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50%

A couple of weeks ago, we moved to a house. A beautiful house, a lot of rooms, a huge garden, cellar - everything needed. This weekend, the kids were out of the house (on vacation or with grand-ma). Instead of just enjoying life doing nothing, my wife and I spent saturday and sunday going through the boxes, sorting the books, installing shelves in the cellar, opening boxes, rearranging furniture, hanging paintings and all the other things necessary to make an area, that was looking like the beginnings of a landfill area to something habitable for a family. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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The cult of the mouse

It’s absolutely unbelievable, how little it takes to make a good design. Actually, it’s unbelievable, how much it takes to make so little. The Mighty Mouse is such a thing. While I haven’t seen it yet, or actually laid hands on it, it seems to me, reading the descriptions, that the designers have put a lot of thought into this. Items like the left/right finger detector. The built in speaker for audible feedback. The roll-thing (I wonder how this compares to the IBM version of old, where a tracking-point was used instead of a wheel – I never got the hang of that and didn’t like it). The squeeze buttons. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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Lotus Domino Server with ODBC connection

On one of my customer projects, I needed to access an Oracle 9 database to transfer information from a Notes database to the SQL database. Because this was going to be an intermediate solution, only for a couple of weeks, I hacked together something that used the Oracle ODBC driver and installed it at the customers site. We got it to work on a R6 Notes client, but not – as intended – on the R5 server they had hidden away in some basement. Recently we moved to another Notes server (R6.5 this time) but the agent still had problems. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer