Where Are The New Bloggers?

I've been thinking and it's been a while since I've seen some new faces in the Lotus Blogging community...

With that being said, I would like to welcome two new bloggers.

The first is Michael Smelser. He's a colleague of mine here at Lotus 911 and makes the 5th Blogger here!! It looks like Mike may be focusing on dev - looking forward to it.

Also, let me introduce you to Bryan Kuhn. He's a former colleague of mine and he's been updating his blog a little more lately. Bryan focuses on BES and Dev (though not at the same time) at his blog.

Also, Ed Brill (and others) linked to two new sites in the past week - LotusViralMarketing.com and FastNSF.com, so check em out if you haven't already.

Anyone else out there have a new blog and just starting up? Would love to hear from you!

Top 5 Side 1 Track 1 - My list

OK, so I've been tagged to list my favorite 5 album openers. Hmmmmm....

Virtue and Vice - Holy Soldier's Last Train - 1992 - Awesome opener for H5 dealing with the inner struggle of good and bad in us all. This is probably one of my all-time favorite albums too!

Paradigm Shift - Liquid Tension Experiment's self-titled album - 1998 - LTE was actually my first taste of Dream Theater. Crazy, right?

Where Moth and Rust Destroy - Tourniquet's Where Moth and Rust Destroy - 2003 - I really dig their older speed/thrash stuff, but I'm more into their newer sound and this song really defines that for me.

Surfing With The Alien - Joe Satriani's Surfing With The Alien - 1987 - Amazing song followed by stellar album that still defines Satch!

Welcome To The Jungle! - Guns 'N Roses Appetite For Destruction - 1987 - Not only was this the Side 1 Track 1, but it was Disc 1 for them too. Truly definitive song followed by other songs that are GnR!

OK, so I need to tag 5 others. Not sure who's been tagged (I've only seen Nathan and John's posts on this), so here we go. I'll even go outside the Notes community some to start this up for others... :)

Phil Randolph
Bryan Kuhn (no, you can't pick Every Rose by GnR!! ;) )
Jen Whisonant
Jen Wade
Greg Simmons

Technorati: Top5Side1Track1List

Start 'Em Young!

otibm, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Just thought I'd share this pic of little OT wearing his IBM bib! Never too young to start, eh? :)

Notes Client Debugging Parameters

I like to dump this section of parameters into my Notes Client notes.ini file. It's all commented out and you can just remove the semi-colons as needed to enable more or additional logging. If you can think of any other options let me know, but this is a good base.

;-------------------------------------------
;-------------------------------------------
;-----Notes Client Debugging Parameters-----
;Console_LogLevel=2
;LOG_SESSIONS=1
;LOG_CONNECTIONS=1
;DEBUG_TCP_ALL=1
;CLIENT_CLOCK=1
;CONSOLE_LOG_ENABLED=1
;DEBUG_CONSOLE=1
;-------------------------------------------
;-------------------------------------------

p.s. - I'm doing this as much for my record in case I need to debug a remote client I can just hit my blog for this reference... :)

Me as a Simpsons Character

Since everyone else is doing it, here's what I guess I would look like...lol


Go here to get your own Simpsons avatar.

Nickname Too Funny To Pass By...

LOL, I just saw that Rush is referring to my (soon-to-be-ex)* Senator from SC as "Lindsey Grahamnesty"... Too funny! He should continue with his former nickname and call him "Veep Lindsey Grahamnesty"!

* By this, I not only mean that he will no longer be my Senator because I'm a GA resident but that I doubt he will be re-elected in SC.

Now Playing: "Secret Ambition" by David Crowder Band: Cover of Michael W. Smith song

One Down, One To Go

So I guess I'm officially "homeless" for a couple of days as we have closed on the sale of our house in SC yesterday and will be closing down here in GA tomorrow!! What a relief... On Tuesday all of our worldly belongings were packed onto a moving truck (except, of course, for my guitars!!) and will be unloaded on Saturday.

I've been using Quickr some - so cool! Just trying to trap for whether a document is being checked-in for a placebot notification agent. But I don't think this is exactly possible within a placebot...

Now Playing: "Go West Young Man" by All Star United: Cover of Michael W. Smith song.

Every Boat Needs A Name, Right?

boat, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

I think the name of this boat says it all. It was a great laugh driving down 85 to GA on Sunday!!

Song Redux

One of my favorite bands is Holy 5oldier! I really wish they would put out some new music. Anyway, back in 1995 they released "Promise Man" and they covered Larry Norman's (father of Christian rock) "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus" from 1972.

Well I found copies of both on Youtube, so enjoy.

Here's Larry Norman's (The volume is really low on this recording though):


Here's Holy 5oldier's much more modern redux:


And here's a sample of why I really dig H5. Great music and powerful lyrics in this song!! Their original vocalist, Steven Patrick, is amazing. Does anyone out there have a copy of his solo project Red Reign? I have to find that...:

Great Dinner With Family In NH

I've been working with a client in NH this week and decided to give a call to my wife's uncle Dennis and his wife Linda. They live in Maine only about an hour away from where I am. So I called them up on Tuesday and they called me back yesterday and said they would love to come meet me tonight. I believe I have only met them once at our wedding almost 7 years ago. It was really great to hang out with them. They are involved with their music ministry in their church, so we were able to hit it off talking about that. They're a great couple and really exhibit what Christianity is about (James 1:27). They have taken many kids under their wings - specifically some that may have lost parents when they were young (the orphans) as well as doing some foster care. I really had an awesome time with them!!

Great NOMAD Tip

Judging from my Google hits, I seem to be the Nomad expert. Googling Lotus Notes Nomad yields my review as the #2 site after IBM. So I thought I would follow up with a way I've been using it now as a consultant.

First of all, Nomad is intended to provide USB stick access to the Notes client and it's great. However, you can also install multiple instances of Nomad on larger drives, shares, or local drives. You can check out the full installation procedure from the link to my review above, but below is a modified version that will allow you to have separate Nomad installs for multiple customers (or other needs). This keeps you from having multiple location documents and dealing with cross certificates, etc... It would require you to have about 400 MB free space for each install as well as a bare-bones installation that you would need to use later. Below is a modified installation process.

1. Insert the USB drive into the USB port on your computer and create a "NOMAD\base" folder. This can also be performed somewhere on your local disk. (i.e. C:\NOMAD\base)
2. Make note of the drive letter that is assigned to the USB drive.
3. Extract the C94QIEN.exe file. This is the filename of the self-extracting executable downloaded from IBM. This is just the Notes Client. (The C94QAEN.exe is the Full Client package with Admin and Designer - you can alternatively extract this file.)
4. In a command prompt window, navigate to the folder where you extracted the C94QIEN file (there should now be a setup.exe), and then enter this command to install Lotus Notes on the USB drive:
setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=F:\NOMAD\base\ /qb+"
Where F is the drive letter.
The parameters /qb+ allow for the display of the basic user interface and a message box at the end of the upgrade. Don't forget the last quotation mark!
5. Perform the post-install cleanup (from my original review) to free up space.
6. The \base folder now has a copy of the Nomad installation. You can run Notes from here, but I use it to keep a copy of the files.
7. Create a folder \NOMAD\CustomerX.
8. Copy and paste the entire contents of the \NOMAD\Base folder into the \NOMAD\CustomerX folder. This step can be repeated for each customer!!
9. Open the \NOMAD\CustomerX folder and edit the autorun.ini file. You will need to modify the path for the MSI_LOCATION= and MSI_COMMANDLINE= (including the DATADIR= part of this line) options. You will see that they may have F:\NOMAD\Base\... Simply modify this to be the CustomerX path. Save and close the autorun.ini file.
10. The \NOMAD\CustomerX\autorun.inf and \NOMAD\CustomerX\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\notes.ini files will also need to be modified to match the path.
11. Run the command AUTORUN.EXE from the root of any of the CustomerX folders by double-clicking on the filename or by typing the command on the command line. OR
12. Alternatively, create a shortcut to the nlnotes.exe and just run this.

This can provide a good deal of flexibility and gives you a clean Notes install for each customer!

In Honor Of The Silver Surfer Movie

Since it's coming out in theaters today, I believe I will be spinning this album on my iPod for a while!

surfingwithalien, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Quick System i Tip

Updated - see information below. I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I'm either crazy busy or just slack. :)

If you're installing Domino (or anything for that matter) on a System i, then you should make sure that your joblog is generated when you signoff. Simply prompt the SIGNOFF command and use *LIST for the joblog option. I think just SIGNOFF *LIST will work. Doing this will make sure that you have a record of all the commands processed during your job. For instance, installing Domino does a lot of background stuff with the RSTLICPGM command you have to use. If anything goofy happens you'll want a copy of the joblog to send to support.

UPDATE:

Thanks to César for a quick clarification to this tip:

I prefer the DSPJOBLOG OUTPUT(*PRINT), perhaps because I’m a developer or because I still use the same session for more things.

What I do not suggest is generate a joblog with the SIGNOFF *LIST when you’re removing Domino from your system, due to some functionality of the system I’ve seen “weird” things appear on the joblogs (you know, *MSGF is deleted and joblog is generated/built afterwards).

Regardless, make sure you get a joblog of the install/uninstall... :)

Great Weekend With Family

On Thursday night my wife and our 3 year old came to Kennesaw to look at houses with our wonderful realtor, Myra Brown! She's been extremely helpful! Anyway, I believe we have narrowed the field to just a few and are working on a contract for one! I knew once SWMBO (she who must be obeyed) came to look that she would be able to find what "we" needed... ;) She's on her way back now and I had a tremendously great time with them. We decided that house hunting wouldn't be too easy with a 3 month old, so it'll be about 2 weeks until I see OT when I head to Rock Hill this weekend. Till then I'll be hanging out in some free wi-fi spots... This Starbucks isn't too bad and the Strawberries & Cream was great for this hot day!

lol, I just overheard a lady say "There are things on that iPod I should be made fun of for, but that's not one of them!" Hope they don't look through mine... By the way, the new Dream Theater album is great and has been spinning a lot on my iPod this week. And I think I'm going to order the Rush of Fools disc. Should have done that while I was sitting here - duh! OK, I'm rambling - catch you all later!

For Those Of You Who Embed YouTube Videos...

Hat tip to the desiringGod blog for this one.

Because of a new YouTube feature, when you embed a video, your users can watch related videos on your site. This is, of course, risky for anyone who wants to be in control of the content of their site. (Wouldn't that be everyone?)

If you want to, you can disable it by adding &rel=0 to the end of the video's URL when you embed it.

That can be kind of scary if something "related" isn't exactly what you wanted to have other people see when at your site. Just the other night while at a Barnes & Noble looking at a magazine I saw where a seemingly orthodox preacher in New England somewhere (I think) was actually fired because of some links from his personal web site. It turns out that he had some links to some occult sites so that people could get information about certain groups. But from just a couple of clicks people at his site could order shirts, etc... from these groups. It appears that the church he was at saw this as something they didn't want visitors to their pastor's site to be able to do so easily.

The moral is, along with the YouTube issue above, that you should probably be aware of what you're linking to and what people may perceive about you.

Now Playing: "Repentance" by Dream Theater

Great First Week

Thanks to those of you who emailed or pinged me about my first week at Lotus 911! It went well - just getting accustomed to things and jumping in where I can. The team is awesome! Of course you all know about Nathan and Tim, but they're just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended!) there. I know I have a lot to learn from everyone and I'm glad to be able to dive right in. It's like a cool geek family (and it's wild knowing that if I need to ask Nathan or Tim something that I can just walk over to their stations - a little surreal).

On the personal front, it's a little tough being away from Jen and the kids during the week until we can all get back under the same roof, but we've seen some great "God things" happening that I hope to write about soon... They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I'm really beginning to see that. It's kind of wild.

I'll try not to be so slack here at the blog, but I've said that before!

POWER6

Sweet CPU announcement from IBM today - IBM kicks out energy-efficient 4.7GHz POWER6 processor. The new System i boxes we got this year are the Power5+ models clocking at around 2.2GHz. They are insanely powerful and fast - can't wait to see these in action!

"The device reportedly runs "twice as fast" and packs four times the cache as the POWER5, and boasts a processor bandwidth of 300Gbps....preliminary testing showed that all four of the 'most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix servers' were shattered by its CPU."

They will probably be introduced for the System p first and eventually make it to the System i. Time for another NotesBench record!

Sametime 7.5.1 Information Center

I have always* found the System i Information Center to be extremely helpful with information about the System i platform. In case you've missed it, there is now a Sametime 7.5.1 Information Center. It appears to be something that all Sametime admins can use for some great information.

