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Let's say you have a view of support tickets that are awaiting processing. The older the ticket gets the more important it is that somebody does something about it.

How do we convey this to the user though? Well, there's various methods, but yesterday I came up with a new way, which I think you'll like. Imagine each row of the view is a varying shade of red, based on the document's age. The older the document the redder the row.

You can see an example of this in the screen-grab to the right and in this DEXT demo page. On the demo page you'll need to scroll down to see it in effect.

In terms of CSS this works by virtue of the fact you specify a colour as three numeric values representing the mix of red, green and blue. You might be used to seeing something like this:

<tr style="background-color:#ff0000;"><td>I should be bathed in red</td></tr>

But did you know you can also do it like this (in all browsers!):

<tr style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0);"><td>I should be bathed in red too</td></tr>

An RGB value of 255,0,0 is red, whereas 255,255,255 is white. You can specify any shade of pink by passing 255 for the Red value and any number for Green and Blue, as long as they're both the same. See this table as an example:

The smaller the number you specify for Green and Blue the redder the colour. Can you see where this is going?

What we need to do in our view is have each row calculate a number between 0 and 255. Brand new documents need to come out of the formula with a value of 255, whereas really old documents need to compute to 0.

The view itself needs to be treated as HTML and one of the columns would have a formula like this:

As you can see (hopefully) the G and B values of the row colour are worked out as a "percentage" value of 255, based on how many days have passed since it was created.

The number you multiply 255 by should be somewhere between 0 and 1. If it's 0 then you get red. if it's 1 then you get white. So it might seem the opposite way round to what you'd expect.

Note that I've introduced a "factor" in to the formula above. What I found was that you need to spread the shading of your rows out over the range of dates you expect to encounter. The factor needs to be about the same order of magnitude as the top end date expected. The best way to work this out is to play with it in your real world scenario.

By now you might have noticed the view uses today's date in a column formula. Although the way I've done doesn't invoke the problems with indexing that using @Today does you might be wondering how it gets updated, as the date appears hard-coded.

Remember I've talked before about how you can use scheduled agents to update view selection formula. Well, you can do the same thing with column formulas too! Imagine this code running every night at shortly past midnight:

It's as easy as that. There's little wonder I'm so fond of Notes.

Used in the right place this technique can add much usefulness to the user and help them immediately recognise documents in need of attention. How you use it is down to you (it doesn't have to be a support ticket system!). It doesn't have to be shades of red either. You can use shades of any colour, as long as one of the RGB values always stays the same. Brilliant.

Next blog entry will discuss the use of this technique with LotusScript.

As developers it's easy to email users of our systems. How do we know if the email ever reached the user though? And (more importantly in some cases) can you ever prove it got there?!

Most systems I've worked on have sent email notifications out. Until recently I've never really thought much about what happens after the .send() method has been invoked. Hey, I've sent the email. Now it's in the hands of the internet gods. Whether the user ever actually reads it or not, I just don't know.

One recent scenario involved sending a Booking Confirmation email to users of an online booking application. The first line of the email is in big bold letters and reads:

The trouble is that some users didn't print it and didn't bring it. In fact they claim they never even received it.

This is the point where email fails as an effective form of communication. It just can't be relied on. This is especially true nowadays thanks to our friends the spammers. Spam filters are having to get more and more aggressive in order to be effective. In doing so there are bound to be false positives. As I understand it system-generated emails themselves are more likely to fall prey of spam filters, especially when faking from headers. It's a wonder any of the emails we send get there at all.

So, my question to you is, if you have an important message that your user must see, how do you make sure it gets to them?

Alternatives to the booking confirmation email which I've discussed with my customer are:

It all leaves me feeling sad that the spammers have all but destroyed a wonderfully simple means of world-wide communication. Maybe that's the problem. SMTP is too simple a protocol.

Do you rely on email? If not, what do you do to get round its shortcomings?

Last week I finished a blog about learning JavaScript by saying "more on that next week". I don't know why I make promises like that. I should just say nothing and surprise you with the "more" when I get round to it.

What happened as a result of my (empty) promise was that I felt pressure (especially after a couple of you said you were looking forward to it) to write something concise and meaningful at some point last week. What actually happened was I never felt the inspiration needed in order to do so. Hence the solitary blog entry last week.

The real reason is that I just haven't had the time to write such an in-depth blog. A typical blog entry can take an hour or so to write. Something along the lines of what I was planning would take at least twice as long as that, if not longer still. I just don't have that much time spare right now.

You'll have to make do with more seemingly-random entries until I get more time.

In the mean time here's a copy of the file I have on my desktop at the moment. It's a HTML file with some JavaScript in it (see source). What I'm doing is going back to basics. Instead of reading I'm just doing. I've started by creating objects in JavaScript and seeing what happens when I mess around with them and add prototype functions etc. In testing what I think is true I'll hopefully learn what actually is.

Back to normal from now on though. Hope I haven't disappointed any of you. I'll try and talk about JavaScript at some point. Just don't expect anything amazing!

