If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck...

I don't remember who first recommended Go Fug Yourself - maybe Duff. Whoever it was, thank you! It's provided a sorely-needed chuckle (and sometimes an outright snort-guffaw combination) every day.

Today's was particularly amusing... if Ms. Love's lips get any bigger, she's going to need to join the quacker's club with Melanie Griffith.

Programming in Klingon :o)

Last week, Rich had a Klingon horoscope posting; ever since then I keep accidentally running across more Star Trek references. Just found this one: a programming language based on Klingon. So now you can be a geek twice over... :o)

Domino hosting

I'm involved with Basset rescue. Here's why. I'm looking at putting together a simple web app that would allow people in the community to enter fundraising information. That's easy enough to do. How do I host it, though? I have a Domino server at home, and a broadband connection - is it possible to host it myself? What do I need to do to make my server accessible to the world? And do I want to?

If not, can anyone recommend a very low-cost hosting company? I don't need dedicated hosting; I just want to be able to attach a domain name to the site and be able to maintain the database. I've done the obligatory Google search and come up with a lot of companies, but would like to hear good things about a company from someone who's worked with them, since this is a non-commercial endeavor and I don't really have any kind of budget.

Show-n-tell Thursday: highlighting web view rows on mouseover

This tip is actually a solution I posted on Notes.net... er, LDD, uh - developerWorks Forums... whatever. Someone was looking for a way to highlight rows in a web view as the user was mousing over them. Although I started out as a web developer, I've spent the past 5 years working primarily on client apps, so I occasionally try to answer questions like that just to refresh my memory.

Create your view and set it to treat contents as HTML. Don't bother trying to concatenate all of your content into a single column; just create individual columns, each using td tags around the content.

The first column of the view should just be this:

"<tr onMouseOver=\"TrowOn(this,'#ffffcc');\"
onMouseOut=\"TrowOff(this,'#DFDFDF');\">"

Then create all your columns, creating links inside td tags. Your final column is just a closing tr tag.

Then, in the JS Header of your viewtemplatedefault, add these functions:

function TrowOn(src,OnColor){
src.bgColor = OnColor;
}

function TrowOff(src,OffColor){
src.bgColor = OffColor;
}

This will handle the mouseover row color changes. Obviously you can adjust the hex values passed into the function in the view tr tags to get the colors you want.
Show-n-tell Thursday

Show-n-Tell Thursday - viewing SnTT posts

I've only recently started using Technorati, so maybe everyone else already knows this, but... if you set up a watch list in Technorati for Show-n-tell Thursday, you can view the list as RSS. In other words, no need to search for Show-n-tell Thursday posts at multiple blogs, or even go to Technorati to look them up. They'll be delivered right to your RSS reader.

Show-n-tell Thursday

Show-n-tell Thursday - date entry formatting on the web

Just a quick way to validate date formatting on the web using regular expressions...

function checkDates() {
missinginfo = "";
re = /^([0-9]{1,2}\/){2}[0-9]{4}$/
if (re.test(document.ReportDates.strStartDate.value)){
}
else{
missinginfo += "\n - Start Date";
}
if (re.test(document.ReportDates.strEndDate.value)){
}
else{
missinginfo += "\n - End Date";
}
if (missinginfo != "") {
missinginfo ="______________________________________________________\n" +
"Please edit the following fields to use the xx/xx/xxxx date format:\n" +
missinginfo + "\n______________________________________________________";
alert(missinginfo);
return false;
}
else return true;
}

Show-n-tell Thursday

Defining career goals

So the time is coming up for our annual reviews, and I'm dreading it. Not because my performance is below-par, but because I'll have to fill out the self-review form - specifically, the career goals section.

In five years with this company, I've never figured out exactly how to answer the question of, "what are your goals for the next 12 months, and what kind of training is necessary to achieve them?" When I was in consulting, I could say I wanted to learn a new technology, and my manager would look at it and say, "Well, we have a new client who uses that technology", or "So-and-so is an expert in that technology - you can be a junior on her team for this project and learn it." But working in-house, how do I answer this question? If I say I want to learn a new technology, there's always the question of why. My company has very specific uses for Notes/Domino, and saying I want to learn AJAX because it can do cool things for our web databases doesn't fly, since we don't have many web-enabled databases. And if I were to say I wanted to learn a completely unrelated technology, like Ruby, the assumption would be that I was looking for a new job, and the company is certainly not going to pay to train me in a technology I can't use for their benefit.