This article is for a niche audience even smaller than my usual readers. 🙂 There are not that many Lotus Notes developers; even smaller is a number of Lotus Notes coders who have bulk integration/migration needs. But some use cases do exist. I have started (and probably finished) a small GitHub project that demonstrates how to export Lotus Notes into an XML format and then - as an example app - how to extract external links from it for link checking or other purposes.

Google has just announced the release of BidiChecker - an open source tool to automatically test Arabic web pages for issues related to bidirectional support. This is a great news, as bidirectional support is always a huge problem and requires both deep Arabic language understanding and deep technical HTML/CSS understanding, preferably at the same time. Any level of automation would be useful. However, all the tool usage descriptions are geared towards using it with automated JavaScript testing library.

Image via <a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EgyptphoneKeypad.jpg">Wikipedia</a> For my other project, I needed to process some Arabic text that was in HTML file derived from MSWord document. Everything was going reasonably well, except my regular expressions were not picking section name/numbers sequences in all of the cases, which was causing a problem with the 6-language alignment algorithm. Normally, I just examine the text visually, determine a new regular expression pattern and that particular problem is solved.

I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow on how to cycle between 3 states for list items , but with initial state for each item being potentially different. This random start position part of the problem was making me think, so I used it as an exercise to try some newish jQueryfunctions, such as delegate and advanced class selectors. My solution was basically to build a reduced case of state transition diagram with a cycle.

I got myself a new digital camera recently, a Canon T2i. It feels really nice and makes it quite hard to go back to point-and-shoots afterward. And it takes really good 18 megapixel shots. Here is one of the South African Warthog, displayed using Microsof’s Zoom.it technology. Try zooming on it: