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Nathan T. Freeman just posted a very interesting article on XPages Performance.

Highly recommend you check it out.

http://nathantfreeman.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/xpages-performance-pro-tips/

I figured I’d blog this just to make it easier to tell the story..

So last night my family and I went over to by brothers for dinner. Near the end of the evening I ended up twisting my ankle pretty bad. This sent a jolt through me which made me dizzy and nauseous. After sitting for a couple minutes I decided to head over to the kitchen to get a little water. I remember cupping my hands under the sick to get water. Next thing I knew I was on the floor. My head was in my wifes lap people were staring at me and there was a pool of blood next to me.

Apparently I passed out while at the sink. When I hit the floor I cut my chin pretty bad. An ambulance was called and got me to the hospital. X-Rays of ankle.. CAT scan of head… blood tests. Heart tests… Maybe some other stuff.. not sure.. 8 stitches to close my 2 inch cut. Kinda felt like a hockey player that lost a fight against Dave Shultz really. 🙂

I guess there’s some kind of vasavagal nerve in the body. When it gets stressed it cuts off blood to the brain. This is what causes some people to pass out from the site of blood. While I don’t have that problem in my case it seems that if I get a quick / sharp pain… This nerve is going to take me down. This happened twice before – where I got quick really bad injuries though I didn’t pass out those times probably because I didn’t try to get up so soon as I did last night. I guess standing with that kind of lightheadedness doesn’t go well together.

Here’s an interesting article on this nerve. Again – I don’t pass out from blood at least I don’t think so. Just quick intense pain I guess. Weird….

Anyway – I’m still a bit shaken up but doing much better then last night.

I noticed something at Lotusphere. There was a hearing impaired person in many of the XPages sessions. She was clearly starting to learn XPages. She had two translators who would switch off during the sessions. While it was amazing to watch I found myself wondering if she knew about NotesIn9 and if she was even able to make use of the videos. So I did the only thing I could think of… I asked her. Her name is Carolyn and she was very nice. The first bad news is that she did not know of NotesIn9. That’s a marketing problem I’m working on. The other problem is that she probably can’t make much use of the videos without some kind of sub-titles in them. That’s not something I ever thought about before. When I started asking about subtitles to my friends, some of them, like Serdar, thought it would also be really good for people where English is not a first language. Others seemed to echo this. It seems that for people in other countries it’s easier to read English then hear it. Another revelation that I never considered.

So it seems to me that there’s a potential demand for adding sub-titles to the show. I really have no idea how to add sub-titles to the video feed either for Youtube, or my hosted stuff which is on the website or available via iTunes/RSS for downloading. So I’d need to investigate that. Not sure what happens if the sub-titles conceal pieces of the screen…

Regarding generating the sub titles I THINK there are three ways to do it.
1. There’s a service that does this for $1 per minute. I would certainly try this for a couple of shows, but to do it for every show might get too expensive. I think NotesIn9 is closing in on 7 hours of material….
2. I could try to create subtitles that weren’t a complete translation – but maybe a shortened outline.. not sure the value in that.
3. MAYBE I could find a volunteer to do a fuller translation…

While I’m NOT promising to add subtitles to every show, I am promising to investigate the feasibility.

So my question to anyone who might care is this:

How valuable would adding subtitles be in helping you learn XPages from the NotesIn9 shows?

Any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I submitted an XPages Jumpstart with Mike McGarel and another session on XPages and Dojo with Paul Withers.

Ok so I got shut out this year. I’m bummed but I’ll get over it.

But rather then getting too bummed about it, I think I’ll take the time and try and get some more NotesIn9’s out before the conference and hopefully even be able to make some improvements to my site(s). Maybe there will be another surprise as well. 🙂

Did you also submit a session that got rejected? Then let me suggest this. Publish the material anyway! Either on a blog, or wiki article, or even forum post. Heck – if you are interested in screencasting then please contact me about doing your material for NotesIn9. No it doesn’t have to be XPages specific! I’d be interested in talking to you.

The point is you have material to share. Just because there wasn’t a slot available at Lotusphere doesn’t mean you still can’t present it.

I did a show on integrating Woopra analytics into your XPages applications back in episode 20. However it appears that back in May I messed something up and actually broke the link. So it’s not been available for some time. I’ve now fixed the link to the video of the show. It can be found:

http://notesin9.com/index.php/2010/11/09/notesin9-020-adding-woopra-analytics-to-xpages-apps/

Sorry about that.

This week saw 4 new NotesIn9 shows added the the collective XPages learning material. 2 regular shows, 2 Extended Editions and one new guest contributor!

NotesIn9 029: Combine URL Parameters with Excel Exporting
NotesIn9: 030 – Formatting Numbers in XPages
NotesIn9: EE 008 – XPages: One Man’s Journey
NotesIn9: EE 009 – Using Java HashMaps and TreeMaps with XPages

I had fully planned to publish another show today – to round out “NotesIn9” week. But it’s Friday… Harry Potter is out now and no one cares. 🙂

So I think I’ll save this for next week I think. I also have 2 NEW guest contributors about to come on so I’m considering another 4 shows next week. We’ll see how it goes. I do wonder if 4-5 in 1 week is too much.

As always, I really hope all this stuff helps and I thank everyone for their comments, feedback and interest in the show!

I just wanted to take a minute to say how absolutely impressed I am with IBM about a couple of things.

First, and this was covered in detail on The XCast podcast, but they really did a great job of responding to the community regarding the XPages forum. We asked… ok for some of us, myself included, I think “demanded” would be the more appropriate word. And they delivered. They’re not finished with that but they moved very quickly on working with the community in an unprecedented manner.

The next thing they did is a little more personal.

You see I’m a member of one of the Notes Design Partner program. As such I’ve signed an NDA which means I can run early Beta’s but must not divulge anything inappropriate. That means that I can’t run the beta code in my home environment because of the NotesIn9 screencast. But what do you do when you get to a point where the Beta has such an important feature that you don’t want to go back to 8.5.2? It has something that you’ve always wanted, started using, and now can’t live without? Well here’s what I did:

1.) I emailed a contact at IBM asking if it was ok for me to use the beta code in NotesIn9 as long as it’s a disclaimer. There was a similar arrangement pre 8.5.1.

2.) I hear back – Same day mind you, that sure- it’s not a problem. Yay!

3.) But hold the phone! I then hear that there was a misunderstanding and that technically it’s not ready until the NEXT code drop. 🙁 But wait. What they will do for me is create a waiver so I don’t have to wait and can continue with the CURRENT software.

How awesome is that?!?! Seriously. IBM is this HUGE company and sure, they’re not perfect – I still have never gotten my Lotusphere evaluations… but in at least these 2 cases they’ve gone out of their way to be accommodating to community requests. I could also mention the fact that they’ve been supplying the LUGS with printed XPagesCheatSheets as another big win.

Do other companies respond to their communites like this? I have no idea but I’m very glad IBM is really taking to heart the whole “Be Social. Do Business” thing. Thanks IBM!

What’s this killer feature I’m so interested in? You’ll have to wait for the next NotesIn9 for that!

🙂

I got this in my email, but as much as I like, I can’t really advice this person as I myself don’t know that much about integrating XPages and a relational database, which I assume Postgres is.

So I thought I’d through this out to see of anyone had any thoughts on this.

===============
Dear David,

I am very new to Lotus notes 8.5.2 and I am trying to learn programming in lotus notes Xpages.

I have to develop a meeting room reservation system using calendar and mail user list of Lotus Notes as the GUI and then save the data in the postgres database.

Can you tell me that is possible to mix read/write the Lotus notes mail and calendar DB with Postgres DB in XPages.

The reason for doing this is, that we have the reservation system online already but we would like to encourage our users to use Lotus notes more and migrate the application within Lotus Notes some how.

I am very grate full for your time in advanced.

I am blessed in life by being married to my lovely wife Becky. She’s my best friend and I’m very proud of her.

She’s extremely creative and rather tenacious when she get’s an idea.

I’m hopeful that one day I’ll figure out how to use her powers for the good or all mankind.

🙂

Love ya sweetie!!

A little while ago I was looking at my MacBook Pro, which is a 15 inch 1680×1050 Anti-Glare with a 500GB 7200 Hard drive and got the itch to tweak it out a little bit. I really wanted to try an SSD drive which I’ve heard so much about…..

Ok that’s a TOTAL lie… What really happened is that my wife needed a new desktop, and when I spec’d it out I made sure she had an SSD drive for the OS. I thought I could handle her having one and not me. TOTAL FAIL!

So I sprung for a SSD drive for my laptop. Actually I splurged and got one of the bigger “affordable” ones which is a 240GB Mercury drive from macsales.com. I told myself it had to be that big because I really wanted 2 of my notes VM’s to be on the SSD drive, but I KNEW that I couldn’t live with only a 240 GB hard drive. So rather then carrying an external USB drive with me – I had to sacrifice the optical drive and go for two hard drives – moving my original to the space where the optical was. Conveniently, macsales.com sells a special bracket to do just that.

Let me tell you. The hardware moves were EASY. Macsales had high quality videos show everything you needed to see.

What was difficult to me, was actually the OS. It seems on the Mac, if you want to install to a SSD in the boot drive, you better have a 10.6.4 OS disc. Earlier versions would not install in the boot drive. I ended up putting the SSD into my mac Pro and installed and updated it there. Was quite a pain actually. But it did work.

Am I happy with all this and the SSD?

Unbelievably so! I like that I can start a full Windows 7 VM in like 12 seconds. The mac apps are all but instant. It’s just a beautiful thing. And I ended up with more disc space then I started with. Do I miss the optical? Not really. I rarely use it. And even if i did get an install disc it’s easy to convert it to a DMG file.

So I truly think I’ve extended the life of my laptop until at LEAST Apple’s next refresh of the MacBook Pro line.

🙂