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Just found out that Redshift Solutions was the successful tenderer for the State Revenue Office contract. Hurray!!! It was a lengthy one (a nail-biting process really) but we’ve come through in the end and that’s what matters. Again, it demonstrates the model I’ve been following since day-one of the business, which is to give my clients an honest, reliable, professional and value-for-money experience when dealing with me.

The next couple of years promise to be very exciting (at least from a technology point of view) that will see the battle between the two ‘giants’, Microsoft .NET and IBM Websphere (although they do both believe that EVERYONE needs to have an ‘n-tier’ environment) but that’s the way it goes and another reason for skilling up in the near future.

Someone once told me that I was a ‘dialogbox maniac’ - well, not quite but I do like to experiment with the Notes client to give it a more ‘Windows’ feel (is that a bad thing?) so hence Pop-up keywords was born… and now we’re up to version 2.0!

I guess the idea is that the concept can be used with any notes document (I simply chose keywords) where the requirement is to open documents as windows, without opening the document as the whole screen. The sample database provided contains all the code (including a generic library so it can be used in any notes database), forms, views as well as some documentation to get you started. I tested on R5 but I suspect it will work on R6 too.

Download Pop-up keywords v2.0.

My 60GB IBM Deskstar Hard drive started loosing power whenever it felt like it, so I had no option but to buy a new HD today - I bought an 80GB Western Digital (you know, the ones with the 8MB buffer). I quick ‘Ghost’ from drive to drive (whilst the old one still worked) and voila, back in business. Initial impression of the WD drive are: Faster, quieter, bigger, and all that for just $145.

Saw it over at LotusGeek, that IBM has bought Aprix the popular (and Australian) web content management system for Lotus Domino. This is very interesting indeed; Why would they be investing on a pure Domino-based web content management system since they’ve been shoving WebSphere down our throats for the past year. I also wonder what it will do to other solutions like NetEnable.

Update: it has been re-branded as “Lotus Workplace Content Development”

Lotus Workplace Messaging is IBM’s “NextGen” lightweight web-based mail client. LWM runs on top of WebSphere Application Server (meaning that it’s a J2EE application and heavily uses web-services) and DB2 as the back-end database. I spent some time recently using LWM and I must admit the interface is very slick (although I thought a bit ’shallow’ in some features). Integration with Domino is pretty cool; like the ability to manage accounts using the Domino administrator client. Is it a good idea? will it take off? hmmm, time will tell…

AROS is a portable and free desktop operating system compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. I’ve had a bit of a play with the latest build and it’s incredible how similar it is to the Amiga OS. Most of the Amiga programs will run, having the advantage of running faster since AROS is not an Amiga emulator like WinUAE. However, it still has a long way to go to be a fully-featured OS like Linux or Windows - maybe one day.

We watched a DVD documentary the other day; BBC’s ‘Blue Planet’ all about the habitats of the oceans and more specifically the habitats of the deep. What on Earth are these things??? Bioluminescence, teeth like carnivores, strange behaviours, just to name a few… If you’ve never seen them, the National Oceans Office did an expedition to find and catalog those creatures; damn they’re weird!