The Feb 2007 edition of IBM Forward View contains a video, "Is Second Life The New Business Center", which provides a simple and quick overview of some of the things IBM is doing in Second Life. ? ?It's only a minute and a half long, I suggest you take a look.

Thanks to a forum post , I just learned that Chris Riccio has a blog ! Chris is a test manager on the ASP.NET AJAX team. I've never actually met him, but he and his team have answered a number of questions for me in email. Anyway, the main thing I wanted to point here is that Chris has a post called Demystifying 'Sys is undefined' . That error message comes from the JavaScript code in the browser, and it basically means that the Microsoft AJAX Library hasn't been loaded. That could be for a number of different reasons, and the browser can't really tell you what went wrong. That's where Chris' post comes in. He describes a number of the common causes of this error and how to resolve them. Here's a sneak peak at his list: The browser fails to...(read more)

A friend of mine is having a problem where he has a Notes URL like this:

notes://servername/databaseReplicaID?OpenDatabase

He has no icons for this database on his workspace, and yet when he clicks the link it opens a replica of the database on some other server -- not the one specified in the link.

So I did some searching and found this technote that indicates that calling @Command([FileOpenDBRepID]) to open a database uses the following logic:

1. Look for an icon of the database on the workspace, and use that if it's available (if there are multiple icons, use the one at the top of the stack)
2. Look for the database using the Catalog/Domain search, and use that if it's available
3. Look for the database using the server specified in the server hint, and use that if it's available
4. Look for the database on the user's Home Server, and use that if it's available
5. Look for the database on the user's local machine, and use that if it's available
6. Give the user the "Choose Servers to Search" dialog (listing the servers in your Home Server's Notes Network, and highlighting all servers for which you already have an icon on your workspace)

Okay, that seems reasonable... all except that second and third part. Those look reversed. According to the technote, even if you specify a server hint, the client will always check the Catalog first. And the Catalog is (of course) in alphabetical order, so if you happen to have a server in Anguilla then that one will have preference over a server that may be much closer to you.

Taking this a step further, this LDD post indicates that this is the same logic used when you open a database using a notes:// URL. So even though my friend was clicking this:

notes://servername/databaseReplicaID?OpenDatabase

he was getting the database on "anotherserver" instead of "servername", because "anotherserver" came first in the catalog.

At least, that seems like what was going on. Here are my questions, if anyone can help:

• Can someone in a larger enterprise environment confirm/deny this for me? (ANSWER: yes, that's exactly what's going on)
• Does it help to have the database name instead of the replica ID? (ANSWER: yes, using the database name will fix it)
• Does the same thing happen with doclinks and database links? (ANSWER: yes, the SPR says that doclinks have the same problem)

If the client always checks the Catalog first anyway, then the server hint doesn't do a whole heck of a lot of good, does it?

UPDATE: oh, and I realize that if the server name that is specified in the link is not available via DNS, then the server hint doesn't work. In case you were thinking that was the problem.

SOLUTION: Michael Urspringer did some testing and confirmed that (A) the Catalog server was indeed the problem in this case, and (B) using the database filename instead of the replica ID will fix the problem. Kurt Higley also said that the filename versus replica ID has always worked for him, so a big thanks to Michael and Kurt for coming back with the answer so quickly!

Thanks also to the anonymous commenter who said that SPR EAVM4THH42 indicates that doclinks work the same way (always look at the Catalog server before the server hint).

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The latest release of Script# enables authoring Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets using C#. It also comes along with a sample gadget that enables searching MSDN content and a project template to get you up and running quickly. Read More......(read more)

Your number and percentage of supplemental results can be viewed as a proxy for the quality of your information architecture and your link equity relative to the size of your site.

Alessandro "Garbin" Gallo, David Barkol, and Rama Krishna Vavilala have been working on a great ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 book for Manning called " ASP.NET AJAX in Action ": Early chapters are now available online via their early access program. Click here to learn more and start reading it today. Read More......(read more)

No, this is not a post about the new term for replication in Notes/Domino 8! ? This is about my excitement over The Police 30th anniversary reunion tour.

I've been a big Police fan ?since I was little, but was too young to attend the Police Picnics when they were originally touring. ? I have dozens of live Police concerts, and I've seen Sting many times, but I am very psyched to try and see this new tour. ? Of course, getting tickets is not going to be easy, nor cheap! ? The unfortunate part is, the day they are playing Fenway Park in Boston, I will be in Toronto for a wedding! ? ?However, the scheduling gods are not entirely against me. ? The are playing in Toronto at the Air Canada Center the weekend before. ?So if I can get tickets there, I'll just go a week early and see them in Toronto.

Boston would be much better though! ? Fenway Park. ?Outdoors. ?Huge crowd. ? Ah, so sad... but I'll take what I can get, if anything at all.

Joe Stagner on the ASP.NET team has been busy the last few weeks, and has just finished updating all 23 of his ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos to go against the final ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release . If you haven't watched Joe's videos before, I highly recommend checking them out. They are short, focused, videos that drill in on a specific topic and are designed to help master common scenarios when using the product. Both VB and C# sample code versions can be downloaded for each video topic. You can watch all of the videos online for free at: http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/ (also make sure to check out the more than 50+ other videos on that page as well). Now that Joe has finished covering a lot of the ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit...(read more)

SearchDomino.com member Chandra Teja explains how to load XML from JavaScript and manipulate the data in Internet Explorer using the DOMDocument object.

When used in a form action, this code from SearchDomino.com member Jon Urwin will invite users to click a button, browse for a file, and then insert a shortcut to that file in a rich-text field. This is ideal for items like a Lotus Notes discussion database, because it provides an easy way for users to create a pointer to a shared file.

via the front page of Saxonica.com, we learn, Saxon 8.9 is now available. The most exciting feature of this release is that XQuery queries can now be translated directly into Java source code, reducing execution time by anything from 25%...

ReviewMe is offering advertisers 50% off for the rest of for the rest of February.

Tidal Software announced its Tidal Intersperse 6.0 solution now embeds JRockit Mission Control diagnostic toolset to connect to BEA JRockit, delivering an advanced, very low overhead solution for detailed monitoring of SOA applications. JRockit Mission Control can provide deep JVM performance profiling such as fine grain memory utilization, visibility into hotspots, and memory leak detection at a lower overhead than any other performance monitoring technology available in the market today.

Unfortunately, there are always people that find ways to ruins things. ?Spam. Spim. Spit. Phising. ?Visuses. ?Trojan Horses. Hoaxes. ?What a waste of time, money, bandwidth, and good Karma these thing are!

The other day I was helping a user with a hoax email from Paypal, and I pointed out a Notes feature that I thought would make a good tip for today.

When you hover (don't click!) your cursor over a URL in Notes, you will see the actual destination of the click appear in the status bar at the bottom of the Notes screen.

For example, while this URL appears to go to www.paypal.com, notice at the bottom of the screen it shows that it is really going to www.scannerstalk.com. ?So in this case, I would not trust the link.



I hope this helps you fight the bad guys.

Tips to help you get your blog out of Google's supplemental results.

Search is mimicking the offline world, and in many markets established offline authorities are locking out newer smaller online players. Video content can be used to help some of these smaller players compete with larger players.

ChrisG recently offered a free downloadable ebook about creating Killer Flagship Content.

Video about using web directories as a link building source.

Google may use search engine scrapers to help clean up the search results by letting the links from automated search result scrappers dirty up the link profiles of high ranked low quality websites.