Search Engine Hits for September

sametime 651 fixpack 1 - This hasn't resolved my issue yet - my IM server was hung this morning!
domino web access was unable to process…. - I get a good many of these in various iterations
b6000901 - I sure hope you didn't have to SLIP the LIC!
dltdomsmem - You didn't hear this from me, but call IBM for this
song would you like fries with that - I still get these hits too - was the song that popular?
lotus notes nsd
lotus notes 6.5.2 smart upgrade - It's much improved in 6.5.3+ with a tracking database
do not save encrypted pages to disk' lotus blog - "lotus blog" - you should try the new Google Blog search. It's in beta - haha
stmux - This task has become the bane of my existence!
lost books of the bible - This is a myth!
im_show_status'
breakfasst at tiffany's
chris rock's comments at katrina relief - MUCH more sane than Kanye West!
waiting for frwsem 0x0244 - PTFs and IPL seemed to have corrected this for me
st67007 download
domino shared memory
cell processor - Pretty slick processor from IBM
debug_threadid
lotus notes 7 beta 4 - Don't look for beta - full release is out!
dyson hand attachment
stmux failed - Sorry about that - not my fault...
insufficient memory domino iseries 6.5.4 - Get more iSeries memory on used market - check out Canvas Systems
notes.ini 6.5
notes.ini instant messaging im_show_status - Toggles Presence Awareness on/off for client
the bible lost years - Another myth
domino iseries http task crashes server every 20 minutes after upgrade to 6.5.4 - Wow, that's no good
damo 6.5.5
how to fix the error b6000901 - SLIP the LIC
debug_tcp_all
os x skyfight
lnd is' linux on Altavista - Well LND is NOT actually Linux...
blackberry sms audit - Be more big-brotheris with BES 4.1
lotus notes 6.5.4
the lost books of the bible - Why does this myth persist?!?
blackberry bes 4.1 - I'm looking forward to it!
are clay bar good for car - For cleaning exterior, yes. For interior, no.
iseries b6000901
100 top hits - Hope yours were better than mine!
5580 i5 - I'm right below IBM with this search
your star wars name and title
waiting for frwsem
lotus notes 6.5.4 instant messaging .ini
ringtones 7100g
lotus notes 6.5' 'easter egg' - Pretty cool, huh?
lotus notes cross certify nsd 6.5.4
windows xp commercials - or, False Advertising!
sametime 7.0 sametime.ini
blackberry 7100g ringtones
the lost bible - Go pick up another one, I recommend the ESV!
stmux.txt - STMUX debug file
nsd lotus notes 6.5
lotus notes: nsd
ibm error b6000901
entry already in index message domino 6.5.4 with fp1
lotus notes smart upgrade
spr #jpas6aljqe - Ahh, the NIF pool memory fix
blackberry 7280
514 mln paid-for copies windows idc
debug_dbserver
domino 6.5.4 server won't restart after applying fixpack - That's no good either!
cache.ndk' db compact
lotus notes skins
sametime 6.5.1' 'domino 6.5.4' - Hope it works better for you!
genocide chris moody - That's not the Chris Moody I know
insufficient memory index pool

Alias Season 5 Premiere!

WOW! What a premiere. I'm missing Vaughn already though...

So, they bring in the Bennifer pregnancy to the show and now Sydney is going to have to vindicate the death of her child's father. This should be interesting. This was a really great episode. My wife and I have been a faithful viewer of Alias since the 2nd Episode of Season 1. We even watched an episode once in our room when we went on a cruise to the Bahamas - it's that good!

I loved Marshall's line - "I encrypted it with 4096 bit encryption and it will take him years to figure it out. But that's OK because he's a butt."

Domino 7.0 Server Upgrade

Check this out:



I just upgraded my mail cluster server. I need to upgrade my app cluster now. I'm going to dive more into DDM now! I'm really pumped about DDM for some reason.

The upgrade from 6.5.4 went well. The RSTLICPGM took about 20 minutes total and the UPDDOMSVR took 5 minutes. This is on a 2-way 270 Dedicated Server for Domino. On my 4-way 820 iSeries it should only take about 7 minutes total judging from past upgrades!

I'm planning on also taking some CPU snapshots for the next several weeks on my production box to see how the 7.0 upgrade fares in a production environment.

Roberts is in...

John Roberts was confirmed today as The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. All said, it was a fairly bipartisan confirmation - 78 for and 22 against.

All Republicans voted FOR the confirmation along with the single Independent.

Exactly 1/2 of the Democrates voted FOR with the other half voting NO.

Looking through the list of NOs, I was not surprised. It's comprised of the more left-leaning crowd that is always against anything that President Bush recommends!

ND7 Virtual Launch Event

I must say that the virtual launch event at LotusUserGroup.org was great. It was good to see a brief synopsis of the new features with Notes and Domino 7.

Some of the things I'm interested in here are:

- Domino Domain Monitoring
- Web Services and the possible integration with Blackberry and iSeries
- Greater flexibility/control with Policies

The Story Behind The Pictures

If you went to the following picture and read the caption, you would think that this was done in front of a good size crowd:

US Military on Yahoo! News

But you wouldn't know to check out Little Green Footballs. Check out the following picture taken from the opposite side of the protestor showing the crowd gathered. It's self-explanatory - the media crops out the image that shows no protestors!

Getty Images

Fresh Face in the Blogosphere

Please welcome Jerry Glover to the Blogosphere. Jerry is a colleague of mine who did contract work on a massive Domino project for my company. He's an awesome developer and just as great a person. Basically, he's an all-around Domino guru and I'm looking forward to some good content over his way!

Midrange News E-mails

For the past month or so I have been dealing with weekly e-mails from Midrange News. These have been completely unsolicited and the first week I tried using their unsubsribe option online. That didn't work and I got the following error message:

Microsoft JET Database Engine error '80004005'

Los cambios solicitados en la tabla no se realizaron correctamente porque crearían valores duplicados en el índice, clave principal o relación. Cambie los datos en el campo o los campos que contienen datos duplicados, quite el índice o vuelva a definir el índice para permitir entradas duplicadas e inténtelo de nuevo.

/deleteemail.asp, line 17

So, the next week I tried it again with the same error. Then I sent standard emails to the postmaster and abuse accounts. The next week I got the same error and clicked the "Contact" link at their site and asked to be unsubscribed that way. Today I got the e-mail again and I created a SpamCop account and reported their IP that way. I just saw that they have a new contact so I will also try that method again.

I hate spammers...they probably harvested my address from Midrange lists!

Where to buy gas?

I was thinking about where I should purchase gas. I remembered that a couple of years back I got an email stating that you shouldn't buy Middle Eastern oil because it aids terrorism. This is, of course, absurd. However, we know that a lot of oil does come from that region. If you don't want to buy oil from a Middle Eastern (Persian Gulf) state (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates), then you can look to the Department of Energy's website to see how much each oil company imports from the Persian Gulf.

Below are some of the stats that caught my eye from January-June 2005:

Exxon - 26%
Valero (there are a lot of these popping up in my town!) - 38%
Chevron - 38%
BP North America - 15%
BP West Coast - 53%
Phillips 66 - 8%
Conoco - 6%
Murphy (Wal-Mart) - 18%
Citgo - Venezualan; not much Gulf Oil, but their government isn't a good one to support...

The following import 0% Persian Gulf oil
Sunoco
Shell
Many other I haven't hear of.

Always The Bridesmaid - Never The Bride

One of my best friends, Chris Moody, was in a wedding this weekend. He has probably been a bridesmaid (sorry, groomsman) in 10 weddings since he graduated from college in 2001.

Sorry Moody, but maybe it's time to put an end to this and take the driver's seat... (you know what I mean!) =)

Sametime Fixed For Me?

It appears that my STMUX problems may have gone away. A few weeks ago I loaded a tracing hotfix for Sametime. The hotfix was simply intended to debug the STMUX task. Since loading the hotfix my Sametime server hasn't hung up again. My Lotus Support technician said that about 3 or 4 other customers have stated that after loading the debug hotfix that the problem has gone away.

While it may seem strange that additional debugging may have resolved a problem, consider this. A while back I was having to debug some Lotuscript that wasn't working right. So, I did the usual - throw in a MSGBOX statement to throw a status up to the server console. After adding this the code worked. I had even tried recompiling Lotuscript before that, so I don't believe it was just the fact that I saved and compiled the code. Who knows?

Anyway, I'm pretty hopeful about Sametime being OK. But, I will let you know if I have any other issues with it.

