If you need more advanced/enhanced information when hovering a text on a webpage besides the usual yellow box with black text, there's a way to do it. You can change the background color, font color, add a border and have both text and images, in fact any html in the info box that comes up when hovering. Go away old alter text!

I found this functionality implemented on Planet Lotus. It is a solution developed by Walter Zorn and it is very easy to implement. See the instructions on this page on how to use the script.

In the meanwhile here's an example for you to look at.

HOVER ME!!!

The other day I painted a view over Najomtien. While I was trying out different colours and mixtures - at the same time I was painting other things too – just to see the colours flow and what kind of shade I was looking for.

So we had a great lunch or more exactly brunch at the restaurant “Mantra” in Pattaya. On the way there, or maybe it was at the entrance, I saw some beautiful orchids. Or maybe I should confess I saw them from afar and they looked like orchids anyway. They inspired me to make some surrounding graphics too – as you can see. There are thousands of different species of orchids – and one might think of this one as being “The Wohill Orchid”.

Enjoy your surroundings – I do.

You can access Lotus notes documents from outside Lotus Notes either using an Internet url (if your Lotus Notes database is web enabled) or you can access and open up a specific Lotus Notes document in the Lotus Notes client from for example Excel or Word in other ways.

Duffbert has some good information on this. One of the tips is to get the document's Notes url and paste it in as a hyperlink in Excel. To accomplish that you need to find the document's UNID. Or you can use the Sametime client for some translation.

Create a document link for the Lotus Notes document to which you want to create a link to. Paste this into a Sametime chat window. As you can see the document link is translated into a Notes URL. Now, simply paste it in as the hyperlink address in excel and you have a funtional Notes link.

When you paste the document link into a Sametime chat window it will be translated into a Notes URL, looking something like this, which can be accessed from outside Lotus Notes. Be aware of access though, these rules still apply.

notes://DOMINOSERVER/C1257465003C1F7D/BF25AB0F47BA5DD785256

Every morning when I woke up in Najomtien these last three weeks I have looked at the sunrise and the landscape outside my balcony - a beautiful view and horizon. So one morning I decided to use my aquarelles (water colours) to grasp the nice view. So you can see the roof of a temple for monks and some palm-trees, a few Thai flags and some bushy hills far away as well as a blue sky with some thin clouds - all very inspiring to look at.

We were fortunate to get a corner balcony and could see the sun rise and also set in the late evening. I will post some more pictures too in the near future.

I have made a wallpaper too so you can get a better look at the aquarelle (water colour painting).

The trip I took to Thailand was great. Three weeks of sun and fun. We flew into Bangkok and then took a taxi to the little village called Jomtien. This little fishing-village lies not far from the outskirts of Pattaya and I could easily say that it has changed a lot from just being a tiny fishing-village. The good thing about it is that there still is a fishing feeling in the village and you can see a lot of fishing-boats in the neighbouring harbours all around. You can also see them out at sea at night. They have big lights on, as you can see from the photograph - I think over the nets when bringing in the fish. The picture I took here is when the tide is out and the fishing-boat is stranded on the beach. In the background you can see some islands far away in the mist.

I’ll have to show some more nice pictures later – so look for more photography from my travels.

Most bloggers or site owners use an analytics tool like Google analytics or something similar to keep track of the statistics of their site. We use it here at Wohill as well and it's very helpful.

If you however need a way to easily and fast get an overview of all of your incoming links, you should test the Backlink Watch. You simply type in the url of your blog/site and the backlink watch searches and assembles the incoming links to the blog/site. It seems very accurate as well! A search came up with 592 total backlinks. About 80% of these are not interesting to me though since they list the same source although there are only a few links on that site. This is a common behaviour on these types of services I believe and probably for a reason.

An advantage to Google analytics is that you can do this for other blogs/sites that you are not the owner of as well.

Not a very pretty site though. Maybe they need some professional design help?

I have been to Thailand for a couple of weeks and it has been really nice. It has been great weather – sunny, no clouds and the water in the sea was perfect temperature. I will post some pictures from Thailand further on.

As you might recollect, I have drawn a dragon tattoo some time ago. It is posted here on the blogg (Wohill). I even made a cool wallpaper for the computer. Back to the story again… I was walking about getting some things in the shopping-mall called Tesco Lotus. It is a chain that is all over Thailand and I think even in China. When walking about looking for some food I saw that they sell lots of other things too. TV’s, computers, movies, bikes, toys – you name it, they seem to have it. They also sell clothes and this is where it gets interesting… Walking down an aisle Magnus, who is also travelling with me, pops round the corner and says: Have you seen this cool kid’s shirt? And what is he holding up – a shirt with my design on it – The Dragon Tattoo! So they have printed up two types of shirts with the Wohill dragon. One with an Asian symbol over it as you can see in the picture below and one with the whole dragon. The company, LEOkids, that have made the shirt have stolen my design – as you can guess they haven’t asked, informed or paid me anything for this – it’s just there!

They seemed to have liked the design, the dragon, but not done more than that. Nice that they thought it was trustworthy made by somebody on the other side of the world. I guess a dragon is a dragon all over the world – even if I made it into a dragon inspired by Chinese artists.

So I will try to contact them and see what they have to say – I’ll keep you posted. Or if you know anyone that works or has a connection to LEOkids – please let me know. If Tesco Lotus has anything to do with LEOkids, except buying clothing from them, I don’t know.

It will be interesting to hear what they have to say…

An old way of creating links on an image is the use of the area tag. This way the image is located directly on the page though and is not a background image.

It's common to use a background image in a table, div or something else and then put other html like text, links, table, lists and so on on top of it. If you need to put links on specific places on the background image you could accomplish this with some css.

The image below is a background image in a div. The red and green squares are different linked areas.

Here is the code. First the html:

<a href="http://www.google.com" title="Google"><div class="link1"></div></a><a href="http://www.ibm.com" title="IBM"><div class="link2"></div></a> <div class="bg1"></div>

And the css looks like this:

.bg1 { background: url(http://www.wohill.com/images/pel.jpg) no-repeat; height:226px; width:140px; } .link1 { /*background-color:#FF0000;*/ border:thin dotted #FF0000; position:absolute; width:25px; height:25px; margin:25px 0px 0px 10px; } .link2 { border:thin dashed #00FF00; position: absolute; width: 40px; height:80px; margin: 60px 0px 0px 80px; }

As you can see the two link divs are located just above the div with the background image and these are positioned absolutely in relation to that div. Each link div gets a width and height. The margin attribute specifies where on the background image div the link div is placed.

The other day I was talking to Niklas Waller about the “Elephant” project and as you might have seen I made a little pictogram. Now I have been thinking about using a font to match this symbol or icon. So I started drawing a font…

The font is made in a little twirl – or not all on a straight base – a bit like an elephant trunk - just to make it a bit more exiting with the little bend. I started to sketch the text on paper and then moved on to finishing it up in Illustrator. I haven’t made it into a font but it would be an idea anyway. We will see how it turns out in the end. We will keep up-to-date on that in the future.

Randolph Guy mentioned on his Twitter that he had been taking a course on how to Kitesurf on his trip to Thailand over Christmas. This remembered me of the many kitesurfers that we watched from the hotel and from the beach on Isla Coche in Venezuela. This beach together with Isla Margarita beaches are, as far as I understand, considered to be the best in the world for kitesurfing. We actually met many Swedes down there that were there only for the kitesurfing.

The man on the picture above is kitesurfing and it does look like a really nice thing to do.

Unfortunately I didn't take the time to learn myself during our visit. But now Randolph has bought himself a kit so I hope I'll get to try it out this summer. And perhaps I'll even have the opportuntity to learn on our coming trip to Venezuela?

I wrote a blog entry a while ago on how to handle png-images in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) that are used as a background in a 'div' or a 'td' or something so that they can become transparent. This solution works but is not the best. Instead I use the IE PNG Fix by TwinHelix.

All you have to do is to copy the iepngfix.htc and blank.gif to some place on your server. See the instructions. Then use the following css which will handle the tags which use the png for transpacency.

<style type="text/css"> img, div { behavior: url(css/resources/iepngfix.htc) } </style>

You could add ''a or 'td' if those tags are used instead, like this:

<style type="text/css"> img, div, a, td { behavior: url(css/resources/ iepngfix.htc) } </style>

So this is basically everything you need to do, very easy and handy.

