Ok, so this is my first attempt at creating a background image for my PC. Normally I just browse around deviantArt until I find something that strikes my fancy. The stipled background is from an icon package I downloaded at some point in time called Black Gloss DA. As for the apple logo, I took a black image with a white apple logo in it and then just modified the apple icon part of that image. But for a first try I don't think I did too bad.

I've been messing with Date/Times here a lot lately and it's behaviour is rather inconsistent to say the least, especially NotesDateTime.LSLocalTime Sometimes it returns 06/18/2009 01:00:00 PM, other times it returns 6/18/2009 1:00:00 PM. I was wanting to use the Date/Time to do a lookup in a view, but due to the inconsistenc of LSLocalTime I've resorted to converting the Date/Time to a double and using that instead. This behaves much more reliably as you get the same number no matter what. What gave me this idea was this post over on Tim Tripcony 's site which is a rather interesting post and a nice shorthand way of handling date adjustments.

But sometimes I just get frustrated with the way Notes handles Date/Times.

I don't recall where I got these from, but they sure are handy. In Mac OSX, you can define a Folder Action script which will run anytime a file is added to that folder. Since I mess with Notes and we all know that it won't accept PNG images, we have to convert them to GIF or JPG. So after starting to make an Automator script to do this (This one is from Apple Inc.), I found an AppleScript that you enter as a folder action that will do your conversion for you and save a copy of the original image, pretty cool. You can find it in the Downloads menu over there on the left.

Another folder script that I created using the Automator scales an image. I guess you could ask what size to scale it to, but I've got it hard coded in the script. But this also works very well.

I hope you find these as useful and that they save you as much time as they save me.

The other day while looking for a Mind Manager replacement I stumbled across XMind. This is an Eclipse based application that has all the features I frequently used in Mind Manager. I had tried using Mind Meister but I just couldn't get past the way you modify your mind map, it just took too long.

But the feature set for XMind is great, it includes many features that you only find in the "pay for" apps. Best of all it's Open Source. Some of the features I've found most useful in starting to migrate to XMind are:

• Import of Mindjet Mind Manager maps, among others
• Using the "Summary" connector - This allows you to group entries with a "}" and add some text to it
• Double-Clicking a connection gives you a text box to provide a description of the connection
• The User Interface is great and easy to use
• Maps are defined as work books which you can add multiple sheets to
• Easy to add custom graphics
• Attach any type of file to the workbook
• It's easy to customize the look and feel of your map
• Floating topics with their own style

Now I know you're saying that this isn't anything new really, and you're probably right. But to find something of this calibur that runs natively on Mac OSX thats also Open Source, to me that's a big deal. But I got to looking and there are versions that run on virtually every operating system out there. But my mind wanders and starts to imagine that since this is Eclipse based, could it possibly be included as a Composite app within Lotus Notes? That may be something that is doable, but I just don't have the time at the moment to investigate it, but I think could be something pretty cool.

My overall impression of XMind is a good one, it's Eclipse based, has a great UI, a rich feature set and is Open Source. So check it out, it's a good tool that fits the bill for a Mind Manager.

I'm currently working on a very large project that involves re-writing a bunch of apps that are part of a suite of applications and this suite is being used at multiple sites. These applications were written in the early 90s I assume, probably version 4.5? But this thing is full of hard coded references to many of the other databases and hardly any of the code is reusable in any way. Also, there are little pieces of code that reach out to these various databases from the various databases. So you may change something in one app and break god knows what in another app. Also, coding practices within these apps are very poor. For example, a variable is set to the value of another variable that got it's value from another variable which got it's value from a field in another database and so on. To say the least, this whole thing has been nothing but a mess, a rather big mess at that.

But the team I'm on developed a brand new version of one of the applications because that would be faster and more cost efficient than fixing all the hard coding. The old app had some of the design elements that are based on the data within the app, so if the data changes the design has to change. But this new app we developed had a more modern user interface, more features and if data changed the design didn't have to change. Nothing was hard coded and it is very configurable to operate the way the customer wants it to operate. We deployed this app and it has been being used for a few months now, which of course has a few months worth of new data in it.

Fast forward to today, the customer now wants to roll back to the app that we didn't remove the hard coding from, change the design elements to match the new data and change the hard coding to still be hard coded but work for the current site. This decision is based on the behaviour of one button and one feature. These are things that can be changed rather easily. I've never experienced a customer wanting to go back to a design that's impossible to maintain, performs poorly and by today's UI standards is butt ugly. They're going to end up paying twice as much as it would cost to just fix the few issues they have with the new version, not to mention the fact that they already paid for the new app which is now being trashed. Also by doing this, the other apps that interact with the new app will now be broken and have to be fixed, it's a rather nuclear reaction that results from this decision.

But what I really don't understand is, from a business point of view, why a decision like this would be made? I assume they've already paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars on this project (salary for a team of 4 developers, 2 project managers, among others for the past 8 months) and are getting ready to dump even more money into it by making the decision to go back. I'm just dumbfounded as to the reasoning behind this. We probably could have re-written the entire suite with this much man power and time for much less money. I may be wrong for posting this rant, but I'm hoping someone can provide me some of the reasoning that I'm obviously missing.

On another note, I'm currently working on a new Open Source project in my spare time, as code starts to come out for it I will post more about it. But for now, I'm going to keep it under wraps at least until I have a workable demo to highlight the initial idea. So, stay tuned for a useful (I hope) freebie in the near (again, I hope) future.