Sunday, September 30, 2007

This is what I feared would happen...

It's been a long time since I've had a political post. But this one really caught my attention and it's something I've thought about for a while actually: Christian Conservatives Consider Third-Party Effort

It's pretty self-explanatory - if Rudy Giuliani gets the nod for the Republican ticket, then there are some pretty high-profile names among Christian Conservatives that apparently will try to run a 3rd-party candidate. And just like in 1992, the entrance of a popular 3rd-party candidate on the conservative side will all but ensure another Clinton Presidency (remember, they're a team...). Actually, the first comment at the Times blog sums it up:
These people are the exact reason Rudy Giulaini must win the Republican nomination. This country was founded on separation of chuch and state. GET OUT OF GOVERNMENT AND LAW MAKING. Will you “bless” us with Hillary to prove how badly you just don’t get it?

Actually, the whole "wall of separation" has been severely abused by those who don't really get its original intention, but that's for another time. I would, personally, much rather have Giuliani than Hillary Clinton. She's the inevitable nominee for the Democrats and she has a long history of Socialistic policies. It's proven.

Anyway, regarding this effort by certain Christian Conservatives. I hate that they are hinging everything on his stance on a single issue. One that it doesn't appear that Giuliani will try to extend or restrict. I think we really need to pick our battles more carefully. We can't focus on one issue when there is so much more at stake...

Joke of the Day

Sorry Bruce, no offense...

So today before church, the 18 year-old keyboardist told a joke to crack on the drummer who's old enough to be her dad...

Johnny told his mom that when he grows up he would like to be a drummer. Johnny's mom said that he couldn't do both!!

Friday, September 28, 2007

Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool - Windows Explorer Integration

Yesterday, I randomly stumbled upon this:



If you have an NSD on your drive, you can right-click it and see a "Lotus Notes Diagnostic" menu!! If you select "Automatic process", the nsd will be processed and the LND application will open in Lotus Notes. Furthermore, the nsd will be removed from your drive and added to the application. (Update: Actually, after further working with this, the NSDs are not removed from the drive but a new folder is created in the same directory where the NSD resided. The folder corresponds to the date that the NSD was analyzed and is in DD_MM_YY format.) There are some other options for RIP (old school) and NSD files. And for you System i shops, you'll love the "Convert EBCDIC to ASCII".

This tool gets cooler and cooler! Now to wait on some crashes... :)

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Domino 8: 101 - Admin Preferences and Client Versions

There are 2 features that I would like to review quickly in this session.

First are two additions to the Domino Administrator Preferences that can be time savers. One is the option to "Automatically run in live console mode". This will default to launching the Administrator Client to the Server > Status > Server Console screen for the server listed in the "On startup" field. How many times have you wanted to just open the Administrator client to get a console window. Now this can be your default behavior! The other option allows you to specify databases that will launch automatically. In the image below I'm wanting to open ddm and log on the specified server.



The other is a "Client Version" view that's in the address book. It's listed under People > by Client Version. I have manually created this view in the past. This should provide some value to administrators in being able to know what versions of the client are being utilized in the environment.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Remedy Is Here...

This new album, Remedy, from David Crowder Band is awesome!! Check out the 268 Blog. It's good to hear studio mixes for "Glory of it All" and "Everything Glorious" as they were only available on live compilations previously. There's even a special guest guitarist on "We Won't Be Quiet": The Nuge - yep that Nuge...

The lyrics to the title track are excellent and inspiring...
here we are
here we are
the broken and used
mistreated abused
here we are

here you are
here you are
the beautiful one
who came like a sun
here you are

so we lift up our voices
and open our hands
to cling to a love that we can't comprehend

o lift up your voices
and lift up your hands
to sing of the love that has freed us from sin

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who embraced us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy

here we are
here we are
bandaged and bruised
awaiting a cure
here we are

here you are
here you are
our beautiful king
bringing relief
here you are with us

so we lift up our voices
and open our hands
let go of the things that have kept us from him

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who forgave us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy

oh i can't comprehend
i can't take it all in
never understand such perfect love
come for the broken and beat
for the wounded and weak
oh come fall at his feet
he's the remedy
he's the remedy

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who forgave us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy
he's the remedy
oh he's the remedy

you are the one who has saved us
you are the one who forgave us
you are the one who has come and is coming again
You're the one who has come and you're coming again
You're the one who has come and is coming again
to make it all right
you're the remedy

you're in us
you're the remedy
you're in us
you're the remedy

let us be the remedy
let us bring the remedy

Monday, September 24, 2007

"Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool" Has Been Released

Hat tip to Jack Dausman for this info! As Jack said, this is for Admins what NotesPeek is for developers! The download can be found in The Sandbox. Once you download it, you'll want to run the setup program and then sign the local notes database. I'm hoping that (more of) this code will be extended to the Fault Analysis code that's on Domino 7+ servers as it already does some of this.

From Jack's blog:
If you are programmer, you might remember the excitement when NotesPeek and NotesPing were first released. Well, LND is the definitive administration tool for Domino failure analysis and will be quite worthwhile to study.

It has some cool features, like recreating the server doc from a DXL dump, NSD file comparisons, and reading through all the semaphore locks.

It does come with a help document , but there isn't much hand holding--you are going to need to know the terms and architecture of Domino to really extract value from LND.

After a quick test drive, I agree. It does a good job of gathering all of the relevant information and presenting it in a friendlier format than the NSD. Kudos to IBM for releasing this. It won't tell you "Hey, here is exactly why you had this crash", but it will get you pretty close...

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Good Game Gamecocks!

My favorite team, the #12 Carolina Gamecocks went to Death Valley* today in Louisiana to face the #2 LSU Tigers. It started off with Carolina going up 7-0 followed by 28 unanswered points by LSU. We ended the game with a field goal and touchdown to make it a 28-16 final. While we looked a little messy at times, we actually scored some points against LSU. In the first three games this year, LSU only allowed 7 points total! They're tough and they ran hard against our defense (taking advantage of taking out our star linebacker about 2 minutes into the game).

Oh yeah, what's better is that I watched it at my BFF Chris's house. :)

* - Not to be confused with the copied Death Valley that's in Clemson, SC. This is the team that stole the stadium name, fight song, and mascot from LSU...

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Domino 8: 101 - Prevent Simple Search and Deferred Sort

The two items I will discuss below are enhancements to Domino 8 that may impact disk space and/or memory utilization on your servers. The first may also impact your end-users, so you should be aware of the caveats of enabling it.

Prevent Simple Search:
This option is found in the Advanced tab of the Database Properties dialog. It's called "Don't allow simple search" in that dialog. This will prevent someone from performing a search in a database that is not full-text indexed. Performing a search on a database without an index is a very time consuming process and the results are generally not as you would expect when compared to the search time and results returned from an indexed database. Enabling this option will prevent this type of search. However, many end-users may not know that they are doing this (by not noticing, or caring, that the database is not indexed) and will be used to performing searches. If you enable this option on mail files, be aware that you may receive many requests to create full-text indexes for those end-users who may have been performing simple searches. Creating these indexes will add to the overall drive space that is needed on your server.

Deferred Sort Index Creation:
This option can be a fairly decent space saver on your server. It is a design property, "Defer index creation until first use", of sortable columns and is visible under the "Click on column header to sort" option. What this option does is prevents the indexing of specific columns when the view is created. For example, most users may never sort their mail file using the Response Icons column. Prior to having this option, however, that column's sort index would have been included in the space used by the view.

So exactly how much space can this save?

Let me use my mail file as an example. After perusing through Designer to see how this option is enabled by default in the mail8 template, I notice that the Subject, Size, and Response columns have this option enabled. So, after purging the view index of my All Documents view (~1,500 docs), I opened that view. The initial size was 1,147,984 bytes (so, just over 1MB). I then sorted by the Subject column and the size increased 28%. I then proceeded to sort by the Size column and the increase was another 29%. Finally, I sorted the Response column and the size increased another 28%. In total, my view index for All Documents is now 2,132,224 bytes. This represents an 85% increase over the initial size of the view. Of course, with a relatively small mail file this will not have as much impact, but just imagine the savings with a much larger file.

I'm hoping that this "Domino 8: 101" series will be helpful as you continue your planning to upgrade to Domino 8 and evaluating the things that you, as an Administrator, will need to know. There have been many features added in Domino 8.0 - even though it was mostly a client-focused release. As you can see from previous posts in this series, IBM has a focus on saving space and time with Domino 8 and beyond. Just this week, an additional NSF compression algorithm was announced with 8.0.1 and there is more planned for Domino Next.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Some Things Never Change: Bring Back The Bronco...

So 13 years later he gets busted for robbing some sports memorabilia - the irony. Five words:

If the glove don't fit...

Friday, September 14, 2007

Domino 8: 101 - Server OS Upgrades

In planning for Domino 8, it may be possible that you will have to upgrade the Operating System that your Domino 7 (or 6 or earlier) servers are running. For more information, see the detailed system requirements here.

In some of these cases, such as Windows 2000, this is because the Operating System is no longer supported by the vendor. However, there is currently no set EOS date for i5/OS V5R3. However, this is not a supported OS for Domino 8.

The following operating systems are not supported for Domino 8. If you are running one of these with any prior version of Domino, you will need to upgrade the OS to be in a supported configuration for Domino 8. Please note that the latest release levels of all of these platforms are still supported and that it is generally recommended to stay fairly recent on the Operating Systems in your environment. There is also no rip-and-replace involved (as with other messaging platforms) - the most current OS levels were supported for Domino 7.0. So, if you are current on your OS and current on your Domino installation, you will have no issues upgrading to Domino 8. Also, I'm in no way criticizing IBM for this move to only support the latest OS release levels - just making you aware of it for your planning purposes.

