Yellow is the New Blog

Last month, Greyhawk  expressed frustration with a pattern he'd detected in the whitepaper emails they'd been sending, and unsubscribed from their distribution lists (as did many of us). Ed later took them to task on the same issue. I'm keeping them in my RSS strictly because I've also noticed a decline in the quality of tips submitted, and I would like to occasionally serve as some small bulwark against the dissemination of bad advice to noobs. Messiah complex? Yeah, maybe a little. Earlier this week, I spotted a real winner.

In a remarkable display of over-engineering (sorry, Christian), the tip linked to above demonstrates one approach to downloading the contents of a server's INI file. It uses approximately 220 lines of code (including comments and whitespace) to issue a remote console command and store the response in a text file... using Notes API calls to issue the command and Windows API calls to write the response to the file using Notepad. Assuming you're using one of the last three major releases of Notes/Domino, the same exact operation can be accomplished with 8 lines of code. And (gasp) it'll work on all supported platforms.

Sub downloadServerINI (Byval server As String, destination As String)
    Dim session As New NotesSession
    Dim stream As NotesStream
    Set stream = session.CreateStream()
    Call stream.Open(destination)
    Call stream.WriteText(session.SendConsoleCommand(server, "Show Config *"))
    Call stream.Close()
End Sub

I used their comment link (a mailto:... they haven't quite gotten around to implementing the comment feature you'll now find on almost any blog) to send Gervais a comment summarizing the above. He responded less than an hour later, thanking me for the feedback and indicating that he'd update the tip as soon as he got a chance. I just checked, and although it's been over two days since then, there's been no change... except that it now shows that, thus far, it's been rated a 5.00 out of 5.00. So anyone reading this tip that doesn't know any better might think this is the most elegant approach available. I rated it a 1, but apparently the average isn't real-time.