Now it's time to start considering an ND7 upgrade...

Notes Faster on Vista?

We have a beta of Vista from MS and one of our PC Techs loaded Notes 6.5.4 on it. He was saying that Notes seemed to run faster than before. My question was the obvious: "So, what changed?"

Did the Notes executables change or did the Microsoft code change? Hopefully there will be some performance improvements for Java-based applications in Vista.

Poll Numbers

So, with all the talk about The President's job approval numbers being in the tank, we usually don't get to hear about the Rasmussen Report's numbers.

Look how close they were in predicting the 2004 Presidential Election results:

President George W. Bush won the popular vote on November 2 by a 50.7% to 48.2% margin over Senator John Kerry. The final Rasmussen Reports projection had shown the President winning 50.2% to 48.5%.

Now, we usually hear of the CNN/Gallup poll showing Bush having a 40% approval rating (his lowest ever). But, do you ever hear the media cite the Rasmussen Report (which was the most accurate for the election)?

Today, they have him at a 47% approval rating - far from the 40% we often hear.

Am I saying that Bush is doing a great job? Not necessarily, but at least he's trying to do some things like, oh, education reform, tax reform, social (in)security reform, etc.... During the election they criticized him saying that the Democrats didn't want to see "more of the same". Well, this weekend I saw Democrat and Republican strategists talking about what to do in the Gulf Coast area for relief and rebuilding. The Republican said that this gives us a chance to try changing the system and making things better for those dependent on the Government. The Democrat (and I've heard it echoed by other Democrats) decried that stating that now is not the time to try new things. They know their old way of dependence helps them keep voters.

Finally, you need to get a copy of The FairTax Book!! It should open your mind no matter what your political persuasion.

Lucas The Sellout

Nothing more is needed than the graphic from an email I just received from StarWars.com:

Lotus Notes 6.5.4 Rollout Update

As of August 8, my progress was:

6.5.4 - 70.1%
6.5.3 - 17.6%
6.5.2 - 4.5%
6.5.1 - 6.2%

As of today, my progress is:

7.0 - 0.6% =)
6.5.4 - 76.5%
6.5.3 - 16.6%
6.5.2 - 2.4%
6.5.1 - 3.9%

Looks like I'm pretty much there - for some reason the Smart Upgrade isn't working with some of the ones remaining with the 6.5.2 and 6.5.1 clients. I have had Smart Upgrade set with deadlines to force upgrades, so it appears that these people just haven't seen the notices.

New Orleans Links

I saw the following links at Neal Boortz's site yesterday. I couldn't pass them up.

- Apparently Amtrak offered a train to carry about 900 people out of the city. But it left with equipment only.

- In 1997 Congress appropriated $500,000 to FEMA for an evacuation plan.

Frustrated by inaction two years later, Congress strengthened its directive. It ordered "an evacuation plan for a Category 3 or greater storm, a levee break, flood or other natural disaster for the New Orleans area."

The $500,000 that Congress appropriated for the evacuation plan went to a commission that studied future options for the 24-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said.

- In 1996, environmentalists sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prevent them from fortifying the levees.

This suit argued that the Corps had not considered “the impact on bottomland hardwood forest wetlands” and the effect on Louisiana black bears and bird breeding.

Memory Lapse or Hypocrisy?

I blogged last week about America's Iraq policy since 1998. In that I offered the following quote:

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

There was a news story yesterday regarding former President Clinton speaking out against the current President's Iraq policy. In that story we read the following quote by President Clinton:

Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."

Sorry Mr. President, but I'm calling you out on that. You knew in 1998 that there were weapons and you did nothing to stop it. You knew in 1998 (and made it policy!) that Saddam Hussein would not let the inspectors do their job. I'll stop there for now without mentioning what else your administration knew before your term was up.

6.5.4 FP1 Hotfixes Anyone?

Well, yesterday my production mail server started having some semaphore issues. I was getting tons of the following errors on my console:

WAITING FOR FRWSEM 0x0244 database semaphore

No clients were responding (HTTP, Notes, etc...) so I had to end it after 56 days uptime since loading FP1. After clearing shared memory and semaphores I restarted it. I also enabled semaphore debugging dynamically at the console by issuing the following commands:

set config DEBUG_THREADID=1
set config DEBUG_SHOW_TIMEOUT=1
set config DEBUG_CAPTURE_TIMEOUT=10

Soon after that I started to panic b/c it only stayed up for about 5 minutes. So I got on the phone with Lotus Support and was able to send them the debug.txt file from my semaphore debugging. The server's been up now for about 24 hours. Lotus Support said that there are some hotfixes out for 6.5.4 FP1. Initially it appears that my debugging matches one of them, but we want to wait for another hang to make sure that the errors match up between my debugging and the hotfix code.