Last month I talked about how being Mr Computers can sometimes pay dividends. This weekend was another example of that. Friends of ours own a group of holiday cottages in the Peak District called Hurdlow Grange. For the design, hosting and upkeep of that site I get to stay there free of charge. Since designing that site they've bought the local pub, The Royal Oak, for which I also host the site (a modified copy of the other). In return I have been given every man's dream - a free tab in the pub.

This weekend a group of us had a get together, based around the pub. We (the Howletts) stayed in the cottages and ate/drank in the pub. All free of charge. Although I'm paying the price in other ways this morning. I'm getting too old for a whole weekend in the pub and probably won't feel myself again until at least Wednesday.

Having a free tab in a pub is only a good thing now that I've grown up somewhat and learnt to drink responsibly. Having children really does make you think about how that extra pint at the end of the night is going to make you feel in 7 hour's time when you wake up.

Talking of drinking responsibly I was in our local pub the other week with the guys off our street and fiddling with one of the beer mats on the table. On it in small (about 8pt) font in one corner was the web address D-RINKAWARE.CO.UK. I'd seen it before on other adverts for alcohol and wondered why they'd had to register d-rinkaware.co.uk. Was drinkaware.co.uk already taken? Drink-aware.co.uk too? How do they expect people to remember the dash. Especially if they've a fuzzy head in the morning, as I'd imagine their target audience might.

Then, while fiddling with said beer mat I must have tilted it enough to notice the "clever" part. As you'll see from the logo above the D and R help form a wine glass on its side. While this is a nice little visual trick (although not half as good as the FedEx arrow) and immediately(?) obvious in the full-size colour logo it doesn't work on the scale that most people see it. They must know this as they have in fact registered d-rinkaware.co.uk as well as drinkaware.co.uk.

For ages now I've been trying to find the time to learn JavaScript. That statement might surprise some of you who I know consider me as something of a JavaScript "guru". Bear with me.

As with most languages I'm self-taught and have learnt by the modification of example code. Undoubtedly this isn't the best way to learn. At some point you need to go back to basics.

Sometimes I think my problem is that I misunderstand too much about JavaScript to ever be able to truly understand it. Is there any way back or do I already have too many bad habits!?

<analogy quality="medium">I guess it's a bit like learning to speak English by coming to live in a Northern working-class town in England (like one where I were born). You'd pick it up fairly quickly but you'd learn some bad habits along the way, such as not using the word "the", saying "Am going te pub" or "Working down pit". You'd probably use double negatives such as "I haven't got no money" and way too many clichés, such as "At the end of the day I turned round to him and said..." which do nothing but pad-out what you're actually trying to say.</analogy>

My accent and way of speaking has changed considerably since I left home. Mainly due to my stint down south where they tend to talk proper (like what the Queen does). Having a job in "business" means you need to communicate effectively with people. This means talking clearly and concisely, which I do do now. This is especially useful when dealing with international clients on the phone.

However, although my speech has improved I still don't know the basics of my first (only!) language. My education didn't really dwell on the grammar side of things. Although I do consider myself something of an expert on the proper placement of apostrophes I still don't really know what a past participle is or what a split-derivative means. Although I can write in a way that I think is easy for others to read I don't know if it's correct.

Take this question from an online quiz at the BBC as an example:

Q. Which sentence has the adverb in the wrong position? Suddenly I felt sick. I suddenly felt sick. I felt suddenly sick. I felt sick suddenly

Now, to me, all of the sentences work (in that they make sense and convey the message to the reader) and I'm not sure which is correct or exactly why or what an adverb is for that matter.

Writing code is the same in many ways. Especially with JavaScript. There are numerous ways to achieve the same thing. Chances are most ways will work but only one way is the "proper" way. Coding the proper way means it's more likely to be understood by a greater number of people and make you seem a much cleverer person. Nobody wants to be the Vicky Pollard of the coding world do they!

What I want to do is learn to code JavaScript properly. More on that next week...

If you use a lot of JavaScript in your applications and you haven't already then you really ought to have a play with the Domino Developer Plugin for Aptana Studio. I got started with it last week and am now wondering how I managed to get by without it.

At the moment I'm working on an Ext-based template solution for a customer and this is an absolute God-send. You get all the things you'd expect of a coding IDE -- such as auto-complete, object awareness, colour-coding and line highlighting. Will I ever be able to return to editing JavaScript in Domino Developer? Not easily!

I seem to remember taking a look at the plugin some time ago and not seeing much use in it, but I think that was probably when it was first released and before all the useful stuff was being added, such as being able to edit JavaScript Libraries.

Give it a try! Everything you need to know is on the page linked to above.

A funny thing happened last night. There I was sprawled over the sofa, minding my own business, dividing my time between the laptop and Silent Witness, when Karen pipes up:

"I've got something to say to you", she says.

This normally means the same as "We need to talk". Inside I'm thinking "Oh God, what have I done now!?" but simply ask what's on her mind.

"Ray... Ozzie... Clouds", she replies.

"Have you been watching the news?" I ask her.

Having watched this clip from BBC online earlier in the day I think I knew what she was talking about. Turns out she'd seen it on the TV and thought she'd try and impress me or, at least, feign an interest in whatever it is she thinks I do. What she didn't realise was who Ray Ozzie is or the relevance of what he's done in the past to my life now.

