martin jinoch

I’m just making this quick short note to save myself a few searches next time I’ll need this: Do you want to manipulate PDF files, for example to merge them? Use Apache PDFBox. Version 2.0.1 works just fine on Domino, API is well documented and reading PDF files from notes documents is easy - EmbeddedObject has method getInputStream().

This is starting to be a little old, but after every BLUG/Engage every blogger from the community simply has to - contract is very strict about this :) - write that Theo and Hilde did it again, that Engage was bigger than last year, venue was impressive and event most successful. It’s very easy to do so, as it is 100 % true. In previous years you may have noticed, though, that most of the “post-event” blog posts don’t mention specific sessions but more the general vibe of the event (and that’s not because sessions are not good, they sure are). It’s caused by the fact the people in this community are simply great and it is extremely nice to be part of it.

My wife and I are not the biggest fans of winter, especially version of it that we usually have in Prague. Every year we plan our vacation to cover as much winter time as possible. Last year we spent 7 weeks in Nicaragua and at the end of our stay we felt we hit the limit of how long we can/want be abroad and NOT doing anything else than travelling. Therefore we’ve decided to try another approach.

You may have heard about Let’s Encrypt. If not, go there and check it. You can have SSL certificates for your servers for free, so there is now no excuse for not using https by default. But Let’s Encrypt certificates are not yet trusted in all browsers/systems. And one of those is my beloved BlackBerry OS 10. Here comes the good news: there is a way to fix it! Go to https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/ and download https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrgrootx1.pem and https://letsencrypt.org/certs/letsencryptauthorityx1.pem. And then go to https://www.identrust.com/certificates/trustid/root-download-x3.html and copy certificate body to text editor. You need to prepend -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and append -----END CERTIFICATE----- so it looks like this

You may already have 9.0.1FP5 or better FP5IF1 installed. If Designer is part of your installation, chances are all your plugins in DDE got disabled. I mean the plugins you have installed to DDE, such as newer version of Extension Library or OpenNTF Domino API. Solution seems to be simple: in Designer go to File - Application - Application management, expand the second entry and there you should see list of user installed plugins. You can select them all and then Enable them. Or simply enable only those you want to use.

I finally have some more time to write blogpost about thing that has made me very happy recently. Thanks to all of you who have nominated me and all people involved in final decision my IBM Champion status has been extended for the next year! Being awarded for something I love to do is very nice, right? I mean I was making contributions to the community before I was awarded. I never did it because I wanted to be awarded. But it feels good to be officially recognized, to know people are appreciating what you do.

You may know that I’m involved in organizing Social Connections and SUTOL conferences. I do love working with both teams to make those events happen. It’s never ending work, lots of hours, lots of effort and lots of fun. But during the events I don’t (none of the organizers) have time to enjoy it. So what we need is the feedback from attendees, speakers, sponsors and pretty much everybody else involved. And feedback is sometimes not only positive, because a) mistakes happen and b) you can never please everyone. Like with our current switch of official language for Sutol (Czech Lotus User Group) event. We decided to do our annual one day conference in English this time. The whole event. For the first time. We did have some sessions in English in previous years, but usually just one or two. The rest was in Czech. Speakers were mainly from Czech Republic only. Sponsors as well. It was very local event. After couple of years it started to feel boring to me. Or very predictable. Maybe it was bringing some value to attendees, but definitely not for me. When you invest a lot of time and effort to conference, you want it to be great. You want it to bring a lot of value to everybody. With help from some core Sutol members we managed to persuade others to do it in a different way this time. Not everybody was happy, but even those ones were helping with organizing it. That’s why I like to work with them. Since 2011 I’m travelling to BLUG/Engage and other events every year, so I was in a great position to contact potential speakers and sponsors, as I know a lot of them, some of them I even consider being my friends. I hope it’s a mutual feeling:-) And I really think this time Sutol event was of a great value for all those involved. If you’ve missed this one, it may be because we did not do a great job promoting it. Lesson learned. Some of the negative comments we got from people who were not attending at all. Because they were scared of English, they were scared of seeing new speakers, they were scared of change. I probably should have used word afraid instead of scared in the previous sentence. This was the reason we had our usual number of attendees, which is approximately 100 (our long term average number). We were expecting more. We were wrong. But I’m pretty sure next year will be better. We did however get a lot of positive feedback as well. I was personally very happy seeing some very shy people asking questions in English. I remember myself in 2011 approaching speakers at BLUG and asking them if we can use and translate the slides for Sutol event later that year. I was scared (can’t use word afraid here)! I was also very happy seeing speakers enjoying themselves and willingly sharing their knowledge. Overall vibe of the event was very good for me. And it seems that not just for me, which is fantastic. I’d like to thank all “core” Sutolers for doing this.

It has been quiet here for some time and this is the reason: I’m very happy to announce agenda for our 7th technical conference in Prague, Nov 11. You can find all the details about our event at the conference site. Space is limited in the venue, so do not wait and register now.

Starting with Lotusphere (you know what I mean) this year I noticed stronger movement inside our yellow bubble. It seems lot of the people that are active in presenting and blogging are already partly “investing” in other technologies than Domino/Notes. And it is only logical. Despite the fact that XPages team guys are extremely helpful and open (we’re talking IBM here!) I’d say number of problems and drawbacks is a bit too high. Beginning with security problems (POODLE, Java, …), last FixPacks for Notes/Domino had been not tested as they should had been, through outdated Eclipse under DDE to not offering standard set of tools (integrated test framework, decent version of Java, …). * And all these (and each of you probably can add one or two problems to this list) smaller or bigger drawbacks lead to inevitable conclusion: We can no longer treat Domino as a development platform of choice. World is moving forward so fast. Domino is not. Unfortunately.

As you may have noticed, Czech Lotus User Group (SUTOL) opens its annual conference for foreign speakers and attendees this year. Official language of the conference is (for the first time) English. So you’re more than welcome to attend or (even better) speak on November 11th 2015, at Hotel Barceló, Prague. You can submit your abstract now! Should you have any questions regarding conference (sponsoring, attending, speaking, accommodation, travelling tips, …) please contact me at email address jinoch@gmail.com.