I’ve written before about Lotus Notes… to my surprise, there’s a whole web site dedicated to documenting how much it sucks.
Wow. I thought dealing with correspondents using Notes email was bad. Looks like it’s absolutely hideous if you’re trying to actually use the interface.
(via Coding Horror)
I had to do this recently. It’s not excessively difficult.
You can use this thing, but it’s really for dev environments.
WampServer installs Apache, MySQL and PHP. Easy.
Once it’s running, go into PhpMyAdmin and change the root password from the default (blank). You’ll need to update the PhpMyAdmin config too: this is in C:\wamp\apps\phpmyadmin2.10.1\config.inc.php — remember that this, like most of the files, is in Unix format, so you need to use a Unix-aware file editor. (Wordpad seems to be okay for this if you have nothing else installed, at least on Windows Server 2003.)
Download Joomla and chuck it into the root directory (default is c:\wamp\www)
Browse to http://localhost/
If Joomla tells you to change anything in the PHP setup, you’ll find it in C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\php.ini — though it seemed to take no notice when I changed magic_quotes_gpc as requested. Odd. I eventually found you can reset it using the WAMP5 tray icon: Left-click, PHP, PHP Settings. It then automatically restarts Apache to make it take effect. Neato.
The rest is easy… go through the Joomla install pages and it does it all for you. Then start figuring out your template and structure.
Still to figure out:
I don’t think it’s that my eyesight’s going. I think it’s an ever-growing trend to use more subtle text highlighting and cursors. Sometimes when I search for a word, particularly a short word, within a web page or other document, I just can’t see what it’s found.
Sometimes it’s because the idiots programming it haven’t thought about what happens when the text found is underneath the search box. I’ve seen that happen when searching within an email’s text in Outlook 2003, for instance. Easily fixed the way most applications do it: by moving the search box if necessary, or by scrolling the document so the text isn’t underneath.
But sometimes it’s just that the screen is so busy with words that the highlighted term just doesn’t stick out. It happens to me when, for instance, in Word I’m searching for plain apostrophes and quotes that I want converted to their “smart” versions (because they look better on the printed page). In Word, particularly in Word 2007, the highlighting is tiny, and on a busy page, almost invisible.
Seriously, just try and find it in the text below.
This is made worse in Word 2007 because of the severely limited customisable colour schemes. But other applications have similar problems.
Either the highlighting needs some more emphasis, or (and I think this would work better, especially if your search term is short) a big arrow should appear pointing to it, or a circle or some other kind of highlighting should appear if, within X seconds, the user doesn’t do anything which indicates they can see where the text is.
Otherwise you have to find the found term. It’s not my idea of fun.
SnagIt 7, notable for being able to capture long web pages, is bein
g offered for free download.
So is Camtasia Studio 3.
(via Greg)
What idiot designed the email component of Lotus Notes? How is it possible that something so broken can be so popular?
Who decided that replying to an email with an attachment inside it should send the attachment back to the original sender? It’s in my Sent Mail; I don’t need to see it again. Waste of space and bandwidth!
And who decided that when replying it should ignore the From address and use the Sender address instead? Yeah sure I sent it from my Gmail, but it was on behalf of xyz; replies should go to xyz!
And why does it sometimes screw up email names and addresses? I’ve just seen something CCd (unsuccessfully, I assume) to John.Smith@company.comJohn.Smith — WTF?!
(And elsewhere in Lotus Notes… have you seen the state of the permalinks it produces in web sites?! I mean really, does anybody think something like http://www.doi.vic.gov.au/DOI/Internet/transport.nsf/AllDocs/CF55EBCAB40CEB3DCA2571F80004823E?OpenDocument is a sensible URL to present to human beings?)
Pondering switching from expen$ive Photoshop to free Paint.Net, but want to be able to read all your Photoshop files?
Just download this plugin, unzip and copy the DLL into the Paint.Net Filetypes folder. Easy.
Caveat: it doesn’t support absolutely everything in PSD files flawlessly. Discussion here. But the files I’ve been dabbling with (actually converted from CPT to PSD using an ancient copy of Corel Photopaint) work fine.
Why do I keep getting these? They rarely happened in Outlook 2003.
I promise you, I did close Outlook properly. Just like I do every time. It’s good that this version can do the integrity check in the background, but I don’t see why it’s needed at all.
IMAP performance in this version is appalling. It rarely seems to stay connected to the IMAP server for more than a few seconds at a time. Just about all the time I need to keep reconnecting and/or do the Mark For Download / Process Marked Headers thing, which gets old really fast.
