Okay, so I know I live in the sticks.

For example, let’s examine Exhibit A:

And we can’t forget Morla, the Ancient One (aka Exhibit B):

And of course, we all know that an ancient indian burial ground resides about 20 feet from our property line. It’s just that kind of town.

But I was REALLY surprised to read this paragraph in a letter I got from the Charlestown Economic Improvement Commission (I get these things because I own my own business from my home):

Once again, we will have the open house at the Senior Center, and we will make it easier to find your way out in the dark.

I had two issues with this statement. First of all, from the sounds of things, I think I am probably quite happy I did not go last year.

But secondly, if we could expect to have a hard time getting out, how do they expect the seniors to do it?

One of the neatest things that Matt pointed out to me was that even in Notes, I have the ability to use *any* WinAPI call, provided I include the .dll if it’s not already part of my OS. It’s just a matter of tweaking the code, parameters and data types so that LotusScript can translate it correctly.

One of the more useful calls I found was InternetGetConnectedState, which simply returns a boolean value if the code executor is online or not. Previously, I had racked my brains to come up with kludgy methods like a ping that outputs the results to a text file, and checking the text file for “reply.”

Why would you even want this? The obvious example is to give to a user before clicking button code that requires them to be online, but I found other uses for it, including:

- testing toggling between wired and wireless connections
- including in additional software packages as safeguards before other code will work successfully

To test, simply put this code in a button. Run the code, then unplug yourself and try it again.

I did find that there is a delay in re-plugging in and trying the code. For a few seconds it will still say you are offline. And, on Matt’s machine, it didn’t work at all. However, I called Matt’s machine tainted and called it a day. Experimental workstation, is not the word for it. Mad Scientist playground is more like it. He’s got more SDK’s, runtime environments, compilers, etc. etc. than I’ve ever seen. So he doesn’t count.

‘Declarations
Declare Function InternetGetConnectedState Lib “wininet.dll” (lpdwFlags As Long, Byval dwReserved As Long) As Long

After that, it’s just a matter of heading over to msdn.microsoft.com and typing in what you want to do in the search box. If it’s there, you’ll find it.