Monday, October 31, 2005

Happy Birthday and Halloween!!

OK, so the 2nd Birthday picture is a little late...


2nd Birthday Party - 10/22/2005


Halloween - 10/31/2005

More Chris Moody

As if the first image wasn't bad enough, here is some more Chris Moody:

Domino 7 Fault Analyzer Task

Chris Miller prompted me to finish setting this up today.

First, you should look up "Fault Analyzer" in the Domino 7 Administrator Help for documentation on how to configure this.

I was not aware that there was a specific Fault Reports database until I saw Susan Bulloch's blog about it. After reading that, I configured that database along with all of my Desktop Settings documents. I am housing this database on my 7.0 Cluster server. Before starting the Fault Analyzer task (via a configuration document), the database was pretty useful for storing all of those pesky NSD files.

But this morning I configured the Fault Analysis task. It automatically started shortly after enabling it in the configuration document. The task name is FAULTANALY (which, by the way, does NOT appear anywhere in the Admin Help file...). From one of the comments at Susan's site, you should check out the "Fault Analyzed" , "By Callstack", and "By Occurrences" views. As you can see from the images below, the Fault Analysis does a good job at keeping the data organized.


Fault Reports by Call Stack


Below, note the "Similar fault for.... 43%". In the image there is not one visible, but it also includes "Exact fault for...".

Fault Reports by Occurrence


Below, note the portion of the call stack at the top followed by an Administrative Section. In here, you can add an SPR or PMR numbers to keep track of calls to Lotus Support about these faults. Also, the twistie will show the unique number of clients affected and each of those will have a detail number of how many times each client has had the crash.

Detailed Fault Report

Happy Reformation Day!



On this day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. While Luther had hoped for an academic discourse and debate regarding the problems of indulgences, the debate never occurred. Instead, the Protestant Reformation, as we know it, had begun.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Go Gamecocks!!

We finally managed to beat Tennessee!! It was the first time we have ever won in Knoxville and the first win in our past 12 meetings - way to go! We were so close many times during the Holtz era.

You may ask why I'm posting this so late. Well, I had to make sure that my Domino servers didn't get messed up by the time change. While I had my production server down I also loaded 6.5.4 FP2. Will follow-up on that later. Time for bed - again...

Friday, October 28, 2005

Domino 6.5.4 Semaphore Issue (Follow-Up)

I just checked back on the IBM Technote that I blogged about last week. At that time, IBM was not planning on addressing the issue in 6.x codestream. However, it seems that they have now corrected it in 6.5.4 FP2. I may load this Sunday morning when I'm bouncing the server for the time change.

Remember, I was getting the following error:

WAITING FOR FRWSEM 0x0244 database semaphore

This issue was reported to Quality Engineering as SPR# MALR6948NQ, and was fixed in Domino 6.5.4 Fix Pack 2. The issue was also addressed in Domino 7.

Excerpt from the Lotus Domino Release 6.5.4 Fix Pack 2 fix list (available at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus):

SPR# MALR6948NQ - Fixed a problem which causes a deadlock to occur in the buffer management component. There is a timing window when an unused temporary buffer is being evicted, where it gets reused. Once it is reused, the eviction code will wait forever, causing a deadlock. The fix is to close the timing window so that this no longer occurs.

Refer to the following document on the Upgrade Central site for details about Lotus Domino 6.5.4 Fix Pack 2 (FP2), and how to obtain it:

Upgrade Central: Planning your upgrade to Lotus Notes/Domino 6.0.5 and 6.5.4, Including Domino 6.5.4 Fix Pack 1 and Fix Pack 2 (# 1201845)

The issue occurs because the "NSF buffer pool container" semaphore is being locked while waiting on the call OSAutoFDGDestory.

Domino Web Admin Logo (Update)

I posted a while back with a graphic depicting the Domino Web Admin logo to the Star Trek logo. In 7.0 Beta 4, it was looking more and more trekkish. It has been modified slightly for 7.0 Gold. It is the same form as 6.5.4 but with the red background.

New York City Odor - My Theory

They have WAY too many Starbucks....

Strong, Sweet Smell Reported in Manhattan

New York City has many odors, but when the city began to smell a little too good, New Yorkers became alarmed.

Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 10 miles north called a city hot line to report a strong odor Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup, The New York Times reported Friday.

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to find the source of the mysterious smell.

Air tests haven't turned up anything harmful, but the source was still a mystery.

"We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there's nothing hazardous," said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. "What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don't know."

Although many compared the smell to maple syrup, others said it reminded them of vanilla coffee or freshly-baked cake. All seemed to agree that it was a welcome change from the usual city smells.

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos (waffles). Or pancakes," Arturo Padilla told The Times as he walked in Lower Manhattan. "It's pleasant."

Inbox Management (Adding Mail File Size to Template)

One of the items I posted about at Ed Brill's thread on this was that I have implemeted a text section below the mail file owner's name that will display the mail file storage utilization. This looks nearly the same as the OpenNTF implementation, but my implementation was far simpler after looking at their code.

The following modifications need to be made in the most current releases of the "Domino Web Access" and "Mail" templates (or other template(s) you may be implementing).

1) Open the "Switcher Form for Mail" Form.
2) After the first "Computed Value" section, hit Enter.
3) On the blank line create a Computed Text Field named dspMailFileSize with a default value of dspMailFileSize
4) In the PostOpen event of the same Form, use the following code:

Sub Postopen(Source As Notesuidocument)

Dim s As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim size As Variant

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

size = (Cdbl(db.Size) / 1024) / 1024

Call source.FieldSetText("dspMailFileSize", "Usage: " + Cstr(size)+" MB")

End Sub


Please note that due to client caching of the mail template(s), this change may not be propagated for a few days. From my research, I could not find a way to force the client to update the cache. Deleting cache.ndk would force it to work after restarting Notes, though.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Domino 6.5.4 Fixpack 2

IBM Technote 1219981 provides information on Fixpack 2 for Domino 6.5.4. I believe I will skip this an go to 7.0 (hopefully soon...) since IBM has decided not to correct a Semaphore issue in the 6.x codestream.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Thank you Senators!

South Carolina Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham are planning on sponsoring a bill in the US Senate to end the Income Tax. It appears to be a decent plan that would provide real reform to the sad state of our Income Tax system.

"There is a growing urgency and consensus that the tax code is killing our ability to compete in the global economy," Mr. DeMint said. "It's as if we have huge signs on our beaches saying, 'Take Your Business Somewhere Else!'"

"Tax reform," the senator added, "has never been more relevant."


Sadly, it doesn't resemble the bill in the US House of Representatives, H.R. 25 - The Fair Tax Bill. This is a beautiful plan that economists and politicians have been considering and honing for about 20 years. Find information at http://www.fairtax.org/

Domino Web Access 7.0

Have you seen screenshots of DWA 7.0? Very nice Lotus...



News Story of the Day

If there is one story you read, it should be "It Wasn't Just Miller's Story" by Robert Kagan. There is an abundance of information and news articles on Iraq from before George W. Bust took office. It's rather eye-opening. I particularly like the following:

The Times was not alone, of course. On Jan. 29, 2001, The Post editorialized that "of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous -- or more urgent -- than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf," including "intelligence photos that show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons."

NY Times Promotes Welfare

If you have had doubts as to whether the New York Times is set against the ideas of Conservatism, you should read this New York Times editorial from yesterday. I'll just quote a little bit from it - no explanation is really necessary.

The government must capitalize on the end of the era of perpetually cheap gas, and it must do so in a way that makes America less vulnerable to all manner of threats - terrorist, environmental and economic.

The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina highs of $3-plus a gallon. That would put a dent in gas-guzzling behavior, as has already been seen in the dramatic drop in the sale of sport-utility vehicles. And it would help cure oil dependency in the long run, as automakers and other manufacturers responded to consumer demand for fuel-efficient products.

