chrisbekas.com

Now, what have I done to deserve this? I’ve been struck by chicken-pox; at my age? apparently so… anyone that had chicken-pox later in life will relate to this ordeal. But I feel fine… (apart from all those sores in my body) so it’s simply a waiting game until those stupid chickens go elsewhere I’ll be out of action for at least 7-10 days (I ain’t showing up with anything resembling the pox) but as you can imagine I’ll be on email and phone. I tell you, I feel better than I look, really!

I don’t normally write anything up about games (unless it’s Half-Life 2!) but in this case I’ll make an exception. Some of you may remember ‘Beneath a Steel Sky’, one of the last (and best) adventure games from back in 1994 (OK, so you don’t know this one, how about ‘Zac McCraken’ or ‘Escape from Monkey Island’?). Last month, Beneath a Steel Sky was released as a free download by the makers… and the good thing is you can run it on the PC even on the Pocket PC! All you need is ScummVM and the data files; that’s it. Now I finally found some use for my 128MB SD card for the PocketPC!

Now that the Mars craze is over, we have to turn our attention to something else; how about Saturn? the ringed planet does look spectacular in the telescope and Hubble recently took some snaps. Is that more impressive than Mars? you bet! (it almost looks ‘cartoonish’). And to add to the excitment, the Cassini spacecraft is on it’s way there to search for signs of life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. July 2004 is the anticipated date.

With all the hype in Java, J2EE, SOAP, XML etc etc, it’s funny how in our daily lives as developers get to do some of those ‘good old’ things with the Notes client, like exporting to Word. I had a requirement to export data from Notes documents to MS Word (no problem, done it a million times) so I pursued with this:

Call wordDocObj.Content.Find.Execute(”find this”, , , , , , , , , “replace with this” )

That’s pretty standard, however this being a Find & Replace operation, it’s limited to small strings (so forget adding a whole paragraph). So I had to resort to bookmarks on the Word document and this:

Call wordDocObj.Bookmarks(”this bookmark”).Select
Call wordDocObj.ActiveWindow.Selection.TypeText (”replace with this”)

By the way, I heard that Google turned 5 this year - happy birthday Google!

Now that IBM was kind enough to show us how to create a “Hello World” portlet, I must say looking at the whole process, that this sort of think would have taken 1 minute to create in .NET and SharePoint portal server (it looked more than a minute to build a simple portlet in Websphere Portal 4.1; is v5.0 much better?). I wonder, why are there so many steps involved?