No doubt William Henry Harrison will be well known to most Americans as the ninth President of the United States. Or perhaps not, given the fact that his presidency only lasted 31 days, between March 4 and April 4, 1841. Harrison was the first president to die in office.
The story goes that Harrison, who had been nicknamed the “petticoat general” in the election campaign, wanted to put forth a tough image of himself. And so, despite the low temperatures and cold wind on the day of his inauguration, he decided to appear without an overcoat, hat or gloves. To make matters worse, he had written what still stands as the longest inaugural address in history, which took him two hours to deliver. On March 26, Harrison developed a cold, which turned to pneumonia, and despite being treated with blood letting, he died on April 4. Given the chance of a do-over, you might imagine that Harrison would have chosen to wear a coat, and perhaps shortened his speech a little.
The world of politics, of course, is rife with examples like this. The one that’s most in people’s minds here in Britain right now is, of course, David Cameron’s decision to let the Brexit genie out of the bottle by putting the issue to a referendum. That’s probably a little too raw to discuss here, so we’ll move on to a different example of a British politician making a slip up (there are many to choose from, believe me).
You may not be aware of this but next Sunday, April 28, is known by many in the UK as Ed Balls day. The reason? It marks the day, in 2011, that this British cabinet minister tweeted his own name. Nothing else, just his own name. Rather than delete the tweet, as many in that situation would have done after realizing his mistake, he embraced it and even retweeted it.
So it’s fair to say that in politics, as in any other walk of life, sometimes all you want is a do-over. That is, after all, why the control-Z key sequence was invented. So what’s an IBM Notes & Domino developer to do when she or he makes a slip-up, a gaffe or a faux pas? Ctrl-Z? Maybe, if you’re lucky. What if the mistake you made wasn’t actually the last thing you did? Or (as many of us have trained ourselves to do) you slipped a Ctrl-S in there in between?
That’s the reason we created Teamstudio Undo. Undo keeps track of changes that you make to a database design so you can roll back the individual design elements of either templates or databases to any previous version. If you’re already using Teamstudio CIAO! as a source code control solution for your Notes application development, Undo works nicely with it, allowing you to roll back changes between check-out and check-in events.
Once you have Undo installed and configured, it will start tracking every change you make to design elements and, should something bad happen, you can browse through the previous versions and even compare different versions to see what the changes are.
So if you’ve ever felt like you did something you shouldn’t have done, and you’d like a do-over, this might just be the the product for you! It may be too late for William Henry Harrison, but for the rest of us, it’s not.
To learn more about Teamstudio Undo, click below.