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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Relative measures
Wed 10 Sep 2003, 04:30 PM
I look forward to Tuesdays, because on Tuesdays, the New York Times has a section called Science Times.  Science Times is always interesting, and this last Tuesday was no exception.  Amir Aczel wrote an article about celestial measurements which advocates changing from A.U., light-years, parsecs and megaparsecs to something he calls jet-years.  At roughly 600 miles an hour, a jet travels 5 1/4 million miles a year, which is a jet-year.  This is somehow easier to understand than a light-year.

In a similar vein, Ned Batchelder writes about lines of code per month.  This makes slightly less sense to me than a parsec (about 3.26 light-years).  First, I haven't the foggiest clue how many lines of code I write per month.  Second, I cannot begin to imagine why it would be a useful measurement.  We need measurements that are relative to what matters, and that are easier to understand.  Tell me how many gripes-per-week an employee voices, and I'll tell you whether that employee is destined for the front office or the front stoop.  Tell me how many meeting-shortening-ideas-per-month, and I'll tell you whether this he/she has the right stuff.  In direct programmer terms, tell me how many useless-code-cycles-per-week the programmer eliminated, how many non-obvious-comment-lines were generated, and how many previously-written-subroutines-reused-per-day the programmer has, and I'll know whether this person is who I want stranded on a desolate consulting gig with me.

What measurements would you like to know about a developer/programmer/consultant?  Don't worry about how impossible they would be to measure.  Think outside the box.

Copyright © 2003 Genii Software Ltd.

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Tabbed tables in HTML
Wed 10 Sep 2003, 12:19 AM
As I am sure many of you are aware, our Midas Rich Text LSX has evolved a lot over the past few years.  You can work with all sorts of structures in rich text on documents, as well as with rich text in design elements such as forms, image resources and such.  Nonetheless, the biggest area of growth and new usage is in HTML generation for one purpose or another.  Companies use Midas to project better HTML on their Domino websites, to export Notes content to MS Word, to migrate out of Notes entirely, or to save snap shots of Notes data for those without a Notes client.

We are constantly working to find better ways to represent Notes rich text, especially as we are more and more likely to render a form along with the document.  Domino handles tabbed tables somewhat poorly, and their approach requires that you have Domino behind the HTML to serve up the pages, but that is not an adequate solution for customers moving data out of Notes to SQL Server, or to stand alone pages, or even to Domino websites.  Therefore, we are working on ways to represent tabbed tables using CSS and JavaScript, with results such as that below.

So, the question is, would you want to use this approach, or do you have a better one?  Does it work in your browser?  Is this the best thing since sliced bread, or are we creating more chaos?  Let me know what you think.


Migration - Exchange
  • SPR# KWEL4P5QXC Scheduled for 5.0.7 (regression found in build 5.0.3)
    Fixed a problem where migrated Outlook appointments are 1 hour ahead. This problem occurs when the appointment is created when in Central Daylight Time (CDT), but the actual appointment occurs in CST. This regression was introduced in 5.0.3.

Copyright © 2003 Genii Software Ltd.

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