In the meantime I'm about 60 days behind on PTFs so I'll probably be IPLing tonight. I'm going to send in my request for downtime now.

Rebuilding New Orleans

OK, so am I wrong to thing that we need to rebuild New Orleans in another location on higher ground? Last night the President said that "the Federal Government" will be footing the 200 BILLION dollars it will probably take.

First of all, "the Federal Government" has one means of income - taxation (Look here for a great tax plan before the Congress...). So, we, the American people, will be the ones ultimately footing the bill.

Secondly, regardless of who is footing that $200,000,000,000, I would hate to see another cat 5 hurricane come in and flood out the city and us have to pay billions again (not to mention the other devastation to human life).

Acoustic Guitar For Sale

I'm parting ways with an awesome acoustic guitar I've had for over 10 years.

Images are here!

eBay listing ends Saturday morning at about 9:15 EST.

eBay listing here!

Enabling Transaction Logging to Secondary ASP (iSeries)

A couple of months ago on the Domino for iSeries list, someone asked about setting up transaction logging on an iSeries. I found a proof-of-concept that I thought I would give a try on a test box. The idea was to set up a secondary ASP for dedicated disk units and point the transaction logging to that pool of drives. Here is what I did to enable this.

System:
iSeries model 270 2248 Feature
i5/OS (V5R3)
512 MB Main Storage
System ASP - 210 GB
New User ASP - 115 GB
Domino 7.0

Since I had some eStorage drives lying around that were "taken out" of a production machine, I figured I would use them for the user ASP.

Add Disk Units To System In A User ASP:
- Ensure that you have available space for the new disk units
- Power down the system and do not restart
- Insert disk units into the system
- IPL system to B/Manual and Slow
- Go into the Dedicated Service Tools (DST) environment
- Work with Disk Units
- Work with Disk Unit Recovery
- Disk Unit Problem Recovery Procedures
- Initialize and Format Disk Unit
- Select the new disk units to format and proceed
- Return to the Work with Disk Units menu
- Work with Disk Unit Configuration
- Work with Device Parity Protection (or mirroring - depending on what type of protection you desire)
- Include Disk Units in Device Parity Protection
- Return to the Work with Disk Unit Configuration menu
- Work with ASP Configuration
- Add Units to ASPs
- You will see your new disk units; just type in the number of the next available ASP. I only had a System ASP, so I typed in "2" beside each disk unit to place them in ASP #2
- Confirm your new configuration
- Exit DST and continue with the IPL

Configure New Directory in User ASP:
- CRTDIR DIR('/translog')
- CRTUDFS UDFS('/dev/qasp02/translog.udfs') (This creates a User Defined File System (UDFS) that will be used in the next step as the mount point for your translog directory. The "qasp0"2 must reflect the number of the ASP you created for your drives. The "translog.udfs" can be anything.
- MOUNT TYPE(*UDFS) MFS('/dev/qasp02/translog.udfs') MNTOVRDIR('/translog') I
- WRKLNK OBJ('/translog')
- Option 8
- Note that the Auxiliary Storage Pool should reflect your pool.

Enable Transaction Logging for the Domino Server:
- Open the Domino Administrator client to the server on which you wish to enable transaction logging or to your home server where your main Directory is stored
- Go to the Configuration Tab
- Expand the Server section on the left
- Go to All Server Documents
- Choose Edit Server for the Server Document of the the server on which you wish to enable transaction logging
- Go to the Transaction Logging tab
- Transactional logging: Enabled
- Log path: /translog/ (or whatever you used for the CRTDIR command. It is relative to the root and not the Domino data directory)

- For the remainder of the settings, it is recommended that you become familiar with the various options and make sure they are suited to your environment.
- Logging style: Circular
- Use all available space on log device: No
- Maximum log space: 10000 MB
- Automatic fixup of corrupt databases: Enabled
- Runtime/Restart performance: Favor restart recovery time

Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing Blog

I found this Washington Post blog that you can put in your RSS to keep up with what's happening with the hearings:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/campaignforthecourt/

XML: http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/campaignforthecourt/index.rdf.

