Erik Brooks

 
I haven't seen anything regarding a release date for 8.5.2 yet except for "mid-year". But according to the Fix List database here we can expect it Q3 2010.
 
I'm part of the managed beta (go join if you want to take part also) so I can't comment about it yet, but as Tim Tripcony blogged it's going to be "cuh-ray-zee".
 

 
We were downloading in London from a Domino server in Florida. Domino was serving the file at a whopping 65K/sec to London, despite being on a connection with about 8 MB upstream available and the London connection having tons of available downstream bandwidth. Running an FTP server on the same machines allowed the same file to be transferred at about 600K/sec.
 
HTTP transfers are slower than FTP but not that much slower. So we opened a PMR. The answer is this SPR on Windows:
 

SPR # MKIN7TGMQV    Fixed in release: 8.0.2 FP3, 8.5.1
Product Area: Server  Technical Area: Web Server  Platform: Windows
Lotus Customer Support APAR:  LO45289  What is an APAR?

SPR# MKIN7TGMQV - Fix for Windows, where we had  performance problem on high latency networks. We added/changed code to reduce latencies by changing how the winsock layer is used and by increasing the buffer size of network writes.

 
Apparently Microsoft changed the Winsock layer interface when they released Windows Server 2003 but didn't tell anybody. The old interface (which IBM was using) became worse while the new one was the latest-and-greatest (which IIS, surprise surprise, was using.) The end result is that a user's transfer speed was heavily influenced by their latency.  E.g. with 60ms of latency you might get 240K/sec.  With 80ms of latency you might get 180K/sec. And in our case (160ms or so) we were getting 65K/sec.
 
Installing a hotfix for this SPR brought that server's HTTP transfer speed up to around 400-450K/sec to London.
 
While this fix is great and all, the scary bit here for me is that IBM didn't notice this until 8.5.1, so sometime in 2009... about 6 years after Windows 2003 shipped. I hope that a high-latency network model is part of their test suite now.
 

 
If you missed it, you MUST  check out Niklas Hiedloff's blog video. It showcases some projects on OpenNTF, and most importantly shows products on the Notes/Domino platform. And since they're on OpenNTF they're freely available.
 
If you sell Notes/Domino, this video covers in 8 minutes a ton of stuff that - if I were a prospective customer - would make me salivate. It shows off the technical prowess/flexibility of N/D without getting techy, and when you say "yeah there's this entire website of stuff like this" and "yes you can deploy these easily within your organization" and "yes it integrates automagically with your corporate security hierarchy" and "yes lots of this works in your browser too" it's powerful stuff.
 
This specific video looks like it's on its way to replacing the "Nifty Fifty" or whatever it was called from back in the day. If you were to glue a few key LotusKnows video snippets (e.g. LiveText) to the front of this video you would have a 10-12 minute quick intro to Notes capabilities that would blow peoples' minds.
 
Thanks, Niklas. Your work and your videos rock, and you've managed to showcase more of the product in 8 minutes than IBM has for years (LotusKnows not withstanding).
 
Spread the word about this video - this simply can't stay buried on the OpenNTF website.
 

 

 
So a few weeks ago I blogged about the Dojo website getting a facelift. It was much cleaner than before, a bit more organized, though less eye-catching.
 
Well apparently they decided to step it up a notch with an entirely new site design. Click here to see it. I have to say I like it.
 
It looks like they've really put a lot of effort into documentation, too. Click the "Learning is Easy" in the lower-right.
 
And I didn't know Cisco was using Dojo also. Cool stuff.
 

 
So today I was doing some Yellowsphere community service. I decided to hop on over to IdeaJam and start looking for ideas to comment on. I clicked on "Popular" where you see a list of all of the most highly-promoted items. Some of these have been delivered in recent versions (GO IBM!) and others are coming soon. But they're still in the list, and there's no way to tell that some of them have been addressed. I posted "hey, this is done" in the comments of some of them, but it'd be great if IdeaJam had a way to flag something as "RESOLVED" possibly with a note, like "addressed in version XXXX".
 
But there's something else IdeaJam could use: an SPR tracking field. Some of these ideas are already tracked via SPR numbers inside of IBM. Having the SPR number visible on the Idea would allow us to open PMRs to have our customer weight added to the SPR, therefore helping to add weight to the Idea. If two Ideas have a similar vote count, but one has 200,000 seats of customers attached to it and the other 350, that probably makes it obvious which one is more important. Of course if those 200,000 seats are distributed amongst 50 SMBs, that's even more useful data for IBM.
 
It would also help IBM -- who does look at IdeaJam for input -- to relate an Idea to their own internal tracking of the SPR (which has internal notes, insight from development, etc). This would help reduce effort on their end in determining the effort needed to implement an Idea.
 
Whad'ya think, Bruce? Anybody else got any input about this too?
 

 
Generally speaking, Lotusscript should run about 15%-40% faster on 8.0.2+ versus prior releases, primarily due to this fix:
 

SPR# BHUY75XJL2 - LotusScript is yielding too often, which was necessary a while back with slower machines. Now that Machines are much faster, we changed it to yield less often.

 
However 8.0.2 also introduced this fix:
 

SPR# DCOE6KPW48 - Fixed a crash calling fulltrim on arrays returned from certain other lotusscript builtin functions (eg Join).

 
Unfortunately this fix could cause your Lotusscript your code to run slower if you used dynamic arrays or lists. Possibly much slower - on the order of over 3-4 times as slow, even with the first fix running also.
 
During the 8.5.1 beta we noted this problem and worked with IBM. They stamped out a fix that made it into the gold 8.5.1 release. If you're not affected by the crash mentioned above (and most people won't be -- it's apparently an extreme corner case) then you can turn that fix off with this INI setting:
 

SPR# DPOL7PEHQX - The fix for SPR DCOE6KPW48 can cause a performance issue when heavy array processing is in use. This SPR provides a new ini - FullTrimFix=0 - to disable DCOE6KPW48, which then will restore performance.

 
The end result is that your script code on 8.5.1 will run significantly faster than any prior releases simply by upgrading and adding this INI setting. We're seeing around 30% in production. You may see even more. Don't forget to also do this on your servers that run script code agents.
 

 
Neither the iPhone nor the iPad run Flash.
 
There is currently an incomplete open-source javascript-based flash interpreter that came out a few weeks ago that seems to be able to run some flash if it's hacked in. At least, it runs some flash for now on the iPhone.
 
Keep in mind that Apple has a vested interest in Flash not running at all since then applications could potentially bypass the App Store's screening process (and revenue). Also keep in mind that they've made updates that disable applications/workarounds/jailbreaks in the past.
 
Consider your target audience's capabilities wisely. That is all.