Two months of updates!!!

05/17/2006 10:14 AM by Chris Toohey

It's been too long...

Work has been keeping me insanely busy lately (but anyone who runs their own business can attest that being 'insanely busy' is better than the alternative). So busy, that I began to realize that I was not updating this site as often as I should. As the days turned into weeks, it became harder to get back here to post as the habit of not posting set in. Additionally, it's kinda hard to find the words to come back after such a long holiday from updated content. I think anyone who runs a site like this one, who has gone through a "dry spell" of content, will understand what I mean.

So here I am, refraining from banal apologies like "Sorry I haven't 'blogged" - while I truly appreciate anyone who happens by this site, I doubt my lack of updates really caused much grief!

So.... I'm back! And the past two months+ have been a whirlwind. Here's some of the things that I've been geeking out to in that time:

I've setup a few applications from OpenNTF to allow Clearframe's Business Partners and customers to communicate and collaborate with each other and the Clearframe team - namely Ben Poole's DominoWiki and Steve Duncan and Michael Bourak's domBulletin - two really slick and fully functional solutions that allow me to collaborate with my customers and my Business Partners - and both solutions that I highly recommend as part of a Domino-based intranet/extranet solution. If you haven't played around with these or any of the other OpenNTF.org projects, I suggest doing so.

The past two months has resulted in me being neck-deep in Macromedia Flash-based and DHTML-and-AJAX-based UIs with Domino-based backends (and sometimes a combination of mySQL data posting for meta-reporting purposes), not to mention a ton of Lotus Notes client development efforts for client projects - all resultant in what I feel is some pretty slick work and items that (cleared of NDAs and such) would make excellent article content for this site. This being said, expect some articles involving the aforementioned (yup, expect articles!) to make their way onto the site relatively soon.

In fact, as a teaser for the DHTML-and-AJAX-based UI:

(Direct link here: http://edm.clearframe.com/ajaxedm.html)

The above example has no UI validation, so you should be able to break the flow rather easily (the example is meant to illustrate a method - thus the code is as simple and straight-forward as possible) - but you should be able to create, modify, and delete domino data via this DHTML-and-AJAX-based UI!

Aside from the Domino-side of things, I've been using my Cingular 8125 almost exclusively over the past two months. I still think that it's an excellent phone, however I have found a few issues:

1. The device can be sluggish at times, requiring a soft reset.
2. As solid as the device feels, it still doesn't feel as solid as a Blackberry. I had no issues with throwing my 7290 into my laptop case before going into a meeting or onto the passenger-side front seat when I was getting into my car - I feel like the 8125 would blow up like it was a bad guy in a Richard Donner movie.
3. I think my Inbox database is corrupt...

This last point causes me some alarm. I constantly show 1 unread message in one of my POP3 accounts... despite having deleted all messages, deleting the POP3 account and re-adding said account, and even running a local database tool on the device (which just didn't seem to work for me - although admittedly I didn't know what I was doing to begin with...). What started out as something that I could overlook has become a true annoyance. And posting in the Cingular forums as well as a few Wizard-based forums has yet to prove successful. I'll keep those interested updated on my quest to dump that unread message when/if I make any progress.

Other than that, it's been the daily grind. I have a few plans for things on this site and in general, so here's to hoping that they come to fruition before another two months go by!