Continue reading »]]> If you are both an admin and a dev and you missed my session with Jess Stratton at Lotusphere, go register for the webinar:

Collaboration, Party of One : When You Are Both the Dev and the Admin

When your administrator and your developer are one and the same, and they’re both you, things can get confusing. As the administrator, you’ve got a lot of power. Frequently, the role of administrator is to lock things down, keep the server running smoothly and tune performance. As the developer, you want a lot of power. You want unlimited agents to run anytime you want, as frequently as possible, with little to no limitations! So how do you reconcile these opposing needs when you have to play both roles? Jess and Kathy will show you how to use separate IDs, location documents and other fail-safes to make sure your party of one is successful!

Go here and register, then keep your eyes open for the email to register on gotomeeting.  (Sorry for the double registration, it’s just how it works, don’t shoot the messenger). Â

Continue reading »]]> Wow!  In my first post about the Nike Fuel band, I mentioned that I need the same thing for tracking what I eat.  While this app doesn’t just automatically track stuff, it is about as close as you can get!

The Calorie Counter and Diet Tracker from myfitnesspal is free and the best part is that you can add food via BARCODE!  I’ve done MANY food tracking systems in my lifetime, from paper to spreadsheets to apps, and the big hurdle to doing it consistently is inconvenience.  No one wants to write down (or type in) everything they eat.  This app makes it super easy.  Tap “add”, select which meal, hit the barcode button and scan.  Wow.  And it’s free.  More wow.

Continue reading »]]> I wrote about my new Nike Fuelband here.  Now that I have had it for a few weeks, I wanted to say a little more about it.

I love it!

First, the battery life.  It lasts roughly 9 days per charge.  It charges up pretty quickly, and has a nice little reminder indicator as it is getting low.  For something I am using all day, every day, that seems pretty good to me.

I wrote about Nike Fuel in that post.  When you first activate your fuel band, you are asked to select a goal.  I picked the lowest goal “suggested”, which was 2000.  (Remember, these are not calories, but “Nike Fuel”, a converted number so anyone with a fuel band can compare on equal footing).  Sadly (and a bit surprisingly) I did not easily meet the lowest suggested goal every day.  Many days I had to do a little extra to meet it.  But in a way, that was exciting, that meant that thanks to the Nike Fuel band, I was moving a little more each day.  Also, that I wasn’t as active as I may have thought.

After a week at 2000, I increased it to 2100.  We’re doing baby steps here, people.  I made my goal every day except one!  Where I missed it by 7 measly fuel points, and only because I wasn’t paying attention and midnight passed me by before I noticed.

They track some fun stuff, for example my best day was 3,194.  I’ve hit the 10k, 25k, and 50k Nike fuel milestones.  My average day is 2,300.  I can track my fuel against Women age 30-39 and the entire Nike+ community.  I see I lag them in most fuel in a week, and average fuel per week, but I am smoking both comparisons in daily goals hit.  So no surprise there, I may do a little less, but I’m consistent.  Still, it’s motivation to beat out the comparisons in all categories. Â

So here I am at 27 days with the Fuel band and I still love it, and I still wear it, and it’s still motivating me.  I’m increasing my goal to 2200 today.  I’m hoping to increase 100 points every week or so.

Anyone else got one?  Want to compare stats?  Let me know!

Continue reading »]]> I recently received a Nike+ Fuelband (thanks Paul Steel!).  If you haven’t heard of it, it is a small wristband (slightly thicker than those Lance Armstrong type bands) with a three-way accelerometer to track your  movement throughout the day.  Go here for more info from Nike+.

It measures steps taken, “Nike fuel” (more on that in a second), calories, and displays the time.  You can connect the band to your PC or Mac via USB, or wirelessly sync to the iPhone/iPad app via Bluetooth.  From there, you can track your stats, share with friends, and earn badges/streaks, etc.

So what is Nike fuel?  A way to evenly compare activity.  A person weighing 100 pounds is going to burn less calories than a person weighing 300 calories even when they’re both just sitting on the couch.  So calories is an unfair comparison.  And not everyone does the same sports, so to say I ran a mile means nothing to someone who plays basketball for their activity.  Supposedly Nike fuel is a measurement that is equal for everyone, so you can start getting competitive with your friends.

You can pick a daily goal, and of course you get little visual rewards and badges for reaching it.

I am not so into the competitive thing.  So sharing to Facebook and comparing numbers with friends doesn’t appeal to me.  I do like having goals however.  And I really like getting rewarded for getting to those goals.  Now I’ve only had the Nike+ Fuelband for 3 1/2 days, but already I have walked a little more, or run a little more, or gone up and down the stairs a few more times, just to hit my daily goal.

Doing a little more is a big deal for me, as I’ve recently found myself in a bit of an exercise rut (and at the same time have found myself up quite a few pounds from my normal weight).  I’m looking forward to earning more badges, and maybe losing a few pounds in the process.

Now, if someone could just invent a gadget that measures everything I eat. Â

Continue reading »]]> I recently added a pager control to an Xpage custom control.  I usually use the default of “Sample 1″ for “Pager style”, but I wanted a last page button, so decided on Sample 4.

Sample 4 should look like this:

|< <Page 1 | 1|2|3|4|5 > >| per the example shown in the control.

But when I added it to my custom control, it kept looking like this:

|< <Page 1 | 1|2|3|4|5 > ..

My application was using the OneUI theming and CSS, so I kept thinking it was getting cut off somehow and I just wasn’t seeing the whole control.  Silly me.

After some poking around, I found “alwaysCalculateLast” in the All Properties tab for the pager control.  Now my pager looks just like the example.  Why the default settings don’t make it look like the example is beyond me, but there ya go.

Continue reading »]]> I was selected to do a “spark idea” at BLUG this year.  Kicked off at Lotusphere 2012, the Nerd Girls started the Spark Ideas talks.  Short TED-like talks, meant to inspire.  Although given at technical conferences, these talks are frequently have nothing to do with technology.

My talk was titled, “How a New House Made Me a New Woman”.  And here it is, if you’d like to watch:

Spark Ideas BLUG 2012 featuring Kathy Brown

Continue reading »]]> From my earlier post, I linked to an article that questioned the creepy factor of an app called, “Girls Around Me”.  Follow up shows the app developer claims to be a scapegoat, and FourSquare has shut off the apps access to the FourSquare API AND Apple has pulled the app from their store.

Read more about it here.