Still, raising the gas tax would be politically difficult - and for very good reasons. The gas tax, which has been at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, is painfully regressive. It hits hardest at poor people for whom fuel costs consume a proportionally larger share of their budgets; rural dwellers for whom truck-driving over long distances is an everyday activity; and the gasoline-dependent middle class, particularly suburban commuters, who, on top of living far from their workplaces, have been encouraged by decades of cheap gas to own large, poor-mileage vehicles.

Fortunately, those drawbacks can be overcome. A bolstered gas tax would raise huge amounts of revenue, roughly $1 billion for every penny of additional tax. Some of that money would have to be used to provide offsetting tax breaks to low-income households, such as an increase in the earned income tax credit.


[rant]
First of all, are you serious?? Secondly, why do you want to pay high gas prices? Finally, the gas tax is supposed to be for maintaining roads and not for redistribution of wealth.
[/rant]

Monday, October 24, 2005

Notes Compared to Home Construction

While playing Rock's Clues, Mike Schubert posted the following:

Lotus Geeks build a Habitat for Humanity house maybe? Let's see:

- It would be painted yellow/orange/whatever that color is.
- The mailbox wouldn't look like any of the other mailboxes, so people would complain.
- The house would be useful beyond anyone's wildest desires, but no one would be able to get past the fact the mailbox looked different.
- Maintenance costs would be lower
- The project will never be completed because we all have "architect" in our titles now and therefore would not actually want to pick up a hammer and look like an "engineer".


I love that analogy. This is precisely how the industry is, though. At Ed Brill's blog, someone was talking about the need for a better UI for Notes. UI is subjective for the most part. Honestly, I could care less about Outlook. I'm really only familiar with Outlook 2000, but have used 2003 before. It's nothing to write home about. Am I a bit biased? Possibly. But, Notes has really come a long way with it's UI and developers have a lot of control over the present database UI. We have some quick and dirty databases that I would hate for anyone to see. On the other hand, we have some fairly slick databases where we have focused more on the UI. I guess it's just my little rant on UI.

Just because the mailbox looks different doesn't mean it's bad!

Friday, October 21, 2005

Thanks To The Electricians

They worked on A/C and power last night and killed the UPS circuit that our backup mail server is on. So, that server was down when I got to work and we had to start it and then power it back down to start it again normally! We had some PTFs that didn't apply because of the previous abnormal system end. Basically, our HTTP tasks wouldn't load because the JVM was a little messed up because of the PTFs not being loaded.

It seems to be OK now. Oh, and during the middle of that our production App server decided to restart itself. AMGR was the task that hosed it. I'll have to dig through that a little more too!

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Hello Redmond...

From "the belly of the beast" - check out this MapStats hit today...

Lotusphere 2006

I'll be staying at Swan this year - a departure from staying at Caribbean Beach or Port Orleans the past 3 years. Looking forward to being "on campus"!

Who else is going?

Also, I may be co-presenting an iSeries session. More on that when it's finalized...

As a side, I've been monitoring my 6.5.4 FP1 server's CPU performance since the beginning of the month. I have found that my average total CPU utilization has been 47.54% and average mail DPAR's CPU utilization has been 20.96%. That leaves the other 27% to my Application and IM servers and any system resources.

Badly Thought Out Domain Names

This forward I received was too funny to pass up....

People spend a lot of time thinking up their children's names. It's just a
pity they don't always think as hard about their domain names.

Firstly there is Who Represents?, a database for agencies to the rich and
famous: http://www.whorepresents.com

Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can
exchange advice and views: http://www.expertsexchange.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: http://www.penisland.net

Need a therapist? Try: http://www.therapistfinder.com

And there is an Italian Power company: http://www.powergenitalia.com

Finally we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
http://www.molestationnursery.com

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

NSFDB2 for iSeries?

I was going through some commands and saw that in the CHGDOMSVR command in the QDOMINO700 library that the following options are available:

Enable Server for DB2 . . . . .*YES, *NO
Default data store . . . . . . . . .*NSF, *DB2
DB2 access server . . . . . . . . .

We know that NSFDB2 hasn't been officially released and that IBM has said that it would not be available for iSeries until a later date.

It's fairly promising to see the options available in the CHGDOMSVR command. It almost makes me think that IBM is trying to get this going for iSeries fairly quickly too.

Farewell to a legendary band

After a 30 year career spanning 4 decades, Petra is calling it quits.

To celebrate 33 years of music and ministry from the pioneering Christian rock band, PETRA, Inpop Records will release PETRA FAREWELL on November 22nd. PETRA FAREWELL, recorded on October 4th in front of an audience of family, friends and fans at W274 in Franklin, Tennessee, features PETRA classics, emerging worship favorites, and special guest appearances by former band members, including vocalist Greg X. Volz and keyboard player John Lawry.

“It was great to see Greg and John on the same stage together,” says PETRA lead vocalist since 1986, John Schlitt. “Everyone had fun and I’m sure the fans enjoyed the show. We’ve had a wonderful 33 years, and God has done amazing things through this band. We are thankful for all He has given us,” Schlitt says.

PETRA, currently comprised of Schlitt, band founder/guitarist/songwriter Bob Hartman, drummer Paul Simmons and bassist Greg Bailey, has impacted generations of musicians and fans alike over the years with over seven million CDs sold, four Grammy Awards, 10 Dove Awards and an induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The band initially formed in 1972 and paved the way for the rock genre perhaps more than any other in the Christian music industry.

Made In Mexico

OK, so I'm all for NAFTA, CAFTA, whatever. Better jobs offered in our neighboring countries can mean less immigration problems here - but I digress.

So, a couple of months ago our company decided to start buying IBM workstations. As you know, IBM sold their PC business and name to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo. I was perusing one of the workstations we received and looked at the label. To my surprise, I see that the computer was "Made in Mexico".

That's hilarious - Big Blue, the epitomy of an American corporation, sells off a business unit to a Chinese company who builds the computers in Mexico!!

Monday, October 17, 2005

Chris Moody

I just want to introduce you all to my coworker Chris Moody. Here is a picture I took of him in his cubicle "working".


"Where's my Ferguson Toilet? Bawoosh!!!"

Domino 6.5.4 Semaphore Issue

A month ago our mail server went down with the following error and basically, that issue won't be fixed in 6.x codestream but is fixed in 7.x:

WAITING FOR FRWSEM 0x0244 database semaphore

As a follow-up, I just read IBM Technote 1202068 - though we haven't had this hang again since applying PTFs and an IPL, this makes me a little more eager to get Domino 7.0 running:

Problem Your Domino 6.x server hangs with the following messages in the Notes.Log:

02:03:07 AM EST sq="0000A65F" THREAD [0B74:0002-0B70] WAITING FOR SEM 0x0256 NSF buffer pool container (@1210B3E8) (OWNER=0E44:0DB FOR 30000 ms

Why does this occur?

The issue occurs because the "NSF buffer pool container" semaphore is being locked while waiting on the call OSAutoFDGDestory.

This issue was reported to Quality Engineering as SPR# MALR6948NQ. There are currently no plans to address this issue in Notes/Domino 6.x; however, the issue was fixed in Domino 7.x.

An Iraq Blog

I found this US Army Combat Medic's blog via a story at Little Green Footballs. The link is regarding the "staged" event between President Bush and military personnel. This medic was one of the dozen military personnel who were part of the Q&A session. It's good to see the story from a participant's point of view.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Happy 2nd Birthday!!

AT 3:05 PM on October 16, 2003, Emma Grace was born! Happy Birthday to my beautiful daughter!!

Friday, October 14, 2005

Staged Events

The media seems to be in an uproar about the "staged" event by President Bush with some military personnel in Iraq.

I would like you to take a look at this article:



NBC's Today Show had just run a story about Bush's staged event and then they were going to a live shot of a reporter in a canoe on a street in New Jersey demonstrating how deep the water was. Unfortunately, for the reporter staging the event, two people walked by in the water only up to their calves!! How ironic!

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Give me a break!!

Do we live in such a society that the following are really necessary?