* - OK, for those of you who used the i Info. Center before around V5R2, it was pretty bad. But after they got rid of the slow java menus and cleaned it up some more it is much better.

Congrats To The Moodys!

This weekend Chris Moody (the perpetual bridesmaid!)and Lottie got married! Congrats you two!! Here's a link to the Flickr tag I posted and below are three pics I really like followed by some stories.


Chris and Lottie's First Dance


Lottie, Chris, Jen, and Me (After an ordeal with getting Cocky to the wedding in humid Columbia, I changed out of the tux...)


Lottie, Cocky (Go Gamecocks!), and Chris

I've known Chris for about 10 years now! I remember him and Seth Dean coming into FCA their freshman year of college when I was helping out with worship. We lived in the same house my senior year. I had to be on campus early for BSU and was one of the few there when Chris came up early too. I helped him move in and we became really good friends that year. I put in a good word for him and we've been working together for the past 5.5 years and we've been really close the whole time. I'll miss him with the move, but I'm sure we'll be back up this way pretty frequently and will hang out with the Moodys.

This entire weekend was amazing. It was like a mini college reunion. We just had a wonderful time and I won't bore you with all of the details. It was a little sad too because I won't be seeing most of these friends for a long time. One of the highlights was being asked to play guitar accompanied by Billy Robinson. I've never actually played a wedding and we had to talk Billy out of retirement! Billy and I go way back - we were friends in high school and college roommates for 3 years! Who knows when we'll get to perform together again? :( He did a great job with the song and I believe I did too... :) It was a privilege to play for the Moodys on this most special day of their lives as they took communion together for the first time as husband and wife.

I guess about now they are in or nearing Hawaii - he pinged me to say they had a missed layover and were put about 4 hours back... Poor kids! It'll be worth it, I'm sure!

We love you guys!!! Congratulations again!!!!

My Big News!

As I've hinted at, I have some huge, exciting news to share!!

Beginning on May 29 I will start my new job with Lotus 911 as a Lotus Consultant!!! Thanks for the warm welcome Nathan!

This is a wonderful opportunity for my family and me. It will be a major shift for me moving from a position as an Admin/Developer for 7 years with a private sector company to a Consultant position. I am really looking forward to the challenge of that change as well as working with some great talent and wonderful folks!

My family will be in a transitional phase for a while as we will be moving from Rock Hill, SC to Kennesaw, GA. In honor of this and through peer pressure, my wife, Jen, has also started a blog! As a bit of background, I have always had the nickname "Nut" because of my last name. With that said, my wife's blog is "The Nut House" and as she posted in her first post, "watch out Bulldogs - family of nuts and Gamecock fans headed your way!"

Won't Be Making It to The VIEW 2007....

I was hoping to meet a lot of you there, but I won't be able to make it. More on that very soon!!! Big changes coming my way... :)

Sametime 7.5.1 Upgrade Failed

Guess I'll try again another day... I was upgrading on an i5/OS V5R4 box from 7.5 CF1. When I started it back up I got a "Meeting Server: Child Process Died". There were about 2 hits on the Lotus Support site that seemed to be close, but neither of the solutions worked. Well, one was to reinstall PASE but I was not at the server to load a CD and that didn't appear to be the problem anyway. I started the whole process at about 8:55 and was starting it back up initially at about 9:00. After looking into the error for a bit I called Lotus support and waited 30 minutes before even speaking to a human. I hung up with them after specifying a priority 1 (server down) and being told it was callback. This was about 10:30. At 11:00 I decided to uninstall 7.5.1 and reinstall 7.5. I'm back up now and haven't heard back from Lotus and the whole "up to 2 hours for a callback" wasn't floating my boat on something that should have only taken 10 minutes... :)

Have You Offset Your Carbon?

It seems that the latest rage is "carbon offsetting". This is where you can buy a credit (around $50 per year per vehicle) and something environmentally friendly will be done with that money (like planting a tree or preserving current forestation). Al Gore does offsets, so I guess anyone who wants to "live green" should be OK doing it too, right? :)

According to the Save the Planet website, six 25-year old pine trees can absorb 1 ton of CO2.

About 20 years ago, we planted about 1,000 pine trees on my parents' property:



This means that (when they are 25) they will absorb 166 tons of CO2 annually. My sedan accounts for about 4.6 tons and our SUV accounts for about 6.6 tons. So at 6 tons average per vehicle (depending on mileage, of course), the 1,000 trees we planted are more than covering the carbon footprint for all vehicles in my family. Actually, this covers about 27 vehicles per year until the trees are gone!

I just feel really good about myself knowing that I'm "green" as far as my vehicles go.... Hopefully you can see the humor in this - if not, then go out and find 6 pine trees to call your own so that you can live green too. That's a whole lot cheaper than buying a "green" car and it's officially sanctioned by our former VP!

Speaking of "green", I saw a car the other week with one of the "Live Green" banners on the bumper. Was it a Prius? Nope. It was a 1995 Mustang GT - the little V8 must be green, eh? ;) Maybe the lady found some pine trees!

Updated Sandbox Application

One of the first applications I downloaded from the Sandbox was the "Staff Whereabouts". It's basically an in-out board to see the status of a workgroup. We actually got the application to replace an AS/400 based! signout application. I have commented at the sandbox that I have reworked the ui and have web-enabled the application. I actually web-enabled it a while back. We only have one or two people that may use it on the web, so not much time was invested in it (it's mostly if you need to signout in a pinch). But about a month ago I completed changed the colors of the ui. It could stand for a complete overhaul, so forgive me if it still looks like a Notes application. :)

Here's what it looks like now:



If anyone's interested, post a comment. I don't want to link directly from here since it's not really my application.

Bella (The Movie)

Thursday night at the Thirsty07 Conference, we were treated to a screening of the movie Bella. Described at the website as "a heartwarming story about friendship, family and our capacity for love in the face of the unexpected," this film was the 2006 winner of the Toronto Film Festival. This puts it in some great company of past winners.

This is possibly the most moving film I've seen since "The Passion of the Christ." But don't just shrug it off as a "Christian" movie just because it was screened at Thirsty (or because I'm writing about it). It really is about our "capacity to love" and all people will benefit from it. The friendship between Jos and Nina is challenged and the way that they make it through is truly amazing and inspirational. I don't want to really talk about it here because the plot would be ruined. I will say, though, that this film has been worth it because two lives have already been saved!!

My Donation To The Lotus Museum

I "donated" the picture of Notes "Express", Release 3.30 for OS/2. Thankfully, I don't have to manage any more OS/2 boxes!

Four out of Five Complete

Whew... we've migrated 4 out of 5 of our physical iSeries servers over into LPARs on 2 physical System i boxes. The first server we migrated was our Domino cluster box and I started/completed that on 1/27/07. Since then we've migrated a dev server, Domino production box (twice...), and yesterday moved our MiMiX box. This last one will take longer as we have to migrate our entire user base from 5250 "Green Screen" to Webfacing.

This slow process will likely be why I don't post much new Domino content. But I'll try to come up with some stuff...

Now Playing: "Upon The Face of The Waters" by Tony Palacios

Lotus Museum

If you're in the mood to check out some of the history of Lotus, check out the new Lotus Museum. I've already made a donation and am waiting for it to show up online. I'm relatively new to Lotus, so this is a great site for me to brush up on some history.

I'm digging the Nurf Football and the Sametime Coaster is pretty nice! But the Captain's Hat is maybe the sweetest item!

So little time...

Heading to Alpharetta Tomorrow for Thirsty!

I'll be heading to Thirsty 2007 tomorrow with my wife and our worship leader, his wife, and their daughter. We went last year and it was awesome. It's a really refreshing conference with a tremendous focus on Worship. Can't wait!

I'll have my corporate mail off, so gmail me if you want at chris.whisonant.

Now Playing: "Peace" by Third Day

eBibleicious

I've added the eBibleicious script to my blog. This means that any scripture references will automatically be hyperlinked. I have chosen to use the ESV Translation that will display in a window when you hover the mouse. Check out these:

John 1:1
John 21:25
Acts 8:20-24

LCTY in Raleigh Yesterday

I was able to make it to the Lotusphere Comes To You event hosted by Lotus 911 yesterday in Raleigh, NC. I was able to meet Nathan and Tim. During the morning session, there was a meeting/revival being held by American Baptist churches. It's a historically black denomination, so there was some soul filled (and filling) gospel music going on next door during the morning sessions. Good stuff!

The Lotus information was really good as well. I'm guessing there were about 40-50 people there in the morning session. Nathan asked how many of them had downloaded the Notes 8 client and maybe a dozen raised their hands! This was great - especially compared to the ONE person he said raised a hand at the Hartford event earlier in the week. As an admin, there is some great stuff coming in Domino 8 and Domino "Next". In Domino "Next", you can get rid of Notes ID files if you wish and potentially even authenticate against AD or LDAP.

I had to straighten Nathan out once after a session. There were a couple of ladies who were not Notes customers and Nathan confused them by referring to a Notes "Application" as a "Database"! What were you thinking?!? :)

Quickr integration is going to be excellent - check out this video.

Now Playing: "Dirty Pool" by Stevie Ray Vaughan

I'm A Soccer Monster

EG "The Soccer Monster", originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Yesterday Emma Grace and I got out her soccer ball. She kept running around saying "I'm a soccer monster." I had no clue where she got that, but after googling the phrase, it turns out it's from The Backyardigans. We had a blast!!

Unresponsive Sametime Server And Its Effect On Other Servers

Right when we were about to leave yesterday, we got two helpdesk calls. One was from a user who couldn't open a document in a web app. The second was from a user who couldn't open DWA. So, we asked if it was OK for me to look at the code for the app (there was what appeared to be a JS error from the onload event) and we had the DWA user login to the old school webmail. Two random calls, right?

When I got home I was paged with a problem that nobody could get into DWA. So I tried and it didn't work for me either. Just a white screen trying to load. The first rule of server troubleshooting is to check the console. So, I did this and I saw this message sporadically: "Error connecting to server IM/ORG: Remote system no longer responding". Well, I know that DWA has integrated chat and I recalled that as my Notes 8 Basic was shutting down at the office the "Connecting..." message was in my Sametime status. I didn't think anything of it at the time - I thought it was just because I was closing the client. But at home I checked the console of the Sametime server. Everything seemed fine. All of the tasks were running, but we couldn't talk to it from other servers. So I shut down that Domino partition and viola!, DWA began working. I fired Sametime back up and it was all good.

I later recalled that the web app also uses STLinks to allow chatting with the document owner. So, this unresponsive Sametime server caused DWA to fail as well as web apps using STLinks. Gotta love it!

BES Down - EVERYWHERE

In case you haven't heard, this may keep some of you BES admins from troubleshooting today. Last night the entire BES infrastructure went down...

And it's still down as of this posting! At least it appears to be for us.

A Milestone for Ollie

Congrats to my 1 month old. At 11 pounds, he has now surpassed my Les Paul's weight of 10 Pounds! :)

Speaking of Ollie, here's a recent picture of him doing what he does best...

Ollie Sleeping (1 Month), originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

What's Up In Lotus Land?

It's been a while since I've posted anything about Lotus. We're actually not doing a lot of exciting stuff with Lotus right now - as far as projects go. Our main project is just System i-related. We're migrating our user base from 5250 to Webfacing. Should be loads of fun! It will be a big adjustment for the users. We're running very well on our new System i - great performance!! Once we get all System i users to the web, we will move them into an LPAR on the same box as our Domino server.

I've been using the Notes 8 client all the time. Even NOMAD (though it's not "supported" yet, you can manually run nlnotes.exe as long as you make sure the 3rd line in the notes.ini points to the proper drive letter).

I've posted 17 main topics in the Beta forum. That's about the 7th most main topic posts from what I can count. There are no gotchas for my environment yet. Though I'm waiting on more feedback on a line that crashes the client when opening a datab....umm, application, and I've been assured that an install issue will be corrected. There is a lot of great feedback in the forum if you haven't been able to keep in the loop.

