Little Logos

New Project. Love new.
Inventory control of human specimens in the morgue on campus.
RFID was the initial thought but ended up with more conventional Barcode scanners.
Great chance to do some work in .Net and SQL with GPRS (mobile) PocketPC devices although the web front end may still end up in domino given our in-house experience and the security model.

The decision to use PocketPCs with mobile telephony was actually pretty straightforward on cost and implementation grounds.

More to follow.

From a post at Lifehacker from a post at juiceanalytics showed a cool way to put mini graphs in a cell next to the data in Excel. This is not new but a good reminder of what can be done with old fashion ASCII art.

Reminds me to go back and look at the work of Edward Tufte and his beautiful displays of information - I have used sparklines and other techniques from his books.

Also worth pointing out that this also works nicely in lotus notes and domino views using basically the same code and exactly the same technique.

The formulas in Notes for the above cols are:

@Repeat(”l”;NumberField) for a Number Field
and
@Repeat(”l”;@TextToNumber(TextField)) if a text Field

then you can format the col as you need

While removing a replication or save conflict document yesterday (the server mail config document for the mail server), we inadvertently deleted all the mail rule docs that went with it.Now, these are “keep private” documents, so you can’t just copy and paste them from a working NAB (which we quickly backed up off a replica before anything bad happened to it).We found some useful info on notes.net. This post tells how to copy them from one db to another, and this post tells how to set the response docs so they have the correct parent document. So what we did was to first create a private view that just has mail rules documents so we could see what we were working with. We did this in both the mails server db, and the local copy we had. Next, we set all the documents $KeepPrivate to 0 so that they could be copied. Copied the 28 mail rule documents back over to the mail server. Then set the $KeepPrivate back to 1, and set the CfgDocUnid to the correct one. So the mail rules now showed up ok, although we kept getting a strange error - Cannot find external name I_ISSERVERRULES. There is *nothing* on the net about this - on notes.net or google. So we replaced the design of the database, and the errors went away. Not sure if this was to do with the rule documents themselves, or, more likely, the deletion of the replication save conflict document and problems that may have caused.Next we restarted the router to make sure all the rules were in place, then tested in and outbound messaging, and also tested the rules to make sure they were working too.

Thanks to Karen for doing the actual work on this