Carl Tyler's Blog

Category Import PDF
Back in December Peter Presnell posted a blog entry about Importing PDF files into Rich Text Fields in Notes.  It explained how you could now import PDF files into Notes, if you renamed them to .DOC.  At the time I thought, that is totally coole, but had no time to test it.  I honestly thought it was so cool that it would have had a lot more hits on PlanetLotus and others would have talked about it, but they didn't.  

Today I decided to test it, and low and behold it worked.  Then I decided I wanted it a little easier and would like a File Import Adobe PDF option right in the import dialog, versus renaming files .DOC.  Remembering that the import and export filter settings were stored in Notes.ini I made a quick change and now I had File, Import, Adobe PDF there.

To add Adobe PDF as an import option to your Notes, find your Notes.ini file.

Look for the lines that start with EDITIMP follwed by a number, and find the last one.  In my Notes.ini it was EDITIMP23=Microsoft Excel 2007,0,_IW4W,,.XLSX,,2,
Add a new line after this last EDITIMP line, and make it read EDITIMPnn=Adobe PDF,0,_IW4W,,.PDF,,2, where nn is the last EDITIMP number plus 1, so in my case the final line was:

EDITIMP24=Adobe PDF,0,_IW4W,,.PDF,,2,

This line basically tells notes to add a new import option shown as "Adobed PDF" that uses the PDF file extension, and to use the Word import filter to import it.

Once you've done that, start Notes, create a new mail, go to the rich text field and choose File Import, Adobe PDF.  

Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:28:49 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

Category QOS Setting
For the last couple of weeks, I've been wondering why my upload speed was slow, I'm paying for 1Mb and I was getting around 300k.  I plugged my PC into my backup DSL line and that was giving the advertised 768k, so how come the cable wasn't giving me 1Mb.  The sleuthing began, after unplugging various routers, conecting to the modem directly and getting the correct speed I decided it was the router.  Downloaded the latest firmware and checked it again, still 300k.  Plugged in an old spare router and that was fine, so time to check the router settings, hidden away on the QOS settings page, was an upload speed setting, it was et to 300k instead of being set to 1Mb or Auto. Changed it and the world was good again, oops.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:14:01 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Sametime Podcast
UCHear Episode 2 - A diamond in the rough, is now available at the UCHear.com website.

hosts Gabriella Davis and Carl Tyler discuss
* Sametime 8.5 Announcement
* Sametime 8.5 issues to be aware of
* Lotusphere 2010
* Sametime Telephony
* UC2Ready

Posted by Carl Tyler At 04:49:47 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Flying Safety
Hello from Alton Bay!!!


On Friday I said that this weekend was the Alton Bay Winter Festival and I was planning on flying myself, my Nephew and his friend there for a fly-in.  Just like a Lotusphere presentation I decided to do a practise run on Saturday.  So Saturday we started out heading south to Boston, where we hoped to do a scenic flight of the city, unfortunately the planes were leaving Logan directly over the city so that didn't work out.  So we fly over to IBM Westford and Littleton, and buzzed the Nashoba valley ski slopes.  From there we flew to Laconia and then across to Alton Bay.   We landed at Alton Bay and then flew straight back out to Sanford Maine, where we stopped for breakfast at the Cockpit Cafe, which is a very popular place for pilots, as you can fly-in , taxi to the restaurants door, hop out and grab a meal.  From Sanford, we left did a few pencil floating tricks in the plane, buzzed the picturesque Nubble Lighthouse and then returned to Portsmouth.  The weather Saturday was great, with visibility greater than 60 miles, no clouds and very light winds.  It wasn't warm, but it's wasn't much below freezing.  The landing on the ice was pretty uneventful, yet the ice was very slick with no snow cover whatsoever.

This is the landing and takeoff from Saturday:



Sunday was a different day, with different weather.  It was very windy, gusting up to 24 knots.  There were scatted clouds at about 3000 feet for the early part of the morning, which meant we almost decided not to go to the ice festival.  We delayed taking off for a couple of hours to let the clouds to life, which they did, so we were left with clouds at around 4500ft.  We flew direct from Portsmouth to Alton Bay, and boy was it bumpy, as the saying goes kept the plane shiny side up so all were happy, but it was turbulent.   We got into the circuit and landed the plane.  The crosswind was pretty strong, and you'll see on this next video the wind actually turned the plane into a weathervane on the ice and turned us towards the snow bank (ice would be a more correct description) I'm glad that I managed to turn the plane back to going forward the right way and had no incident.  As you can see in this picture however, someone landing after me was not as fortunate.  I am glad to say that no one in the plane was hurt.