I like a lot of the other stuff in the new Outlook, but these are very irritating.
(Skip the lecture, go straight to the instructions — but note the update.)
I’m yet to be convinced that microblogging (eg Twitter, or those status updates in Facebook) is genuinely useful. Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to try it out.
Problem is of course that if you use multiple services, you don’t want to be having to update them all individually. If such a concept is going to work, you’ve got to be able to update once and have it cascade to everywhere.
Facebook has an app to push updates out to Twitter. Which would be fine, but for those outside North America, you can’t update your Facebook status from anywhere except within Facebook. (North Americans can use SMS from a mobile, but others can’t.) Okay, so maybe you’d want to do it mostly when in front of a computer anyway, but I do like about Twitter than you can update from anywhere… anybody can SMS a number (it’s based in the UK, so for me it’s costing 50 cents… so I’d better not go mad using it) so no fiddling with mobile web access just to post an update. Twitter also takes updates via IM (such as GTalk and Jabber). I also like that it’s open; people can see what’s going on without registering.
I normally hate words like synergy and leverage and convergence, but that’s what’s gone on here. Alex King has written code that updates WordPress from Twitter every 15 minutes. Christian Flickinger has written code that updates Facebook using PHP, with a hack using the Curl library (since Facebook doesn’t actually accept inputs like this) that logs into Facebook’s mobile web page and does the business.
And Blake Brannon has put the two together, so a Tweet (that’s Web 2.0 talk for a Twitter post) will cascade to your WordPress blog, and then on to your Facebook status.
Neato, huh? Now that really is leverage. If it works. Which it does for many people, but it didn’t for me. I was having problems with Blake’s code; probably an issue with my Web ISP’s configuration. I ended up splitting it off to a separate WP plugin, which was messy, but allowed me to use the code in isolation, and figure out the problem.
It may be an issue that only affects particular versions of PHP or Apache or something — I’m no expert — but the problem was the Curl call couldn’t write to the cookies file. Creating the my_cookies.txt file and making it writable (777) and modifying the code slightly to specify where the file lived solved it. Another issue involved Curl being unable to use the FollowLocation flag, but it turned out this wasn’t needed.
I also ended up with Blake’s (modified) code in a separate file to Alex’s, rather than inserted into it as Blake intended.
Update 2007-08-31: Blake’s been told that automated access into Facebook is against the Terms of Service. It’s unclear if Facebook will actively go chasing those who use or distribute code like this, but it would seem to pay to be cautious. Sorry.
I think that’s all the steps. Good luck.
Thanks to Blake for his assistance on this. And to Alex and Christian, whose code this is all built on.
Admittedly I’ve only been using it for a short time, but here are my initial thoughts about Office 2007.
What I like about Office 2007
What I don’t like about Office 2007
For those using YahooGroups to run your community groups and so on, they are having issues with slow email delivery at the moment, which they acknowledge here.
This I suppose is the problem with outsourcing your IT requirements. The overhead of managing it is gone, but fasttracking resolution is out of your control.
I’ve ranted before about applications which decide to implement their own standards for colours. iTunes is the classic example. In order to make it look all cool and hip and skivvy-wearing-Apple-like, it has subtle shades of grey on the title bar to indicate (ha!) whether it’s active or inactive.
So I’ve been playing around with Office 2007, and now I find they’ve done the same damn thing.
Here is Word 2007 when it’s active.
And here it is when it’s inactive.
Actually, no, wait, I might have got those mixed up. Which is precisely my point.
WinXP’s default colour scheme gives me nice bold title bars, which clearly prompt me as to what’s got focus, and what hasn’t. Office 2007 overrides this, ignoring any preferences I might have set in Windows.
Digging around the Office 2007 help, and sure enough there is a way to change it. Well, almost. Well, not quite. Actually no, there isn’t. All they give you is the option of three different colour schemes: Blue (default, pictured above), silver (which is so close to blue it might as well be the same) and black.
Black, as it happens, gives the most contrast between active and inactive title bars. But it’s not only ugly, it also totally grates against every other window under the XP colour scheme. Do I have to change my XP colour scheme to be equally ugly just so I don’t have clashing window colours? The only benefit is it appears to almost match Media Player 11.
I know MS wanted to break the mould with Office 2007, to radically change the user interface. And I kinda like the big goofy buttons. But this bloody title bar thing is very, VERY irritating.