Rob's Blog

18/12: LOL Emoticon

On slashdot there's a reference to a patent application from Microsoft entitled "Email Emotiflags".  Talk about trying to patent the obvious.  Lotus Notes has had Mood Stamps for as long as I can remember.  Now I wonder if Mr. Ozzie could cast his mind back that far.

15/12: Credit Card Security

I got a call today from my credit card company asking whether I had tried to make a purchase at Comet for £629.99.  I couldn't think of anything offhand.  When he said it would have been today then I knew something was awry.  Somebody had tried to use my name and credit card number to buy something over the internet -- probably some new flat screen TV for Christmas or something.

Luckily for me, my credit card company had detected something wrong.  Had they used a different delivery address? Maybe the three digit security number was wrong or something?  I don't know.  Hats off to the anti-fraud systems in place at MasterCard anyway.

I don't know where they got my number from.  Unfortunately these days we tend to trust any company that sells over the internet so long as they use SSL encryption on their servers.   We don't really know how these companies treat our data once on their servers.  It could equally have been someone in a traditional shop although I rarely let it out of my sight.

My card has been cut up and cancelled and I will have a new number as from next week.  Hopefully that will be the last of it.

7/12: Domino 2.0

Today I came across Michel Van der Meiren's Blog Domino 2.0.  Over the last two months he has basically built his blog site from scratch and is blogging whilst he does it.  Very impressive and a testimony to what is possible with Domino despite its well publicised quirks.  It is all XHTML compliant and he has plenty of tips in there for mere mortals like myself.  I would recommend subscribing to his RSS Feed.  Great Blog Michel!

4/12: A Winter Poem

A winter poem dedicated to my friends, who are about to enter the season of snow and ice!!

I found this beautiful winter poem and thought that it might be a comfort to you.  It was to me and is very well written.

Enjoy!!

Winter Poem.  The best piece of English literature I've seen in quite a while.

Try to memorise this prose before Christmas.

WINTER

A poem by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre.

"SHIT,  IT'S COLD!!"

1/12: Mollio and Meebo

Yesterday I launched a new website for Inter Weavers.



A few months ago Bill mentioned Mollio and I took a look and liked what I saw.  I decided to write a simple Domino Content Management System (CMS) that allowed me to easily create Notes documents and have them displayed as web pages.  Basically Mollio is an Open Sourced Design of HTML/CSS templates.  I had intended to add my database onto OpenNTF but it's been done already!

Anyhow, I did the work at least a month ago and there were a few gremlins.  I've decided to release it (warts and all) as a way of forcing me to work on it!  It isn't rendering the same in all browsers (whereas the Mollio templates do).  I need to figure out why and get that fixed.

And Meebo.  That is a web based Instant Messaging System that Alan mentioned a while back and I thought I'd give it a try.  It will allow me to chat even when I'm using a client supplied laptop.

So now inter-weavers.com points to this new site which has a link to my blog.  Blog feeds remain the same.  In the past inter-weavers.com pointed straight to my blog.

1/12: Lotus Notes and AutoCAD

One of my clients wants a system to automate some of their AutoCAD drawing.  They do a lot of surveying and they want a system that will take the survey data that has been typed into their PDAs, validate the data, calculate some data and then draw it using AutoCAD.  Much of this is done manually at present.

I have proposed a Lotus Notes system that can use LotusScript to access the AutoCAD ActiveX classes much as you can do this with Excel or any other application that has VBA.  I have tried it and it seems to work very well.

Anyone have any experience of programming with AutoCAD?  I think that there may be plenty of other opportunities with my other clients once I have written this.  They all seem to use AutoCAD.