A few cool things I've seen in 8 are:
- Tabbed chatting with embedded Sametime 7.5.1 (should be in the connect client build too). Some known ui issues with it, but it works - tabbed chatting was one of the first things I thought would have been in 7.5.
- Mail template - beautiful!
- DWA 8 - the UI parity with the mail template is much better. It looks a lot more like the Notes client than previous iterations.
- Productivity Tools - these are very nice to have right from the client. Hopefully in the 8.0.1 timeframe they will be more of the Office killer that they have the potential to become. There are a few things that were already being addressed before Beta 2 was even released.
- ALT-F-T-D ('nuff said, right Nathan?) OK, so this isn't "cool", but leave this keyboard combination to the professionals! It's not your mother's ALT-F-T-D
- I also love that the spare memory in my computer is now being more fully utilized! ;)

States I've Visited

Looks like I need to get out west a little more. In June I'll be making it to Boston, so Massachusetts will be checked off... And I have a feeling that I may make it to Texas sometime to visit friends. Well, my wife will make it sometime probably.



create your own personalized map of the USA
or write about it on the open travel guide

If I Was There

One of my favorite Tourniquet songs is "If I Was There". I always wanted to perform it in church with a video or images from Good Friday. Back in college, I sang this song and played the electric lead at the end while the other BSU worship leader played the acoustic. Today I stumbled upon a moving YouTube video with footage from The Passion of The Christ.

Chris Said What I Was About To Post This Morning...

Trackback to Chris Byrne's post Should Imus Be Fired? He said basically what I have been looking for time to post. Specifically, being so close to North Carolina, I want to know when the demagogues will be coming back to apologize to the exonerated Duke students. Now I don't need to find much time to post because Chris pretty much said what I feel and more. Good post!

People Who Went To My College

I thought I would fill you in on a couple of people from my Alma Mater - North Greenville University (it was a College when I graduated in 2000). The first two have made a bit of news recently and the last few are more personal...

First, Chris Sligh, of this season's American Idol attended North Greenville. We wish him the best in his musical career. I'm sure that American Idol will be a huge step in his career.

Second, and of greater global importance than a singer (no offense, Chris), is Mike McConnell. Who is this? He's the man who, on February 20, was sworn in by President Bush as the second ever Director of National Intelligence. Under the Clinton Administration, he was director of the NSA. Of course, he attended NGC in the 60's (64 I think) when it was a Junior College.

Third are Jake and Jen Wade. We all attended NGC at the same time but were only acquaintances (and it was before they were "Jake and Jen" too). On April 1, Jen went to be stationed with Jake - who joined the Army last year. My wife and I were able to become really great friends with them when we started going to church with them in February, 2005. We will miss them deeply, but we know that God has a great plan for them. It will be tough being so far away from great friends (especially for my wife and Jen), but our friendship will be stronger than the miles.

Finally, Jon Barbee was my suite-mate for 2 years at NGC. He's just accepted the call as a youth pastor at a church here in Rock Hill. So it will be great to have him and his wife Brandy (also an alum) move up here! He started on April 1.

That's all for now!

New Iron

We moved our production mail, application, and Sametime environment from our iSeries 820 to a new System i 570+ (again). Let's just say that scheduled agents that took about 7 minutes to run with no load now take 50 seconds to run under full load on a Monday... :)

Another Moody Picture

Sorry pal, you opened yourself up to this one. I would like to introduce the next in a series of Moody photos... Except this one didn't require photshopping!
I now present to you... Chris Moody with his manbag (it's even pink!):

Pics from G307!

IMG00263, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Unfortunately, I couldn't take my camera in, but I did have my Pearl! So, here are some pics. These were the best of the best. This picture is of Satch, Gilbert, and Petrucci jamming in their collaborative set. It was an amazing show!! Mike Portnoy played drums for Petrucci and Dave LaRue was on bass for Petrucci and Satch. I think Petrucci said it best when he introduced LaRue and Portnoy - even though there are only three of them on stage, LaRue and Portnoy made it sound like a train was coming through! When Satch played "Satch Boogie" a guy beside me said that he's been waiting 20 years to hear that song live! So it sounds like Satch hasn't come to this area in a LONG time - I'm so glad I was able to witness this! Great show guys!!

The entire photo set can be found here.

Taking Dad's Car to G3!

Should be a fun trip on this beautiful day in SC in this little car... :)

Got My PCLP!

I guess it's actually my "IBM Certified Advanced System Administrator - Lotus Notes and Domino 7". I finally took the "Notes/Domino 7 Configuring Domino Web Servers" exam this morning! So that's out of my way now. I put off taking it for a while for some reason...

In other news, it's been rather slow on the Lotus front for me. I've been testing out the Notes 8 Client a good bit and have found a couple of minor issues with some custom apps in our shop. I just found out that an SPR was created on one of the issues I reported. Overall, it's really great! I even like the "old school" Notes 8 Basic edition. It has some nice updates to graphics, etc... The new personal address book template is really clean too! Very nice.

Pic of the day

We're all doing great!!!

I Was Quoted In Computerworld

I'm quoted in the Computerworld article "Notes fans hope upgrade ends e-mail client's ugly-duckling status". Update: In my earlier haste, I forgot to mention that Nathan Freeman and John Head were also quoted in the article.

At the point of the article when the apparently poor performance of the Outlook 2007 client is being mentioned, they put in the following quote from me:

Chris Whisonant, a senior systems administrator at Comporium Communications, a telecommunications service provider in Rock Hill, S.C., said the increased functionality in Notes 8 means that the upgrade "does use more RAM than before." But Whisonant said that Notes 8 "is easy to get used to because you just like using it more."

I did say that more RAM is used, but only in passing. In fact, that was possibly the only negative statement I made in my e-mail to Computerworld. Note 8 is very impressive - both the Basic and Standard clients. Sure there is more overhead, but there is a ton more functionality! It's a great article for Notes. I just wish that they had put the short paragraph I sent them about performance instead of just the sentence. Here's what I sent them:

Even though this is still a beta (please keep that in mind) with debug code and some kinks to work out, it still runs very well and I haven't noticed too much of a difference from my 7.0.2 client I previously had installed. But it does use more RAM than before. At the same time, it has a lot more functionality so that offsets the jump in system requirements.

Notes 8 should be a great .0 release after some more tweaking. If you want to see some of the other things I've written about the client, check out some of my posts at the Public Beta forum.

Welcome Oliver Thomas!!

Ollie was born at 11:54 today. He was 8 pounds 9 ounces and 22 inches! Mom and baby are great!

Happy Pi Day

Todays date is 3.14, at least in America, for those of you who do dates wrong, happy 14.3 day!

Gmail Down?

My wife was complaining that her gmail is down too, so I tried their SSL version:

https://mail.google.com/mail/

This takes a little longer to load and you'll have to accept a certificate, but it lets us in...

Sola Scriptura by Neal Morse

The new Neal Morse album, Sola Scriptura, is nothing less than spectacular. It's based off the life of Martin Luther - the title is one of the "Solas" of the Reformation meaning that "Only Scripture" should be our guide. The back of the CD insert has the Latin text of the first 6 phrases of Luther's 95 Theses. Before getting into the musical aspects of this album, I would like to post some of the lyrics that really stand out to me. First, Jeff posted the tracks back in January. There are only 4 tracks on this epic:

* The Door (29:14)
* The Conflict (25:00)
* Heaven In My Heart (5:11)
* The Conclusion (16:34)

The Content
Some lyrics from the section "Mercy for Sale" in "The Door" really get to the heart of what Martin Luther was battling - especially with Indulgences:

In the name of God you must pay your penance
If you don't well that's a crime
If you want to buy your way to heaven
We'll indulge you every time

Also from "Upon The Door" in the same track, we have:

Sometimes comes a moment when there is no escape
A man by candlelight reads "The just shall live by faith"
And a rushing ray of light comes and hits him at the core
I will write my words upon the door

History is hinged on him playing out the role
The dawn is coming after the dark night of the soul
This simple act has changed our world forever more
I will write my words upon the door
I will write my words upon the door

In the section "Underground" in "The Conflict", we have the following - and we should all be thankful that Luther translated the Bible into German because that opened the way for us to have English Bibles:

I thought I was coming to die
And that's what they're thinking outside
But I will stay lost
'Til it's safe there to be found

Writing the book in the day
In words that my people can say
Here I will stay tucked away
I'm underground

And I'll just leave you with the section "In Closing" from "The Conclusion":

God can change the world with just one willing soul
Who will stand up for the truth and give him a starring role
So come in to the fullness and open up the door
Maybe it is you he's looking for
Maybe it is you he's looking for......

The Music
If you're familiar with Neal Morse's prior works, this is very much like those. "The Door" starts off with heavy keys and then gets into the powerful lyrics. Mike Portnoy's drumming is awesome throughout and the fills he adds really make the songs. As I mentioned in my previous post about G307, Paul Gilbert is really amazing with his solos. The fills at about 16:00 into "The Conflict" and the solo at 27:00 in are superb! After the powerful first song that's over 29 minutes, one feels like an entire album has been covered with the various styles. And then "The Conflict" starts with a really crunchy guitar intro. Then the usual prog-rock style comes back and about 14:00 in we come to an amazing flamenco classical guitar part delivered by Gilbert. The next song "Heaven In My Heart" could almost be a radio song if it could be separated from the remainder of the album. It's still a really good prog song but it's fairly slow. With so many different sections in the first 2 songs, we've already run the gamut from fast to slow, heavy to soft, and even classical. It's extremely eclectic! "The Conclusion" starts off with "Randy's Jam" - a bass led section featuring Randy George. It's pretty wild - I need to listen to it on my system with a subwoofer! The rest of the album continues the theme of great rocking prog!

Like I said earlier, this album is really spectacular and you should check it out! At the end of the liner notes we find this from Neal:

Also, I am not trying to point to only one church that needs to be reformed, but rather that we should ALL look at the scriptures afresh to see what truth God wants to restore in THIS generation! If Luther brought back salvation by faith; the Wesleys brought sanctification, and the Pentecostals restored the baptism of the Holy Ghost, what is there for US to restore? Remember, the latter house shall be greater than the former!

Satriani, Petrucci, and Gilbert - G307

I just found out yesterday that G307 starts this week!! Better yet, I found out that it's coming to the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach. Since that's the weekend of our Easter production at church, I have to be at church Saturday and Sunday mornings. That means that Saturday afternoon I'm off to Myrtle Beach and then back after the show!!

Satriani has always been a guitar hero of mine. I have a number of his albums and had a cat named Satch! Petrucci is, of course, of Dream Theater fame. Just search this blog for Dream Theater and you'll see tons of posts with them in the "Now Playing" section! The OLP guitar I had was very close to Petrucci's MusicMan guitar. It wasn't the licensed Petrucci model, but I did replace the pickups with those like Petrucci used. But it's no Les Paul!! Paul Gilbert, of Mr. Big fame, has his own solo guitar album now. Oh, and he plays on Neal Morse's album (see "Now Playing"). The solo at 27 minutes into "The Door" on Sola Scriptura as well as the Flamenco section at 12 minutes into "The Conflict" on the same album both demonstrate why he's on G307! Should be an amazing show!

Now Playing: "The Conflict" by Neal Morse

Downloading Notes 8

It's going at a smooth 50 KB/sec on my cable modem and I'm only at 15%. I may get to it later! And yes, Greg, you can get a copy of it next week! :) But, wow, 638 MB for the client. Wow!

The Golf Course I Live On...

...will be no more:



It was just a 12 hole par 3 that I only played twice, but they're starting the process of tearing it down. In the top half of the picture, there used to be a lot of really big trees - they are no more! A developer is going to be putting in about 300 units. About half of the units will be townhomes, and the majority of the other houses will be around 1,500 square feet. And then about 10-20 homes that will be around 3,000 square feet. We know that 10 are supposed to back up to the homes across the street from me. These are bigger than our homes and will probably do good for our property values.

A Quick Update

After we got our new System i up, it went back down that same day (Tuesday). So on Wednesday IBM came back down and swapped out the backplane on the tower in question. The server has stayed powered up since then. Maybe we'll move our Domino data back over to it in a few weeks.

I would move the data this weekend, but we have two guys out next week and on Thursday they are supposed to induce my wife!

Picture of the Day

I took this pic with my Pearl of a dvd-ram we opened from IBM. Notice how it is stapled... Nice QA job!

My Electric Guitars

I only have 2 electric guitars and got around to taking some decent pics the other day, so here they are!
My '04 Gibson Les Paul Standard (bought new in May '06):



My '04 Standard with her older brother - a '97 Jackson Performer PS-4 bought in December '97 (I added a Duncan 59 PAF in the neck position, Duncan George Lynch Screamin' Demon in the bridge position and a Mini Screamin' Demon in the middle position - I want to find a good single coil for the middle, though...I was experimenting with the "triple bucker" sound.)

This Is Why Our System i Was Failing

After nearly 18 hours of continuous downtime troubleshooting, we found the culprit with IBM. Since there was something pointing to a perceived power failure being the problem, IBM decided to isolate the specific frame that was the issue. But we had to find it first. Since we have two 570 system units and 6 0595 expansion towers in the rack, that would take a lot of power ups and downs. This morning IBM decided to disconnect the SPCN cables from the 570 system units and we were able to power up the box. After eventually isolating it to the second expansion tower (via multiple power up attempts focused on daisy-chaining towers), we isolated it to having something to do with the 2nd tower.

We already banked on having to simply replace the backplane on one of the towers, so we had a backplane en-route. But when one of the IBM techs opened the tower and removed the power supplies, he saw this wedged underneath the power supply against the T14 9-pin connector (this is the connector that a UPS can connect to which alert the system of a power loss...):



This is one of the 4 small electro-static insulators that are placed around the opening of the hole through which the power cable connects to the power supply. Apparently there was enough contact to short out the connector and alert the system of a power loss. And it's been up for about 5 hours now...

WOW!

24!

No, I'm not talking about the TV show - the one I missed last night! I'm talking about the number of hours I've been awake now... Saturday night we moved our production Domino data over to our new System i 570. Things were wonderful when we left - everything checked out.

Then we came in Monday morning to find that the entire server was powered off. Since 9:30 PM Sunday night. So we turned it back on and it came up well. Then Monday evening at about 5:30 it powered off again! My manager called me about 6:30 pm to check on it and we both headed on over because this time it wouldn't power up... And all night it hasn't powered up. We've had IBM technicians here since about 10 pm and they've been on the phone with L3 product engineers. We can't figure it out yet and I just threw back over to the data from our old server. So it's replicating back from our cluster and everything seems to be running along smoothly so far. I'll be up for many more hours I'm sure...

For those interested, we've been thinking it's the FSP (Flexible Service Processor), but it doesn't appear that's the problem. I'm not sure if it's something in the backplane (motherboard) or one of the main 570 units. But, as always, I'll let you know!

I'm going to THE VIEW Lotus Developer 2007

Who out there is going or speaking? I hope to meet up with some of you! I've never been to this conference, but I've been told that it's really great and I need a good kick in the dev... I've never been to Boston, either. That should be fun too! I'll be flying up on that Sunday afternoon.

Let me know if you're going!

500th Post!

Just saying hi! Wow, in just over 2 years I have 500 posts here. Thanks to all of my readers. I hope you have a great weekend - I get to migrate 3 Domino servers to new hardware! :)

Think Long and Hard Before Upgrading to 7.0.2 FP1

Unless you're in dire straits for some fixes in 7.0.2 FP1, I urge you to really think about whether you upgrade.

Well, that's the word on the street...

When I migrate from our old System i to our new one on Saturday, I will not be using 7.0.2FP1 with a hotfix like I have on my current box but will use 7.0.2 with my hotfix. I'll manually do the java updates for DST. I'm not one who would generally recommend to not upgrade, but in our environment it's been suggested to me on two separate support calls that I may wish to remove FP1...

Quick Tip for System i Domino Shops (SnTT)

One important thing that System i shops have to keep in mind for Domino is making sure that the owner of all Domino data objects is the user QNOTES. In the past this has been a little difficult because you would have to specify each subdirectory in the path with the CHGOWN command.

But that has changed with Version 5 Release 4 of i5/OS. There is a new SUBTREE parameter for the CHGOWN command.

We have 3 Domino Partitions on one of our System i boxes. The data directories are similar to the following:

/LOTUS/DOMINO/servera
/LOTUS/DOMINO/serverb
/LOTUS/DOMINO/serverc

Now, if I want to make sure that QNOTES is the owner of all of the objects in all of the data directories, I just have to issue the following command:

CHGOWN OBJ('/LOTUS/DOMINO') NEWOWN(QNOTES) SUBTREE(*ALL)

Now Playing: "Seven Days Into Nevermore" by Balance of Power

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

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

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.

Technorati: Jesus Tomb, James Cameron

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!!

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.

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

Six Degrees of Global Warming

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

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!!

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...

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?

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

My Valentine's Day Date

"A Date With Daddy" Valentine's Day!

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? :)

How Many of Me Are There?

HowManyOfMe.com

There 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

Snow in SC!

Lotusphere 2007 Poll

For those of you at Lotusphere, does Nomad work on the kiosks?

Technorati: Lotusphere 2007

Domino on 64-Bit Hardware

The Lotusphere Deployments, Performance, & Interoperability (DPI) Lab Blog posted Friday about Domino and 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit and Teraspace topics. Being a System i Lotus Nut, I have posted about this topic before: here, here, and here.

According to the DPI blog, Domino runs on the following 64-bit platforms as a 32-bit application:
* AIX
* Solaris
* Linux on zSeries
* Linux x86_64 (Technote #1231920)
* Windows 2003 x64 Edition (requires 7.0.1 and higher)

But then they state that Domino is actually a 64-bit application as it runs on i5/OS. However, from the first comment it appears that this is going to be coming in the future. My understanding is that Domino is only a 32-bit application in its current iterations, but will be ported to 64-bit in Domino 8(.0.1) (but will also have a 32-bit port). So this DPI blog post was somewhat vague until the 2nd paragraph of the first comment (unless I've missed something) when we read "When 64-bit support for Domino becomes available, Domino for i5/OS will also change to use the i5/OS 64-bit pointer and teraspace support."

Regardless, the post also states that "i5/OS only runs on 64-bit hardware and has been enabled for 64-bit for a long time. i5/OS also provides 128-bit pointer capability." Yes, you read that correctly - i5/OS runs with 128-bit pointers! If you read the quote below, you will see that when the AS/400 (System i) architects were designing the RISC processor-based system, they were going to use a full 96-bit address space back in 1990!! but actually decided to scale it back when they went the PowerPC route! Some of these other Operating Systems (Windows and *NIX) have come to the game rather late.

The best quote from my posts is from my second link above which I'll quote again here. This is from an old book I have here at the office titled Inside the AS/400 by Frank G. Soltis. I have the edition from way back in 1997:

"The AS/400 is the first and only system in the world to have completed the transition to 64-bit computing.... The challenge for the computer industry is how to enable existing software to take advantage of the new hardware designs. The AS/400 is the only system to have met this software challenge - all AS/400 applications are fully 64-bit enabled. No one else is even close.... In contrast, the AS/400's technology-independent architecture protects the system's customers and ISVs from such disruptions as they move to the new 64-bit RISC processors. Existing application software can immediately use the full capabilities of the new hardware." (Inside the AS/400, pp. 1-2)

Then on page 206 we find this:

"Our original RISC processor that we started to design in 1990, which we called C-RISC (the C was for commercial), had a 96-bit address. We had the room for this large address in the pointers and decided to go all the way. When we decided to use the PowerPC architecture in 1991, we scaled the address back to 64 bits."

Help With A NOMAD Issue

One of my readers has asked me about an issue he's having with NOMAD. Has anyone seen this or do know anyone who has? (Or can you ask anyone at Lotusphere?) Here are some details from email exchanges:

- Windows XP SP 2 and Windows 2003 SP 1, same behaviour.
- All the USB sticks are of the same brand and model, SanDisk Micro Cruzer 2GB. (This is the same model I have but in the 512MB size.)
- I've tried to format the sticks but still the same so I don't suspect the sticks can cause this on their own. The only other suspect would be Notes but I cannot figure out anything that can cause this, I've check all the files create under the NOMAD installation and cannot find anything remotely to cause this.
- I was just assuming here, that Notes might be related because Notes on USB will remove the icon on the desktop once you stop it.
- The only time all the desktop icons, start menu shortcuts and quick launch shortcuts disappeared immediately was when the USB stick was unplugged.
- When removing a USB stick empty or containing other data, either by just unplugging it or by ejecting it first, this never happens.
- I can only reproduce the whole scenario with Notes install on the USB stick.

Now Playing: "Into A New Dimension" by Divinefire

Domino Designer in Eclipse

Looks like Domino Designer is going to get ported to Eclipse... :) I suppose this will be announced this week (or have I missed something)? Thanks for the small screenshot Maureen!

Surprise Birthday Party

Since she knew I would be expecting it next year for my 30th, my wife put together a surprise party for me last night. I was definitely surprised. My brother - funny guy that he is - got me an Uptown Bill doll. You'll just have to click the link - lol. I had a great time - thanks honey!!

Speaking of President Clinton, my wife got me a lot of books from a discount/used bookstore in town. A lot of them were political and there were a few religious. One of the books was "Slick Willie": Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton. I started flipping through it last night after everyone left and saw that it was actually printed in 1993 - before any of the scandals that came up during his White House terms! The chapter on Hillary Clinton was rather revealing too.

One of the other books was Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation from 1984 by President Reagan. The text written by Mr. Reagan was actually just an essay and can still be found in its entirety at The Human Life Review's website. I started reading some of it this morning and the foreword by J.P. McFadden states that Dr. C. Everett Koop "warned long ago that infanticide would follow closely after abortion because it would be 'justified' for the same reasons." The sad thing is that, 20 years later, we don't have to worry too much about infanticide because of how far technology has progressed. With karyotype tests, which we elect to not even have, doctors can check for Down syndrome during pregnancy. And 92% of those pregnancies are terminated if the test(s) returns positive. Forget infanticide, we'll just take care of "the problem" during the pregnancy!! And what of the false positives? I know of a man who said the doctors told them that their child would have Down syndrome and that the doctor recommended the termination of the pregnancy. Two years later, the man said, the child is a normal, healthy, smart 2 year-old!

Now Playing: "God of Wrath" by David Crowder Band

Sorry for no posts...

It's been almost a week! Nothing much going on for me in Lotus land right now. Just moving users to the Notes 7.0.2 Client and preparing to fire up our new System i boxes! Finally got some UPS stuff straightened out and power is being pulled tomorrow.

Oh, and I believe I have contributed to an OpenNTF project (not as a chef - just a taste-tester). Vince Schuurman (et. al.) have released OpenNTF Mail Experience 702b. He posted about one of the new features I'm pretty excited about. I may even roll out the template because of this addition! It's the "Memo size restriction" feature. Users and admins can set a preference or Notes.ini parameter for the maximum size of an email. I posted the following at Vince's site:

I've thought of doing this before, but never got around to it. As an admin, I think we should be able to have this as a "policy" that users cannot edit. Of course, if it's an ini parm, we can set it via desktop policies and the users wouldn't know where to change it anyway.

We have a 50MB email limit, but I still have people trying to send 75-100 MB+ files in their email. The problem is that if you can send it and then get a failure from the router, then the message is still in your sent items.

Also, the message is not only in your Sent items, but the delivery failure from the Router contains the attachment as well!

Regarding my "contribution" to the project, Vince was asking for verbiage for the error message and apparently liked my suggestion (which was just an expansion of his suggested message). I have downloaded the template but haven't looked to see if I made it officially! ;) My suggestion was:

Sorry, this document is 5343 KB. This is larger than the allowed size of 1024 KB. Please review the size and number of attachments to make this document smaller.

30 Minus 1

On Wednesday, January 17, I will be 29! If we weren't a base-10 system next year wouldn't really matter too much.

How Have The 7 People Responded With The "5 Things"?

I tagged 5 people in my initial post and 2 more in another.

I have seen 5 responses so far:

Chris
Bryan
Greg
Chad
Phil

Update: I finally have seen Ray's 5 things, and they are here... :)

But, I have not heard from Angus yet, but he has AS/400 Syndrome!!

New Open Source BlackBerry Site!

I just listened to the latest Taking Notes Podcast regarding BlackBerry development. This was a really good Podcast. Bruce and Julian are doing a great job - keep it up!!

In the Podcast we learn of a new Open Source BlackBerry applications site that is similar to OpenNTF. It is openCOD.org - check it out!

How To String A Guitar

The following PDF is one that I created as an easily printable reference from the steps at this website. I take no credit except for making the PDF.

From the author:

When customers come to me complaining of tuning problems, improperly wound strings are the number one culprit. If the string is not properly wound around the tuners post it will slip, when you loose tension you loose tuning. This is also the reason locking tuners were created...to reduce string slippage at the tuners by gripping the string firmly (of vital importance to tremolo users).
If you wind your strings as shown you will have much of the advantage that comes with locking tuners.

PDF: 5 Step Guide To Winding Strings Properly Around The Tuner

There goes that theory for stem cells!

Let's really hope that there is some promise to this...

A Source of Stem Cells Without Controversy?

"Dr. Anthony Atala, of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who led the current research, writes:

It has been known for decades that both the placenta and amniotic fluid contain multiple progenitor cell types from the developing embryo, including fat, bone, and muscle.

We asked the question, ‘Is there a possibility that within this cell population we can capture true stem cells?’ The answer is yes."

TAG, You're It!

Since I've posted my 5 things, I can tag anyone else...

OK, you guys asked for it, so Ray and Phil, what do we not know about you??

Now Playing: "Closer" by Charlie Hall