So, we've talked about compiling Notes C-API programs in Visual Studio Express, and Ed Schaller later gave some pointers on how to compile Notes C-API programs in gcc/MinGW (which I had tried and failed to do). Now Christian Mueller follows up with some step-by-step instructions and screenshots for compiling with MinGW and Eclipse on Windows.

The good thing about using MinGW/gcc to compile this stuff on Windows is that it should (in theory) make it much easier to port the code over to other platforms -- I'm thinking this because you're forced to get rid of all your Visual Studio-specific functions/classes in the process. I dunno. Interesting thing to try, anyway.

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That's me, "AlanLepo Lotus", wearing my Lotus Notes t-shirt (designed by IBMer Darren Adams) standing (actually flying) in front of one on the many IBM buildings in Second Life.

Hopefully by now you've heard about Second Life. ?IBM is extremely active in this space. ? Even before the hype began, lead by the efforts of Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM was helping shape the foundations for this virtual world. ?Similar to how IBM introduced the industry to e-business as the web became a house hold name, Irving is propelling IBM forward into v-business, or virtual business. ?So much so, that we have set up a new division of the company dedicated to virtual worlds and related technologies and services. ?This is about much more than just "gaming", it is about the dawn of highly interactive user interfaces for collaboration, learning, and forming communities.

There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of web sites, blogs, and news articles about Second Life for you to read. ?I suggest starting with Irving's blog, as well as the following:
News: IBM's virtual pioneer
News: IBM Accelerates Push into Virtual Worlds
News: IBM's chief steps into 'Second Life' for incubator launch
News: IBM to open islands in virtual world. ?More about the islands: here and here.
News: IBM to give birth to 'Second Life' business group
News: IBM and Circuit City Join to Explore the Application of Virtual Worlds to Business
News: IBM Expands in Virtual Worlds Initiatives with a First-of-It's Kind Block Party in Second Life
Blog: IBM Eightbar
Blog: The Greater IBM Connection

As part of the Lotus strategy team, my days have been filed with Second Life lately. ?Were discussing everything from marketing in virtual worlds, to integration of features of our product portfolio, to brand new products based on a emerging set of requirements. ?This is an incredibly exciting space. ?At the moment I'd say it is a mix of hype and actual usefulness, but the point is, we're at the dawn of "something", and it is great to be a part of it.

Total Training has released Total Training For Photoshop Elements 5, a new 6 hour DVD video series designed to help users master the extensive capabilities of Photoshop Elements 5. If you'd like to see some of the DVD lessons, you can view 3 free clips that Total Training has provided us. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

I love books that inspire you to explore Photoshop in new ways, and Adobe Photoshop Unmasked, from Nigel French, does just that. It ignites curiosity and guides you through mastering Photoshop by understanding layers. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

Happy New Year! And here's a little present to start it off right - a working with shadows tutorial from Photoshop expert Mark Galer, extracted from "Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills." (posted by Jennifer Apple)

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) has announced the launch of Darkroom – a how-to magazine for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users. (posted by Jennifer Apple)

12 speakers speaking, 11 bloggers blogging, 10 scribblers scribbling, Nine Diggers Digging...

Feedback form for contacting Search Engine Watch Editors

Well, I'm finally back in town after the holidays. Let me tell you, I'm glad to be home. Between multiple holidays and taking my grandma to her cancer treatments in Ann Arbor, I was gone far too much of last month.

My Grandma is doing well. They used an experimental new procedure called radio frequency ablation to remove the meta-static colon cancer tumors from her lungs. This procedure is amazing compared to the standard treatment. The doctors at the University of Michigan were impressive. We'll know the results in a couple months when her lungs look a little less like scrambled eggs. We're hopeful.

I'm not much for retrospectives. Looking forward into 2007, I have a few major goals. I joined a gym today. I'm going to get a new laptop and refresh my development environment next week after MacWorld. I want to get at least a beta release of WACT out by May. I have to prepare for php|tek. I need to find a new place to live by this fall. (Ann Arbor?) I want to move by the end of the year.

