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Seems like Melanie's husband Chuck now is taking responsibility.
One of the comments further down have an interesting point/explanation:
I do DSL support for a major ISP. I think I can guess how Mr. Kroll came to send the e-mail from his wife’s account….
Many businesses (and quite a few individuals) use e-mail client programs, typically various versions of Outlook and Outlook Express on MSwindows machines or MacMail on Mac OS X machines. If you have multiple e-mail adresses in one of these programs, one of them will be tagged as "default" and, unless changed when you send an e-mail, the default address will be used as the "from" address for any e-mail.
At a guess Mrs. Kroll’s machine was set up this way and Mr. Kroll–in his rage–forgot to change the from address. Understandable, in a stupid sort of way, but poor setup in any case.
On any reasonbly modern machine (WinXP, Vista, Mac OS X, Linux), access can be separated by login account and mail clients can be set differently for each account in order to prevent something like that–at least to extent that the error would be sending e-mail inadvertently from ones own work account, rather than that of someone else.
Perhaps worth to point out is that if you use the Lotus Notes client for your email, you don't have the same problem, even if you have Notes setup to be your default mail client. If Notes is not running, you get a login prompt asking you for password, and you see the name of the user. Of course you don't give your spouse the password to your work mail.
But in most cases I would assume that you don't use Notes as default mail client for mailto links. I have Gmail setup for that, using Gmail Notifier. So to send work mail, I login to the Notes client, and to send mail to addresses found on web pages, I use Gmail.
The other day, Philip Storry wrote "A lack of training, or a lack of intelligence", about someone sending a death threat to a professor who happens to be an atheist. This person (mkroll, who later was identified as Melanie Kroll) sent the mail from her work address at 1-800-FLOWERS. If you look at the headers provided by Professor Myers, you can see that the address is not spoofed.
I contacted a journalist at IDG that I know from working there, and he did some investigating to see if he would be able to write a story about this. I just got a mail from him, informing me that Melanie was fired yesterday over this mail.
I say as the very funny Ron White: "You just can't fix stupid"...
Robert McMillan just wrote a story in PC World about a new laptop tracking system, which is free:
Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it's a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.
But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to give you a shot at getting your life back. On Monday, they plan to launch a new laptop tracking service, called Adeona that is free and private.
Named after the Roman goddess credited with guiding children back to their parents, Adeona uses software that has been under development for the past year.
Sounds interesting! Read the full article for more details.
You are Superman
| Superman |
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75% |
| Iron Man |
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70% |
| Spider-Man |
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65% |
| Green Lantern |
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65% |
| Robin |
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57% |
| The Flash |
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55% |
| Supergirl |
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50% |
| Catwoman |
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50% |
| Batman |
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45% |
| Hulk |
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45% |
| Wonder Woman |
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35% | |
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.
 | Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
Bill Buchan just wrote about exporting data to Excel using a CSV file. There is actually a cool and surprisingly easy way to generate documents that show up in Excel as real spreadsheets, with formatting, colors, etc.
Simply create a file containing a HTML table. It may even work with multiple tables. You can use tags like <B> and <I> for bold/italic, and use the color attribute to set text color and background color. Use the colspan attribute to split a cell over multiple columns.
Save the file in Lotusscript as a regular text file, but with the extension XML XLS. Excel, as well as OpenOffice.org, will read the HTML and present as a nice spreadsheet.
We all know that Notes let us create tabbed tables. But you have limits to how nice you can create the tabs.
In an application I am working on, I wanted full control of the tabs, and I found out it was actually pretty easy to create my own tabs. I just used a computed background, something I actually never used before.
By the way, I stoleborrowed the graphics from Yahoo Mail for now, until I get the final graphics created...
The application displays information about the (insurance) claim selected in the drop-down box. Each claim has one or more claimants (affected people/parties), and I display them in the tabbed section. You can see the tabs in the screenshot below.
What I simply do is to keep track of the currently selected claimant, the number of claimants, and then I built a table with 3 columns in the first row and one merged cell as the second row.
In the center cell in the first row, I set the background to the "active colored" (lighter) tab. I use @Formulas to set the background in the two other cells:
@If( @TextToNumber(CurrentClaimantNumber) > 1; "CCdb_InactiveTab.gif"; "" )
and
@If( @TextToNumber(CurrentClaimantNumber) < @TextToNumber(LNPClaimantCount); "CCdb_InactiveTab.gif"; "" )
The inactive tab is the darker one. Then it is just a question about writing code that trigger when the lables (computed-for-display fields) are clicked, to update the current claimant value, load the claimant data and refresh the form.
I hope you get some inspiration from this. Oh, and this is all Notes 5...
The last month or so, I have been pretty busy at work and in my personal life. My sister came over from Sweden for a 10-day visit, and at work I been working on wrapping up a project we been working on for a while. I have been having some time to do private things, but I have not put a priority on computers/blogging. This coming weekend I am going to Austin for a friends birthday, but then I should have time to do some blogging again.
According to an article at boingboing.com, Paramount is dropping the sound in the new Indiana Jones movie, in order to trace where pirate copies are coming from.
While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don't bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.
Repeat after vowe: DRM is bad for the customer
As many of you may know, I am originally from Sweden. A small, neutral country in northern Europe, who have not been in war since 1814. Sweden have been having a fairly strong defence force, at least until about 10 years ago, when budget cuts been reducing it to basically non-existant... Sweden always had a conscript army, like most European countries. All males must serve for about a year around the time they turn 20, and I served 11 months in the Air Force. There are pros and cons to this system, of course. The pros are that you have a huge army trained, and can call it up in case of war. The cons are that you need to pull the men out of their regular jobs every few years for additional training/repeat training. Due to budget cuts, that has not been done on a larger scale for the last 20 years or so.
Anyway, the mobilisation is supposed to take 72 hours. To protect the mobilisation, as well as important locations and object (bridge, air fields, TV towers/buildings and other infratructure sensitive to early attacks and/or sabotage), a volonteer unit called the Home Guard was established in 1940.
I joined a youth company in the Home Guard when I was 15, and served there for 13 years, until I moved to the US. Yes, we could join at age 15. The first year we did basic stuff: marching, erecting tents, recon, operating radios, target practice with bolt action rifles, using map and compass, etc. At age 16 we started learing assault techniques, ambushes, and combat skills, still with bolt action rifles. At age 17 we got full automatic weapons (sub-machine guns and assualt rifles). I spent many weekends out in the field on manouvers, while other kids at school were out partying or having fun. I did not expect any thanks, I did it because I cared about my country and was willing to make sacrifices to protect it. People were actually sometimes making fun of us.
Later, after my miltary service, I transferred to a regular unit of the Home Guard, and continued my training. We actually got paid, the same amount as a conscript soldier. That meant about 5 dollar a day back in 1991/92, for each 8 hours of service. A weekend manouver counted as 4 or 6 hours... So nobody did this for the money.
Last spring, I went to a Nascar race here in Texas. I went to watch a movie about the US Air Force with my son, and a female soldier came in and wished us welcome. She asked "is anybody here in the service or a former service man/woman". A couple of people raised their hand, and I did too, even if I did not serve with the US military. I thought she was just going to see how many were military/ex-military. She then said "Thank you for your service" to each of us. That was amazing. In 13 years, nobody in Sweden said a word of thanks. Here in the US, people respect your soldiers in a way you should be proud of. You may not support the war, but I feel the soldiers are supported and rightly so. I have to admit, I was choking up when I was standing there. I think I actually teared, it was a very emotional moment for me.
On my mother's side of the family, I have a long tradition of soldiers. My mom was from Germany, and grew up during WWII. She was 19 when the war ended, and she had to run from her hometown to avoid the advancing Red Army troops. My grandfather, who also served in WWI, became a POW with the Russians after he served on the Eastern front.
My uncle, Karl-Heinz (whom I am named after) served as a glider pilot in the Luftwaffe, taking part in the airborne invasion of Crete in 1941. Later in the war, when Germany was pretty much out of fuel, he was assigned to a anti-aircraft regiment who was part of the Luftwaffe. On February 26, 1945 he was shot through the left lung. On March 10 he arrived to a hospital ship in Denmark, but on March 16, he died from his wounds and infections. My mother also lost a sister a year later, due to Diphteria.
My aunt in Germany married a veteran from the French Foreign Legion. He served for 9 years (1951-59) in several parachute regiments, in Indochina (Vietnam) and North Africa. He jumped over Dien Bien Phu and was a POW for 2 years.
No matter what politics you support, and what you think about the government, you have to respect the soldiers doing the fighting.
So, for all the soldiers, in all countries: Thank you for your service to your country.
The other day I saw a posting in comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer, where the poster said that he have been defending Lotus Notes from people that dislike it and want to get rid of it. I asked what problems the users had, and this is the response:
This is the only application we have in Notes - we do use notes mail -
but it is the application that is giving Notes a bad name.
It is the result of a extremely bad design and implementation of an
application 12 years ago in Notes 4.5.
The application - a customer order configurator - was created by
someone else in a branch of the
company which sold us off so the designer/programmer is no longer
available to us..
This has been compounded by massive changes over the last 6
years. I have added 2 new databases (6 databases now) and possibly
140,000 lines of code to the application over the last 6 years. However
this has been hampered by the original bad design.
This results in users getting annoyed rather frequently.
So basically, one badly written application, probably developed by someone that was not a programmer or did not understand Lotus Notes, then patched over 12 years is giving Notes a bad name... What can be done about things like this? There are some (old) best practices out there, but perhaps it would be a good idea to write some new ones.
The other day I was writing some code where I had to check a value against a list of potential values. I was importing a file as XML, and checking a number of transactions, each in their own node. If the Trans-ID tag had one of several values, the whole node was supposed to be discarded and not used.
I am sure many already use this method, but hopefully someone will learn something new.
In my example below, I am reading a field in a Notes document instead of data from an XML file, but the principle is the same:
tranType = Ucase(doc.GetItemValue("txn-type"))
If Instr("PD;DR;RP;NSFNF;RD;CRT;RCT;VCK;TPD;RCK;", tranType & ";") Then
End If
What I do is to use Instr() to check a string (the first argument) for the presence of a particular string (the second argument). To make sure I don't get any false matches, I add a semicolon to the end of the tranType as well as use the same character to separate the values in the first argument.
The Instr() function returns the position of the string found (1 or higher if found, 0 if not found). Since 0 is "False" and everything else is "True", if the tranType string is found, a value greater than 0 is returned, which is considered "True".
This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.
I am in the market for a car stereo (a.k.a head unit). I have been looking around, and I have a alternatives. But I am always looking for the best choice, so I decided to ask for help.
Here are my requirements/wish list:
- Play MP3 from CD (other formats a bonus), support for ID3
- AUX in to connect my (non iPod) MP3-player (Cowon A2)
- Bonus: USB input for Flash drive/portable harddisk
- BlueTooth so I can use it as speaker phone
- Bonus: BT syncronisation of address book, to facilitate caller ID and outgoing calls from stereo
- Good sound (just using stock speakers for now, may get better speakers later)
- Easy to use interface, nice/easy to read display
- Bonus: support for text (some radio stations display artist and title of song)
- Bonus: ready for HD radio
I been looking at the following:
Sony MEX-BT2600 ($138 at Amazon, $169 at Best Buy), no USB.
Pioneer Car DEHP7000BT ($220 at Amazon, $289 at Best Buy, $325 at CarToys and Fry's), has USB.
Listening to the two in the store, the Sony sounded like it had a little bit clearer/better sound, but it is hard to tell in a busy store, when you don't know how the signal is being received.
Any other suggestions? They must be available on the US market... The vehicle I will put it in is a 2007 Ford Taurus SEL. The budget is somewhat limited, I been getting quoted between 60 and 120 dollar for the mounting kit, and 50-70 dollar for installation. So I am hoping to not go too far over 250 dollar for the head unit.
UPDATE: Since only YellowBleeders can comment here, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to mail them to me at TexasSwede@gmail.com.
For the last few years, I been a big fan of Chipotle, a chain of burrito restaurants. The burritos are good, they meat is from animals raised without hormones and antibiotics, same with the sour cream. The beans are ecologically grown, etc. In short, I been feeling good eating there, and I also thought the food was reasonable healthy.
Last Saturday I went to get a haircut, and happened to pick up Men's Health or some similar magazine. They had a tip; have a bol (bowl) at Chipotle instead of a burrito, skip the sourcream and cheese and add double tomatoes. They said that the tortilla by itself was 300 calories!
