My Portal Project

How much caffeine?
- A cup of drip brewed coffee has about 115 mg
- An espresso (and percolated coffee) about 80mg
- Instant coffee has about 65mg
- Decaffeinated coffee has about 3mg
- Coca-Cola has 23mg
- Pepsi Cola 25mg
- Mountain Dew 37mg
- TAB 31mg
- Tea has about 40mg
- An ounce of chocolate contains about 20mg

With more than 25 million people employed in the industry, coffee is second only to oil in world trade. (No blood for coffee?)

4 out of 5 Americans drink it , consuming more than 400 million cups a day. Consumption in Scandinavian countries is more than 12kg (26lb) per capita.

So after two weeks of learning Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and converting basic RPC methods to real SOAP web services, I got a chance to load up Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2003 and create some basic web apps, and I have only one thing to say: holy shit is it easy!!

It came at a good time too, since I have become tired of how little IBM has done to make Domino a better web platform. Let’s face it, with all the work needed to get around its limitiations, we might as well be using tools that create apps from scratch. I know Domino has its place in IBM’s eyes, but I cannot help but wonder where it would be if any other company had the product. I have held back the criticisms over the years since I left ISSL, but I am glad that I have found another rapid development tool that reminds me of how much fun it used to be.

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The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was declared in 1777 by the Continental Congress. However, this was not an annual event. Today, our Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November. This was set by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941), who changed it from Abraham Lincoln’s designation as the last Thursday in November (which could occasionally end up being the fifth Thursday and hence too close to Christmas for businesses.)

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Some noticed that my Buffalo Snow Meter was not calculating the “Last Cache” date properly, it had been showing 11/35/2005, which we know is fubar. Ends up that my parsing failed miserably when NOAA added actual accumulation numbers. My bad, code adjusted. Still cold and snowy.

Finally GOT IT!! As is the case with most catastrophes there was more than one cause. In a nutshell, I had some conflicting namespaces (which I now know are ultra sensitive to things like conflicts), and I finally learned how to return arrays of complex data types.

First, Thank goodness I had access to Google’s Web Services API, which had a great WSDL file and a sample request with the sample response. It was only through their example was I able to get this done. I never realized how much crap there is on the Internet until I tried doing this WSDL project. Everyone has advice about simple data types and the occasional array of scalar variables, but nothing on arrays of complex data types. So here it goes, manual WSDL creation for Dummies with Domino.

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In September 1752 the Julian calendar was replaced with the Gregorian calendar in Great Britain and its American colonies. The Julian calendar was 11 days behind the Gregorian calendar, so 14 September got to follow 2 September on the day of the change. The result was that between 3 and 13 September, absolutely nothing happened!

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I think I have officially bitten off more than I can chew. I am trying to convert a simple URL-triggered agent that returns XML into a real SOAP web service in Domino R6. I am almost positive that the data I am returning is in the proper format, but I cannot seem to get the WSDL file to match up with the output.

I am using a very cool Web Service testing tool called .NET WebService Studio which evaluates my WSDL file, and prompts me for the proper parameters to make the call. It makes the call and returns the data to client which formats the response in the format that the WSDL tells it to. This is where I am near my breaking point. The SOAP client seems to have an issue with casting the data it receives into the format/class that I define in my WSDL. SO I am going to walk myself through this to see if I spot any patterns and any help would be appreciated.

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So a recent request about sending mail from other applications prompted me to write a quick and dirty LotusScript agent that could send an e-mail from an XML request. This was enough to get the developers going but it also opened up the dialog about standardizing XML calls around the organization. The method that I employed in my example was a bastardized version of XML-RPC with a little bit of SOAP mixed in, but now we are going to make these calls full fledged SOAP calls and we will do it on Domino R6.

I mention this because R7 now has some new classes to make SOAP design alot easier, but our company is not that hot and heavy for R7 and we are unlikely to see any upgrade in the next year. Our admins will need to see R7 get past the Rx.uhOh verion before moving.

Too be honest, my SOAP kung-fu is not strong enough to speak authoritatively on the topic, so these next few weeks are going to be a learning experience for me. If any of you lurkers (I know you are there) see me stating something wrongly, please step in and put me right.

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On 5 October 1960 an early-warning system warned the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) of a massive Soviet nuclear missile strike approaching the United States. What happened is that a fault in a computer system had removed two zeros from the radar’s ranging components, detecting the missile attack at 4 000km (2,500 miles) away. The radar was actually detecting a reflection from the moon, located 400 000km (250,000 miles) away.

On 3 June 1980 a massive Soviet missile attack was again registered by computers. 100 nuclear-armed B-52s were immediately put on alert. A computer fault was detected in time, but three days later the same error occurred and again the bombers were put on alert. The problem was later traced to the failure of an integrated circuit in a computer, which was producing random digits representing the number of missiles detected.

On 10 January 1984, Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, recorded a message that one of its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles was about to launch from its silo due to a computer malfunction. To prevent the possible launch, an armoured car was parked on top of the silo.

So I had a few requests recently on how to send a mail, via Notes, from Visual Basic. I responded with the typical answer for developers to use the Notes COM interface, with the option to use the LDAP service for directory information. The problems with the COM interface are that it is Win32 only, and it requires a local Notes install. This would not be a problem if the messages always came from a workstation VB app, but as more and more apps are placed on the server the additional install is less attractive. So I got to work on an XML based solution for both sending messages and retrieving directory information.

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