I loved all my christmas and birthday gifts this year. (My birthday is December 28th.) This year I pointed everyone to my Amazon.com wishlist and I ended up with a ton of good books to read. Jason Gillmore from Apress also sent me some web development books. My to-read stack for 2007 includes:

• The Promise of Sleep - A survey of the subject of sleep for laymen, written by a top sleep researcher. I'm almost done with this one. This book has a bunch of sleep deprivation horror stories and a good survey of what is known about sleep, which is not much. Its incredible that we know so little about something we spend so much time doing. Its also amazing how many people have easily treatable sleep disorders that don't even know it. Do you snore?
• Don't make me Think - Looks like a nice overview book on web usability.
• Domain Driven Design - Recommended by Jason and Marcus. How did I get this far without reading this book?
• Da Vinci Code - Wasn't on my wishlist, but I'll read it anyway. I read so little fiction these days. Where is a beach when you need one?
• Getting Things Done - I'm almost through this one. It is a testimony to the power of the ideas that this book expresses that so many people recommend it, despite its being so incredibly dull. Useful? Yes. Inspiring? No. But, then I've read enough of these self help / personal productivity type books for a lifetime. Anyone want to buy a Franklin Planner? I used mine until I got a cell phone.
• Practical Subversion - I'm really liking subversion. If you haven't tried it, do so. I'm hoping to combine this with Greg Beaver's book, The PEAR installer manifesto -- the book on my wishlist I most wanted that I didn't get, to create a new deployment process.
• Pro CSS Techniques - A CSS book that tackles maintainability? I'm really looking forward to this one.
• Pro MySQL - The last MySQL book I read was a couple years ago, yet I use it almost every day. I'm due for a refresh. This one looks good.
• Pro PHP Security - Never hurts to brush up. This one looks like it has alot on encryption, SSL and SSH; not strong areas for me.
• Pattern-Oriented Software ARchitecture Volume 2 - The first volume, A system of patterns, is one of my "always within reach when developing" books. Nice to add to the set.

Thanks for the books, guys. I'll have in-depth reviews of some of these here in the future.

Happy New Year.

Crap, I've been tagged. Here you go: five things you may or may not (want to) know about me:

1. Sandpaper gives me the willies. I'm not sure if the word "willies" is going to translate properly for the non-English speakers out there, so if not it's that shiver you get up and down your spine sometimes. I can't stand touching sandpaper, or emery boards, or anything like that. I thought everyone was like that until I was about 12 -- kind of like how no one likes the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard. Apparently I'm kind of a freak that way.

2. I can't stand needles. Not an unusual thing, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Last time I gave blood (in high school) it took over 30 minutes to drain a pint, and the Red Cross people told me they had plenty of blood and not to come back.

3. I had never bought a TV -- ever -- until last week. I've owned several television sets, but they were always given to me in one way or another. My wife has still never bought a TV (she didn't go to the store with me).

4. I can stand with my feet facing in opposite directions. And not just one facing left and one right, I can turn one foot completely around to point behind me. Supposedly this is odd. I've just always been able to do it.

5. I once went to Halle Berry's house to assemble some furniture. I worked for a furniture store in Atlanta while I was in college, and she bought a few things that needed to be built. She was wandering around the house the whole time I was there, singing to the radio, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt. She was super-nice, and I think she even offered me a drink (like a water, not like "shaken or stirred"). It was right after she married David Justice and moved into an enormous new house -- I got to meet David Justice a few weeks later too, and he wasn't nearly as friendly.

   I also got to build a bed in Bill Berry's cabin outside of Athens while he was still drumming for REM. He was really nice too, but he was whistling the song "Do The Hustle" off and on the entire hour I was there. Drove me up a wall.

Apparently I have to tag 5 more people now. Let's see. How about Alan Lepofsky, Damien Katz, Chris Miller, Mac Guidera, and... oh, what the heck, how about Mother Vowe (just to see if he'll play ;-).

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Is your site defensible against algorithmic shifts and other shifts that could hurt your income potential? Andy Hagans offers a quick quiz to test the stability of your site.

SearchDomino.com contributor Chuck Connell provides an overview of Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) and outlines strengths and weaknesses of the Notes/Domino 7 administration tool.

