Mozilla is hoping to get a Guinness World Record today for the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

The software is none other than the most recent version of the open standards Firefox browser. So if you’re still stuck with Internet Explorer, do yourself a favor and get Firefox 3 today.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

I’ve finished this one some time ago and even started a review before that got lost, so I’m coming back to it.

The Blade Itself is the first book on The First Law trilogy, by Joe Abercrombie. I have read the entire trilogy already and so it might make it hard to review this book independently, but I’ll give it my best shot.

This series has a fairly basic fantasy setting: there are no orcs or elves or similar, and even magic is scarcely used. There is the mention of demons and a fighting race called Shanka, but both barely show up in this book.

Unlike most fantasy books, there isn’t off the start a clear definition of the threat presented by the “bad guys”. The book begins by following the paths of a few of the main characters, who are eventually brought together by Wizard to go on a conquest to, according to him, save The Union, which is the kingdom where most of the action of this book occurs.

The book itself doesn’t include any map of the main land or kingdom, so some times it’s hard to understand what is going on from a geographic point of view. There is a central main kingdom (The Union), on the north we have a cold and icy land called Northlands, and in the south an old Empire, defeated by The Union in previous wars, called Gurkhul.

The Union is, as the name somehow implies, an association of smaller kingdoms brought together by a ruler from the past. The present ruler is a weaker and older man and so throughout the book we witness the different games of power manipulation, helped and endorsed by institutions like The Inquisition or Trading Guilds. This brings an interesting dimension of intrigue throughout the story, not to mention it is often not clear who is actually “pulling the strings” in quite a few situations.

From a magic point of view, the book mentions only the main Wizard of the story, Bayaz The Great. Throughout the books Bayaz will talk about his other fellow wizards (some of which will actually appear in the 2nd and 3rd books) and about the Master Maker, a character Bayaz defeated who is opposed to magic but created wondrous mechanical inventions - including the Shanka race. This gives the books a very (extremely) slightly touch of a steampunk setting.

Bayaz, an apparently peace-appeasing wizard, is but one of the main characters but not the main one. We have Logen “Ninefingers”, a barbarian dangerous to enemies and friends; Jezal Dan Luthar, a soldier whose main concerns in life are drinking and finding pretty women; Ferro Malijin, a vengeful fighter from the south with an unhealthy keenness for killing Gurkish, and last but not least, Sand Dan Glokta, formerly hero of war, captured and tortured and crippled by the Gurkish, returned to his homeland to become a bitter Inquisitor.

As much as the story itself is very good, it’s on the unusual characters the book’s strengths really show: these “heroes” are very akin to the anti-heroes depicted on Stephen Donaldson’s books. The author himself studied psychology and it shows in particular on the reflections of life present and past done by Inquisitor Glokta.

Mind you, even though I am praising the excellently depicted characters, the story itself has enough twists and turns to keep fantasy fans happy. Maybe it’s not as evident in this first book, but it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems, in particular who is “good” and who is “evil”.

I therefore unconditionally recommend this book and this trilogy to any fantasy fan. I sure hope the author continues creating such great quality books.

Last week I was at the Irish Lotus User Group! Besides the magnificent sessions, it was great to meet some great people I already knew, and some others that I didn’t.

The organizers were, as usual, fantastic. I don’t know how they make it. Thanks folks!

I’ll also add a few notes as they spring to mind:

- Ed says IBM still won’t invest on TV advertisements for Notes. Disappointing.

- Another great session by Rob, the Dojo techniques were amazing (no I didn’t drink my free beer )

- As Steve already mentioned on his blog, hats off to Ben and Mark for their great Eclipse session

- I got a LS2008 staff shirt from Mary-Beth. Thank you!

- Despite the green hair, Bill is still a fantastic speaker

- Found yet another Notes and Ubuntu fan

- (… possibly more to come after I wake up properly and my memory returns!)

Cya all next year!

First thing you notice when you open the Return of the Heroes box is the nice amount of good quality materials, almost worth in itself the 20 eur for the game. Colored cubes for skills, glass counters for life points, nicely drawn characters and map pieces… and a huge amount of chits. We’ll get to that later.

Return of the Heroes is famous for one thing - it has the most confusing rules ever written. Fortunately there’s an online condensed/improved version that should be downloaded and followed.