The 100-Minute Bible
A new version of the Bible which its author says can be read in less than two hours has been launched.

The 100-Minute Bible, written as a page-turner for those who do not have the time to read the full version, was unveiled at Canterbury Cathedral.


The SMS Bible - It's gr8 news 4 believers - da Bible sent 2 u in txt - Good grief!
True believers can now encourage each other with lines such as "4 God so luvd da world" and "In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth".

Do we live in such a society that our attention span is relegated to reading the Bible in less than 2 hours or needing an SMS "translation" of the Bible? Our education system was founded on the premise of teaching children how to read by using the Bible! I'm in the middle of reading History of the Bible In English by F.F. Bruce. I'm just now 100 pages in and just now getting to the King James Version of 1611. The forerunners to translating the Latin Vulgate, and eventually the original Hebrew and Greek tongues, into English suffered tremendous hardship and even loss of life to bring us an English Bible. And now we're literally spitting in their faces by dumbing it down so much!

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Template Change

I had to get away from the old standard. I would like to give credit to this site for the template. They have a few others available as well. I'm using the Luna Park template. While I generally like the links on the right side, I thought I would switch things up a bit here. Enjoy!

Eseries

No, this isn't a new server brand from IBM. Rather, I'm talking about the latest phone announcement from Nokia. Greg sent me a link to these phones earlier and there are a couple of features that I find very promising.

First, here is a brief run-down of the features:

Features of all three initial models include the Series 60 platform 3rd Edition, QVGA or better displays, push email including BlackBerry and attachment editing, Wi-Fi with VoIP, Bluetooth 1.2, 75 MB of memory plus hot-swap memory card slots, speakerphone, EDGE and 3G high-speed data, corporate phone system integration, Push-To-Talk, and remote device management via the OMA DM standard.

First, BlackBerry and attachment editing is a must! The Nokia 9300 should have BlackBerry Connect without attachment editing. So, it's good to see the attachment support here. Secondly, it has Wi-Fi with VoIP support. I would be curious if VoIP is only available with VoIP connectivity or if it's available with EDGE/3G as well. Regardless, I could have a small candy-bar phone with BlackBerry and use my corporate VoIP at my desk on a Wi-Fi link (or if I'm in a hotel, conference, etc...) and have my current landline telephone number active. One feature I missed earlier was corporate phone system integration. In Nokia's press release we read that "Companies deploying an Avaya or Cisco IP PBX can connect the new Nokia devices directly to their corporate phone networks, enabling functions employees have come to expect from a corporate network like four-digit dialing and assisted call answering."

It appears that Nokia is really stepping up to take control of the business market and I will be available to test these...

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Update

Since you probably won't hear too much about the Southern Baptists' assistance (the #3 top organization in giving assistance for the Hurricane Relief), here is an update in an email my wife received yesterday:

Activity Report (as of 10/10, 10 a.m. EDT)

State Conventions Activated: 41
Total Units Activated: 342
Volunteer Days: 81,743
Meals Prepared: 7,200,450
Jobs Completed: 9,466
Showers Provided: 45,897
Laundry Loads: 10,463
Children Cared For: 6,449
Messages Sent: 2,628

Also, check out this information on monetary donations:

2004-05 contributions exceeded the approved budget by $12,496,728.55 and because of budget actions taken in September, the extra amount will be redirected to meet extraordinary hurricane recovery needs of Southern Baptists

These figures are for the Cooperative Program overages and do not take into account monies donated specifically to the "Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Fund". According to this article, and additional $4 Million was given to the Disaster Relief Fund. Two Christian philanthropists challenged the North American Mission Board and Southern Baptists to raise/donate $2 Million and they would match it. The challenge was met and that means that near $17 Million has flowed through Southern Baptist organizations for Disaster Relief!!