OS Platforms Not Supported For Domino 8.0:

Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
IBM AIX
IBM AIX 5.2(4) (64-bit kernel)
Linux
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9
RHEL 4
Sun Solaris
Sun Solaris 9 (64-bit kernel)
IBM System i
IBM i5/OS, V5R3
IBM System z
IBM z/OS Version 1, Release 5 or later
Linux on System z
SLES 8 & 9
RHEL 4

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Where Were You 6 Years Ago Today?

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... It was really surreal and words can't describe it. Just a couple of weeks ago I took the picture below. It's a shot of two flags standing at the site of the World Trade Center with a plane flying just overhead...



And here is a shot of the construction that's happening at Ground Zero:


It was really odd to see this site nearly 6 years later. I wish they had it a little more open - there was a wrap around the fencing and you could only find gaps to look through.

For the past few years I've posted the lyrics to Dream Theater's Sacrificed Sons about 9/11. It's a pretty powerful song. You can find those lyrics here.

And here is a video of them playing the song live in Rome.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

New Gear - G&L Tribute ASAT Special


07 - Front Angle, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Just got this in yesterday. I consider it a great deal from eBay! This thing plays wonderfully, the finish is excellent and the tone is fabulous. With the tone level at 10, you get the tele-twang. Back off and you get some nice P90ish tones. Check out the Flickr slideshow here.

If you don't know, G&L are George Fullerton and Leo Fender. Both are from Fender guitar fame. In a nutshell, they later split and started G&L. Leo Fender considered the G&L guitars his best work. And that's saying a LOT!

This one will be named "OT" in honor of my second born. I have a Takamine acoustic that's "EG" in honor of my firstborn. (ATTN: Wife - are you seeing a trend??) And my Les Paul is "Blondie" along with my Jackson, "Jenny", both in tribute to my wife... :) The G&L should fill in the tone gaps left from the Lester and the triple-bucker Jackson! ;)

Thanks Mom and Dad! :)

My Post Was Spoofed!!!

My Domino 8 ODS48 post from the other day was spoofed!! Some wiseguy thought she'd have some fun with it. Turns out it was my wife and her spoof is hilarious!!

Check it out here

Go Gamecocks

With a huge SEC East win tonight against UGA, the USC Gamecocks are at 2-0. My college dorm-mate Jay has some videos of past wins against UGA... :)

Way to go team!!

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Domino 8: 101 - ODS 48

A new On Disk Structure (ODS) is available with Domino 8. This is an update from ODS43 to ODS48. First of all, upgrading applications (formerly called databases) to ODS48 is completely optional and requires the addition of a notes.ini setting on the server (or client).

This setting is: Create_R8_Databases=1.

If you enable this in a global configuration document, the Pre-8 servers will ignore it and will not be affected by having this setting. This can be a good way to propogate this to all (or many) of your servers prior to upgrading to Domino 8. As with previous ODS upgrades, a copy-style compact is required to upgrade all databases to the new ODS. However, the applications will not be upgraded automatically with a copy-style compact as they were with previous ODS upgrades unless the notes.ini setting is enabled.

What do I get with the new ODS?

1. There are some general I/O enhancements and "folder optimizations".

2. The maintaining of a "Database Names List" used for user renames
With ODS48, a list of all of the Readers and Authors in an application is maintained at a high level by default. This will improve the efficiency by which AdminP can process the user rename requests ("Update User Name in Reader and Author Fields"). If AdminP finds the user's name in the Database Names List, it will continue processing that application. Otherwise it will skip the application.

3. Design Compression
This database property (found on the Advanced tab of ODS43 and ODS48 database properties) will compress the design notes. IBM states that mail files based off of mail8.ntf will only utilize 11MB instead of 25MB if design compression is enabled. As you can see, 14MB of savings per mail file can be huge. This feature is disabled on all databases by default. However, the mail8.ntf template does have it enabled. You may choose to disable this property in the template prior to creating new mail files or converting existing mail files to version 8.

As with enabling ODS48, a copy-style compact is required to enable design compression. If you are planning on upgrading to ODS48 and enabling Design Compression on mail files, you should consider doing these at the same time by enabling the Design Compression property prior to running the compact so that you don't have to run the copy-style compact twice.

In planning your Domino 8 upgrade, the considerations above regarding the new ODS should assist you in deciding whether or not you will wish to enable ODS48.

Monday, September 3, 2007

NCAA Football Is Upon Us....

In honor of that I have changed my blog template colors to reflect my team - The University of South Carolina Gamecocks! We'll see how the year is going to be after this week's matchup against the Georgia Bulldogs...

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Classic I.T. Dilbert Today


Seems like we've all been there and done that...