Address Book. ?Contacts. ?Personal Directory. ?Little Black Book. ? There are many names for it, but no matter what you call it, essentially this is the place where you store the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of your friends, family, and coworkers.

In Lotus Notes, your personal address book is the database names.nsf.


Did you know you can have more than one address book?

Over the last 10+ years of using Lotus Notes, my address book has built up quite a list of names! ? I use my address book as the primary source for all my contact information, both work related and personal. ?I also synch my address book to many things, such as my BlackBerry. ? Many of the people listed are names I don't want getting in the way when I am addressing an email. ? Similarly, many of these names are people I don't need clustering up my phone.

The solution was simple. ? ?Similar to the way we archive old email, I decided to "archive" my older contacts. ? ?Here is how you do it:

1. ?From the Notes menus, choose File - Database - New. ?(or press CTRL+N)
2. ?In the dialog box, leave Local as the Server, and enter a Title and File Name. ? These can be whatever you would like. ? "Friends and Family", "Secondary Address Book", "Old Girlfriends", etc. ? ?The most important thing is that you choose "Personal Address Book" as the template, as shown by the arrow in the screen shot below.



3. ?Press OK, and Notes will create the new database for you.

Now we want to transfer contacts from your original Address Book, into the new one you just created. ? As with any change, you many want to make a backup before doing this, just to make sure you don't loose any data!

4. Open your original address book, names.nsf. ? Select the contacts you want to move. ? From the Notes menus choose Edit - Cut. (or press CTRL+X)

5. Open the new address book that you created in step #2. ? From the Notes menus choose Edit - Paste. ?(or press CTRL+V)

Now you have a nice and "clean" primary address book, and an archive that you can look up any of the old names if/when you need them.

Ken Holman sent me copy of the latest draft of the OASIS/UBL Methodology for Code-list and Value Validation, which is a pretty good use of Schematron. It looks like a neat and workable solution to a problem that is somewhere...

Welcome to 2007! This week Simon St.Laurent gives us an interesting report from the XML 2006 conference.

... and then it hit me... ongoing � JSON and XML The Arguments Are Over � There used to be an argument about whether platform-neutral, language-neutral data formats were important, or whether distributed objects were the right answer. That's over:...

You *ROCK*!!! Lawrence Lessig Details to follow later today, but when you add our offline campaign to the online campaign (and assuming we solidify some pledges made in the final week), we will have bested our goal of $300,000 by...

Hello: Registration for the DITA 2007-West conference (February 5-7, 2007 in San Jose, CA USA) is currently $800 for the full 3 day conference. Early

The Lotus Notes User Interface (UI) is made up of several different elements. ? Today I want to describe the four elements shown in the screen shot below. ?I'll describe the areas the arrows below are pointing to, working from the top of the screen down to the bottom...



The top arrow points to the File Menus, and the second arrow points to the Toolbar, which contains Toolbar icons. ? Most likely you are accustomed to these two UI elements, as most programs use these.

The next row contains "Window Tabs". ? Lotus Notes has had a "tabbed interface" since version 1 in 1989. ? As I pointed out last year, I find it amusing that now tabs are all the rage in other programs such as web browsers and chat clients.

The fourth arrow points to the Lotus Notes Action Bar. ? Action bars (and the Actions Buttons they contain) are available at both the Notes datbase view level (as shown above) and the form/page level (shown below).



As you move from one Notes database to another, the file menus, toolbars, and window tabs stay pretty much the same (they are some contextual changes) as they are associated with the overall Lotus Notes interface.

However, Action Bars are unique to the specific Lotus Notes database you are in. ?The database's developer decides what actions are most appropriate for you to use. ?For example, in your mail file you have Actions such as "Forward" and "Reply", while in a Discussion Database you have Actions like "New Topic" and "Response".

If you like to use your keyboard more than your mouse, you can access Action Buttons by pressing the ALT key and the number corresponding to the Action Button as shown below. ? I describe this feature in more detail in the tip Extended Accelerators.


I wish more programs had Actions similar to the way Lotus Notes does.