Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Tourniquet!

Any Tourniquet fans out there? As I've said before, they're my favorite band! While I can't wait for the next Dream Theater and Neal Morse albums to come out soon, they won't be anything compared to the anticipation of another Tourniquet album!! I've been waiting since 2003, though - come on guys... :)

I just found out that a friend of mine at church is into Tourniquet - and his wife is too! So I've been pretty much listening to straight Tourniquet this week. I have about 8 hours and 40 minutes of their stuff in my playlist now! I was listening to them in my ride in this morning and the song Pecking Order (click for audio) came on from their Vanishing Lessons album from 1994. Here are some lyrics - it's about judging others:
Who made you the judge of me
Turn away, just let me be
The notion that we're better than them
The ultimate delusional gem
The notion that we're better than them
The ultimate delusional gem

Too fat, too poor, too black, too pure
Too white, too foreign, too smart, too boring

Ninety-three million miles
From the earth, the granite boils
Half the heat, half the burn
Scorches those who never learn
Look to Him and you will see
The only judge for you and me
Grace and mercy from His throne
Imparts to those He calls His own
Grace and mercy from His throne
Imparts to those He calls His own
See Philippians 2:3 - Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.


Now Playing: "Incommensurate" by Tourniquet

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Loaded Hotfix for Domino 7.0.2 FP1

Just loaded a hotfix for my 7.0.2 FP1 http issue. Thanks to Lotus for the quick turnaround on this one. It actually takes care of my previous 7.0.2 issue as well as the new one I encountered with FP1. And there are 2 other SPRs covered as well (that I'm aware of).

The Jesus Family Tomb

I'm sure many of you have heard about the archaeological find in 1980 that is supposedly the tomb of Jesus, Joseph and Mary along with Mary Magdalene and Judah, son of Jesus and Mary as well as a Matthew and Yosef. On March 4 (Sunday Night), the Discovery Channel will be airing "The Lost Tomb of Jesus." Last night, Dr. Albert Mohler Jr., president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was on Larry King Live discussing this. A full transcript is available here. Also, he has a podcast about this that I will have to listen to tomorrow.

First of all, I would like to say that this is nothing to get up in arms about. Whether or not a filmmaker truly believes this, he has no proof that this is Jesus' tomb. Regardless of your belief in the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, we all know by watching enough CSI that to prove that DNA belongs to someone that you need two samples of DNA. One has to vouch that one of the samples belongs to the person in question. However, there is no sample of DNA from Jesus. Unless, of course, James Cameron has spent some time with Harrison Ford going through the Great Temple at Petra looking for the Holy Grail.

One interesting thing to note is that Dr. James Tabor, Chair Religious Studies locally at UNCC is really going out and supporting this new theory of the Jesus tomb. I've seen that the local newscasts have talked about his support of this. However, it's great that Dr. Mohler called him out on the hypocrisy of that notion because Dr. Tabor wrote a book in which he claimed that Joseph was NOT the father of Jesus. But in this transcript you can read where he believes this theory and asserts that Joseph was the father of Jesus. So, like Dr. Mohler, I would like to know what Dr. Tabor believes? Was he mistaken in his book or is he just following this controversial theory because it supports some of his other notions?

In the transcript, Ben Wedeman (a CNN correspondent) even said "they are referring this story to Israel's prominent archaeologists, who, by and large, as I said, are fairly skeptical."

But I mostly wanted to pass along to you some of what Dr. Mohler had to say on the show. I hope that it can help clear up some of the mud...
Well, it is only startling in terms of the sensationalism, I think, of public relations here. You are talking about a tomb that was discovered, as you said, well over two decades ago. The archaeologists there in Israel, who are the closest to this, have the greatest expertise, are not only looking at this with skepticism, but basically dismissing its claims.

You are talking about frankly trying to dress up an old documentary, the BBC did something like this over a decade ago, with this kind of supposed statistical research and DNA testing. The DNA testing is to me the most laughable aspect of all of this. I mean, frankly, there could be a thousand, thousand different explanations for whatever DNA pattern they could find.

No one has the DNA of Mary. You know, trying to bring this into a modern crime investigation is like trying to go back and figure out who exactly put the first dagger into Julius Caesar. It's impossible....
I'm going to base my beliefs on the scriptures which hold together far better than the kind of farcical documentary we are talking about here, throwing in a little bit of statistics. I mean, you're talking about the most common names, especially the most common male names, also frankly, female with the name Mary, you're talking about anything that could be found just about anywhere.

And then there are some rather really far-fetched claims. I mean, after all, you're talking about a poor, peasant family from Nazareth with an ancestral heritage in Bethlehem. There's no logical reason why their bones should end up in a middle class tomb in Jerusalem.
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Monday, February 26, 2007

I'm Not Sure What To Hate - Lotus, Spam, or Stupid Politicians

Please forgive me for the rant that is about to take place - I'm really going to be civil about it. But I'm really having issues dealing with the myriad of Domino Web Access and/or HTTP problems that have been introduced with every Lotus release in the past couple of years. The latest is dealt with in SPR BRIS5TXQJU and is occurring in Domino 7.0.2 FP1. Basically, a user gets a spam email with an image and they try to forward it or reply to it. OK, the replying is just lunacy, but I can see how it's possible that one would forward a junk message to an administrator to show them the junk that got through. Reading the spam is OK by the Domino http task, but when you reply to or forward it, the image is placed in the server's memory and this is where the entire server is halted! Who cares if Domino is secure and can escape viral outbreaks if you can't access the server. And this didn't even start happening with a major "dot zero" release. It happens in a fixpack. And it's happened to my server 5 times today!

I can deal with a couple of crashes every now and again, but we're talking about multiple crashes per day! And it's not just me. And it's not just this latest Fixpack. If you've read my blog long enough, you'll know that the major Domino problems I see are related to the HTTP task and/or DWA. I have posted about HTTP crashes (sometimes 8-10 per day) with Domino 7.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, and now 7.0.2 FP1 with a hotfix that was made to keep my prior 7.0.2 issue fixed. And I did go to 7.0.2 FP1 knowing that this could happen and that reverting would be easy. So tonight I will be reverting back to 7.0.2 and loading my stable hotfix. Lotus Development is working on a fix for this that I will probably load another night this week or this weekend.

And I wouldn't have even been so trigger happy to load FP1 had it not been for this whole DST fiasco that our wonderful politicians have gotten us into! Even Al Gore's home energy usage is 20x the usage of the average household (actually 15x more than my household)! And he's calling us to be green and is going to make us change our DST! Sorry, I digress...

So I've listed 3 things to "dislike" right now. Lotus http because of bad dealings with spam due to a rushed apply of a fix (per Lotus support - it's all over their websites!) to aid in the transition to new DST rules because of a ludicrous energy bill. What's even more ludicrous is that it would appear that I agree with Senator Clinton on the fact that the bill will be a failure!! What's happening to me?!?

Well, in 20 minutes I will be watching 24. My cable better not go out!!

Happy Blog Birthday! (2 Years Old)

This blog is now 2 years old. I posted 220 times in the past year - not too bad! I'm actually up to 492 total posts, so this year was slower than the first year. Here's to another year!!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Paste Special (SnTT)

Lately, I've been using the Edit > Paste Special menu more in Lotus Notes. Instead of doing CTRL-V now, I generally use ALT-E-S-T (if I want to paste in the plain text). The dialog box looks like this:



As you can see, there are many different options that are dynamic in relation to what is on your clipboard. If I just copy text from a browser, I wouldn't have the options for, say, Picture, HTML, or MS Office Excel Worksheet. But today I tried to paste something from Excel and I noticed that there were a lot of choices in the dialog. I guess I've just never tried this so some of these were new to me. I thought that some others may be interested to see what they do, so here is a graphic with numbered screen grabs followed by a brief explanation:


1. Pasted as MS Office Excel Worksheet
2. After pasting as worksheet, this shows how you can actually edit the pasted object inline inside Lotus Notes
3. Pasted as Rich Text
4. Pasted as HTML
5. Pasted as Picture
6. Pasted as Text

And options 3 and 4 are editable in a table format. Option 6 is editable but does not have column formatting like a table.

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Six Degrees of Global Warming

This is pretty good satire about how everything can be linked to global warming...

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

A Self-Proclaimed Hollywood Superstar

Behind that cute face is a true Hollywood superstar!! An "American Icon", if you will...


I don't know if I should link to the actual video, but it's hilarious!!

Monday, February 19, 2007

More Info On Our Notes Client Issue (Possible DST Implications)

After my post Thursday, I was able to call Lotus Support. I worked with them for 2 hours on a specific PC on which Notes was crashing. The NSD pointed to the automatic diagnostic collection as the faulting task. We believe that there is an issue with that Desktop Settings option, but we haven't had issues with ADC in the past. The actual "quick" resolution I have come up with is to delete all but the top 4 lines of the notes.ini and rename the names.nsf file. We thought that since ADC was the offender that if we just cleared out the ($Policies) view of names.nsf that this would help us, but it did not. So we now just rename the file and copy/paste the information needed back into the new one.

This is still not sitting well with me. I think the real issue is something in the notes.ini because on the reinstalls we did, we always kept the names.nsf.

As part of the DST changes, I wanted to make sure that the clients wouldn't have a bad notes.ini setting, so per IBM documentation I added UseNotesTimeZone=0 to my Desktop Settings document. It was on Tuesday afternoon after I enabled this that our problems began. In my 2 hour call with Lotus, I was informed that this setting should actually not exist at all. Even though the documentation states that is should be set to "0", I was told that they have heard of client issues (crashes) with this setting existing. Since we knew I made this change, I tried deleting that line from the notes.ini, but the client would still crash. Perhaps if this happens more today I will remove that line and clear the ($Policies) view in hopes of resolving the issue.

And, of course, I made sure all notes-related tasks and any other tasks that could cache the notes.ini or id were all ended (PIM software, BlackBerry software, multi-user cleanup, etc...) I had even tried deleting the perweb.nsf and ~notes.lck files before calling Lotus (as Chris Miller alluded to in his comment on my first post). Oh well, it was nice to receive a call from my EVP Sunday afternoon stating that our President and CEO could not open his Lotus Notes...

Friday, February 16, 2007

Did Anyone Else Have Contaminated Peanut Butter?

After seeing the FDA warning, I pinged my wife to get her to check our PB. It turns out that a jar we got to make PB cookies for a Sunday School party was part of the batch. The party was actually a couple of weeks ago and we ended up not making those PB cookies anyway. When my wife found the jar, the bottom of it had expanded so that it wouldn't sit flat and the top was mis-shapen some. My wife said that the bacterial gases could have done that to the plastic. She has the chemistry degree, so I take her word on that. Also, my in-laws had a jar.

Anyone else?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Anyone Else Seeing This Notes Issue?

Starting with an SMTP email that was received by 15 people on Monday, we have had some crazy Notes issues. It was so bad that we really haven't had time to call support. At first I thought it was just that particular email, but then some other users had the same issue with other emails. And on top of that, at least 2 people called in to say that they just couldn't open their Notes Client and, after speaking with them, they weren't even looking at a suspect email.

Basically, we are seeing that people are forwarding web pages as emails instead of doing the sane thing and just sending a link. This will yield a javascript error when a Notes user opens the email. If the user chooses "Yes" to continue loading the email, then the client crashes. Choosing "No" will not allow them to read this email from Lotus Notes.

So, what's the big deal? In order to get the Notes Client running again, we have to uninstall, delete the C:/Program Files/Lotus/Notes folder after backing up a few files (names, bookmark, journal, id, and user.dic). We have tried everything we know of to keep from doing this. Just reinstalling over Notes doesn't work. The clients are a mix of 7.0.1 and 7.0.2. I think we have two calls that just came in...

Now Playing: "Innocent" by Third Day

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Monday, February 5, 2007

Microsoft Exchange Hosting

When my mom started her mortgage company back in 1999, I was tasked as her IT guy. So I found a pretty good company to host her mail. If you're in South Carolina and you need a mortgage, let me know... It's Xeran. For the past 8 years, they've been really good. One of the reasons I chose them was because they operated in SC. Now, they operate from MA. When they merged with a company a few years ago there were some hiccups, but it's been pretty smooth since then.

However, I just got an email today that they will let you convert some (or all) of your mailboxes to Exchange Hosting. I decided to look into it, and there are 3 tiers of hosting above and beyond the current rate:
250MB mailboxes:
$12.95 billed every month, per mailbox

500MB mailboxes:
$19.95 billed every month, per mailbox

1000MB mailboxes:
$34.95 billed per month, per mailbox
I'm somewhat surprised that they offer a 250MB quota mailbox - much less a 1GB one! If you're a small company that wants push email to phones, good mobile access, calendar sharing, etc... then this is probably a pretty good deal at $13 per mailbox per month. There's no upfront server cost, no administrator cost.

So the big question is where's the Domino hosting? :)

Saturday, February 3, 2007

How Many of Me Are There?


HowManyOfMe.com
LogoThere is:
1
person with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

According to the site, there is one person with my name and 3 named Christopher Whisonant. Here's the freaky part - I dated a girl in high school whose father showed us a picture of some distant relatives in TN (I think). Right there in the picture was a Chris Whisonant! Just a little scary...

By the way, it's rather odd how close the howmanyofme table above resembles the look of my current blog template!

Now Playing: "It's So Easy" by Guns 'N Roses