My Life With IT

I had a discussion with a friend of mine this afternoon. We have just completed that final exam for the step towards our degree and I was telling her that I want to get out of programming because I feel that I am no longer able to chase after the latest technology. I do wonder if it’s due to my leaving of a challenging company a few months back. It is not the first time since I left that company and reviewed my career path. I have been thinking if I should get out of IT and do something else.

Another friend told me that life’s short, we have to do whatever we feel is the right time to execute. I’ve been doing Lotus Notes development for 4 years and I think I’m not cut out for it. Maybe the lack of challenges in the current company? I am still able to earn my keep and there is not much pressure on the system being forced to work “bug-free” during UAT.

I don’t have any users calling me. Yet. Or I need a new learning curve because I keep ending up doing client based Notes applications instead of web based Notes applications that I prefer. I like that because it’s easier to control user actions. They won’t use the keyboard “Esc” key to close a document that they don’t want to save. I don’t have so many fields to place the Formula individually.

Maybe I’m asking for too much. Who would want to develop web based applications when it takes longer to complete than a client based? Me, I guess. I like playing around with CSS and JavaScript.

Maybe I am really just not cut out for IT.

I actually miss the challenge of developing web applications using Lotus Notes. I haven’t been doing it for half a year and am getting rusty with the knowledge. I wonder if I would ever get to design web applications for this company in future or learn some new programming language.

It seems that I haven’t been keeping myself updated with the functions that can be done in views for Domino. Domino uses up on my precious RAM and I can’t bear to install trials in my laptop for fiddling purposes during my personal time.

I’m still playing around with the idea of a spare computer to run Domino.

I’m looking at Agent Monitor (DAF) by Joerg Reck. I like the fact that I don’t have to go to the databases to amend the codes so that the agent monitor can work. Sweet. I just click on Add Database and the system does all the necessary additions.

I’m still trying to figure out the Administration section though. I’m not sure why the information is mostly of the Agent Monitor. It took me some time to figure how to get to it, I had to click on Actions, Tool -> Administration. As I don’t have a development server to test the function, which is a real pity, I encountered this prompt in German. How very friendly. Thank goodness I understood the Formula used.

The next thing I’m trying to figure out is why there’s a web version of it. I can’t load it using local no matter what I tried. In the past, I thought it was something to do with FrontPage. Here, I have no use for FrontPage, so I can’t figure out why my Domino is unable to load the system for me to see the interface. Again, there are some information in German. So, why wasn’t it highlighted in the description?

I wanted to change the design so that it will notify more than 1 email but can’t seem to make it work. I think the rationale behind allowing to monitor some agents and not all to be sent via email makes sense. There are critical agents that do need to be monitored but not all of them needs to be emailed.

This monitor purges the log every 7 days by its scheduled agent. Once I manage to figure out how to make it from settings instead of by the agent itself, I shall have to see how I can make this work in the server.

I like its way of adding agents without having to amend the codes in the existing databases. Imagine having to modify 65 existing databases. I can faint.

IE7 is simply unable to render CSS properly. The site looks ok in IE6 but terrible in IE7! The image header is covered by the table and it looks as if the div is not even placed in the correct position. I don’t understand how IE7 handles CSS, it’s as if it’s a foreign language that IE7 is unable to understand.

I was going through my blog stats and noticed that there was a search for “JavaScript Hide/Unhide table rows”. It seems to be a commonly used function. I mentioned that I have used such a function before. Well, with a little help from Coding Forums and Lotus Forums. I have changed the original to suit the system that I was building for.

There are other sites that I’ve used in the past for coding help. There is no one site that will help to solve all the problems. It’s the combination of these sites that helped me solve my problems in the past. So, I shall list them down and hope that the list will help.

Coding Forums

Lotus Community

Dynamic Drive

Web Developer