SPR For Notes 7.0 Multi-User Install

As a follow-up to my last entry about 7.0 Multi-User Installs, IBM has issued Technote 1219467:

Users are prompted to complete the Client Setup Wizard after upgrading a Notes Multi-user installation to 7.0

Problem
You are attempting to upgrade a Notes 6.x multi-user installation to Notes 7.0. When you launch Notes after completing the install, however, you are prompted to select a location and to complete the Client Setup Wizard. This is not the expected behavior. You should not be prompted to provide additional information when upgrading a multi-user installation of Notes.

Note: This issue does not result in data loss. Local databases and NOTES.INI files are not removed or adversely effected.

Solution
This issue has been reported to Quality Engineering as SPR# HXXE68T7Y5 and a fix is being researched. The issue has been reproduced when the multi-user upgrade is performed manually, through a silent install, or when deployed using a third-party installation program.

To work around the issue, each user that uses Notes on that workstation must complete the Client Setup Wizard. Doing so will require that the user provide information including their user name, home/mail server, User ID file location, and specify which additional services to enable.

Friday, October 7, 2005

Notes 7.0 Multi-User Install Upgrades

I just got off of the phone with Lotus Support. I have some good news and some bad news.

Good news - one of the new enhancements with Smart Upgrade in 7.0 is the ability to Upgrade Multi-User Installs. This is great to hear as we have a fair number of multi-user clients.

Bad news
- with the 7.0 Client Installer, a Registry key is not being set prior to the actual installation. The install is successful, but upon starting the Client you are prompted with the new client setup wizard asking for User Name, Server Name, location of ID file, etc... This has, in my experience, only affected Multi-User installs and Single-User installs will upgrade and start successfully.

My PMR is being escalated to Development to get this corrected. I can hope that there may be an update to the installer or possibly a 7.0HF1 Client. While there wasn't a ton of focus on the UI of 7.0 being updated, it could possibly keep people from upgrading clients depending on the number of Multi-User installs. I will keep you posted!

Thursday, October 6, 2005

Sametime 6.5.1 for iSeries Still Giving Me Problems

So, do you think I'm still having some IM server stability issues:



It went down a couple of times today (as you can see). I'm still actively working with Domino for iSeries support and the Development team on this one.

Changes to Public NAB in 7.0

- IM
Presence Awareness has been enabled in the views and documents within the NAB. It looks like almost every field with a Name has been enabled for Presence Awareness.
- Open Mail File
In the People view and on the Person form I have noticed an "Open Mail File" button. This should save some time...
- Mail Settings Document
This could probably be covered in a topic in and of itself. Policies and Settings - if you're not using them you should start. With 7.0, a new Mail Settings option is available. With this you can basically set most, if not all, of the options in the Tools > Preferences dialog within the user's mail file.

This could be useful if you want to specify a default Letterhead for all users (or a subset via multiple policies). But the new option in here is to specify a Message Disclaimer (either Prepended or Appended to the message) for outgoing messages. This is pretty slick. I believe you will also have to specify the disclaimer for DWA on top of this. I'm glad to see this feature native to Notes mail now.
- Person Document
- Administration Tab > Notes Client Release fields - It appears that this has been reformatted into a wider table with multi-value fields separated by line breaks. It is much cleaner to see all the machines a user has been at.
- Server Document
- Administration Tab > Public Key Requirements - Here you can specify Minimum and Maximum Key Strengh for added security.

Thoughts on Harriet Miers: Part 2

Yesterday, I linked to Al Mohler's site with some positives about Harriet Miers. Today, let's look at some negatives provided by none other than Ann Coulter.

Today, the main article is at her main page.

After today it may be in her archives.

I believe her first two sentences basically sum it up:

I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush's real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.

Basically, Ann's premise is that sitting on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is a great honor that she doesn't feel Harriet Miers is worthy of. Further, Ann states that there are some truly great Judges, lawyers, etc... that should have been offered the position because they have lived their lives in an attempt to promote the judiciary as set forth in the Constitution.

I have been a little leary about the Miers nomination. While on the one hand I would like to trust the President (and Vice President) on this decision, we really do not know how Harriet Miers will do on the bench.

I'll end with another quote from her:

Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts.

