Better Late Than Never! (Win2K Update)

I kid you not, this update was waiting for me on a Windows 2000 test box that we use every day. And it's kept up-to-date regularly!



Now Playing: "Outsider" by Neal Morse

Technorati: Windows

Reverse DNS and GoDaddy

Has anyone else had any dealings with GoDaddy.com-hosted domains blocking your email? When we send an email to anything hosted by GoDaddy, we get the following delivery failure:

553 Bogus helo my.comporium.com. <http://unblock.secureserver.net/?ip=165.166.200.55>

OK, so that's fun right? I go to the URL, fill out the unblock request, and get back a canned response with some things to look at. That really didn't help, so I called GoDaddy's support. I was told that I would have to do the following two things:

1) They will not accept emails from Reverse DNS records that are not MX.x.com or MAIL.x.com. Is this a standard? Can they force me to do that? I have actually changed it just to not have to deal with this as an issue, but even when I send an email to my gmail account it's still showing up as my.comporium.com. Checking out dnsstuff.com shows that the lookup should be returning mx.comporium.com.

2) They insist that I will have to open port 25 so that they can perform a helo. I'm going to check with my firewall guys, but currently I believe we have all incoming smtp requests going through our Barracuda. I definitely don't want to open up all smtp requests to our Domino server just so one hosting provider can helo.

Any recommendations? I'm open to anything. We've thought about matching our public addresses for our inbound Barracuda and our public mail server address so that the helo requests could be handled by the cuda.

Now Playing: "One Big Rush" by Joe Satriani

Look Out The Window

Following Derek's call, here is "a picture of what we see out our windows, as a glimpse into our daily lives." This picture wasn't taken by me, but it is what's outside my window this week. It's my dad's 1997 Porsche Boxster! While it's not the quickest thing around (my GTP is just as quick!), it is super fun to drive around!! It handles really well and the exhaust note is tuned oh so right! I had to snag the keys from him Saturday night for a few days. Oh, and I'll probably take it to my 10-year high school reunion in August... ;) So after a long day today, it will be great to unwind with the top down!



Now Playing: "Glasgow Kiss" by John Petrucci

Technorati: Porsche Boxster

Reviving CLNUG?

Earlier in the week I exchanged some emails with Susan Bulloch about trying to revive the Charlotte Lotus Notes User Group (CLNUG). I went to a couple of meetings back in 2003 and I believe that was about the time that burnout took hold of the man who was doing everything then. I'm not certain of the extent of my involvement, but I would love to see it active once again. One of the first orders of business would be to update the website - it looks like a Notes website! From looking at the discussion forum at the site (which I would like to port to domBulletin!), there was a post in April from someone wanting to get involved and possibly host and maintain the site. I wish he left his email address!

There appears to be some interest from sponsors and others, so maybe we'll see this come back!

Now Playing: "Summer Song" by Joe Satriani

Technorati: Lotus Notes Charlotte

Any Interest In This Application?

I have a fairly simple application (I guess I could put it at OpenNTF also to see if people are interested) for tracking services performed on your vehicles. It's a really simple app that I wanted to port for use on my BlackBerry web browser. What better to do than create service records while you're waiting on your vehicle to be repaired? Below are some screen grabs from my BlackBerry 8700c. It looks pretty much the same on the web as well as in Notes. The main view will give you collapsed categories for the vehicles with the date, service, mileage (in Notes), and cost displayed. Basically the information available to track is all on the form (Image 2). There is a separate form for the vehicle record as well.

If there is any interest I can post up a template.




Now Playing: "I Wish You Were Here" by Balance of Power

Technorati: Lotus Notes

Can The Geek Squad Be Trusted?!?

Note to self - do your own PC maintenance; trust nobody!

Hat tip to Jeff for this story!

Best Buy definitely has the potential for a major lawsuit here. Possibly even class action if they haven't "Enroned" (sorry Tom) their records of what they did with other hard drives!

Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer's old hard drive -- loaded with personal information -- would be destroyed.

"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.
A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago.

"He said, 'My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,'"

Thankfully Ed was kind enough to return the drive. (Hey, this isn't our Ed from the Chicago area is it? He's a kind fella...)

Wow! Thanks Best Buy. I won't be recommending you as a quick stop for anyone to take computers any more!

Technorati: Best Buy

Awesome Weekend! (Dead Sea Scrolls and Worship Service)

Now that I have some time, I just wanted to go over some highlights from this past weekend. I know it's almost the next weekend, but it's been a wild but great week!

On Friday night, my wife and I finally went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC. This was amazing, but I'm not sure exactly what I expected. To begin, the group gets to watch about a 10 minute film that relates some of the background (for the uninitiated!). This was a fairly high-level overview, but was good. Since I've been putting off going (the exhibit was from February through Memorial Day, so we went on the last weekend), I've been taking the time to read up on this. I had a couple of books on the scrolls and acquired a couple of others since the beginning of the year. Two good ones you should try to get your hands on are Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls by F.F. Bruce and The Dead Sea Scrolls by Millar Burrows. I don't believe you'll be able to find these in B&N, though. I've been trying to find a decently priced edition of the Bruce book on eBay for a while and finally did find one in April. After the short film we were able to go into a large room with different stations set up to see many artifacts from Qumran and other generic ancient artifacts. Highlights (for me) from this room include a replica of the Copper Scroll and coins from the era. There was also a good deal of pottery in there.

After this we were able to see about 15 samples of the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. They were enclosed in a case with lighting that would only illuminate the case for about 10 seconds at a time at 15 second intervals. The room was also extremely dry to emulate the conditions that sustained the scrolls for nearly 2,000 years. It was truly amazing to see these historical documents. Offhand, there were samples from (a) the Biblical books of Numbers, Psalms, Genesis, and Isaiah, (b) the apocryphal book of Enoch, and (c) the sectarian writings of the community such as The Rule of War and The Community Rule.

Sunday, my wife and I took a road trip with our church's worship leader to Villa Rica, GA (about 20 miles on I-20 from Alabama) to lead a worship service with our youth group (about 100 kids were there). We discussed a lot of songs on the way and were up in the air on one to do for "humility". Fastforward to about 5 minutes before the service, the youth minister asked a youth (the worship leader's daughter actually) to give a testimony about humility. During the course of her speech she stated that the song Facedown (also look here) by Matt Redman really speaks to her of humility. WOW! That was the song we had decided on in the car ride down there. It was really awesome!! The service was great and 4 youth made decisions to follow Jesus.

I've already posted about what I got on the way back too...

What's The Worst/Funniest Thing Lotus Has Been Accused Of?

It's story-telling time! What's the worst or funniest thing that Lotus has been accused of in your organization (or consulting, etc...)?

I love the ones where the users will have a problem with their email signature due to the server being changed that stores their "My Documents". Oh, and a 300MHz machine with 128 MB ram means that Lotus Notes is slow. Perhaps an upgrade is in order.