Setting up the game is possibly what I like the least in this game. Even though I have organized everything in ziplocks, it is still a chore to get everything up and running - and gets worse during the game. The board game can be set up from the start from a predefined order, randomly or during the gameplay also randomly, which is a nice feature.

I won’t go into much detail in the game mechanics, but basically the heroes have to gain experience by doing quests or killing monsters, until they’re powerful enough to face the Nameless One - bad guy of the game, whose identity can also, as a game option, be displayed in the end. These monsters and quests come from the small chits that are on the board since the beginning or added each turn. Now it starts getting confusing because some chits have to go in a bag, others are then mixed into that bag, and then some are removed from the game and others go back into the bag and… arghhhh. Let’s grab that ruleset again. And again. Oh we’re now playing it different from last time. *sigh*

Eventually the Nameless One chit also comes into play and players can assault his castle. Now, it seems to me, from our plays, that invariably the players try to improve their “best” skill, until they have it at maximum and then they try to have a go at the bad guy. There’s no real variation from this type of play. The game doesn’t include rules for treachery or for incentive for the players to diversify their character skillset.

One last thing I personally didn’t enjoy, was the fact that I was looking forward to something closer to HeroQuest, in which the heroes advance in skills/equipment and they get to keep it to the next, usually radically different, adventure. Maybe the disappointment of finding a much more linear and oversimplified game has some influence on my negative critique.

As a conclusion, the game itself is repetitive and confusing, although fun for a few go’s. Maybe I haven’t yet understood the rules correctly - but I don’t intend to go through them a 6th time. Perhaps someone could use the great material included and make a totally new set of rules?

Final score: 6/10

I’m sure many Notes developers have gone through this problem before: “I want to load a different subform after the form is loaded”. Unfortunately, Notes doesn’t let you do that, and so ways have to be found around this… layers, hide/whens, sections, programmatic tables, etc.

But let’s say you reeeeaallllyyy want to dynamically load a subform, for example, when the user selects a value from a dropdown box. Here’s a way of doing it, supposing the default subform is “sfm_Default” and the subform you want to load comes from that dropdown box.

1. Make your computed subform take the value of whatever’s on a computed field (called for example fld_WhichSubform)

2. Put the following code on a button that should be called (via JS for example) when the dropdown box (called for example fld_DropDown) value changes:

@SetProfileField( “fm_FakeProfile”; “fld_PSubForm”; fld_DropDown; @UserName );
@Command( [ViewSwitchForm] ; Form )

(Any unique key that will correctly identify the document will do for the @SetProfileField. @Username is but a suggestion, @text( @DocumentUniqueID ) could be used as well)

3. Give the following formula to your fld_WhichSubform computed field:

x := @GetProfileField( “fm_FakeProfile” ; “fld_PSubform”; @text( @DocumentUniqueID ) );
@If( @IsError( x ) | x = “” ; “sfm_Default”; x )

This is but a simple example, and more interesting/complex things can be done with it.

Note: for this method to work, the document has to be saved. A @Command( [FileSave] ) before the ViewSwitchForm might be necessary in some circumstances.

I just got reminded from Steve McDonagh’s blog of this “Album Cover” game. The rules are simple:

1. Go to the Wikipedia random article page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random . The title of the article is your band name.

2. Go to the very last quote on random quotations www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 . The last four words of the last quote are your album title.

3. Go to Flickr’s “interesting photos from the last seven days” page www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ . The third picture on the page is your album cover.

4. Add them together and you’re done. Voila, here’s mine:

Some of you might wonder why I mentioned “Collaboration” on the “About” page of this blog.

A huge percentage of my worklife has been dedicated to a collaboration platform called Lotus Notes. How did that happen? Well recently there has been a meme/trend going

around in the Lotus Notes community with many bloggers mentioning how they got into this same bandwagon, so I guess it’s my turn

Flashback to my homecountry, Portugal, in 2000 or so, I was in college studying Computer Science, and we had a “course” on the 4th year which involved doing a project for a

company. Of all the companies we could choose, I picked one called Salvador Caetano IMVT (one of the biggest portuguese privately held companies) that was really close to my

wife’s work and acceptably close from home.

So Salvador Caetano at the time had two available projects, one for SAP and another for Lotus Notes. Someone from the inside advised me that the Lotus Notes project was more

interesting so I took it on. Now as you all know, “Lotus Notes” is not something you hear about in college, so I bought a book about it and started to read.

So I started in December 2000 getting some training in Lotus Notes 5 (although the company was finishing it’s upgrade from, iirc, 4.6.1) and started the project soon after, the

design of a workflow application for computer hardware purchasing based on application requirements. Besides working on this project, and since the existing Notes team in the

company was composed of one person only, I soon started to assist him in Notes Administration issues as well.

The project ended in mid-2001 and the company liked my work, so they hired me for a 3 year contract as a Notes Developer and Admin.

After those 3 years, I moved to a consulting company called Artsecrets TI, a small software house that sold both IBM and Microsoft products. Despite the constant running around, I found the work as a consultant very rewarding, as I got exposed to different systems and solutions every day from different customers, so although most of my work at Artsecrets was done as a Notes Developer (mostly R5, but some ND6 as well), I had the chance to use other tools and application platforms as well.

After some time I decided to seek Fame, Fortune and Glory (OK, not really, just some better quality of life) outside of Portugal so I ended up accepting a position of a Lotus Notes Programmer Analyst at APC (now Schneider Electric). Things have been working well for me here and after less than two years I’ve gotten a promotion to Team Leader - which means I don’t have as much time as I’d like to look into the technical side of Notes since I have to look at metrics and task assigments and…  but ah well, I can’t complain.

So for those that didn’t know me, here’s my story with Collaboration and Lotus Notes.  I still look at Notes as a kick-ass appdev platform, so hopefully I’ll be able to in the future use this blog to occasionally participate on Show and Tell Thursdays (SnTT’s) with some nifty Notes Dev tips

Right, haven’t had enough time to write on this blog so I decided to start with something non-controversial, like a book review

Dawnthief, by James Barclay is the first book on the “Chronicles of the Raven” trilogy. The story revolves around a group of mercenaries, The Raven, who suddenly find themselves in a world-saving quest much different from the usual jobs for money they normally take. This might somehow be reminiscent of Glen Cook’s “The Black Company“, but unfortunately I haven’t yet managed to grab it on this side of the pond.

The setting for the story itself is pretty much a normal fantasy setting with swords, magic, elves, dragons, etc. There is some dimensional travel as well, but it isn’t taken into much detail in this book.

Balaia, the continent where the story develops, is a big rectangular island, with a chain of mountains separating the bad guys (Wesmen) on the West from the good guys on the East. Not the most inspiring of maps.

In terms of magic, there are 4 colleges of magic in Balaia and despite occasional dissent, they are mostly, in this book, in diplomatic terms with each other. The spells the members of each college casts seem to be the same, even though some of the colleges are more prone to cast certain spells - for example ForceCones seem to be used mostly, but not only, by Julatsan mages, and HellFires by Xeteskians. These spells are cast through creation of mana shapes, members of each college having to manipulate their shapes made of a different mana flow visible in a different color - an interesting concept.

The strong point of the books are definitely the characters. The members of The Raven aren’t perfect goodie-two-shoes like Aragorn (Lord of the Rings) or Drizzt (Icewind Dale), nor they’re anti-heroes like Thomas Covenant (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever) or Inquisitor Glokta (The First Law). They’re humans and mercenaries, so they have their strengths and weaknesses and disagreements like any other human - or elf. Some of the characters that are not part of The Raven, like Styliann, also display an interesting personality and behaviour. Akin to George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire“, not all main characters make it to the end of the book, which makes a difference from the fantasy book cliches.

Overall, and mainly because the characters of The Raven are so interesting, I strongly recommend this book. I will soon review the 2nd book of this series which will surely reinforce my point

Welcome to the first post on Playroom 3!

So what’s this blog about? When I started dabbling in the mystical arts of HTML back in 1994, I created the Playroom, which was a really rudimentary/noobish web page.

A few years after, the Playroom 2 came to life. My University page, which covered mostly my hobbies at the time.

Fast forward into the Web 2.0 era, and a blog seems to be the best way to recreate the Playroom. So the Playroom 3 will cover both technologies (Gadgets, IT, software development, Collaboration…) and hobbies (Boardgames, Reading, collecting…).

So, “welcome to my parlour…”