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Thoughts on Harriet Miers

Track back to Albert Mohler's blog:

Positive:

1. Some of what we are learning about Harriet Miers is genuinely encouraging. She has been identified as an evangelical Christian with deep Christian commitments. Ms. Miers is a member of Valley View Christian Church in Dallas where Dr. Barry McCarty is pastor. Southern Baptists will recognize Dr. McCarty through his service as parliamentarian at recent meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention. I know him well, and I know that this is a conservative church. Those who know her speak of her with great admiration and confidence.

2. Her background is unconventional. This is a positive factor as well as a potential negative in some eyes. In the positive sense, this means that Harriet Miers is not a product of the tight and relatively insulated world of legal scholarship and the judiciary. Her real-world experience in litigation, management, church, and life means that she is less likely to fall prey to the "inside the beltway" syndrome.

3. Her legal experience is stellar. Though she has never sat on the bench as a judge, she is one of the nation's most recognized lawyers. She served as the first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association and later served as president of the State Bar of Texas. She had been nominated to the second-highest office in the American Bar Association when she withdrew from the election to accept appointment to the White House staff. She served as chair of the ABA's Commission on Multijurisdictional Practice. The National Law Journal named her as one of the nation's 100 most powerful attorneys and of the top 50 women lawyers in America. She has now served for several years as a senior member of the White House staff.

4. She has been a major player in President Bush's judicial nominations. Harriet Miers has been responsible for advising the President on judicial nominations to all federal courts, including the nomination of John Roberts as Chief Justice. By all accounts, President Bush's nominees reflect her vision of the courts and the Constitution. This is most encouraging.

5. She was nominated by someone who knows her very well -- President George W. Bush. Conservatives who have long been troubled by the courts are always (justifiably) concerned that every new nominee is another David H. Souter. In other words, another nominee represented as a conservative who, once on the bench, turns out to be another judicial activist. There are two reasons why this is not likely to be a good analogy in this case. In the first place, President George H. W. Bush had no personal knowledge of David Souter when he nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1990. President George W. Bush has known Harriet Miers for over a decade and has worked with her closely. As the President made clear in his remarks yesterday, he knows Harriet Miers very well, and he trusts her heart. Given the fact that she worked so closely with the President on judicial appointments, this is a significant positive factor. Secondly, President Bush has established a track-record of outstanding judicial nominations at every level, even as he has articulated a vision of judicial philosophy and constitutional interpretation that should give us confidence. As I see it, the President deserves our support for this nomination unless clear evidence should indicate otherwise. I do not expect any such evidence to appear.

Some lament that potential nominees like Michael Luttig and Michael McConnell were not chosen. I understand, appreciate, and share their concern. We should all lament that we are living in a political context which makes the nomination of outstanding conservative jurists like these all but impossible. The only way to change this situation is to change the political context -- and that is no small challenge. There is much work to do and much ground to recover.

For now, we await the confirmation hearings for Harriet Miers and the 110th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Her nomination deserves our support and close attention.

Tuesday, October 4, 2005

Domino Domain Monitoring

I've been setting this up since loading 7.0 on some servers. This looks like it will be a great utility. There are many DDM probes that are available through the events4.nsf database.

Basically, to set up DDM, you open the ddm.nsf database and click on "Open Configuration" (this opens up events4.nsf). In there you have to specify the "Server Collection Hierarchy." In my environment, I am going to have just one main DDM collection server that gathers all of the data from my other servers.

After setting up the Collection Hierarchy, you just have to set up and enable probes. There are many different probe types:

Application Code
Database
Directory
Messaging
Operating System
Replication
Security
Server
Web

The only problem I've had with DDM is that I'm still getting this freaky UI issue with Notes 7.0 only when I have ddm.nsf open.

Saturday, October 1, 2005

Are you happy Mr. Glover?

Well Jerry, it's the 3rd quarter and the Gamecocks are down to Auburn 41-0. I'm calling it quits! We've got 88 TOTAL yards right now and we suck!

I guess 2005 is the year for all the SEC teams to get back at Steve Spurrier. As we true Gamecock fans are used to saying "maybe next year..."