Things have been pretty quiet here as I wind down over the Christmas period. I have, unfortunately, had to work the 3 business days between Christmas & New Year's this year. This is the first time I've worked these days for quite a while, and all that's keeping me sane is the knowledge that I have only 3 weeks (14 work days) until Tim and I head off for Lotusphere and a holiday.

Anyway, I hope everyone has had a great Christmas (or Channukah or winter solistice or winter holiday or summer holiday) and is enjoying this relaxing time of year with family, friends or at least a good book!

I expect the blogging to pick up again next week, once I start actively trying to get work finished before the big trip.

For fun, via Libby:

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Kitchen Hand, Checkout Operator, Lotus Notes Admin/Developer, IT Consultant
Four movies you could watch over and over: (well, I have over 300 DVDs, so lots) but these get a lot of runs - Dave, Outbreak, A Few Good Men, Sleepless in Seattle
Four places you’ve lived: Sydney, Boston, hmmm - wow, that's pretty lame actually - must try to improve that! (At least there are at least 6 different parts of Sydney, so that makes it a little better, right?!)
Four TV shows you love to watch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, The X-Files, Survivor
Four places you’ve been on vacation: USA, Spain, Morocco, Italy
Four websites you visit daily: smh.com.au, news.com.au, bloglines.com (57 feeds), nytimes.com
Four of your favorite foods: Chocolate, Vegemite toast, Chicken, Roast Beef
Four places you’d rather be: (right now - home!) New York, Taormina (Italy), Paris, The Maldives

Here is a round-up of the things that caught my attention in the world this year. Most of the detail has come from things I remember and looked up on internet/traditional news sources (google, smh, news.com.au, wikipedia) in order to try to get the detail correct.

I reserve the right to add things I have forgotten (indicated with an *), or which happen in the next two weeks - apparently the world doesn't really stop from the middle of Dec to the middle of Jan each year!

So, here's 2005....

...more »

Now that a few days have passed and it seems as though the violence has mostly subsided, largely through the phenomenal efforts of the police, I thought I might offer a few thoughts.

Firstly, I was, and stil am, greatly saddened by what happened at Cronulla, and afterwards at Brighton and Maroubra. I think the vicious attack on the two life guards which "started" all this was a cowardly, criminal act. However, I also think that the vigilante, racist, mob behaviour which occurred afterwards, both by the "white" mob (although there were reportedly many of other races present), and by the "Lebanese" gangs was disgraceful and made me ashamed that our country could have disintegrated to such behaviour.

On a more personal note, I think it's tragic that my friends and I have decided to cancel a Christmas lunch we had planned at Cronulla for this coming weekend, because we are worried that it might not be safe for us (or our cars) to go there. I expect the businesses in these areas will suffer over their normally lucrative Christmas period.

Much has already been said in the news, on radio, in opinion pieces and blogs about what happened, and how to apportion blame. Here is a link to a pretty good summary of where the fingers are being pointed. I tend to agree with the author, I think a combination of factors are to blame, and it will take some time before peace is felt in these areas again for people of all races.

Once final point - do I think Australians are racist? Generally, I think the answer is no. Over the last few days I have spoken to lots of people, at work, friends, family etc. Most people were disgusted by what has happened, most people noted that there were people of many races within their groups of friends and/or families, and that generally everyone gets on pretty well. Obviously there are pockets of racism within this country, as there are in every country, but I think they are overwhelmingly small groups of close-minded individuals, and not representative of the general Australian (or Sydney) population. That said, everyone was also in agreeance that these gangs of young men need to be brought into line. Hopefully the police will now be left alone to do this.

After coming back from a nice relaxing weekend in Cairns for a friends wedding, Tim and I have arrived back to find that Sydney, and more particularly my part of Sydney, is deep in the midst of a racial conflict the likes of which I never thought I would see. I grew up in the Sutherland Shire, close to Cronulla, and now live not far from Brighton Le Sans and Maroubra.

I do know that racial tensions have been growing in Sydney for quite some time. I do believe that within our society at the moment the threat of terrorism (greatly pushed by the government and media) have helped to escalate tensions which may otherwise have never simmered to boiling point. You can't have multiculturalism while at the same time pointing fingers at certain racial or religious groups as threatening. That said, while it is impossible to deny that racism exists within our society, I do believe that these riots are caused by societal misfits who are using this as a excuse to seek out trouble and that hooliganism, not racism, is the single biggest cause of this situation.

I'm not sure yet exactly what I want to say about it other than that I am horrified that quiet, sleepy little Cronulla is now caught in the grip of a racial conflict. I think I need to sleep on it to digest exactly what I want to say about what has happened, but the whole thing has saddened me greatly. I have always loved Sydney, and hope that the rogue elements of all racial groups can be brought into control legally and without further violence.