Now Playing: "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Spock's Beard

Technorati: Lotus Notes

It's A Boy!!

I'm now the proud uncle of a healthy baby boy!! Noah Lyle Whisonant was born about 3:50 today and was 7 pounds 4 ounces and 20 inches. Congrats!!

New Addition To My Family

I had an awesome weekend, but I will have to post about it later because it may be lengthy... Speaking of a new addition, my brother and his wife are at the hospital as we speak with her nearing labor!

Anyway, on the way back from Georgia this weekend, my wife and I (and our church's worship leader) stopped at Hame's Music in Gaffney, SC (beside "The Big Peach") on I-85. I thought I was just going to look around, but I guess the bug bit me hard and we decided that I could get a Gibson Les Paul Standard in Transparent Amber. I've always wanted a Gibson Les Paul. I used to have an Epiphone Les Paul Custom that, while it was nice, was just not a Gibson. This thing sings!! Last night I even just sat down for a while to play it unplugged!

I'm really resisting the temptation to play it at work because I have it in my cubicle. Come on by and see it Greg!





Now Playing: "Damage Control" by John Petrucci

Technorati: Gibson Les Paul

Planned Downtime on 6/11

Just wanted to brag a little. We plan to load some fixes on our production Domino iSeries on 6/11. The last time we powered down the box was on 11/11/05. Seven months isn't too shabby! I want to make sure that I have the latest Java and TCP/IP fixes before I upgrade to Domino 7.0.1. It's inevitable that something will happen and the first thing IBM will want to know is if we have the very latest fixes...

So what's your current uptime?

Finally Giving Domino a Facelift! (SnTT)

I hate to admit this, but one of the databases I developed for the web is ugly! Until today, that is... After going to Lance Spellman and Dwight Wilbanks' session at Lotusphere 2006 about a Facelift for Domino, I finally decided to do something about my formerly ugly web database. For background purposes, the first production Domino server I installed was in August 2002 (at R5). We chose to wait for ND6 to be released in October of that year before doing a corporate migration. So, a good chunk of a year was spend migrating email.

One of the first projects requested was a contract workflow database. Since this entire workgroup was on iNotes, I chose to make it web-only. This database was created in August of 2003. With less than a year's experience I chose the easy route - java views and outline! I knew it would need updating later, but I just never got to it because it was working and we had other huge projects. Until today when I had some time to get to it. If you're in a rut on some web development, go check out Facelift for Domino. It's really as easy as running a menu action from the facelift database. Oh, and if you put it on a server, save it to a folder titled "facelift". Also, if you have categorized views, make sure the categorized column isn't set to 1 for the width (unless you're categorizing by a single character). After making the modifications, I notified the workgroup and they are very pleased with the performance and look. Thanks Lance and Dwight!!

Here is a before shot of one of the views:


And here is my facelifted shot of the database (I still need to work on the top frame's graphics...) Maybe I'll even do away with the frames.


Now Playing: "Solid As The Sun" by Neal Morse

Show-n-tell thursday

Pink Floyd and Who?

Over at the 268Blog, we see this picture:



The album to the right of the Pink Floyd album is Matt Redman's Facedown. Matt Redman is part of the 268 Generation. The 268 Generation is also known as Passion. It's the group that sponsored the conference I attended in March. Matt Redman was one of the worship leaders at the conference. The picture of the album covers on the wall was taken at none other than the Abbey Road Studio in London. It's pretty amazing to see Matt's album cover right beside Floyd's!!

The 268 Generation derives it's name from Isaiah 26:8:

In the path of your judgments,
O Lord, we wait for you;
your name and remembrance
are the desire of our soul.(ESV)

Passion

Alias Series Finale

WOW!!

The final episode(s) of Alias last night were awesome!! They really did tie up some loose ends, but not everything was fully answered. If you haven't yet watched it, then read this at a later time...

There really was too much ground to cover in a blog post, but some of the highlights for me were in the resolution between Sydney, Jack, Irina, and Arvin. Sydney finally gets to kill Arvin (for a short time, but she did fire 7 rounds into him) and sees her mother die as well (after trying to save her again!). After being shot by Sydney and falling into the water created by the Rambaldi device, Arvin is revived and we get to see resolution between Jack and him when Jack sets off an explosion in the cave and traps Arvin in there for eternity. Overall, it was an awesome ending to the series. I hate to see the series end, though. Oh, and did you really have to kill Jack? I guess in the grand scheme of having resolution between him and Arvin it had to happen, but come on! It was great to also see how Jack (and even Arvin to an extent) tried to keep Sydney from joining SD-6 (which she thought was the CIA). Oh, too much to write, so I'm going to stop now...

On a lighter note, Arvin's new name should be Indiana Jones!! He has an amulet that he takes to a hidden cavern and when the sunlight hits it there is something projected on the cave wall. Then he takes "the horizon" to another cavern and creates the holy grail of Rambaldi (making water of eternal life). That was a little cheesy, but it worked!

So to all you Alias fans out there, I guess it's time to move on. I suppose I'll be slowing buying the DVDs now!

Now Playing: "Walking On The Wind" by Spock's Beard

Alias

More Thoughts From GM on Hydrogen Fuel-Cell

In my post yesterday about ethanol, I had a comment with some infrastructure questions from Greg Simmons. Looking through my feeds this morning I see that GM's Larry Burns (Vice President, Research & Development and Planning) posted a response to one of his commenters in a main post. I think it addresses some of the same concerns Greg raised as well. Here is a response from Mr. Burns:

One “Anonymous” writer, however, questioned whether this vision would ever become reality. So allow me to comment on some of the mystery writer’s observations:

* Infrastructure: The writer declared that there was “no hydrogen gas distribution network…” and that building one would be “…slow and very expensive.” But a global hydrogen infrastructure already exists today that produces 50 million tons of hydrogen per year. That’s enough to fuel 200 million fuel-cell vehicles! And GM has calculated that it would cost between $10-15 billion to build an initial infrastructure of 12,000 hydrogen stations. Now, that’s real money, but it’s a fraction of what the global oil industry spends each year on the petroleum infrastructure, and we could build it over time. This initial infrastructure would place a hydrogen-fueling pump within two miles of 70 percent of the U.S. population and every 25 miles along the interstate highways connecting the nation’s 100 largest cities.

* Storage: Storage: Anonymous is also concerned about safely storing hydrogen gas under high pressure in tanks on cars. We share his concern. But we have achieved improvements in range and packaging in three different storage methods -- liquid, compressed-gas, and solid-state storage technologies. Our compressed-gas system is the first 700-bar (10,000 psi) hydrogen storage system, and we are now demonstrating its ability to achieve a driving range of 300 miles in Sequel.