Iraq Policy Since 1998

Bashing President George W. Bush for the war in Iraq is nothing new. Many of the detractors will accuse him of several things: greed for oil (where is the oil and why are prices high?!?), revenge for Saddam's issues with Bush 41, imperialism, etc... I will not just pass by the fact that Iraq was at the front of W's mind when he became President. However, there is another reason for this preoccupation with Iraq.

In 1998, President Clinton signed into law the "Iraq Liberation Act of 1998". The main focus of this act is described in its title: "To establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq." I find it amazing the various issues this Act was supposed to address: Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran (1980-1988), killing up to 180,000 kurds and using chemical weapons against about 5,000 Kurds (1988), Kuwait occupation (1990), failed plot to assassinate George Bush (1993), possible desire to attack Kuwait again (1994), deception of UN inspectors regarding weapons (1996-2003), ceased cooperation with inspectors completely (1998).

Section 3 of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 simply states "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

From Section 6 we read "the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law."

Further, I have found some interesting quotes at this forum:

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

"Hussein has .. chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

Also, regarding the failed attempt on Bush 41's life, we shouldn't villify a sitting President for wanting using that as a reason to oust a dictator (which George W. Bush hasn't used but Clinton did use as a reason!). Remember, from above, that part of Bill Clinton's Iraq policy was also meant to seek revenge for that! It was an assassination attempt against a sitting President - of course we should seek out those who tried.

I wanted to look up some more quotes, and I may do so in the future. I would like to see what Hillary and Kerry said about the act back in 1998. I believe that this passed 98-0 in the Senate, so everyone was on board with it (including Senator Kerry). To be sure, this act was really only intended to give support to Iraqi dissidents, but it did state that Saddam needed to be removed from power. George Bush was the one who carried out Bill Clinton's plan for this.

Remembering 9/11

Sunday will mark the 4th Anniversary of 9/11. I'm certain we all remember where we were. I was sitting at work when my mom called to tell me that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought she was crazy until I turned on Fox News in our server room and got my colleagues in there watching. Then hearing reports that the Pentagon was hit. Then the second plane hit the other tower and a plane crashed in Pennsylvania. Then the towers fell...

This year, Dream Theater released a song titled Sacrificed Sons. The lyrics by James LaBrie are below. The song starts with news samples from 9/11. At first I thought it was going to be a rant about how we have sacrificed sons and daughters in Iraq, but Dream Theater took a different path that I'm proud of...

Dream Theater
Sacrificed Sons

[left: This has all the appearances of an extraordinarily well coordinated and
devastating terrorist attack—

right: —terrorism against our nation will not stand; the government
will hunt down those resposible—

left: —terrorism means striking terror into the hearts of people, that has been
accomplished—

right: —looking in awe, amazement, shock and grief and anger at what they
were seeing in front of them—

middle: There has just been a huge explosion... you can see, uh, a billowing smoke rising, there was a cascade of sparks and fire and we see this extraordinarily big, frightening scene behind us—

left: —there is panic on the streets, there are people screaming and running—

right: Good lord, there are no words.

left: —3000 Palestinians [unintelligible] chanting "God is good"—

right: —This is just a horrific scene and a horrific moment, but just look
at that. That is about as frightening a scene as you will ever see.

left: But there are times in your life that are life changing, where your
life can never be the same and this appears certainly to be one of them.]

Walls are closing
Anxiously
Channel surfing
Frantically

Burning City
Smoke and fire
Planes we're certain
Faith inspired

No clues
A complete surprise
Who'll be
Coming home tonight

Heads all turning
Towards the sky
Towers crumble
Heroes die

Who would wish this
On our people
And proclaim
That His will be done
Scriptures they heed have misled them
All praise their Sacrificed sons
All praise their Sacrificed sons

[Instrumental Break]

Teach them
What to think and feel
Your ways
So enlightening

Words they preach
I can't relate
If God's true Love
Are acts of Hate

Who would wish this
On our people
And proclaim
That His will be done
Scriptures they heed have misled them
All praise their Sacrificed sons
All praise their Sacrificed sons

God on high
Our mistake
Will mankind be extinct
There's no time
Time to waste
Who serves the truth
For Heaven's sake

New Orleans: "Safe from Hurricanes"

Over at Al Mohler's blog, he refers to the following quote from Tech Central Station:

[John] Law was contracted in 1716 by the French government (read: Philippe) to establish a new bank which would extend him endless credit for his company.

