the corner office

These days I'm able to live almost exclusively in Linux, and it's made a lot easier by the fact that Notes 6.5.1 works well with Wine (try saying that last bit a few times over). I haven't done much Notes development recently (you know, it's just hard, man), but I've been working on a small app for Ronwen. Designed, written and sloppily tested, all in Linux. I'm well impressed.

As Julian pointed out months ago, there are still some issues with Java. One of these is that you can't open up the Java debugger - you get an obscure "Unable to create a suitable default GraphicsConfiguration" error as soon as the client tries to do any Java graphics-related stuff, and subsequent attempts to open the debugger throw a NullPointerException back at you. There is a workaround though - and if you get to see the error message I mentioned, you've already got it. Basically, don't launch Notes from a shortcut button or menu, use the command line. If you do this, (typically something along the lines of wine "c:\lotus\notes\nlnotes.exe"), all Java output will go to stdout - in this case, your terminal. It ain't ideal, but it does the job. That might be obvious to most, but I must admit to having a Doh! moment, staring at the error message and muttering about not being able to see Java output, before realising that I was looking at exactly that!