Hopefully that helps address some of your issues Greg.

Now Playing: "Devil's Got My Throat" by Spock's Beard

Ethanol and the "Green" Movement By Automakers

I have some time off this afternoon and have really been meaning to post some thoughts about ethanol and the "green" movement. As I was going through feeds, I saw a post by Derek Punaro - Ethanol: Myths and Realities. He links to a BusinessWeek Online article of the same title. One of the things that I have read in the past is that "fossil fuel" is required to manufacture ethanol. This is brought up in the article:

Doesn't producing ethanol on a large scale use a great deal of energy?

Yes. Some ethanol skeptics have even argued that the process involved in growing grain and then transforming it into ethanol requires more energy from fossil fuels than ethanol generates. In other words, they say the whole movement is a farce.

There's no absolute consensus in the scientific community, but that argument is losing strength. Michael Wang, a scientist at the Energy Dept.-funded Argonne National Laboratory for Transportation Research, says "The energy used for each unit of ethanol produced has been reduced by about half (since 1980)." Now, Wang says, the delivery of 1 million British thermal units (BTUs) of ethanol uses 0.74 million BTUs of fossil fuels. (That does not include the solar energy -- the sun shining -- used in growing corn.) By contrast, he finds that the delivery of 1 million BTUs of gasoline requires 1.23 million BTU of fossil fuels.

Aside from that, my other rant about ethanol is with the "green" movement that automakers (Ford and GM especially) are running with. Both have hybrid vehicles, but GM is really touting their "Live Green, Go Yellow" (reference to corn) campaign. While that's really great that they are doing something about fuel economy and less dependence on oil, I don't know if ethanol is the best route for now. Of course less petrol is consumed in the manufacturing process, but it's less economical so drivers would have to refill more often. I'm a GM guy personally, and I have their FastLane blog in my feeds. Earlier this week they had an article titled "Making Our Vision Reality". Admittedly, they state that ethanol is only a short-term solution and that hydrogen-powered fuel cells are the future. A summary of their vision is in the article and it is:

General Motors is committed to making the hydrogen economy happen, and we have made tremendous progress in our fuel-cell vehicle program, most notably with the Sequel, the first fuel-cell vehicle capable of achieving a real-world driving range of 300 miles. Our goal is to design and validate an automotive-competitive fuel cell propulsion system by 2010. By automotive competitive, we mean a system that has the performance, durability, and cost at scale volumes of today’s internal combustion engines. GM has the enabling technologies well in hand and we are increasingly confident that we will be able to achieve this goal.

So, in the next 4 years we should hope that GM lives up to their word on this. It would be really great.

Now Playing: "Long Time Suffering" by Spock's Beard

Parents.... Stock Up!

Sorry, I couldn't resist snapping this pic in Target with the Treo when I was testing it with BBConnect. =)



Now Playing: "Once Upon A Time" by Arwen

COMMON Conference Anyone?

Are there any folks (Gregg?) planning on going to the COMMON System i Conference this fall? I'm already registered to go with Chris Moody to Miami Beach and we are staying at the Loews Hotel. I submitted an abstract for the same session Kim Greene and I gave at Lotusphere this year, but it's a little too generic for a strictly System i group. Kim and I are tossing some ideas around, though, and I hope to collaborate with her on a couple of things.

Now Playing: "Crossing" by Angra

Technorati Tags: iSeries, COMMON

Angus’ iBlog

For you System i folks out there, I urge you to take a peek at Angus' iBlog by Angus the iT Chap. Enjoy!

Now Playing: "Hard Life" by Balance of Power

Technorati Tags: iSeries, System i

Who Do You Support For Your Gubernatorial Race?

I've been meaning to do this for a while and I think many of my readers should do the same. So, who do you support in your own Gubernatorial race if you have an election this year? Use the power of our Google ranks folks!

I live in South Carolina and we have had Mark Sanford (R) in office since 2003. We have had some issues with Mark Sanford. In November 2005 TIME magazine named him one of America's Worst Governors! While he does support a radical shift in education to a tax refund system to allow parents to get a refund on money used to send children to private schools (Put Parents In Charge), education reform has come too late for our state. Our current Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum (D) has done an abysmal job and has helped lead us to the bottom of the pack.

I believe it may be time for change in South Carolina, and even though he doesn't support Put Parents In Charge, I plan on voting for Oscar Lovelace in the June 13 primary for Republican. If he does not win the primary I will plan on supporting Mark Sanford (who won't even debate Lovelace though!!)

Technorati Tag: South Carolina

Inflated Font Occurring on Replies with History

That was the subject of an email to a Domino for iSeries list today. The question was "Has anyone seen the issue where on email 'reply with history' type conversations with external recipients, the font size towards the end of the email gets inflated drastically? We've seen this before and need to address it again..."

Since this is something I have encountered in the past, I thought I would respond. Before that, has anyone else seen this and been able to correct it?

We get just the opposite sometimes. The font gets smaller and smaller! At Lotusphere this year, someone asked the exact same question at GURUPalooza. I was on stage and mentioned that we see this occur as well. I have also called Lotus support on this in the past with no success.

At one point I created the following FAQ internally that helped back in the 6.0.x days, but with 6.5.x and 7.0.x I have seen that this doesn't work as in the past. I adapted this from a post at notes.net I think:

External recipients receive e-mail with tiny text

When a Lotus Notes user forwards or replies to an email outside the company sometimes the receiver will see extremely small text on the history portion of the message.

This is a problem with the notes default point size settings for the various character set groups.

If you are brave, you can attempt to fix this yourself. If not please call the helpdesk at 326-6020 to report this problem.

Open your local address book (names.nsf), then find and open the 'Advanced\International MIME Settings' view. if you don't have a 'International MIME Settings' document in the view, create a new one. (there should be a 'New' button with a pulldown list of objects which can be created.)

If you are creating a new 'International MIME Settings': on the 'Basics' page, leave the 'for Locations' setting as '*' and select your primary character set group. for now at least, leave 'Secondary character set groups' blank.

On the 'Settings by Character Set' page, pull down the 'MIME settings by character set group' list and select your primary character set group. for example, if you are in the u.s. or in western europe, you should select 'Western'.

In the 'Font Options' section of this page, change the 'Plain Text' font setting to 'Default Sans Serif'. (if there is no 'International MIME Settings' document, the default point size is '12', so you'll have to create one to fix this problem.)


Now Playing: "The Shores of Our Land" by Dragonland

Technorati Tag: Lotus Notes

Updated: Debugging for Domino

I have updated my Debugging for Domino information that I keep over on the menu uner "Don't Miss These!!" I have added the following information and made other minor modifications.

11.) DEBUG_CHECKMARKERS=1 - This will debug memory checkmarkers and can be used with value #12 below to add this information to the NSD.

12.) NSD_RUN_MEMCHECK=1 - Per Lotus Technote 1086330, "Memcheck runs a scan of all shared memory segments in use by Notes processes, as well as the individual stack memory allocated to each process. Memcheck determines if the memory segment format matches the expected format for the memory segment. If Memcheck does not find what it expects in the memory segment, it dumps the appropriate memory segment pool into a file with the following syntax:

memcheck.__mm_dd@hh_mm.dump"

13.) DEBUG_NOTEOPEN=5 - This will log open activities for databases. In researching this, I found Lotus Technote 1086649 on how to use to track deletions in databases. The information logged will be in the following format:

Server Note Open:
Database Path: /local/notesdata/log.nsf,log.nsf
User: CN=Chris Whisonant/O=ORG
Title: tpdomino1's Log
#2StdNotesLog

Now Playing: "Worthy, You Are Worthy" by Matt Redman

The President's Speech Tonight

I hear that he will be giving the entire speech en Español...

Now Playing: "Dancing Generation" by Matt Redman

Poll Results: What is your Notes Client Install Base?

Voting for the Client Platform poll is now closed. The map and results can be viewed here and below is a breakdown:

5.x - 4% - 1 Vote
6.0.x - 4% - 1 Vote
6.5.x - 60% - 15 Votes
7.0 - 16% - 4 Votes
7.0.1 - 16% - 4 Votes

So we have a brave soul out there on 5.x, but 92% are at 6.5.x or higher. And it appears that 7.0.x is creating some inroads. Thanks for the responses!

Now Playing: "Gifted Response (We Will Worship You)" by Matt Redman

Displaying E-mail Header Information (SnTT)

We all know about opening the email message and choosing View > Show > Page Source, right? On an email list someone asked how to display the header information today. I figured I would reply with a routine I have found and also use the chance to get another SnTT post out! So, here was my reply:

I have done the following in my mail file (I found it at devWorks a long time ago).

1. Create a LotusScript agent called "Get E-mail Headers."
2. The agent trigger should be "On event" by "Action menu selection" on "All
selected documents". It will give you the pop-up separately for each document.
3. Paste the code below into the Initialize Sub and save the agent.
4. With your e-mail folder open, just click Actions > Get E-mail Headers
and you will receive a pop-up window with the header information.
5. Then, if you were not aware, in Lotus Notes when you get a prompt
window you can hit CTRL-C and it will copy the text to the clipboard!! The prompt window looks like this:


6. The users can then paste the text in to a memo to you if you add this to the mail template.

Sub Initialize
 Dim s As New NotesSession
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Dim dc As NotesDocumentCollection
 Dim doc As NotesDocument,tempdoc As notesdocument
 Dim m As String, n As String
 Dim first As Integer, l As Integer
 
 l = 1
 Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
 Set dc = db.UnprocessedDocuments
 Set doc = dc.GetFirstDocument
 While Not(doc Is Nothing)
'' create a temporary copy of the document
  Set tempdoc = db.createdocument
  Call doc.CopyAllItems( tempdoc )
'' re-read the document items to ensure you are getting the remaining fields and not the removed ones
NextOne:
  Forall item In tempdoc.Items
   If item.Name = "Received" Then
    m = item.Text
    first = False
    For a = 1 To Len(m)
     If ( Mid$(m,a,5) = " " ) Then
      If ( first = False ) Then
       Mid$(m,a,1) = Chr$(10)
       first = True
      Else
       Mid$(m,a,1) = " "
      End If
     Else
      first = False
     End If
    Next
    If ( n = "" ) Then
     n = "<Hop " & l & ">"
     n = n & Chr$(13) & m
     l = l + 1
    Else
     n = n & Chr$(13) & "<Hop " & l & ">" & Chr$(13) & m
     l = l + 1
    End If
    m = ""
'' remove the current occurrence of the item so lotusscript will get the next one
    Call item.Remove
'' write the document so it will not contain the removed item
    Call tempdoc.save(True,True)
'' go back and re-read the document items to refresh the memory
    Goto NextOne
   End If
   
  End Forall
  If ( n <> "" ) Then
   Messagebox n,,doc.Subject(0)
  Else
   Messagebox "No Internet Received Headers found.",,doc.Subject(0)
  End If
  n = ""
'' delete the temporary document
  Call tempdoc.Remove( True )
  Set doc = dc.GetNextDocument(doc)
 Wend
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

Show-n-tell thursday

New System i Collaborative Edition

iSeries Network has an article about two System i announcements (note to self, it's not i5, iSeries, or AS/400 any longer). The first is the availability on May 19 of an iSCSI adapter.

The second is the premiere on June 13 of a "System i 520 Collaboration Edition".

"The 520 Collaboration Edition offers as much as a 33 percent price break from equivalent 520 Standard Edition machines when configured with extra memory and disk to accommodate Lotus workloads and purchased with qualifying Lotus software solutions such as Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal Express, Sametime, Workplace Services Express, Workplace Collaboration Services, and others.

"The 520 Collaboration Edition offers 1 or 2-way processing power and has a minimum of 4GB of memory and four disk drives to support collaboration workloads. The box requires a purchase of select Lotus collaboration software licenses or the transfer of existing Lotus licenses to the new Collaboration Edition."

When we purchased Domino back in 2002 (basically right when ND6 was released), we started with a 2-way iSeries 270 Dedicated Server for Domino (DSD). It is now functioning as our cluster failover box as we are using a 4-way iSeries 820 as our main system. It runs very well and we're looking at an upgrade to a 4-way 570 later this year with Domino in an LPAR running on 2 of the processors.

The new System i processors are amazing. I mentioned the "Cell chips" back in August. This isn't the same chip being used by the new System i, but Big Blue is doing a lot with the processors. The new System i Collaborative Edition should be a good start for SMBs wanting to get rock solid performance at a decent price! So go pick one up in June...

Now Playing: "Heathen Machine" by Balance of Power

It's OK To Change Passwords Now

Last Tuesday when I was configuring DDM, I enabled a lot of the default probes. It now appears that the server crashes I mentioned today in my earlier post were due to the Server/Administration probe that checks admin4.nsf. I have disabled that probe (per support) and will keep an eye on it.

I love it when these things cause problems!

Don't Change Your Passwords!

Last week while I was out we had some problem with a rename request in AdminP. Today, we are having a problem with http password changes. It's not just a minor problem, but the server actually crashes! Check out the error:


Basically, we are having to remove all of the entries in all adminp replicas and then delete the admin4.nsf database on the server that is crashing. Not fun... We're still at 7.0 on our production server. When we called support back today, they said that another customer was calling in at the same time we just did with the same issue at 7.0.1. The other customer crashed after a loading a debug hotfix as well. This is really random because we have been running on 7.0 since November with no adminp issues. There is something new every day, right?

By the way, our Disney trip was awesome!!!!

Now Playing: "Just Before You Leave" by Balance of Power

DDM Filters (SnTT)

I know it's Tuesday, but I thought I would post this Domino Domain Monitor tip early since I will be on vacation Thursday.

When configuring DDM, there is a set of default filters that can be used to report "simple events" from your Events4.nsf database. This can be really helpful for monitoring replication failures and message delivery failures. However, by default (at least for me), way too much was being logged, so I thought I would tweak it. From the DDM database, choose the option to "Open Configuration" (This just opens Events4.nsf). From there, just go to your "DDM Filters" view:



As you can see below, I have limited the severities of the events reported for Database, Messaging, Replication, and Security. I may tweak this some more after monitoring DDM further, but this is a good start that will limit how much you have to view.



Show-n-tell thursday

Heading to Disney Tomorrow!

Tomorrow we're wheels up to Orlando!! My wife and I are taking our 2 year old and my in-laws are going to. It should be a really excellent trip! I'll be turning my corporate e-mail off at the BES too! We're heading back on Sunday - it should be long enough for a 2 year old... =) This will be her first airplane trip and we've been really pumping her up for it. She's really excited and we can't wait!

In other news, I see that people are getting antsy over June 6 - 6/6/06. For the record, the mark of the beast isn't 6-6-6, but it's 666 (six hundred sixty-six). It could also be 616, but that's another discussion. So will the end times likely manifest itself on our human timetable of dates? Doubt it. Actually, if we want to look at a date 2006 years "AD", then it would have been around 2000 because our dating system was compiled wrong and Jesus was probably born between 7 and 4 BC. That one was free...

Now Playing: "Insectsamongus" by Jordan Rudess

Poll: What is your Notes Client Install Base?

I have created another poll over on my left menu. The poll options are for Notes 5.x, 6.0.x, 6.5.x, 7.0, or 7.0.1. This would be for you to select what you feel are the majority of your Notes Clients. I'm at a 96% penetration of 7.0.1 clients, by the way. I have a feeling that the majority of the votes will be 6.5.x and above.

Now Playing: "No More Tears" by Arwen

Economics Lesson for Today

Corporations Do NOT Pay Taxes

No, I haven't lost my mind. Remember, that any expenses a corporation incurs are passed on to the consumer in the form of a price. This includes taxes as well. It's what is referred to as an embedded tax. If the government imposed some type of windfall tax on gas companies, this would not cause the prices to go down due to the companies reducing their profits to, in turn, reduce their tax liability. I brought this up in November regarding Exxon's profits.

The government took in nearly three times more money ($25 Billion) than Exxon's net profits ($9.9 Billion) and (some) are wanting more.

Now Playing: "Where The Streets Have No Name" by Neal Morse

Michelle Malkin's Hot Air

Michelle Malkin has started a video blog at www.hotair.com. Today's was about the businesses that are "kowtowing" to China. For instance Google has started censoring searches from within China. If you search Google Images for Tienanmen you won't find anything about the Tienanmen Square showdown. Instead you'll just get some images of happy tourists. Bill Gates wines and dines with Chinese leaders but doesn't criticize them for their human rights problems.

Blackberry Connect For Treo, Take Two

As I posted Friday, I had BB Connect for Treo working. However, as I posted over at Tony Kelleran's site, it was not without issues:

The messaging and calendar sync were cool, but I didn't see a native option for synchronizing the address book (would one have to buy a 3rd-party application to do this?). Again, I know that BBC for Treo is far from official for Cingular, so I can't really complain too much.

Also, I could NOT get the Internet browser to connect. From reading at blackberryforums, some users stated that you would have to disconnect the BB service and then connect the Media Net service. I was unable to do this, and it would be highly cumbersome.

So, a Treo 650 with BB Connect is a great idea (even though the only thing I like about the device over my 8700 is the camera), not having Internet access is not cool. I know this will be working when it's an official release. I guess you could call what I loaded an alpha release that works with the Singapore carrier. However, it was great to get my hands on the software and try it out. I work for a Cingular reseller, and have known the guy over our wireless sales division for about 14 years. He's a die-hard Treonaut and I would love to get him off of the VersaMail POP access to our mail server onto something more stable and useful. Someday we'll get it working with the official release and I'll be sure to blog about it.

Also, they are setting up a Nokia 9300 on BB Connect today too. As Tony posted, the device has some great features, but I found it very clumsy and bulky when I handled it Friday.

Now Playing: "In The Name of God" by Dream Theater

"The Gospel of Judas" - Part III

This will, hopefully, be my final post on this. You can view Part I here and Part II here. In the second installment, I related my thoughts after reading through the Gospel of Judas. In this post I would like to share my thoughts of the two hour TV special that the National Geographic Channel (NGC) aired on April 9, 2006.

The first thing that strikes me is how much positive support there was shown for this Gnostic gospel in the TV special. We hear right off the bat that it was "hidden" nearly 2,000 years and that it could "challenge our deepest beliefs". I use the term "hidden" simply because that was the quote from the special. To be quite honest, this gospel wasn't hidden but actually abandoned! There was no group that thought it vital enough to perpetuate it or even its contents, so one must keep that in mind when analyzing its importance to the original audience. I took two pages of notes from the special, but I will keep this brief incorporating only key points.

First of all, I have never mentioned in a main post that Bishop Irenaeus wrote about a "Gospel of Judas." According to the NGC special, we should believe that he was writing about this specific gospel. If you are a casual passer-by watching the special, you will hear the following two phrases describing Irenaeus' mention of the gospel: it was "a scathing attack" and he "railed" against it. This is what we hear about 15 minutes into the special and about 45 minutes in we hear of Irenaeus again. This time we are told that he was "targeting" the authors of the Gospel of Judas and he rejected the gospel mainly on the premise that it was "titled" the Evangelion Judas or Gospel of Judas. Further, Irenaeus only "chose" 4 out of about 30 possible gospels. In prior research, I saw a quote of Irenaeus, but it was not anything major (as we would be led to believe here). I should also note that the NGC special did not take the time to quote Irenaeus at all! Please allow me to relate to you the only thing Irenaeus had to say about the Gospel of Judas when discussing the Cainites:

Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Volume I, Chapter XXXI, Section 1)

Judge for yourselves, but this is not a "scathing attack" or a "railing" against the authors of the Gospel of Judas. It should make one wonder what the producers of the NGC special had in mind when they couldn't quote the only verifiable mention of this gospel that has ever been recorded before the Gospel was abandoned not to be read again until the past few years. Instead they take the stance of those who think the formation of the Canon was done by men who were keeping truth from the Church. This example of Irenaeus is just one of many I could relate in depth. But I said I would stay brief, so below are some other things I noted.

1. It was stated that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John died before their gospels were written and that many theologians support this. I have never read or heard this before in any questions from people about the validity of the Synoptic Gospels.
2. There were "many early Christianities" and the Gnostics bothered the church leaders because "they had special insights and didn't need bishops" or any other type of leadership.
3. Judas "grows more evil from the 1st Gospel of Mark to the last Gospel of John" and is "not a villain in Mark's Gospel." The NGC Special basically promoted this and dedicated about 25 minutes to expound upon this. Personally, the special really got ugly here. They noted that since Judas is a Greek form of the word for Judah that Judas was symbolic of the Jews. The villainy of Judas represents that of the Jews. "Judas becomes the poster boy for anti-Semitic thinking." Of course there was one somewhat conservative scholar who they would bring into the special every so often to discredit some of these claims, but when the narrator of the special said the following, it was pretty clear where NGC stands: "The Portrait of Judas in the New Testament did not directly, but may have indirectly fed into the poisonous stream that brought about the holocaust." Wow!...
4. They stated that about 15% of the Gospel of Judas has been lost forever due to decay. This echoes what I noted in my second installment that of 7 pages, about 67 lines were missing.
5. In a dramatic presentation of the key points of the Gospel, no mention was made of the Angel Saklas or that Judas' sacrifice of Jesus would be to this angel. In fact, much of the Gospel text was about the secret teachings of Jesus to Judas on Heaven and the Creation. None of the insanity I mentioned in my second installment regarding the Creation account (an Angel Saklas created Adam and Eve in a cloud!) is related to the viewers of the NGC special. It was rather disheartening to see this left out because it is one of the main factors that church fathers like Irenaeus would have used to show that the Gospel of Judas was not a true gospel.

In sum, I would like to quote Dr. Craig Evans when he stated that the Gospel of Judas "doesn't tell us about the historical Jesus and Judas tradition." In other words, while this may be an authentic document from the 3rd Century, it's not historically accurate.

BlackBerry Connect on Treo 650 Available...Sort Of

Just wanted to brag and make some people mad, but I have BlackBerry Connect on a Treo 650 and it's working! How, you ask? Go about halfway down this page...

Now Playing: "Stream of Consciousness" by Dream Theater

Who Deleted That Document? (SnTT)

Ever have a problem with someone deleting data that should not have been deleted? Of course you should lock down the ACL, but what if you just want to track deletions in a database? Or possibly you want to prompt someone for a reason they deleted the document? While there is no native Domino log to display this, you can utilize the Database Script to get a handle on deletions.

This is how I have accomplished this task for various reasons. After looking through the Designer Help database and creating a log database, use the following code in the Querydocumentdelete sub of the Database Script. Also, you can grab as much data from as many fields as you would like. Further, you could implement a prompt for each document (inside the loop) or all documents (outside the loop) to have input for why the document was deleted.

Sub Querydocumentdelete(Source As Notesuidatabase, Continue As Variant)
 
 Dim docsDelete As NotesDocumentCollection
 Dim doc As NotesDocument
 Dim session As New NotesSession
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
 Set docsDelete = Source.Documents ' Docs chosen for deletion
 
 Dim delLog As New NotesLog(db.FilePath)
 For x = 1 To docsDelete.Count
  Set doc = docsDelete.GetNthDocument( x )
  Call delLog.OpenNotesLog("SERVERNAME", "pathname\loggingdb.nsf")
  Call delLog.LogAction("The following user was deleted by " + session.CommonUserName + ":  " + Cstr(doc.FirstName(0)) + " " + doc.LastName(0))
  Call delLog.Close
  
  'The following section emails a notification of the deletion
  Dim maildb As NotesDatabase
  Dim maildoc As NotesDocument
  Dim rtitem As NotesRichTextItem
  Set maildb = session.CurrentDatabase
  Set maildoc = New NotesDocument( maildb )
  Set rtitem = New NotesRichTextItem( maildoc, "Body" )
  Call rtitem.AppendText ("The following user was deleted by " + session.CommonUserName + ":  " + Cstr(doc.FirstName(0)) + " " + doc.LastName(0))
  maildoc.Form = "Memo"
  maildoc.SendTo = "Recipient"
  maildoc.Subject = "Intranet Directory Document Deleted"
  Call maildoc.Send( True )
  
 Next
 Continue = True
 
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

And here is a sample of what the logging database can look like as a single repository for tracking multiple databases:



Show-n-tell thursday

Dream Theater Performance With An Orchestra

According to Mike Portnoy, Dream Theater performed with an orchestra at Radio City Music Hall on April 1st, 2006. They did a two set show with an encore. The first set is without the orchestra and the second set and encores feature the orchestra (no mention of which orchestra it was, but conducted and arranged by Jamshied Sharifi). The show will be made available on DVD and CD and is sure to please!

Looking at the orchestrated set-list, we see:

Set #2: (Band & Orchestra)
SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE - This was a 2-disc release with over 90 minutes of music! There was no song with this title - does this mean the entire album is done?
VACANT
THE ANSWER LIES WITHIN
SACRIFICED SONS - This was a 10 minute song about 9/11.
OCTAVARIUM - This is a 24 minute song!

Encore: (Band & Orchestra)
METROPOLIS - Another 10 minute song...

All I can say is this should be amazing. From Mike Portnoy's site, it was shot with 11 High-Def cameras...

Some DT Trivia: They performed a show in New York and were set to release an album titled "Live Scenes from New York". The release date of the disc was 09/11/2001 and below is what the original cover looked like. It was pulled from the shelves ASAP, but what a horrible coincidence...



Now Playing: "The Glass Prison" by Dream Theater

"The Gospel of Judas" - Part II

On April 7, I initially posted something about "The Gospel of Judas" which had just been released as a translation, included in a book, and promoted for a television documentary all by the National Geographic Society. It will also be featured on the cover of their magazine. I have since read the gospel and would like to relay some further thoughts.

The translation I read was a PDF at the New York Times website. The first thing I would like to note is not what is in the text but what's not in the text. The PDF is only 7 pages long, so it would be a quick read for anyone. But there are all total about 67 lines missing from the text. This is a fair amount of material. There are also other sections in which the text is very confusing due to missing words.

The main section that you won't hear reported is when Jesus is relating to Judas the secret mysteries of the creation account. According to this gospel, there are two "angels", Nebro and Saklas. Each of these angels created 6 other angels each. We then read the following about the angel Saklas:

“Then Saklas said to his angels, ‘Let us create a human being after the likeness and after the image.’ They fashioned Adam and his wife Eve, who is called, in the cloud, Zoe. For by this name all the generations seek the man, and each of them calls the woman by these names."

From my prior post, a commentor asked what Christianity would look like if these gospels had been known before the 20th Century. Besides the fact that most of these were known by the early Church, I doubt that it would have been much different. Just looking at the skewed Creation account above, one can see how quickly this document would have been deemed heretical because of the sheer insanity of the hidden knowledge (gnosis) that it supports! At my website, I have some of my own textual notes on the Acts of Peter, Paul, and Gospel of Thomas.

The main issue with the conversations between Jesus and Judas stems around this quote: “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." But what has not been related is the context of that conversation. Just 4 lines above that line Jesus is talking to Judas about offering sacrifices to Saklas (the angel mentioned earlier). So, in the context, Jesus is saying that Judas would sacrifice His body to Saklas.

As I have done in the past with some of the other apocryphal books at my website, I plan to go through this text a little more in-depth and provide some more excerpts and analysis.

Domino Web Access Warning

I first posted this as a help file from my internal FAQ. The most recent update is for a specific DWA 7 error. This post generally ranks high on my search engine hits, so I like to keep it updated from time to time. Hopefully it's helping people get these issues resolved. If you know of a resolution that's not listed, please let me know! This first entry is one that happens pretty frequently. An alternate title could be "iNotes Warning" from previous versions. This document contains two sections. One is a general information section and the other is a section on steps to correct the error(hopefully). Please see the bottom for a change log.

General Information:

The full error message is:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer Domino Web Access Warning. Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working in your mail file, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

In Domino Web Access (DWA) 7.0 and higher, I have been seeing a new error message that reads "The installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked or declined by the user. Do you want to use this on subsequent Domino Web Access pages?" A specific correction for this can be to ensure that the user has at least Power-User authority. Another possible correction is to simply add the DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted sites zone.

IBM has recently updated two technotes regarding this:

Prompt: 'Installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked by the user. Do you want to use Subsequent Domino Web Access Pages?'. This alludes to the DWA7w.cab file being moved or corrupted on the DWA server or even that the default HTML directory has been changed from domino\html. I have notified them that in my experience, this may come up when the DWA server isn't in the trusted sites zone for IE.

Can the Domino Web Access ActiveX Upload Control (iNotes Class) be manually placed on a workstation? While not directly related to the error message, this contains a table of the behaviour of DWA with and without the ActiveX control installed.

Corrective Actions:

Recently, the top two on the following list have been what we have seen internally to cause more issues. If the computers are external (employees' home PC), then I would definitely bank on them having spyware.

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck
“Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete iNotes or Domino Web Access class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Load Convert, Fixup, Updall, and Compact against the mailfile
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor

Change Log:
08/14/2006: Added information regarding Java Cache, Temp Folders, and Resetting IE defaults.
04/14/2006: Added information regarding technotes 1228480 and 1161877.
Added comment to Windows Update line to state that a recent update may be causing the problem. I have personally seen this in 2004 and the link in the text above is from April 2006.

"IBM" Laptops Will Be No More

Interesting article at RealClear Politics titled "No More IBM Laptops". It seems that Lenovo will be removing the letters IBM from their laptops:

"What sells laptops these days is a trendy rep, cute names and colors like purple. Let's face it: To Americans in their 20s, IBM is not particularly cool."

Well, I do take exception to the 20-somethings not thinking IBM is cool, but that's beside the point. And this is something really cool:

"So Americans raised to salute the IBM logo still find it jarring to see those letters erased. IBM is so much a part of the culture. The famous talking computer in the futuristic 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" was named HAL, which, if you move the letters up one step in the alphabet, spells IBM."

But the real reason is simply branding:

"For the record, Lenovo executives say that their motive is to build their own brand recognition in the United States. It now appears that the name they were most interested in exploiting was "ThinkPad," IBM's Apple-like trademark for its laptops."

Whatever, it's just a laptop anyway, right? They will have to pry the System i (formerly AS/400, iSeries, i5) from my cold dead hands with the letters IBM still in place!

Bloglines Hidden Feature

From the Bloglines News feed: "Hit m. You'll thank me later."

Lotus Notes 7.0.1 Rollout Update

Just a quick update: 92% of all our Notes users are now at Lotus Notes 7.0.1! After "fixing" our Smart Upgrade issue, we did not start the upgrade until March 1, so this has been a somewhat agressive rollout for us with just a handful of minor issues.

As a side note to this, our Sametime 6.5.1.1 server has not crashed with the STMUX issue since loading the Sametime server defensive hotfix and simultaneously rolling out the Notes 7.0.1 clients (which provides a fix for the same issue from a client side).

Oh, and where are all the SnTT posts this week? Or are we all taking the week off?

Now Playing: "Egypt" by Symphony X

What If Microsoft Designed the iPod Packaging?

If you haven't seen the video parody of this, you should check it out here. I think it's a lovely package design!

Now Playing: "Center" by Charlie Hall

BES 4.1 Upgrade (and Downgrade)

Judging by the title, you can probably tell that my upgrade was unsuccessful. Let me do a recap (as much for me when I call RIM tomorrow as for the readers).

First of all, I thought I would just upgrade Domino from 6.5.4 to 7.0.1. No problems with the Domino upgrade (as usual). So then I got out my BES upgrade checklist. I should have stopped when the configuration database could not be backed up using the BlackBerryDBBackup.exe command. I was getting a C++ error. I pressed on since we are using a SQL backend and it is backed up regularly. So I proceeded with the BES setup.exe.

I chose to install the full package of BES plus MDS. None of the documentation stated that TWO additional SQL databases would be created (MDSS and MDSS_DIR). This is in addition to having to update the current BESMgmt database. I was able to successfully update the BESMgmt database and then it was to the point of rebooting. After coming back up, the setup program continues.

It was at this point that the two new MDS databases would be created. My SQL user account already had the required SA (Server Administrator) and DB Creator authority as noted in the upgrade manual. After successfully creating the MDSS database, I received an error stating that the database could not be updated. In the BES logs folder, there is an Install sub-folder with installation logs. Looking at this I could see that the problem was that the SQL DB_VERSION table in the MDSS database could not be updated with an INSERT of the new version data. So I paged our Network/SQL admin group and got someone to look at the database. Come to find out, the DB_VERSION table didn't even exist! I'm glad the install program created it properly... Back to the story, I had the SQL admin manually create the table AND give me owner access to all of the other tables. It seems that the install program didn't grant that authority either! Then I was able to INSERT the records for the version and proceed with the setup.

After this, I get to the next to final option. Two more clicks and I'm home free and should be able to get Sametime working (since we have a need for that, hence the upgrade). So I'm at the point where the install program is going to need the location of the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (or 2005) Driver. I didn't have the driver installed, but the installer gives you the location for download. After downloading and installing the driver, the installer cannot find the DLL. I think that possibly a restart would be in order, so I do that and come back to the installer. It still cannot find the file. I uninstall the SQL driver and reinstall it to the D: drive where my BES is installed. It's a no-go! The installer apparently cannot find a file that exists on the system!!