The charter also granted his company control of Louisiana. Law reappointed Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, to a second term as governor of Louisiana. Bienville had been eager to found a trading post at the foot of a Native American portage along the Mississippi which connected the river to a bayou, and hence to Lake Pontchartrain, in the north. He saw this as his chance. Law and the royal engineer both thought Bienville's choice was ridiculous -- the site was in the middle of a swamp. The small patch of dry ground lay at a curve in the river, Bienville argued, halfway between Fort Rosalie (Natchez) along the Mississippi and Fort Louis at Mobile. Also, he said, it would be safe from hurricanes. Being the highest-ranking official on-site, Bienville had his way, and Nouvelle Orleans -- named after Law's benefactor -- was born in 1718.

Blogspot Comment Spam

I finally noticed that Blogspot now offers word verification to prevent comment spam (which I have had here from time to time).

I have enabled that option. It will still allow you to post Anonymously, but you can use the "Other" option to put your name and website if you wish.

Also related to comments, I have enabled the option for comments to open in a new window. Let me know how if you don't like this.

Finally, I disabled my STLinks integration. It was killing the performance of Firefox for me to view the blog. Things are much faster now with Firefox. If you want to IM me, you can ping me at:

AIM - WhisonantC
GTalk - TopherSSGTP

Speaking of Firefox, it accounted for 27% of the unique visitors to my blog in August and 38% of all views. I would have thought it to be higher!

Explorer - 69%
Firefox - 27%
Safari - 2%
Mozilla - 1%

High School Football Week 2

Well, last week the Northwestern High School Trojans lost our starting quarterback. We lost to Spartanburg on Friday night 26-21. The 2nd string QB did step up and he played well.

We are 1-1 now...

Katrina's Half

As time goes on, I personally think this could also be expanded to include other disasters because it is a great idea. This was Rock's idea.

I urge you to simply forward the website to people and/or blog about it. Tell people about it as well. While I don't participate in the lotteries, I know people who do. Try to convince them to pledge at the website.

The website is:

http://www.katrinashalf.com

Here is information from the site:

I was driving to the airport today, and I passed a billboard for Mega Millions, a multistate lottery in which the state of Georgia participates. The Mega Millions lottery is currently at a plump $131 million. As I was driving along, listening to news about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I was milling around the idea of "what if I won that money", and was immediately hit with a sense of guilt if I did. How could I become a multimillionaire while so many suffered along the Gulf Coast?

Then I was struck with an idea.

What if I could create a site where people who play lotteries could publicly commit (obviously nonbinding, but sometimes social oaths can be the most compelling) to giving half of whatever they win (i.e. the "take home" check) to the Red Cross (or some other charity's) relief effort for Hurricane Katrina? Think about it - let's say you won the aforementioned Mega Millions. You'd probably bring home about $90 million on the cash option, after taxes etc. That means you'd still get $45 million, and you would be giving a much-needed $45 million to the Red Cross (or some other charity's) Katrina relief effort.

Domino 6.5.4 and Sametime 6.5.1 Fixpack 1 Update 2

I believe Domino 6.5.4 FP1 has corrected my issues. My mail server hasn't so much as hiccupped since loading FP1. I now have over 41 days of uptime on the mail server.

Regarding the Sametime 6.5.1 FP1 issues, I just received some debugging code from IBM. I will likely put it on after my personal downtime. This is from the technician about the debugging code:

Here is the test fix that requires 6.5.1 FP1 to be installed. Because it prereqs 6.5.1 FP1 (product 5733LST PTF ST67007), that PTF must be permanently applied (using APYPTF) before this one can be loaded.

You will need to edit sametime.ini and turn on logging for the channel operations of the StMux service by adding VPMX_CNL_DEBUG=1 to the [Debug] section.

This will log information to stmux.txt in the trace directory of the Sametime server. We are collecting information about the size of the peer channels table and the resizing of it that is causing the crash. When STMUX experiences another crash, please send in this trace file, as well as sametime.ini and sametime.log. Then delete the existing stmux.txt file and restart the sametime server. A new stmux,txt file will be created and logging will begin again.

Sounds like this will be doing some good data collection!

Feet Up (I hope!)

I'm taking a much-needed vacation next week. After Sunday, I will not be blogging for the week. I will still be accessible via e-mail on CrackBerry, but may not answer those...

Notes 7.0 Pulled From Passport

Volker was the first I saw to post this on his site. Check out this image to see if this could be why it was pulled...this is the craziest thing I've seen Notes ever do. I upgraded my Notes Client from 6.5.4 to 7.0 when it went Gold. Note that between steps 4 and 5 I tried opening a document in step 4 and the document invisibly opens in step 5. By that I mean that I couldn't see that it switched over to step 5 but that I switched tabs and noticed it.

Also, restarting Notes "fixes" it for a while but the problem returns after a bit.

Notes and Domino 7 Interoperability

My Lotus Domino RSS feed had some great technotes today with matrices for interoperability between Domino versions and companion products. If you are looking to upgrade to Notes or Domino Version 7, please check out these two technotes:

Supported Versions for Interoperability Among the Domino Extended Products

Supported Configurations of Notes and Domino 7.0

Oil Shortage After Katrina

(T)he only reason that traders are willing to pay those prices for crude oil is because they believe that individuals are willing to purchase fuels refined from crude at prices that will enable those original purchases to be profitable. In fact, the price of crude oil cannot rise independently of the value of the final products into which it is refined. Even though we are seeing a pattern in which the price of crude oil increases, which is followed by increases in retail gasoline prices, one must be reminded of the economic processes that are occurring.

I've been doing a bit of thinking about this and I think I may have over-reacted, at least economically, at what appears to be blatant price gouging. At some stations here in Rock Hill, SC, gas prices went up about 70 cents in one day. I began to consider this a little more and I'm not so certain that now we should be asking our government to intervene in putting price caps on gas. The solution that we do need is for America's dependence on foreign oil to be reduced or nearly eliminated. If you are complaining right now about gas prices, you should also be in favor of America drilling at home and building more refineries. Independence is a first step to lower prices!

Remember the oil crisis of the 70s (I don't....lol). This was partly due to our government imposing restrictions! Secondly, why is there a sudden shortage of gasoline from Katrina? It's simple - two major pipelines have been taken offline due to the hurricane. After thinking some more, I had to drop my perspective as a consumer and had to put on my Economics thinking cap. I remembered back in college the principle of J.B. Say, that "supply creates demand." This can be true in a shortage in a paradoxical format. We are seeing that we have less oil coming in (about 20% of imported oil comes up through the gulf) and this is somehow making it more valuable for the short-term (hopefully). I then decided to go to Mises.org (an "Austrian" economics website) to see if their writers had said anything about the oil crisis. I found the following excellent article by William Anderson that deals with the shortage issue and related price increases (the quote at the beginning of this blog was from this article). Dr. Anderson was my economics professor in college. I will not quote the entire article, you can read it for yourself if you have about 5 minutes.

"How to Create A Shortage" by William Anderson.

People are not happy about this latest round of gas price increases; and, not surprisingly, they are demanding answers — and "solutions" — from the wrong people: the political classes. At the cutting edge is Hawaii, where gas prices will soon be controlled by law, not markets.

Hawaiians are about to find out in the near future that the "solutions" they have supported are going to have the opposite effect of what supposedly was intended.

People in the Aloha State pay more for gasoline than anyone else in the United States, and anyone with even a basic understanding of economics understands why this is so. Hawaii is a group of islands located thousands of miles from the continental US, and Hawaiians who purchase gasoline must be willing also to pay for the high transportation costs of bringing fuel to that state. (At more than 57 cents a gallon, Hawaiians also pay the highest gasoline taxes in the USA, a penny more than their California counterparts and about 13 cents more than the national average, according to the American Petroleum Institute.)

Hawaiians believe this to be a most unfair set of circumstances and have turned to their legislature for what they believe to be relief. Yes, even though the high prices that people in Hawaii pay for gasoline are due to that pesky thing called the Law of Scarcity, citizens of that state are convinced that the politicians there can do away with scarcity by fiat. They are about to discover just how wrong they really are.