If you watch this movie of our Sunday landing, you will see what I mean about the wind turning us towards the bank towards the end of the video.



We left Alton Bay after having some lunch and getting my brother to snap our photo on the webcam.  We had a great time.  So how icy is an ice runway?  Well, let me say this, before I took off there was a person ice skating around the taxi ramp!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 01:31:31 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Flying Ice
This weekend I will be flying myself, my visiting nephew and his friend to the Winter Festival at Alton Bay.  The Northeast Pilots Group is also having a fly-in meetup, so it should be an interesting day if the weather cooperates.  If you're sitting around Sunday with nothing better to do, you can look out for us and other planes landing on this web cam that covers Shows the runway and the parking area for the visiting planes.  We'll see if we can find the camera and give it a wave.
http://www.unionstreethosting.com/~usmedia/downloads/alton_cam.html

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:29:08 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Enhance
Enhance


a few more here

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:56:07 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category OCS Connections
I know, what kind of crazy company would have a heterogenous infrastructure with solutions from IBM and Microsoft?  Well as anyone in the real world knows, most companies have something from both vendors in one way or another.  Recently we were contacted by a company that wanted to show Microsoft OCS awareness in Lotus Connections and the option to show it in Websphere Portal.  They had what appeared to be fairly reasonable requirements, the ability to have awareness in an iWidget and the one they really wanted to see, Microsoft OCS awareness within the connections business card.  This company was kind enough to let us take what we learnt on their project and publish a couple of articles on it, which we have posted on the CodePlex open Source Project Community website, which is kind of like OpenNTF.org but for Microsoft products.  

We've documented this in two papers, which you can find http://iwidgetpresence.codeplex.com and http://ocsnamectrl.codeplex.com each paper contains links to the relevant sites the background information we needed to develop the solution.  Here are two videos showing the results of each approach in action:

OCS AJAX iWidget for IBM Websphere Portal and Lotus Connections:

Documentation and Example Source
http://iwidgetpresence.codeplex.com

Microsoft OCS Name.dll presence information within the Lotus Connections business card:

Documentation and Example Source
http://ocsnamectrl.codeplex.com

Thanks to our customer for letting us share this information!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 11:08:24 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Lotusphere
I was thinking over the weekend, with all the IT jobs supposedly moving to India, where were all the Indian Domino developers at Lotusphere?  There's definitely been a huge increase in the posts by Indians in the Notes and Sametime forums.  So where are they learning their stuff?  From the posts in the forums I think a lot of it is through the school of hard knocks, where their company has said yes we can do that, and then the poor developer gets told, hey go do this.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:15:21 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (7) |      

Category Movie Appearance
Last night I settled down to watch a satirical English movie "In the Loop" about the British Prime Minister and the US president trying to find ways to launch a war in the Middle East (as if anything like that could happen), very funny by the way, but the language isn't suitable for children and people who like Glenn Beck may not find it funny.  Anyway, in the first few minutes of the movie, I sat there thinking I know that place, that's right outside the hotel where I stayed for Collaboration University, and then I got a stronger memory, I remembered seeing some folks with cameras across the road filming people behind me one morning when I was walking to the UK Lotus User Group Meeting, which placed this recording at around September 2008, so at the end of the movie, I decided to jump back and check the shots again, and who should I see in his debut movie appearance, but...



Where are my royalties I wonder?  Can I get a Screen Actors Guild card now?

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:58:28 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (10) |      

Category Losing Customers

I honestly don't get why people attack companies when they choose to switch from one vendor to another.  If I was someone that chose to switch from Vendor A to Vendor B and the people involved with vendor A then basically called me and my colleagues idiots, I'd make a point of never ever considering Vendor A again.

Perhaps instead of castigating the switching company, we should look at the reasons why they chose to switch, and work with Vendor A to take the steps necessary to stop other customers switching. Who knows, if we're respectful of someone elses decision maybe they'll consider us again for something in the future?

Just my thoughts.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:16:38 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (7) |      

Category Lego Bricks
Our own Mr Warren Elsmore
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8493631.stm


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8497441.stm

Congrats Warren! Now grow up and do something useful

Posted by Carl Tyler At 06:02:58 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |