January 2010 Entries

I have a new favorite Domino Designer error

Yay! It’s awesome! Tags: IBM, Notes, Domino

posted @ Friday, January 29, 2010 2:50 PM | Feedback (0)

On the creation of the illusion of scarcity

One of the most common tricks in marketing is the creation of an illusion of scarcity. There’s been countless studies done to “prove”* this, however when you experience it in real life you have to stop and marvel at the simplicity of the concept. My experience today was in trying to get a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter. When I first got my new MacBook Pro I thought that paying that amount of money for the ability to plug in a monitor was a bit excessive. I could do without one. I won’t bother. Done. Sorted. Ok. ...

posted @ Thursday, January 28, 2010 9:44 PM | Feedback (0)

More ASP.NET MVC vs WebForms

Not from me this time - Scott Guthrie has a good post with some of his own points on MVC, WebForms, and the debates. Link: About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular) Tags: ASP.NET, MVC

posted @ Monday, January 25, 2010 8:53 PM | Feedback (0)

ASP.NET WebForms vs MVC from another angle

While scanning my RSS feeds this weekend I’ve noticed a lot of “MVC vs WebForms” type postings. I feel the need for my own little rant in this area. It’s one which I’ve been meaning to get off my chest for a little while, and so now seems like as good a time as any to get it over and done with.. so here goes. As a possible point of difference, my rant has nothing to do with technology. I keep coming across posts from developers who are new to ASP.NET, and are asking something along the lines...

posted @ Sunday, January 24, 2010 11:16 PM | Feedback (1)

VisualSVN Server 2.1 post-commit certificate error

If you’ve recently upgraded VisualSVN to 2.1, and are getting a post-commit certificate error (often used to replicate your repositories to another location after a commit is made) then read about the quick fix here. Tags: SubVersion

posted @ Sunday, January 24, 2010 3:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Searching the contents of Notes/Domino design elements

I recently posted asking for recommendations for Notes/Domino refactoring and analysis tools. Thanks again to all of you who responded, and also to Ryan from Ytria who emailed me directly (even though I’ve been too busy/slack to respond). After thinking about it, I realised that really it was the Find/Search side of things which was important to me, and Andre Guirard recently posted about how to Export all code of an NSF to file system, which looks to give me access to the solution I was after - even if it is a little bit manual. ...

posted @ Wednesday, January 20, 2010 6:37 PM | Feedback (2) Filed Under [ Notes/Domino ]

VMware fusion performance

I’m looking to tweak the performance of Windows 7 under Fusion 3.0.1, and would welcome any resources or links that readers might  be able to throw my way. I’m interested in verifying a couple of things I read here – one, that assigning a single core to your VM rather than two improves performance, and the other being that running directly from the bootcamp partition is always slower than running from a file (ignoring the obvious fact that you can’t hibernate/suspend when running direct from Bootcamp, which obviously slows down the startup and shutdown times). Any comments or...

posted @ Saturday, January 16, 2010 2:00 PM | Feedback (0)

Mindscape LightSpeed 3.0 – initial impressions

Over the past few days I’ve finally had some time to give LightSpeed 3.0 a bit of a test drive. Nothing extensive so far, but enough to get some initial impressions. The quick summary? I like it. My testing has been with a couple of different projects / databases. One is a greenfield ASP.NET MVC application I’ve been playing about with, and the other is a quick test project I've created in order to run a few tests with LightSpeed against Ignition’s existing Site Foundation Framework codebase (mostly there I wanted to test the single table inheritance...

posted @ Friday, January 15, 2010 1:13 PM | Feedback (1)

Looking back on the past couple of years as a freelancer

It's coming up to the 2 year mark since I resigned from my full time job and went into freelancing / owning my own businesses. After many years of working as an employee, a contractor and doing small bits of freelancing on the side I probably thought that switching to freelancing would be a bit easier than it ended up being, which is part of why I wanted to write a little about my experiences. There's plenty of material out there offering freelancers helpful tips or things to avoid - this post is similar to many of those, but it's...

posted @ Friday, January 08, 2010 12:27 PM | Feedback (3) Filed Under [ ASP.NET Notes/Domino Web Development Miscellaneous Me ]

Engineering your way to marketing success

Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success is an interesting post for people like me – technical people who need to market themselves and their business(es) more. I’ve been looking at marketing options for my businesses in 2010, and have to admit I didn’t really know where to start. The link above has given me some options (and the best thing is that I’m already doing some of them – I just need to refine, and do those things more often and better). I found this interesting: the revelation we had in the last...

posted @ Thursday, January 07, 2010 11:38 PM | Feedback (0)

Things that would make my life a lot easier right now

If the Office Live Workspace connector supported Office 2010 Beta. If the Office Live “Open in Excel” and “Open in Word” links from the Workspace website worked with Office 2010 beta. If VMware Fusion 3.0.1’s 3d graphics was a little bit smoother (it seems just a touch jerky). If I could work out how to make the behaviour of the function keys change depending when my Windows VM is in full screen mode. If the Bootcamp support for the new Macbook Pro touchpads wasn’t so awful under Windows (However it works fine when you’re using the...

posted @ Sunday, January 03, 2010 8:57 PM | Feedback (0)

The obligatory Happy New Year post

This is the obligatory Happy New Year post.. so, happy new year all! I’ve got quite a few posts currently sitting in various stages of draft – I’d planned to write a bit around Christmas, however the novelty of actually having a break took over. So I’m a little behind, but feeling well rested. Here’s a quick preview of what I’ve currently got sitting in draft: My “lessons learned” post from experience over the past couple of years as a freelancer/small business owner. Writing down a bit about my experiences was helpful for my...

posted @ Friday, January 01, 2010 10:49 PM | Feedback (1) Filed Under [ ASP.NET Notes/Domino Web Development ]

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a Developer, Consultant and Writer based in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax, SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.

I also have about 14 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.

I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services, and Ignition Development.

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand


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