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False Positives Adventures in Technology, SciFi and Culture from Toronto

Friday, July 25, 2003

Lotus Notes News Reader v0.3

Lotus Notes News Reader v0.3

New release of my R5.x Lotus Notes RSS News Aggregator. Many new features and improvements. I'm finding it very usable, and useful. NNRv.3.zip

What's a RSS News Aggregator?

New Features include :

  • An About Document
  • Improved Notes UI (outline, pages, and frameset)
  • includes a link to an action to process all active feeds.

  • Moved RSS Feed processing to a Java library. first attempted using a Java library for new agents got dreaded "Can`t make static reference to method". successful using Java library (july 23).
  • Created a Agent for reading selected feeds only in the News Feed view. July 22 2003, agent now using Java Library.
  • Reduce duplicate news entries. If a feed is run twice, rather than have 2 duplicate items either update the existing entry or do not create a new document. updating is preferred, in cause they edited the item, but initially just catch it and don't save a new document for RSS 2.0 use guid field and channel title to do lookup. for other feed types use item title and channel title.
  • Changed News views to show unread marks, so now I can quickly scan for new news items
  • Parse DC:Date and PubDate fields into domino date field, (NewsItemDate). News views use this field or @Created if it's not available. (or should I use a channel date?)
  • Changed News views to sort on NewsItemDate descending, new view sorted by NewsItemDate first. even easy to scan for what's new.


So what you think? email : ian@falsepositives.com


Update Dec 22 2003 : Here's how to get to working with Lotus Notes R6.x


See More, Categories : Domino/RSS

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Napstizing the Record Companies

Robert X. Cringely writes about Son of Napster, One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change . No doubt this is going to bouncing about the Blogosphere very shortly. Key points : the technology for digital music distribution is here (indead, it old news). companies that manufactured horse drawn carriages could have tried to make automobiles illegal Question : how did hourse drawn carriages respond? Cringely idea, called "Snapster" uses Fair Use sharing, and wide share distriubution to address the legal issue and lobbing of the Music Industry and it's lackey the RIAA.

Real World Business Intelligence

Globe and Mail reports on Marketing by numbers using marketing optimization to do predictive modelling: figuring out, based on statistical data culled from operational computer systems and past marketing campaigns, which customers are likely to respond if the bank sends them an offer -- a letter and/or phone call inviting them to buy a new product such as a credit card.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

I wanted to post this story, from a year ago, in light of my Lotus Notes News Reader (the next interation is comming all nicely thanks).

Monday, July 21, 2003

Lotus Notes News Reader v0.2

This is an early draft of a R5.x Lotus Notes RSS News Aggregators.

See "What is RSS", for more detail, but the short answer is that Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based format for content distribution, containing recent or changed items from a website.

I've included several example feed url's. Add your own Feeds, make them active and go. I've built it to handle RSS formats 0.91, 0.92, 2.0 and 1.0 (sometimes know as RDF). More detailed help, new features to follow. Given the growing number of Lotus Notes Domino weblogs (blogs), I thought it was over due time to have a a tool to read those, and other sources, in Lotus Notes as well. By all means email me with suggestions, feedback, etc....enjoy! NNRv.2.zip

A Note about RSS feeds...On many websites, and blogs the xml feed is identified with this a xml gif such as . for example Infoworld point to several feed on their home page this way :
Web Services  The Notes News Reader need the url under the tiny xml gif : http://www.infoworld.com/rss/webservices.rdf, which is a RDF or RSS 1.0 feed.

update >> Lotus Notes News Reader v0.3 is the one you want.

Friday, July 18, 2003

Building Accessible Websites

Joe Clark, Toronto accessibility consultant and journalist, has posted the text of his book of the same name : Building Accessible Websites on line. Based on a quick look over, it is a well written and useful tome. I know the chapter on Colourblindness explicated will be on my reading list. I hope to add this on my book self.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

More UberGeek

They gone and done it again...Are you Tired og your OLD toast?, Also totally topical wall paper...it's Hairy Blogger and the Revolving Matrix

2 Down, One More Bad Fish To Go

As reported on the BBC news site : Finance Secretary Antony Leung said he was quitting ... just hours after security chief Regina Ip handed in her notice. (As Conrad at Gweilo Diaries put it "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead"). Now to get Fish Face (or is it Rabit Face? ).

Saturday, July 12, 2003

IP SANS

infoworld column on STORAGE INSIDER that IP SANs are coming of age. Another step towards high quality, standards based (ethernet rules!) entreprise. ...storage management activities won't affect running applications... a centralized asset rather than a discrete resource on each server...management software that provides more flexibility ...

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Mango Cheesecake Heaven

Must report on Elicia's delicious cheesecake, made for Jaclyn and family before she's off to Texas and her Husband to be.

Based on the happy sounds it may be addictive. Can I have some More, please?

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

And the Gold goes to Vancouver

A very nice post Canada Day present: 1) Vancouver will play host to the world in the winter of 2010., which will drive a lot of tourism, infrastructure and prosperity is VanCity for the next 7 years, plus 2)Toronto is off WHO's SARS list, which means we can cautiously rebuild our tour and culture industries.

Alright lets start planning for Toronto's 2020 Olympic games! (Which seems to be the only way that we can get the Province and the Fed's to pay any positive attention to T.O.).