Now, I have bumped into a problem in the case when I have more html in a 'div' or a 'td' on which I have used this.
Say it looks like this:

<style type="text/css"> td.transparency { background: url(images/anImage.png) left top no-repeat; width:238px; height:572px; margin: 0; padding: 0px 0px 10px 3px; } </style> <style type="text/css"> td { behavior: url(css/resources/ iepngfix.htc) } </style> <table><tr><td class="transparency"> <div><a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a></div> <table></tr></td>

Now the link will probably not work (I haven't tested this specific case actually). Other functionality might disfunction as well. So what you have to do in order to fix this is to work with the postitions of the different elements. This page describes the problem and solution and is recommended by TwinHelix.

What I did to solve the problem was only to add a small style attribute to the inner element holding the links, like this:

<table><tr><td class="transparency"> <div style="position:relative"><a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a></div> <table></tr></td>

And it works!

I am working on a logo or symbol with an “E”. I have looked at a lot of different styles and fonts for inspiration. This is an older, more authentic, style – which was inspired by a book I was looking in the other day. It was a portal or statue over a door of an old building. Leaves and circular shapes – very well made indeed.

The centre part of this logotype is made to look like a ribbon and the leaves round about are to give the same feeling as the “Ribbon E”.

I was curious about if there were any hidden functionality either in Chrome or just in the search engine and found some.

The Google Chrome browser has a few about-pages which could be interesting to look at. Type in the following in the address bar.

- about:memory (Memory usage of the running browsers) - about:stats (Different statistics) - about:network - about:plugins (Installed plugin applications) - about:histograms - about:version - about:dns - about:cache

There is also a so-called easter egg but it only works in Windows XP and no longer in Vista. No that exciting really.

- about:internets

You can kill the browser process by typing in the following in the address bar.

:%

And a few tips for the search engine (http://www.google.com). That is, to be typed into the search text box.

- 1 usd in sek (Translate between different currencies) - Lotus Notes filetype:pdf (Choose to display only results on specific filetypes) - weather Stockholm (The weather in some city) - 1m in ft (Translate between different meassuring units) - 5*(8/6) - 5*7 (You can also use it as a calculator)

Do you have any additional tips or trix?

The dragon has many different interpretations. First, it was the western gods that had to conquer the dragon – then later it was the noblemen. Many times the dragon is something a hero has to defeat to save the princess or something like that.

In the eastern part of the world the dragon is a much more positive symbol. He is the main essence or a part of yang – as in yin and yang - that can give humans the potion of ever lasting life.

The dragon is used on buildings, clothing and vases as decorative symbols. In today’s world a lot of people use the dragon for tattoos. I have drawn a dragon standing on his front legs with a twirling bird’s tail. I have given the dragon bird- or lizard-like legs - an elegant creature, swift and smooth. This dragon has a bit more of a feminine touch compared to the one I posted some time ago.

I have been driving up and down in Sweden many times - to shows or convents or just for pleasure. I have then often stopped in the nice little town called Gränna. It has nice candy-canes called “Polka-grisar” that I personally like very much and it is very enjoyable to stop there and buy a few of these. They are great as gifts and give you some energy for the rest of the trip.

This picture was taken on an early morning looking over the harbour and the lake “Vättern”. I took a walk out on the peer – or hopped out on the rocks while I admired the view.

A feature in Google Chrome (Google's web browser) let's you not only see the memory usage for Google Chrome's different tabs and components but also for the other browsers that are currently running on the computer. It is called the task manager and can be started by either typing 'about:memory' in the address bar or by clicking the task manager.



The task manager offers a summary view of the memory usage of the running browsers. You can see private, shared and total memory in the picture below (and virtual). In this little comparison experiment I opened 4 tabs in three different browsers; Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The pages were iGoogle, Twitter, Planetlotus and Wohill. According to the task manager, Internet explorer requires most memory usage (168.784 MB RAM), Chrome comes on second place (165,588 MB RAM) and Firefox first (141,852 MB RAM). It depends on how you read these numbers though.

Chrome actually takes up more RAM than that. If you look at the processes section below you can see how much the different processes uses. The actual web browser process uses 86248 MB and the shockwave flash plugin process uses 22996 MB. There can be other plugin processes here of course like the Google Talk plugin.

The amount of memory usage differs between the rest of the tabs depending on the specific website. iGoogle and Wohill requires a bit more memory than Twitter and Planet Lotus for example - Good work there Yancy! And shame on me...

So over all Google Chrome actually uses more memory than the other browsers, but since each tab is a different process it runs much faster. If you are not short of RAM memory, Chrome is a better option in my opinion.



While talking about the different browsers, Chrome and Firefox together comes on the first place. Chrome because it runs fast and is very easy tow work with and never goes crazy with memory. Firefox goes crazy with memory sometimes which transforms the computer into a helicopter. On the other hand it is mostly also fast and have the outstanding Firebug-plugin which you can not live without as a web developer. Internet explorer comes last because is does not have anything special in my opinion. Now it has tabs but for some reason the content has to load in a tab until you can start typing in an address for instance, extremely irritating.

Which is your favourite browser?

I have to say that it is very nice to sit and design font-faces and typefaces. They have a lot of character and say a lot before they even become words. These letters I made this time are not for a text-font but more for headers and headings in general - or starting up chapters and so forth. Maybe, as I mentioned before, for a biography about Niklas Waller and myself (Randolph Guy) starting up and running Wohill. Really a super thing – I must say! Lots of marvellous things and great ideas have come out of us writing and designing this blogg.

It also is fun to show you what we are developing and designing for our different clients, when we get the time of course!

Mostly when I develop web solutions I set the charset to 'utf-8'. In some cases I need the charset 'iso-8859-1' for swedish characters.

There are three places where I put the charset definition. The first is the meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

When using this one you have to take care of the html encoding yourself like for example the swedish characters å,ä and ö. If you're using 'iso-8859-1' you can print them as they are.

The second one are sometimes used when receiving information using ajax. Then you have to set the headers before writing back information to the displaying page.

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

The third way is used when you for example have some JavaScript validation on your page and the meta-tag charset is set to 'utf-8'. Then alerting text containing the swedish characters å,ä and ö will become unreadable. In these cases you can set the charset for a specific JavaScript script-tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="aScriptLibrary.js" charset="iso-8859-1"></script>

This is a little girl walking up the stairs reaching for your hand. She has her head-phones on listening to “Linkin Park”. Carrying a bucket of some mysterious substance – almost as smoky as the music coming out of here ears.

Well this could be a modern kid’s story-book idea with inspiration taken from “Alice in Wonder-land”. Might be that it would turn out totally different if I wrote a little story – but a fairy-tale of today. These are some of the things I thought of when I drew the sketch. I was listening to “Linkin Park” at the time too. Good inspiration for this sketch I must say.

A sketch from the “Black-book” again – could be a nice wall-piece!

Zazu was born by her mother Nala about 8 years ago. The father's name was Simba. She had two brothers (or so we were informed). The two brothers were named Pumba and Timon. The sharp-eyed will see a naimng pattern here!

Here brother Pumba however turned out to be a sister we heard after a while so her name is now Pumbalina. (No, there was no odd cat surgery to accomplish a sex change. They just simply didn't look closely enough I guess.)

Anyway, Zazu is a great cat and very special. I don't ever think I have heard of such a social or extroverted cat. When we had a party here with 25 people last spring she layed down on her back on the table asking for everybody's attention. And she is never happier than when someone comes to visit.

She also loves food and probably has a great deal of overweight. But she is an enjoyer of life. We should all learn something from Zazu

Go Girl!

In Java you have to initialize local variables, that is method variables or else the java file will not compile. Class variables or instance variables don't have to be initialized on the other hand. In fact it is probably seen as more good-programming to not initialize them.

Here is an example of a function that takes an argument and checks if it is bigger than zero. If so, then set the local variable 'returnValue' to that value plus 5. The code below won't compile. The error message 'The local variable returnValue may not have been initialized' is raised.
The reason for this is that returnValue may not get a value (num could be less than 1). Since it is not initialized during declaration to a default value either, the code will not compile.

public int returnNumber(int num) { int returnValue; if (num > 0) { returnValue = num + 5; } return returnValue; }

Now, if we were talking about an instance variable, a class variable, this would not be a problem since these variables are initialized by default. Primitives get their default values like 0 and 0.0 for integers and floating numbers and references are set to null. So we could do something like this without a problem. Notice that it is the same code but that the variable returnValue is an instance variable instead.

public class InitializeTest { private int returnValue; public int returnNumber(int num) { if (num > 0) { returnValue = num + 5; } return returnValue; } }

Something that could be a bit confusing to programmers that only uses lotusscript is this difference since they are used to not having to initialize variables at all, i.e. lotussript behaves with variables like Java class variables all the time. Indeed you won't have to declare variables either unless you specifically specify 'Option Declare' in the Options section of a script library or agent. Good or bad? You decide. I like the Java approach better.