I was just about to write a comment about the nature of free speech and how it relates to blogging, after reading this posting on a Sydney Morning Herald blog. However, while I was thinking about exactly what I wanted to say I came across another entry on rival News.com.au which lists readers (or is it reader's or readers') responses to a new government initiative to improve children's literacy. What makes this highly amusing reading is that the editor has gone through the comments to provide grammar and spelling corrections. Most humourous!

While I don't profess to always get it right, and there are some words I always struggle with (I always want to spell separate as seperate for some strange reason), it is something I find extremely important, and I hate when people get common things wrong (there/their/they're), particularly when it's just laziness.

I find it even more annoying when poor spelling and lazy grammar is found within a corporate environment (see Tim's comment on the proliferation of SMS language in the workplace as an example of what I mean).

Now - feel free to criticise my spelling and grammar (although American/English differences will not be tolerated!!!!)

via Peter O'Kelly...Ajax Sucks Most of the Time (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox December 2005).

This is actually a spoof from Jakob Neilson's original article about not using Framesets. Still I guess it makes an interesting point, and will be something I consider. That said, I am still interested in learning more about AJAX and how it could be used at Lotusphere.

Obviously, I think mine is Australia's best blog, followed closely by Tim's (of course - you have to support family!), but in the interest of fairest, I guess I have to report that Smartyhost, in a very clever attempt to garner interest in their new blog hosting service, recently ran a competition to find Australia's best blog. The winner is a blog and supporting site of a girl who travels the world and records the sonic qualities of bridges the world over. Not my cup of tea, but certainly unique.

Also of note in the blogosphere is that voting is now open for the Weblog Awards 2005. While disappointed that no Domino bloggers seem to be on the list - not even Ed, I couldn't help but notice that none of Smartyhost's top ten made the nominees on the global scale.

Since Domino Designer 6, I have found that whenver I copy & paste fields from one form to another, or when I colour a field on a subform, that any colour value I set appears to be lost. Like most other people, I colour all my hidden fields (in red), in order to help easily identify them. Now, many of these fields are common fields across all my forms. Some of them are on a subform, and others exist only on the form itself.

When I add the subform to a form, or when I attempt to copy/paste these fields onto another form, the fields appear black again. Now, if you select the fields and then change the colour via the menu Text-Color-Red, sometimes this setting says it's already Red. However I still have to reselect the value Red before it shows up on the form actually red. There is nothing to be done for subform fields - they just stay black.

What an annoying thing this is! I thought no one else had noticed this, and I might be doing something wrong, but before posting this, I did a quick search on developerWorks and found this thread It appears that this is another thing termed "not a bug", but I don't buy this. Certainly in R5 you used to be able to perform this action. The explanation that a field picks up from it's surrounding paragraph doens't hold with me - if you copy an entire paragraph which is red, only the field will lose it's formatting, even though it is sitting in the middle of red text and a red paragraph. If I paste the field into a new paragraph which is already red, it still doesn't pick up the colour. It always reverts to black, and I have to reset the colour every time.

I wonder if anyone has reported this to Lotus at all to see if it can revert back to R5 behaviour - it would certainly help reduce my annoyance levels. Maybe I'll hijack a developer at Lotusphere :)

I was recently recreating a database which had a form with a dialog list containing a lookup to a "keyword" document containing a list of values. Now, I was actually rebuilding the database from another (part of a code/UNKTable clean up), and I had was surprised to find that the values in my dialog list were showing up sorted in alphabetical order. While this may have been a nice surprise, I actually wanted the values to remain in the same order as my keyword document, as it was in the original database.

Of course, I knew I must have created something slightly differently, so I started comparing the properties between the two version. It turns out that this behaviour is caused by having the value "Show multiple values as separate entries" checked in the return value column. This column was sorted "Ascending, Standard" and was the second column in the view (the first contained the dblookup key). Turning off this property returns the values exactly as in the lookup document.

Just something to beware of when performing an @Dblookup.

"JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'RE DONE, A CAT FLOATS BY WITH BUTTERED TOAST STRAPPED TO ITS BACK

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago." -- -JOHN FRAZEE, IN THE JOURNAL OF IRREPRODUCIBLE RESULTS

Aside from a disturbing observation that the presumably American author requires subtitles to watch British movies, this is an excellent summary article on web accessibility (with an amusing reference to "buttered cats". Read here....Don't Make Me Think, Second Edition: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability - WebReference.com

This morning another casualty was lost in the "war on drugs". However individuals feel about the death penalty (I am strongly opposed), surely no-one cannot feel some sympathy for Nguyen Tuong Van's family & friends as they mourn the loss of their son, brother and friend. They are now also victims of the "war on drugs". As we take time to reflect this morning, perhaps this tragic loss of life can help those in power to start looking a new methods of preventing the harms of drugs on our society. Clearly the current processes aren't working....