of Jennifer, as something he owned.  He had first set eyes on the blonde beauty while she was testifying in front of congress about the exact nature of her father’s business dealings.  After the 4th time she answered a question with “I have no recollection of that, Senator”, he decided that she needed to be taught a lesson of humility.  The fact that Giuseppe’s illegal enterprises were something he wanted for his own was icing on the cake.  Her flexibility in the bedroom was a welcomed surprise and one he intended on enjoying for a long time to come.

The second objective was determining exactly how he was going to kill the man who had stolen her from him.

Albert didn’t recognize the car, but understood immediately that it wasn’t out for a Sunday drive.  Looking around his environment, there didn’t seem to be an easy way out.  That didn’t stop him from hoisting Jenny over his shoulder and running across the road and into the nearby woods.

In case you aren't following any of the Lotus Community on Twitter, Mikkel Heisterberg has released TwitNotes for the Notes 8 Standard Client.  Although still a work in progress, it is a great example on the extensibility of the new Notes client built on Eclipse.  This will allow developers to build applications for Notes without having to learn anything about Notes.  It is almost like building applications for browsers.  When the platform is a known quantity, like Java or Eclipse, and cross platform, developers are more likely to invest the time and money learning how to develop applications for the it.

If you are a fan of Twitter and use the Notes 8 client on a regular basis, TwitNotes is a must have.

The Howard County Fire Department made another unscheduled trip to my house a couple of weeks ago while I was at the LCY event.  The last time they were there, our new black cat had gotten himself high up in a tree and couldn't figure out how to get down.  He was so high that we didn't have a ladder that got more than a third of the way up to where George was meowing. So we put the fire fighters to good use by having them rescue our cat out of a tree.  How cliche!

This time, things were no less comical.  Our nanny, Leslie, had just run outside to get something out of the car when she heard the door close behind her.  Thinking nothing of it, she got the stuff from her car and went to go back into the house.  Unfortunately, when she went to open the door, the knob wouldn't turn.  Staring back at here from the other side of the glass window was Caden, the 2 year old.  Somehow, he had locked the door and locked out Leslie.  No problem, she'll just try the sliding glass door.  That's almost always unlocked.  Survey says.....XXX!  By now, Leslie is totally freaking because the 2 year old she is in charge of is in the house by himself.  He isn't crying, except for when he gets his arms stuck in his coat that he is trying to take off.

So Leslie tries everything she can to get into the house, but has no luck.  So she calls the high school to have Craig sent home immediately to deal with an emergency.  So he gets home and tries the code to get into the garage door.  No luck.  By this time, the Fire Department has shown up after receiving a frantic call from Leslie.  Thinking he has the code wrong, he calls Colette and asks her what it is.  While he's asking her, she hears a bunch of people in the background.  "Yeah, that's the fire department" was what he said in a calm voice.  Of course, that totally freaked Colette out and she calls me to make sure she had the code right. Of course, I was talking with the Ytria folks about their product line.  They certainly got a chuckle out of it. Wouldn't have mattered what the code was because the battery on the remote had died!  So she calls me back to ask me what she should tell them to break to get into the house.

As I am going through my mental list of how much my new windows cost to replace, she gets the good news that the fire department was able to jimmy the front door open without damaging anything.  Leslie rushed into the house only to find that Caden had curled up on the floor and gone to sleep while watching a Baby Einstein DVD. So much for him being totally freaked out.

In the end, the only thing damaged was Leslie's psyche.  Hopefully, that will be the last time something like this happen, but I am not holding my breath.