Month: October 2007

I asked one of my bosses why I wasn’t invited to a certain meeting. He said he did, but it was declined. A few years ago I got tired of the constant stream of meeting invites, modifications, and cancellations, I set it to automatically accept any meeting invitation, so this was a bit of a surprise. So I went into the highly intiutive Actions->Tools->Preferences menu, only to be greeted by a popup saying

Availability Problem
Your availability time range is invalid, please correct.

and when I clicked on “Ok”, I got another popup

Cannot locate field

and when you click on “Ok” on that one, a third popup

Notes Error – Cannot locate field

Going into “Calendar & To Do”->Scheduling on that dialog subjects you to many more of these triple threat popups, like every time you attempt to edit one of your availability times. My availability was set to 4am to 5pm, which seemed a bit over-zealous to me. But I couldn’t edit them, and I couldn’t save the Preferences dialog, either.

I found this page on IBM’s support site for Notes, but none of the complicated options actually did anything except subject me to more of those triplet popups.

Then I found another unofficial page where somebody said to turn on Saturday and Sunday availability, edit their available times, save it, then come back in and turn off Saturday and Sunday availability. Sure enough, Sunday’s availability was set to go past midnight, and when I set that to “11:30 AM – 11:31 AM” and saved it, the problem went away. And then I was able to set my weekday availability to a more reasonable time as well.

Thanks very much Notes. Rot in hell.

Update: I just figured out why his meeting notice was declined: He had it scheduled to repeat every Tuesday and Thursday, and Notes is smart enough to see that there is a conflict (22 November is a company holiday) but dumb enough that it rejects all instances of the meeting instead of just one. And why did it allow him to create the meeting then? Sheesh, what a piece of shit.

I’m trying to find a way to put a nice formatted table in my Google Web Toolkit application, and I was looking at gwt-advanced-table – Google Code. The code comes with no documentation, just an example that took a lot of wrangling to get it to work. And is going to take even move wrangling to get it to work in my demo.

But the problem is that we want to avoid viral licenses in the code we use. And since this isn’t packaged up as a nifty jar, its code will mingle in with ours. Our company lawyers have cleared a few open source licenses, but obviously not the General Public Virus. One they haven’t cleared yet is the Mozilla Source License. So I look at the Google Code Page for this code, and there at the top right is the banner “License: Mozilla Public License 1.1”. But down at the bottom (and in comments in the code), it just says “License: Freeware”.

So which is it?