Author: David Leedy

Categories
Community

NotesIn9 and Blog publishing plans for Tim’s material

I guess I just wanted to give everyone a heads up on my current thoughts on publishing material that I have from Tim.

I have 2 emails filled with “Tim Info” that I want to publish and just get it out there.  1 is pretty old but the other was forwarded to me last week and I think was from that past Thursday.  Both have some really good information that deserves to be more widely available I think.

I also have 2 videos from Tim.  One from a couple weeks ago on using OAuth.  Another small one from a couple months ago that I just totally missed and forgot about.

There’s also a video from a while ago that was intended for NotesIn9 but I think I was on vacation that week and he just got impatient and put it up on his YouTube Channel.  I pretty much intend to republish that inside NotesIn9 so try and get it more visibility.

Anyway – that’s my thoughts.  My current intention is to get all this out as soon as possible.

 

 

 

Categories
Community

This one time at the Eastern PA Meetup and XMage Memorial…

Last night a memorial get together was held in honor of our friend, Tim “XMage” Tripcony.  We met at the Allentown Brewhouse which did seem like a pretty nice place.  It kinda reminded me of the Big River Grill at Disney where we always meet for BALD the day before Lotusphere starts.  So very fitting.

Jesse Gallagher, Chris Toohey and I wanted to have some kind of get together to raise a glass to Tim and share some stories and I think it worked out very well.

It was great to see old friends, Rob and Jim, and make new ones in Dave and Dennis. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Good enough that we might try to do another meetup in the area sometime in the future.

Here’s a couple pics from the event.

photo 1 photo 3 photo 4

 

Categories
Community

Tim Tripcony – Rest in Peace my friend

I really don’t remember all the details of how I met Tim “XMage” Tripcony, but from early on he was always kind to me and a friend of my NotesIn9 screencast.

I remember talking to him probably via email and/or Sametime about a blog post he made on “Fancy Typeahead”. I thought it was brilliant and as like many things Tim was involved with, no one had ever done that before in XPages. I eventually pretty much stole that entire post (with his blessing) and turned it into Episode 24. http://notesin9.com/index.php/2011/02/11/notesin9-24-fancy-type-ahead-in-xpages/

I’m not sure but I THINK I first met Tim in person at the Lotusphere 2010 Opening Party. This was now my second Lotusphere. I was doing NotesIn9 by then so I started to talk to people in the community but I really didn’t know many people “in person”. Just from online chats and stuff really. The original “XPages Blog” brought a lot of people together I think.

I did meet some people in person for the first time at BALD. Declan Lynch was one of them as I was presenting with him that year. I remember bumping into someone from BALD at the Sunday night party as I wandered around aimlessly and they told me not to move as “Tim was looking for me”. Sure Tim and I had communicated by then a little bit for him to actively try and look for me was something else. Made me feel very special and included. I’ll always remember the blogger photo from Lotusphere that year where this popular genius of the community ,who was also the nicest guy you could ever hope to find, chose to stand with me.

I remember Tim pinging me on Skype one day.  He said Nathan, who I never spoke to before, wanted to talk to me.  I said to Tim:  “Oh Crap! Nathan wants to cancel NotesIn9 because I’m doing it all wrong!”.  Tim assured me that wasn’t the case.

I remember on a business trip to Atlanta arranging to meet Tim for dinner.  We went to this really good BBQ place called Foxboro I think and just sat and talked for hours.  It was great.

I remember thinking of him as the “Mr. Spock” of our community.  Tim was completely brilliant.  And where Spock would say “fascinating” Tim would say “Indeed”.

Tim was the SWAT team of the XPages world.  You get stuck on something then you ask someone.  If no one else knows THEN you called Tim.  Tim always happily answered.  Which didn’t mean you understood the solution all the time. but he tried explaining it.  I remember him coming over to my room in Lotusphere one time.  I was really stuck on something…  I don’t remember what.  Tim sat and looked at my stuff and I think gave me a couple ways to proceed.  One of them I understood.

When I would describe Tim to someone I would always bring up a reference to Star Trek IV.  I’d say talking to Tim is like talking Scotty.  It’s like talking to someone from the future and he has the formula to Transparent Aluminum. I think Tim got a kick out of that one.

Tim was actually my best contributor to NotesIn9.  He love to share.  He came on for 8 shows that totaled over 3 and a half hours.  I’ll put links to those shows at the end of this post.  I have 2 more unpublished shows from Tim.  One I knew about and another one that I just completely missed. I’d forgotten all about it. That one seems extra special to me now for some reason.  I’m going to try and publish both next week.  I swear on the bigger show from just a couple weeks ago he seemed “giddy” when going through the code.

I’m a better person for knowing Tim Tripcony. He was an inspiration, a personal hero, and a friend.

 

Tim contributed to these NotesIn9 shows: (2 more coming)

http://notesin9.com/index.php/2012/02/28/notesin9-048-applying-themes-to-form-tables/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2012/03/29/notesin9-063-creating-an-in-view-edit-custom-control/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2012/04/04/notesin9-064-global-custom-controls-fixed/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2013/11/01/notesin9-130-using-xpages-type-ahead-for-navigation/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2014/01/13/notesin9-133-using-java-in-xpages-part-2/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2014/01/14/notesin9-134-using-java-with-xpages-part-3/
http://notesin9.com/index.php/2014/01/16/notesin9-135-using-java-in-xpages-part4/

 

 

 

 

Categories
Community

VENUE CHANGE: Eastern PA Meetup and Tim Tripcony Memorial

I’ve gotten a great response to this!  I believe we’re up to 11 people that are likely.  Amazing!

But the initial plan needs to change. Apparently some of the local colleges graduate that day and the Bethlehem location was booked.  So we’re going to try and move it to their Allentown location.

http://www.thebrewworks.com/allentown-brewworks/

This isn’t really a “room” or anything.  It’s basically reservations for 5:00pm.  I’ve never been there so I don’t know what to expect. I assume there’s a bar if you get there early.  I’m sure I’ll be there a little earlier.

This is low key! The same as Tim or any other LUG type event.  No real “agenda”. We’ll hang… chat… morn, commiserate…  explore the future maybe.  Just basically a meet and be social as in “real world social”.

 

Please let me know if you have any questions.  And if you’re planning on coming and haven’t let me know yet please do!

 

Thanks!

 

Dave

Categories
Community

Announcing the Eastern PA Meetup and XMage Memorial

As much as I would like to, I’m unable to get to Tim Tripcony’s actual memorial with his family and friends in the Atlanta area. But here’s the thing, Tim has friends all over the world. So here’s what I’m going to do:

This Sunday evening, May 18th, starting at 5:30ish in the Bethlehem Pa area,  I’ll be getting together with Chris Toohey and Jesse Gallagher. We’re going to toast our friend*, maybe tell a story or 2 and then probably talk some XPages and whatever.

We’d like to invite anyone to join us for a very informal low-key event.  If we get enough interest one of the topics will be if we want to try and meet again for a more formal-ish “XPages and Beer” type learning event.

I feel that the best way to honor our friend is to continue to practice what he did every single day:

Learn. Code. Share

Again this is open to all whether you knew Tim personally, read his blog, or are just interested in talking XPages with like minded people.

If you are wanting to attend, please let me know ASAP – (dleedy @ notesin9)  so I can try and get a count for the possible venue – most likely at:  http://www.thebrewworks.com/bethlehem-brew-works/.  If you can’t make it on Sunday but are interested in a possible future event please let me know that as well.

UPDATE: Venue Changed to: http://www.thebrewworks.com/allentown-brewworks/

Thanks

* I personally will not be toasting with a White Russian simply because I don’t know how to drink “big boy” drinks and also don’t like coffee.  🙂

Categories
Community

Tim Tripcony

This weekend I was working on a NotesIn9 from Tim Tripcony that I’ve been sitting on for a couple of weeks. I pinged him on Skype this morning to ask a question. I was literally just about to start rendering the video when I got word that he has passed away.

Here’s the linked in post from Scott Hooks

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140512170336-24024491-tim-tripcony-you-will-live-on-in-our-hearts

Tim was my friend.  My heart breaks over this news.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.

I want to be more eloquent but simply can’t.  I can barely breath.

I would like to put this idea out…  if anyone wants to send me any audio stories or memories of Tim, I’d like to put them together and publish them. just email me: dleedy @ notesin9

Here is one of my few pictures of the two of us.  It’s also my favorite.  Taken from the 2010 blogger photo.  Tim standing next to my putting his chin on my shoulder.

Tim1

 

Categories
XPages

The Great XPages Mystery Solved.

Disclaimer: Everything in this post comes from Declan Lynch.  He doesn’t really blog anymore but I felt this important enough to share so I’m just trying to put out what info I know.

So we had a big problem at the day job this week.  Our main server was getting hammered with what looked like a memory leak.  This server houses our main business application that Declan wrote as well as the iPad BarCode Scanner stuff that I wrote.  So naturally the question was asked of me:

“What code updates have you pushed to production in the last week?”

A perfectly fair question.  Apparently he’s actually read some of my code.. who knew?

Anyway as luck would have it I’ve promoted nothing for a little while. I’ve been working on some new stuff that’s not ready. I could even use SourceTree to go back and find the date of my last promotion and it was far enough away that I was pretty much in the clear!  Talk about having a good alibi!  haha

Anyway – as best as I can tell Declan soon figured that is was not a memory leak but an unexplained CPU spike.  Something was happening that was killing the server.  And let me tell you, this is a BEEFY server. But still the CPU and HTTP Task was getting HAMMERED.

So what caused this almost Catastrophic problem?

The Safari Web Browser.  Specifically the “Top Sites” feature. From two users.

Here’s how Declan described it with the needed fix:

 

what I thought was a memory leak wasn;t a memory leak, it was Safari’s Top Sites feature on two different users machines. Safari has a feature called Top Sites, as you visit different web sites it adds the site to the Top Sites list.

So for these users it added our internal site because they use it a lot..  Safari is also trying to be helpful, by pre loading the site to show a preview. Except in our case the sites are locked down so there is a redirect to a login page so Safari tries loading it again.

and again, and again, and again

about 6 times a second safari was hitting our server. Driving the CPU usage up till the site became unresponsive for users. Once we removed the site from the two users top sites listing the server settled back down and is behaving normally again.

and now for a fancy workaround…

you can tell the browser what content to serve if it is being loaded by a ‘preview’ function using the following code.

if(window.navigator&&window.navigator.loadPurpose===”preview”){window.location.href=”http://some.other.content/in/a/folder.ext”};

so you could redirect the preview to a totally different site or you could redirect to an image

 

How did he diagnose this and fine the issue?

He had to put the XPages Toolbox on the production server. With the backend monitor he noticed all the hits to the same login page over and over. So he went to the users machine and used netstat to confirm that it had a connection opened to Safari.  Then he closed safari and saw the connection drop, But the connection came back on just opening Safari without going to out website.  So he saw the Top Sites listing and removed it.  No more connections.

He got the users IP address by running ‘tell http show thread state’ on the domino server.  That shows all the treads and IP Addresses.

WOW

He does other tricks as well.  I can struggle with something for a whole day and when I do break down and ask for help he often has the solution before I’m even done explaining the problem.

Yep.  I have the best boss in the world! It’s like working with Sherlock Holmes.

 

 

Categories
Community XPages

XPages: The Best of Times,The Worst of Times

If you’re reading this you probably already know that I like working with XPages. It’s a great tool that lets me provide business solutions to my company in a timely manner. There’s also a really really good community behind it. A lot of great people sharing wonderful information these days and I’m happy to try and contribute a little bit to it.

But I think the XPages community has suffered a big  loss lately and I thought it was worth mentioning. Recently, at least 3 KEY IBMers have moved on or out of the XPages realm.

We lost Paul Hannan a little bit ago as he moved onto new challenges in IBM. Notes in the cloud or something. Honestly I forget what it was. So he’s still close, but out of the XPages App Dev world.

A couple of days ago Phil Riand announced he was leaving IBM for something new. As far as I know Phil has been the driving force behind not only XPages itself, but the Extension Library, the very recent XPages4Bootstrap project with Mark Leusink, and I’m sure a whole lot more. Heck it was pretty much a single tweet from Phil that got the XPages Extension Library book on it’s path. And who was the key IBMer with that book? Paul Hannan!

Then today Simon O’Doherty announced he was moving to the Watson team. Don’t know who Simon is? He’s a level 2 support engineer at IBM for Notes/Domino App Dev issues. But even more then that Simon went out of his way to answer questions to the community. A quick check on Stack OverFlow shows him answering 166 questions! Wow! He does not get enough credit for his contributions to Notes/Domino App Dev.

I want to personally thank Paul, Phil and Simon for their contributions to the community.  I know they will succeed in whatever they do.

But with 3 very engaged and high profile IBMers leaving the XPages world that just seems concerning to me.

Clearly the Worst of times?

Or maybe not.

We also got out a brand new book this week. Mastering XPages 2nd Edition! Written by the App Dev team itself. There’s a TON of new content in it and I’m looking forward to digging into it. Maybe now I’ll finally understand the JSF Lifecycle. haha

In other news Mark Leusink recently updated the very important XPages Bootstrap project. Oliver Busse released a helper project for that – a template that I’m interested to check out. http://mardou.dyndns.org/hp.nsf/blogpost.xsp?documentId=C0E

Over on OpenNTF there’s been recent releases of the Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls, XPages Extension Library, XPages OpenLog Logger and more.