So after this, I was basically dead in the water. I would have to downgrade to get it working because for some reason I don't have weekend support (the things done to save a buck...). So I uninstalled BES 4.1 and was going to load BES 4.0. Can anyone guess what happened? I didn't have (nor could I find) a full installer for BES 4.0 SP3 that supports Domino 7. So after loading BES 4.0 I got an error stating that the notes.ini could not be located. So I just installed Domino 6.5.4 over 7.0.1 and then ran the BES installer again. During this install, it found that the BESMgmt database was at a "Pre-4.0 level" and could not proceed. So I call my SQL guy again and he sees that in the BESMgmt database there is a ServerDBVersion table that has a record for 4.0 and 4.1. So he just removes the 4.1 record and the installer was happy. Things came up fine and I loaded SP3 for BES to be fairly up-to-date. Now my BES is active but still at 4.0...

To do this week:
- Find a full installer for BES 4.0 SP3 so I can load Domino 7.0.1 and not have to downgrade Domino later.
- Find out why in the world the BES 4.1 installer couldn't find the SQL driver!! Not happy about that!
- Find out where my SQL guy wants to go to lunch because I owe him!

"The Gospel of Judas"

If you've missed it, there is supposedly another "lost" gospel of the Bible that's been supressed for over 1700 years. I've posted about this in the past here. Much like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas is a creation of a Gnostic group in the 2nd Century AD that was penned with the name of an apostle in order to gain a foothold. Otherwise known as pseudepigrapha.

I would urge you to listen to or read through Albert Mohler's assessments of this:

The Gospel Of Judas: What Should Christians Think? - Podcast with guest Darrel Bock

From Traitor to Hero? Responding to The Gospel of Judas? - Here is an excerpt from his blog entry from today:

Accordingly, the most revealing statement in the entire text of The Gospel of Judas records Jesus saying to Judas, "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."

In other words, Judas would perform a service to Jesus by betraying Him to those who would then crucify Him, liberating Jesus from the physical body and freeing Him as spirit. As the editors of The Gospel of Judas indicate in a footnote, "The death of Jesus, with the assistance of Judas, is taken to be the liberation of the spiritual person within."

Needless to say, this is in direct conflict with the Christian gospel and the New Testament. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that Jesus came in order to die for sinners--willingly accepting the cross and dying as the substitutionary sacrifice for sin.

Now Playing: "Jaws of Life" by John Petrucci

West Wing Has New "BlackBerry"

So I'm watching West Wing (hard to believe I like that show, huh?) and Josh said that at least he didn't take his BlackBerry to bed with him. They have all been using BlackBerrys for this whole season... Anyway, what he just called his "BlackBerry" rings and he answers it. But, it's not a BlackBerry but a Treo!! Take from that what you will.

Now Playing: "Insectsamongus" by Jordan Rudess

81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25

What are those numbers? They are the number of US Military deaths in Iraq for the past 6 months. Note: the numbers start 6 months ago, so 25 represents the number from last month.

More numbers:
215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 - Number of Iraqi military and police casualties
70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30 - Number of car bombings

I agree with the point John Hawkins made on this: "My only point is that, at the very least, people who complain that good news coming out of Iraq gets shuttered by the press aren’t crazy."

Trackback also to: Numbers

Now Playing: "Come Awake" by David Crowder Band

Linux Mail Archive Server Installed (SnTT)

Back in February, Jack Dausman posed the question of "How Much Free Space to Recommend on a Mail Server?" at his blog. The consensus was about 30% and it also depends on the drive activity. But I posted at the time that "We're at about 26% free and we are looking at either setting up a Linux Domino server for archiving mail to Network Attached Storage or just buying more physical disks. I prefer the archiving for performance reasons."

Jack responded with "Archiving onto a NAS is interesting, because NAS's are not normally recognized as robust enough to host databases. You'll have to post how well that works for you."

So here is a Show-N-Tell post about my experience setting this up. Since that time of being 26% free just 2 months ago, we're now about 21% free! When I got back to the office monday from the worship conference I had the xSeries in my cubicle. We ordered an xSeries 306m with Pentium 4 Processor 640 with EM64T (3.2 GHz 2M L2). I ordered RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 to run on it. According to Technote 1231920, Domino 7.0.1 is supported on Update 3 of RHEL 4 or Update 2 with the GDB from Update 3 installed. No biggie, right?

After configuring the RAID1, I loaded the OS that shipped with the server. This was, unfortunately, the base release. Off to RedHat's site, I snagged the Update 3 only to later find out that IBM does not have a RAID Controller driver for Update 3 to run on the xSeries 306m. There was one for Update 2, so I finally got that loaded and found the latest GDB and installed it.

The Domino server install took about 2 minutes! This machine really flies (as it should). I can't wait until IBM releases a 64-bit version of Domino. Since we had been testing this on an older system (PIII 650...), I didn't have to configure anything with Domino.

Now to the cool part - archiving the mail to our NetApp NAS appliance! Basically, I just edited the /etc/fstab file in Linux to include a line to mount the filesystem on boot. I came back and opened my archive and it was really fast. I mean really fast! I know that I was the only one on the system, but since this will be an archive-only server there will likely not be more than a couple of people with their databases open at once. Navigating through folders is rather quick as well. So last night I archived our IT Staff's databases. We currently have about 2.5 GB in archives now. I can't wait until I get to the 3-5+ GB mail files. I'm hoping to reclaim at least 35% of my entire mail store (conservatively). At that rate I should regain over 17% putting my iSeries storage back down to around 60% utilization. Oh, and I'll let Bruce know if I have any problems!

Now Playing: "Marvelous Light" by Charlie Hall

Show-n-tell thursday

Blogroll Additions

I try to keep a short blogroll, but I just wanted to inform you of 3 recent additions.

Derek Punaro - Keyboardist extraordinaire! I was able to hang out with Derek some at JamFest 2006 and he rocked out on a few songs. From his site: "Our primary audience is our family and friends, and while we realize other people may stroll through our space from time to time, we make no apologies if there is more information on here than you care to read." He has some good Domino info there too - including his uneventful Quickplace install...

Don McNally - Don was a guest blogger at Matt and Jess Stratton's site on some Show-N-Tell posts. He now has his own space on the Internet! Judging from his SNTT posts, it looks like Don will have some good Domino tips and code.

Ted Hardenburgh - I actually met Ted at Lotusphere. I believe he was one of the brave 100 souls to attend the session Kim and I gave! I stumbled on his blog just a couple of weeks ago when I was looking through Technorati for something. As his domain states, he has Domino Thoughts for all of us. He has some good posts and updates on his family as well. Also, he may post on his son "Andrew has Cystic Fibrosis, and while he's doing very well, you'll read about what's going on in his life regarding his treatments and our efforts to help find a cure."

Now Playing: "Everything Glorious" by David Crowder Band - "You made everything glorious and I am Yours. What does that make me?"