Who would have guessed this?

On ’s site you can read about the ongoing president campaign.

Login in with just url-arguments

Today I learnt something I had no clue about was possible, how to just use url-arguments to login to a notes database on the .

The idea is simple:

http://server/names.nsf?Login&Username=ME&Password=Secret&redirect=MyMailFile.

You can read more about it here: http://vinceschuurman.com/home/ndt4.nsf/(LUBlogContent)/200704151737

Teamstudio Script browser - a gem I didn’t know about

In my current project I’m trying to tidy up som old, eight years or so, code to improve quality and performance. As with many projects the applications has been patched and patched by many many developers and the coding style and implementation ways are just rediculuous. Not to mention naming standards and other things.Lucky me some of the code is actually documented using LSDOC, but most of it is not. But I ran into Teamstudios Script Browser and that really eased up my work. It’s free and I can highly recommend it.

GeekMeet: The celebrities arrived

Right now Siegfried&Roy Viktor and Troy from Snapps has arrived to Ekakan and left their luggage to be able to travel light during the standard first-time-in-stockholm route, you know the drill: Wasaskeppet etc…
viktorandtroy

Geek Meet in northern Sweden

I just wanted to help out Robert Nyman who helps out some guy about a Geek Meet in northern Sweden.

Lotus quickr - first look

My latest assignment ‘forces’ me too look into Lotus Quickr more deeply. It’s of course very interesting and at a first glance it really looks nice, to be an IBMer that is then….

Then I started to look in to the various tools, so far I have tested the doc library and the WIKI. The doc library is good, there’s no freakn’ java applet for RTF text anymore but a decent javascript based editor. That’s great. The Wiki is a disappointment in though. You can’t do quick link formatting like CamelCase or [Standard Links] but you have tot add them via a link button in the toolbar. I’m very curious to see how defines a WIKI.

More about Lotus Quickr will follow shortly.

Wifi on mac is a bless

I have never ever had any problems whatsoever with my mac and network connections. I move around alot and have probably connected to something like 15-20 different WiFi and threadbased networks the last weeks. And my mac has always been there for me, connected and online! MacRocks! A cool tool is coconutWIFI!

Are swedes really that normal?

I got a very funny and spot on text abou how swedes are and act.

Colin Moon - Are Swedes really that normal?

To communicate effectively cross-culturally the first thing you need to
realize is that someone somewhere in the world probably sees you as really
quite strange.

That may be difficult for some Swedes to swallow. How could anybody in
their right mind consider normal, efficient, level-headed Swedes as
strange?

Of course we are normal!

After all, the Swedish starting point is ‘we are normal’. Indeed, Swedes
have a tendency to think they are a little more normal than others. They
believe they are quite sensible, and logical. They are often unaware that
the rest of us, their international business partners, may have a different
opinion. We think they are amusing, entertaining and, at times, really
quite odd.

Take business life for example. Swedes attend meetings. Lots of them. Three
things in Sweden are certain:  death, taxes and more meetings.

Mötet gick bra

When Swedes say ‘Mötet gick bra’  (the meeting went well) what exactly do
they mean? There were heated discussions? The meeting went on for ages? The
incredible number of decisions that were taken? I doubt it.

Other people on the planet believe that the sole purpose of a meeting is to
produce decisions. Swedish meetings, on the other hand, are held to find
out whether or not you are at the meeting to decide when the meeting will
be to decide when you will meet to talk about what happened at your
meeting.

Swedish meetings are short but many. They are arranged to give Bengan,
Maggan, and Lasse a chance to say what they think. If you want to reach a
decision then you’ll have to arrange another meeting because in the
meantime Bengan, Maggan and Lasse have to go back to the office and ask
Ninni, Kicki and Titti (yes, there are girls of that name) what they think.

Process

This, in Swedish, is called the förankringsprocess. If  Swedes mention the
word ‘process’ then it’s better not be in a hurry. There’s a process for
everything. This one means getting everybody involved in everything.

Everyone voices an opinion and everyone listens. Then they compromise. The
word compromise is music to a Swede’s ears. Everybody gets something. Not
too much and not too little. Nobody wins and nobody loses. They may agree
to disagree but what they will agree on is the exact time and date of the
next meeting.

Agenda

Swedes stick to the agenda. They tick off each point after everybody has
taken turns discussing it. They have to move quickly through the agenda as
they all have another meeting planned ten minutes after this one has
finished. They intensely dislike the last point on the agenda which is
övriga frågor, ‘any other business’. No self-respecting Swede wants to be
guilty of causing the meeting to run over time. There is a distinct danger
that ‘any other business’ could drag on and flexibility is not a Swedish
strong point.

Decision time

Swedes rarely say yes or no. This means that instead of saying ja or nej
they say nja which means ‘yes-but-no-but-yes-but’. You see, saying ‘yes’ or
‘no’ can lead to conflict so Swedes avoid these words and replace them with
‘it depends’, ‘maybe’ and ‘I’ll see what I can do’.

Foreigners may get heated, irritated or even angry. Swedes call this
hysterical behavior. Hysteria is abnormal and uncomfortable and should
preferably not occur in office hours. If, on the other hand, a Swede ever
tells you to go a place called ‘hellsicke’, then, take my word for it,
you’ve upset him.

You may wonder how on earth they ever make a decision. Business Swedes
themselves have sometimes called this beslutsimpotens - which, I suppose,
means not having the balls to decide one way or another.

Milk and no sugar

Someone once said that if the Swedes gave up their coffee breaks they could
retire five years earlier. Coffee is an integral part of any meeting,
either as an on-going self-service affair during the discussions or as a
separate break. The coffee break is not to be confused with the briefer,
more frequent leg-stretcher. Or ‘bone-stretcher’ as they sometimes call it.
The Swedish word for leg and bone is the same.

Work/life balance

Most Swedes are dedicated to finding a healthy work-life balance. They
might say they work hard; it’s just that they are not often at work to do
it.

Look in a Swedish diary and you may get the impression that no one in this
country is ever at work. Try to get hold of someone on a Friday afternoon
and this will be confirmed. Swedes will start to ask you about your plans
for the coming weekend as early as Wednesday afternoon. By Friday lunchtime
they have mentally gått för dagen ‘left for the day’.

Red days

The Swedes have a fair share of public holidays. In a good year they take
as many days off in May and June as most Americans take in a year. And they
still have their five weeks vacation to take out when it suits them. Not
only do they have ‘red days’ as the Swedes call their official holidays,
but they may be given half the day off before, just to get them into the
holiday mood.

If they’ve planned it well they can take out a klämdag or two, which are
odd days between a holiday and the weekend.  Come May, June, July the
weekends and public holidays more or less combine into one long vacation
with the occasional day at the office.

However, fair’s fair - when they’re at work they’re very effective. But not
before 8.30 as they have flexi-time, and not after 4 pm, thank you, as they
have to pick up the kids from play school, and not after 2 pm on Fridays,
if you don’t mind, and preferably not between 1 May and 10 August.

So, there you are Swedes. A short, sharp lesson in how to realize that you
are not quite as normal as you think you are.

And thank goodness for that.

My Malicious Mac

I have become to like my mac. The other day I spoke up spontaneously to by poor PC-coworkers saying that “I’ve started to like my Mac”. Today I was close to throw it out the window. I should do such an easy thing as over riding the DNS lookup to test some software. In windows that would be an easy task, just cd in to the sooooo logical path “c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc” and edit the hosts-file. As soon as you save it your local DNS cache will have the new entries and you can start browsing and nslookuping as a maniac.

In OS X on the other hand I changed the hosts file in /etc/hosts and, to be sure, /private/etc/hosts (they are symlinks) and started to browser on the new address… To no avail. I started googling ofcourse, and found these nice quotes:

“Making MacOS X consult /etc/hosts before the DNS server seems rather difficult. In fact, even making MacOS X consult /etc/hosts AT ALL seems rather difficult.” (Origin: http://www.netneurotic.net/mac/configuring.html)

I found a handful other tricks on the aswell, for example this easy six steps rocket:

  • Create (as root or using sudo) “/etc/hosts”.
  • Read the file into NetInfo: “niload hosts . < /etc/hosts" [1]
  • Create a directory “/etc/lookupd”.
  • Create a file “hosts” in that directory.
  • Make it contain this line: “LookupOrder FFAgent NIAgent DNSAgent” [2]
  • Reboot the machine or HUP lookupd. [3]

After a good time (we are talking hours here, including terrorizing my good friend the-artist-formerly-known-as-theMacSupport-but-these-days-is-more-of-a-googlebot. I gave up and went home. Configuring the rest of the software I was about to try out on my wonderly beloved DELL PC.

After a good dish of cod, couscous and a wonderful lime/yoghurt/honey sause I started googling again…

I realized that Mac OS X seams to have changed the hosts/DNS thing between 10.1-10.2 and 10.3. No wonder there’s so many articles that completely contradicts each other. Ohhh wonderfully Microsoft that made a solution and stuck with it for years. Stop all ! :)

Anyway, the trick was just too easy. Do your hosts-thing and then simply:

lookupd -flushcache

Over and out.

Geek Meet - CHANGED DATE! (25th of september) OBS! OBS! CHANGED DATE! Geek Meet UNDER ATTACK.

I have heard, including myself talking to myself in a sometime insane way, that sometimes everyone that works with software will find themselfes in a situation where the biggest challenge is not of technical art, nor the clients political system or other things. The biggest challenge working with software is…. themselves. This is a fact and I won’t say anything more about it right now. In a more humorous way I got this proved the other day when I realised that will have a seminarium the very same day our Geek Meet shows off. I tried of course to call Sam to have him pull some strings, but to no avail. So we will postpone the Geek Meet one day making the new Domino Dev Geek Meet day the 25th of September.However, please continue signing up in this post.