April Fool's - a day later

Several folks have posted some wonderful April Fool stories. Of course, the first one I saw yesterday was an email from a coworker asking about the Inside Domino story about IBM selling Lotus to Microsoft. :-) Follow the blog links on the left -- even just the first couple -- for some more of the pranks that folks either experienced, dreamed up, or played on the unsuspecting.

My personal favorite prank -- which I've still never figured out how to top -- was about a dozen years ago. As I mention on my About page, I used to manage a DEC VAX system. Early on April 1 of some year in the late 80's, I plopped in some code in the global logon script so that when folks first powered up their VT terminals (this was back in the days of dumb terminals on most desks), everything displayed upside down and backwards. After 5 or 10 seconds it would then revert to normal. This was an insurance company, so it was a bit of a risk getting too radical with a prank, but the altered state of the display was short-lived enough that most folks got a good laugh after an initial bit of panic.

These days all I typically come up with are the standard lame pranks like putting a tiny piece of paper wrapped around someone's RJ45 plug when they return from a vacation so they think their network connection's toast -- or removing the mouse ball (if they're not using an optical mouse!).

I'm probably just not drinking enough coffee.


Update: OK, before I get too many emails, here's a routine that will turn a Windows display upside down; it's disabled by simply pressing the <Esc> key.

Quick LS to trim all text fields

Years ago I would use translation formulas on fields to keep the extra white space trimmed. Realizing that this was quite a performance hit on all but the most trivial forms, I began using exiting events. For some ridiculous reason, it didn't hit me until now to just plop a few lines in the QuerySave event to keep all fields trimmed up:

 ' Eliminate any extra white space in the fields
 Forall itm In doc.Items
     If itm.Type = 1280 Then
       ' Text field
       Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( itm.Name, Trim$(itm.Text) )
     End If
 End Forall 

The one caveat (so far :-) is to add a line or two to exclude any checkbox fields from that code. The trim seems to wipe out the contents of checkbox fields. Need to do more testing on that one, but it's quick enough to just add a list of checkbox fields (and maybe radio button, etc?) and have a glance at the list before doing the trim.

Laptop warranty

And the #1 reason to be sure to buy that extended warranty on the new laptop:

Google toolbar for Mozilla

This has nothing to do with Notes/Domino, but it's cool. I use Internet Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla for web browsing: IE because so many sites seem (unfortunately) to require it for optimal viewing; Opera because it's fast (although it takes up too much screen real estate in my opinion), and Mozilla because it's standards based and is just flat out cool. But I use Google -- a lot, and really like the Google Toolbar in IE.

Well I just discovered the Googlebar for Mozilla! It's a freebie download and has more goodies than the "official" Google Toolbar for IE. This one gets 5 out of 5 on the Litton kewl-o-meter :-)

TABINDEX on HTML tab of form elements

One can learn a lot by viewing the html source generated by Domino. While I've developed a number of Domino apps, I've never needed to worry about the tab order of fields and buttons on a web form -- until now. I'd been asked to take a VB app and develop something similar that would run in a web browser and that would not involve DLLs and an install routine. I was able to do this with a Domino form and JavaScript, but since there was a very particular layout required, the default left-to-right and top-to bottom tab navigation of buttons and fields was not acceptable. I set the tab order for a few fields and then looked at the html that Domino generated.

DUH! I had never explicitly set the TABINDEX property. It turns out that even though Designer does not offer an up-front way to set the tab order of buttons, we can do this by simply setting the TABINDEX property on the HTML tab of the item properties box for each field and button on the form. I was able to quickly set the tab order to exactly what was required.

Just another simple discovery that makes life easier.