I looked onthe Chipotle website, but no nutritional information. But I found a site that had it, Chipotlefan.com. I added up what I usually get in my burrioto: Tortilla, rice, pinto beans, barbacoa meat, tomato, corn, hot sauce, cheese and sourcream. 1136 calories, 42 grams of fat!
Ouch!!
So today I tried their bol (a paper/cardbord bowl with the ingredients put in). Rice, pinto beans, barbacoa meat, tomato, hot sauce and lettuce. 521 calories, 13 grams of fat. Much better, and it tasted great. Next time i will skip the beans, that will bring me down to 413 calories, 12 gram of fat. That's less than a double cheeseburger at McDonalds (440 calories, 23 grams of fat), but more food and healthier.
Lately I have been thinking back on my career. You may have read my two postings about how I started with Notes and how I started with computers in general. This made me start thinking: what is it with Lotus Notes that I find so fascinating?
I remember how impressed I was with Visual Basic when the first version came out in 1991. I had previously been writing code using Turbo Pascal, QuickC and Turbo C, so a tool that let you draw the user interface and place controls in a graphic way was a big thing.
I used Visual Basic for several years, I may have been among the few programmers going from C and Pascal to Basic... But in a business environment it makes sense to use a tool that let you build application fast and efficient, not spending days to code the user interface.
While I worked as a journalist in the 1990's, I looked at many other tools as well, like PowerBuilder, Delphi, Visual Café (a Java development tool from Symantec which later got bought by Borland and integrated into JBuilder). I realized that this kind of RAD tool is what I should learn.
That I ended up working with Notes was more luck than skill, though, as you can read in my other blog entry.
The great thing with Notes is that I get so much for free. The user interface is mostly there, I just have to design the forms and views, set some colors and then I can write the business logic. All the database functionality is there, etc. What is there not to like? Well, we all know there are a few things that can be improved, but overall, Notes is a very powerful development platform...
A little while ago I wrote about how I started with Lotus Notes. When I read some other people's descriptions, they told more of their background how they got into computers as well. This has prompted me to share (if anyone really care) how I started with computers.
Back in 1974 or 75 or so, when I was 5-6 years old, my then about 20-21 year old cousin from Blekinge (where my dad was born and grew up and where most of his family lives) moved up to Stockholm. After his military service in the Swedish navy (seems like most males on my dad's side did the service in the navy, for some reason) he got a job at Hewlett-Packard. I think he started as a service technician. For the first few months he was living with my family, and he brought home a couple of different computers. Most of all I remember him bringing home a plotter one evening. I believe he even hooked it up to the phone line and downloaded some images that were then printed on the plotter. Some were just geometric patterns, but for many years I had a Snoopy cartoon created that night on my wall in my room.
In 1981 one of my good friends in school got a VIC-20. The first day he had it, we sat for hours in his room and typed in a program listing for a game from the manual. Of course it did not work.  My friend started programming in his spare time, but my parents could not afford a computer.
When I started 7th grade in 1982, the school had been choosen as one of the four schools in the country to participate in a new government sponsored program to increase the computer knowledge in schools and to develop a Swedish computer for school use. Some different products were evaluated, including (if I remember correctly) MicroBee, TRS-80 and a couple of other systems. In the end a brand new computer was developed, based on the 80186 processor and using CP/M-86 as operating system. My school recieved a number of older Swedish made computers, the Z80-based ABC 80 and ABC 800 while the new computer, called "Compis" (an abreviation of "Computer in School" and also meaning "friend" or "buddy" in Swedish) was developed.
The school decided to start a computer club, and I was there for the first meeting in fall of 1992. The school provided a room for the computers and a card reader. To get a pass card, you had to take 3 evening classes, led by older students or teachers, in Basic programming. Then you got your card and could use the computers any time the school was open and the computers were not used by a class.
I believe I went to the classes right before christmas 1982. My family spent the Christmas break in Blekinge, and I brougth some programming books, read them and wrote programs on paper since I did not have any computer.
Starting in January 1983, I was spending most of my free time in the computer room, learning to program mostly on my own or with help from fellow students. In 1984 we got some prototypes for Compis, and in 1985 the production version was released. The programming languages were COMAL (a structured language that was a mix between Basic and Pascal) and a version of Turbo Pascal 3. I quickly switched to Pascal, and (to my parents dissatisfaction) started spending every free hour in the computer room. I printed my programs on continuous sheets and taped them to the wall of my room so I could look at and read the code, make notes and then bring it back to school and fix any bugs. I even managed to convince the school to let me borrow a computer home over some vacations...
In Sweden, school is mandatory for 9 years, with 2 or 3 years "optional", but in reality most students will go those extra years. Those last years are similar to what is called High School in the US, but it is (just like in Germany) called "gymnasium". According to Wikpedia, they are comparable to "college preparatory high schools" in the US.
Since the 80's, the system has changed, but at that time you had to choose between 5 different 3-year programs, where the subjects and hours were pretty much set. There were some small adjustments we could make, like choosing between psychology and philosophy. I took the "natural science program", where the main subjects were math, physics, chemistry and biology. Of course we also had languages (Swedish, English and in my case German), history, geography, social science, sports, philosophy (in my case) and a few more.
The other programs were an engineering/technical, humanistic/languages, social studies and financial/economics
So why did I take this program? I hated math, and it was always one of my weaker subjects. Well, this program also included computer science and programming. That's the only reason.
During these years, I wrote a bunch of different programs, including my first commercial product. It was a geography learning tool for use in schools, showing a country on a map and asking the student for the name and capital, keeping track of points, etc. I sold a couple of copies to a few schools.
I also started using modems at this time, we had a 1200 baud (later 2400) in the computer room, and you paid by the minute (since the phone company in Sweden charg by the minute, no flat fee for local calls). We even had our own BBS for a short time.
After graduation in 1988, I choose to take a one-year systems programming class at a different school. It was an intensive class, cramming 2 years into one by having classes 8 am to 5pm every day, with just a lunch break. and two short breaks in the morning and afternoon. Well, after about a week, the teachers said that the number of students were not sufficient to run the class. They had tried to get a few more to join, but they had to cancel the class. The class would start again in January 1989.
So I picked up the Yellow Pages and looked under computer companies. I called a few places about an internship, and at one company I got a positive response. They were looking for someone in their support department. I was asked to send in my paperwork, grades, etc. A week later I went to an interview with the head of the support department, who happened to live on the same island where I grew up and lived. The interview went something like this:
"Have you ever user Microsoft Word?"
"No, we used WordStar and another word processor in school."
He started Word for DOS 3.x: "Here, type something"
I typed a few words.
"Select some text and make it bold."
I selected some, not sure if I used the keyboard or the mouse. I had used a mouse just a few times in the past.
To make it bold, I had no clue how to do it. I knew ^K^B in Wordstar, and Alt-F in the Swedish word processor we also used in school. I saw "help" in the menu, so I clicked on it, and noticed that most commands used the Alt key here as well. So I first tried Alt-F (bold in Swedish is "fet" . I then realised it was an english version of Word, so I tried Alt-B.
"Good. What is yor salary requirement?"
That's how I got a job at Microsoft...
I worked at Microsoft that fall, and during the summer break next year. After I graduatued the systems programming class in December 1989, I alternated between Microsoft and teaching C programming and english at a gymnasium down the street. At the same time, I got my forst computer, a 386SX-based machine with 256 MB memory and 20 GB harddisk. I quickly upgraded the memory to 1 MB, got a better graphics card (Tseng Labs ET3000) and got me a 2400 bps modem from a co-worker at Microsoft. This is when I started visiting BBSes more frequently.
In April 1990 I started 11 months of military service with the 16th Fighter Wing in Uppsala, about an hour north of Stockholm. After the service I intended to go back to Microsoft, but I was hired by a company called Esselte Voice to program IVR systems (Interactive Voice Response). After two years of doing this, the company went bankrupt. I now had a 486 computer with a 200 GB SCSI harddisk, and 4 MB of memory.
A good friend of mine saw an ad in the newspaper for a publishing company looking for a tech support person, and in the same ad they also were looking for a journalist. I appled for both jobs, and amazingly enough, I got the job as a journalist, writing about PC hardware and software.
We are now at the point whee I started my article about how I got into Lotus Notes, and you can continue there if you haven't read it already.
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