"Are you asking because you know he was the man who invented Lotus Notes?", I asked.

"No, I didn't know that. Is he your hero then?", she replied. To which I replied "Hmm, not really" and we left it at that. Karen still non-the-wiser as to exactly what I do.

It was funny as, when I'd been watching the interview earlier, I couldn't help but look at him and wonder how different my life would be had Lotus Notes not come about. But hey, that's fate for you and I'm not going to question whether my life would be better or worse. Fact is I'm happy where I am and shouldn't ever take that for granted.

Our clocks went back an hour this weekend from BST to GMT. As a result a funny bug cropped up in my code. What I can't work out is if the source of the bug lies with Notes or not. It's not behaviour I've seen before.

Imagine a "subscription" document which has an ExpiryDate field, which should need no explanation, and also a GracePeriod field, which stores the number of days after the expiry date on which it actually expires.

To work out whether the actual expiry date had passed I use the formula:

Yesterday (the 27th) I noticed that a document had expired a day early. Looking in to it I found that the change to the clocks had caused it.

For the document in question the formula being computed was:

Now, I'd expect that to give me a date/time of "27/10/2008 00:00:00", but, in this case was giving me "26/10/2008 23:00:00". Hence it was indeed before @Today (the 27th) and so the formula returned true and the document expired a day early.

I can see what it's doing here. Two days is 48 hours and 48 hours after midnight this Saturday gone it was indeed only 11 PM on Monday, as the clocks went back an hour at some point in between. I just didn't expect @Adjust to be that clever. Has it always done that?

As a fix I found that ignoring the time component and only adjusting the date part stopped the extra hour being removed. The formula is now:

For the example used above this gives me "27/10/2008", as expected. You live and learn. I'll try and remember to always extract the date part only from now on, assuming the formula isn't time-dependent, which it isn't in this case.

Am I missing something here? Did you all know of this and I've just been lucky never to have seen this behaviour before?

Remember last month I ran the Nottingham half marathon and managed my target of a sub-100 minute time. Just.

Well, yesterday I ran in the Worksop half marathon and smashed that time. Although my brother, Tim, and I turned up with no expectations we managed times of 93 and 94 minutes (respectively), coming about 200th in a field of 1400. We went home aching, but happy.

The two lines highlighted are Tim and I. Although Tim ran as me and I ran as Timothy Watson. Don't ask.

Without realising it we set out at sub-7-minute mile pace and managed to keep this up until about 10 miles, which we reached at just over 69 minutes. It all fell apart after that and we lost minutes over each of the last three miles. I had to stop for a pee (poor excuse to rest my legs really) and then plodded along never managing to catch Tim. Had we maintained our initial pace there's a chance we could have done it in less than 90 minutes!

So my new PB is now 1:34:34. Note that I am no longer counting my time of 1:27:54 from when I was 18 years old as my PB. That was almost half my lifetime ago. That was old me and this is new me. Although, really, this is old me and that was new me. There's no point me counting what I did back then as an achievement. I need to start afresh and forget the past.

<analogy quality="poor">It's a bit like our local football club, Nottingham Forest, going on about how good they were in their heyday. The only thing Forest has in common with the team that won all those trophies is the old football ground they still play in. The only thing I have in common with my 18 year old self is the old(er) body with which I'm tied. I'm a different person now.</analogy>

Talking of it being half a lifetime ago, I recently set myself a new goal. By the time I'm 36 (and hence twice the age) I want to beat my old PB. To be as fit as I was at 18 when I'm 36 will be something of a boost to my confidence and show that there's no reason being a little older means you can't be as fit.

Until yesterday I wasn't sure I'd achieve this goal, but then while running along at 90 minute pace I realised it's not actually that much faster than 100 minute pace and, given the right course (i.e. flat) I think I could just about do it. I have the whole of 2010 in which to try.

As part of the effort to make sure codestore was XSS-proof, which I did at the same time as discussing XSS in detail on here, I made a change to the Form that stores comments to articles. Since the site was born and before it became a blog the form has allowed you guys to post HTML to it. All you needed to know was that the HTML needed wrapping inside [] square brackets. A few of you worked this out, but none of you took advantage of it in any sinister way.

In light of the alarming nature of and ease of performing XSS attacks I decided to disable Passthru HTML on that Form. To do this I add a field to the form called $$HTMLOptions and set its value to ""DisablePassthruHTML=1". You can no longer enter HTML of any kind anywhere on this site (although I might change that to allow a limited subset of HTML - b, i, a tags etc at some point).

The only reason I added it to that form is that the "Body" field on it was Rich Text, where as the comment form on the blog is plain text and so doesn't allow use of [] brackets anyway.

I discovered the existence of this new HTMLOptions fields following a post to one of XSS blog entries. I can't remember who posted it, but thanks anyway. The link was to this slideshow which discusses "What's new in the Domino web server". Although it doesn't mention which version of the server (doh!) I guess it's 7.0.2.

It's worth skipping through the slideshow if you have some time to spare as there are other options to the field that are worth knowing about.