In my little corner of the world people still watch NotesIn9. The recent Java/JavaScript throwdown show was very well received, I have a show from Tim Tripcony to process and tons of my own show ideas that I just need to get time for. It astounds me that my Introduction to XPages show from way back in 2010 is still typically in the top 5 show downloads for the month. I have to believe that this is an indication of new people trying to get up to speed on XPages. I would like to revisit and update that show some point soon.

Clearly the Best of Times?

Which is it? The Best or the Worst of Times?

Ok so some key IBM’ers left. That in itself is not the end of the world.  I guess my biggest concern there is these three were EXTREMELY outgoing to the community. I really hope additional IBMer’s step up and take their place otherwise it’s a huge loss.

I hope IBM realizes that with their official XPages documentation “lacking”, and their plan of Documentation by “Community wiki” somewhat, shall I say, “misguided”, that the best thing they can do is encourage their key experts to engage in the community so we can get questions answered and information published. IBM preaches Social. I hope they know it’s not just about budgets, and spreadsheets. It’s not just about writing Social software but its also important for IBMers to interact with customers and business partners to share knowledge and mutually work together to make something that’s better then the sum of it’s parts.

I’m hopeful that what is happening is that XPages is just catching its breath. Some people want new challenges and others are hopefully waiting in the wings. If any IBMer wants to share something and needs help in publishing via a blog post, NotesIn9 or something else then please just let me know. I’m happy to assist with that. Just reach out. I’m pretty easy to find.

For me, I’m hopefully just catching my breath as well.  I have the best job in the world but man am I busy.  Home life isn’t any slower as the kids school year starts the final stretch.  But I’m trying to gear up for a push to at least get to 150 shows and maybe another surprise or two as well.

I’m going to call it the Best of Times.

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 142: Adding a Please Wait to XPages

In this show it’s back to XPages and demos!  I will do a quick recap on the last show as 141 seemed REALLY popular but then it’s back to work.  In this show I demo a quick tip on how you can use CLIENT SIDE JavaScript to show the user the server is processing.

UPDATE:

Fredrik Norling (@XPageDeveloper)  tweeted me a link to an OpenNTF Snippet designed to handle Partial Refreshes:

http://openntf.org/XSnippets.nsf/snippet.xsp?id=standby-dialog-custom-control

Also, Eric Tomenga sent me a nice email with even another solution.  This one looks like it uses the Ext. Library.

http://xpagesera.blogspot.com/2012/05/add-ajax-loading-control-in-xpages-for.html

I actually did look for a jQuery version as well since I’m using this inside the Bootstrap project.  I couldn’t find one but I’m sure there’s something out there.

I do love having options.

Categories
Community Notes In 9

Wow! Show 141 Recap/

I’ll admit I was a little nervous about the last show.  It’s been a long time since I got a little “Rowdy” on the show.  Maybe too long.

First I want to thank everyone for all the feedback via comments, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  I think this is the first NotesIn9 that someone (Russ Maher) actually live tweeted while watching. Thanks for the kind feedback to my kids as well.  We all had a good time making the show.  Though I am worried they might actually want to Unionize!

I also want to thank Mark Roden for the original post (See it at:  http://XPag.es/?WTF )  There’s a lot of great comments there and it’s a good topic for the community. He was such a good sport with me having some fun at his expense.  Don’t miss his followup post and awesome VIDEO here:  http://xomino.com/2014/04/02/an-open-letter-to-mr-notesin9/  

Wonderful stuff!!

While I always wanted NotesIn9 to be about the content and never about “me”.  The response to the show makes me wonder if over the years it’s gotten too “sterile”.  I used to add a little more fun here and there in the early episodes.  I’ll be pondering that for a bit.

I don’t have great stats overall, but I know that this show hit 500 views/downloads in about 24 hours.  I’m pretty sure that’s a record for me.  That tells me something very important.  That you all like my kids more then you do me! hahaha

So in order to give you a little kid “encore”, I’m posting the links to a couple of videos I made with them a while back.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/notesin9/Ad-Dodgeball.mp4  – XPages.Info Commercial

http://traffic.libsyn.com/notesin9/Ad-Baseball.mp4 – Sharepoint vs Domino  (Matt is playing “the Cousin from Texas”)

 

Thanks for watching!