codestore

Eating Your Own Dogfood

What's that saying? Something like "learning to eat your own dogfood". It means that you should practice what you preach, which is something I'm reminded of this morning.

A bug had been troubling me for a while now whereby the submit button for a custom (non-Domino) "nested" form was not displaying in IE. It would magically appear if you re-sized the page but not if you then pressed refresh. It just didn't render when the page first displayed. After trying various CSS hacks I decided to look for the root cause is the HTML.

The problem turned out to be a familiar one. What I'd done was close the Domino form inside a DIV that was opened after the Domino form was opened. Something I warned against just over a year ago. The problem being that, in the year that followed, I'd forgotten my own advice and broken the cardinal rule:

Never, never, never close the Domino form inside subsequent DIVs. Always, always, always close Domino's form at the very top of the actual Form in designer.

There you go. You've been told. Twice. Maybe you got it first time round. Hopefully I'll get it this time and save myself hours of messing about in the future.

1 Comment Read - Add | Mon 12 May 2008 | Open »

Settling in to New Office

My plan was to be in the new office by the end of April. I was a day late in the end, moving in last Thursday.

Although I've only been in here one working day so far I'm already seeing the benefits. Mainly the peace and quiet. All I can hear is the tweeting of birds and (with the window open) the trickle of the brook at the back of the building. Gone are the cries of Felix and the clatter of the washing machine. Worth every penny. All 600,000 of them!

There's still some work to do before it's finished and I'm waiting on the new furniture I've ordered before I can post a photo of the finished room. For now I'm just going to shut up about it and try and get back to posting more regularly about the techy goodnees you're used to.

4 Comments Read - Add | Tue 6 May 2008 | Open »

Office Chairs: Your Advice Needed

As the new office nears completion there's one final thing I need want to add to it -- a new chair.

The chair I'm sat on at the moment, which you can see in this shot, is five years old. As well as being tatty round the edges it has a wheel missing, which means I take a jolt backwards every now and then. It's a nice wake up call sometimes but I could live without. That and the fact I fancy treating myself to a new one.

Can any of you recommend a chair? Or is it much too personal a choice?

As far as I know I don't have any special needs of a chair and don't suffer with my back. All I really want is something that looks the part, is comfy to sit on and moves about easy enough (probably in that order of importance).

When Mike "Notestips" Golding and I worked together the company we worked for moved us to new offices where every desk had an Aeron chair that cost about a grand a piece. So expensive that they sent a man to make his way round every desk and make sure you were comfortable and sat properly. Shortly after the move they had to make a load of budget cuts and my contract wasn't renewed.

My budget doesn't quite stretch to an Aeron but could probably stretch to a couple of (maybe even three) hundred pounds if I thought I was getting a decent chair that would last.

Anybody have any advice? Wherever I look there seems to be an overwhelming choice on offer. Without being able to actually go and sit on them all I'm at a loss as to which is the best and would have to resort to choosing a chair based on looks alone.

21 Comments Read - Add | Tue 29 Apr 2008 | Open »

Garage/Office Update -- Moving In This Week, Hopefully

I bet you're all wondering how the office is coming along? Well, at least one person asked for an update, which is enough for me.

It's coming along nicely, as you can see. Friday just gone was six weeks to the day since dad took a sledge hammer to the old one and was the day both plasterer and renderer finished off. As you can see it's all but done.

There are still a load of jobs to do -- trimming on roof, paint fascia, fit guttering, lay a path, build new dog-proof side gate etc etc, but all the major and costly work is now complete. My priority now is to get in to the office.

First thing I need to do is let the office part dry out:

While the plaster is drying I need to lay the floor and fit a door. Once the wiring is complete I can finally get my desk in and relax a little. I'm hoping this will happen before the week is out.

Needless to say it's going to be another quiet week on codestore (I'll try and post something useful though). Once I'm in the new office it will start returning to normal. Promise!

7 Comments Read - Add | Mon 28 Apr 2008 | Open »

How To: Adding Embedded Movies to Domiono Pages - With Demo

Karen and I watched The Apprentice last night when we went to bed. We don't have a TV in the bedroom though and we didn't watch it at its 9pm slot as I was busy getting the new office ready for the plasterer, who's here today. Instead we watched it at a time that suited us in a place that suited us (we've gotten in to the naughty habit of watching DVDs in bed instead of reading a book). All this thanks to the BBC's iPlayer.

All the TV stations here in the UK seem to getting in to streaming their programmes once they've aired and letting you "catch up" for a week or so after. It seems like the internet has gone streaming mad. Some say it will choke it to death.

Whether or not all this streaming media is a bad thing for the web, it's obviously what the people want. So where does that leave us Domino developers when we're asked to "add YouTube" to a Domino-based sites?

This is something I was asked to do recently. A customer wanted to embed movies in the news items on their site. Although I knew this would be possible and was sure there be an off-the-shelf Flash player available I didn't realise just how easy it would be. Adding embedded movies to Domino pages is so easy.

The first thing you need is a player. The best I could find was the JW FLV Media Player. The best part about it being that it's free (buy a licence and the right-click "about" menu goes).

Once downloaded all you need to do is import the SWF for the player in to your database's design and follow the site's instructions on how to set it up. Once you have it on your form you just need to tell it what file to play. The bit I was initially unsure of was whether it would play a file that was attached to the document itself. No reason why it shouldn't, but I just wasn't sure it would. So, I configured it to use the first attachment it found on the document and, hey presto, it worked.

You can see the player playing a file attached to a Notes document in this demo. View the source to see how it's configured. So easy and so, so cheap.

The second thing you need is a way to convert movies to the FLV format, which has a 99% chance of being playable by the user's browser.

To do this I bought a copy of On2's Flix Standard for $39. The interface is a bit clunky but it does the trick and converts all the common video formats to FLV.

And that's it! The simplest way to embed movies in your Domino applications. It couldn't get any simpler than that.

The third thing you need to do is give the site's authors a way to upload and place the movies within the document's "body" field at a point of their choosing. This is the bit I'll be on with next and I'll let you know how I get on. I'll probably be writing a plugin for the TinyMCE editor if one doesn't exist already.

Note: I used the term streaming liberally in the above post, although I'm not sure it is streaming in the truly technical sense. You get what I mean though, right...

7 Comments Read - Add | Thu 24 Apr 2008 | Open »