Real World Computing

How to Adjust the timing on a Subtitle SRT file using Subtitle Workshop 4

2011-10-19T21:19:00.000+11:00

In a previous post, I discussed ways to find subtitles to add to your AVI movies and I also looked at using Google Translate to modify them if they weren't in English (or your chosen language).

Note: All of the software mentioned here is free.

See: Finding and Adjusting Subtitles on AVI Files.

In this post I want to look at how to change the timing on subtitles.

Why would you need to do this?
Movies have different frame rates depending upon the country that they are shown in and the system they are shown on. Common frame rates are 23, 25 and 29 frames per second. You'd be surprised how quickly subtitles can get out of whack if they're designed for the wrong frame rate.

Find the Start and End of the Dialogue.
Open your movie in a player, like the excellent VideoLAN (VLC Media Player) and locate the first and last sentences in the movie. You'll find the time in the bottom right hand corner of the player - make a note of it.

Adjusting the Subtitle File
Open the Subtitle File in Subtitle Workshop 4 and check the first and last line in the file. They should be the same lines as in the movie. Sometimes the author of the subtitle will put their name in the file as the first or last entry - if this is the case, you'll have to remove those lines or they'll upset the timing.

From the menu, choose Edit, Select all (or Ctrl + A)
the Edit, Timings, Adjust Subtitles (Ctrl + B)
You'll be presented with a dialog box.
Choose the simple tab and adjust the timings on the first and last line to what you wrote down earlier.
Click the button marked Adjust.

That's it. It's that easy.

Just save your subtitle file (Ctrl + S) and then exit subtitle workshop.

Notes and Domino 8.5.3 are out...

2011-10-06T14:39:00.003+11:00

The Server

I've upgraded our test server from 8.5.2 to 8.5.3 and it took slightly under 5 minutes. Now that's what I call a good server upgrade (are you listening Microsoft???)

Anyway, so far, so good, everything seems to be working but then I haven't done a whole lot of testing yet.

The Client

My client took 21 minutes to upgrade from 8.5.2 to 8.5.3, which felt like a long time. It also came back a little weird and some views didn't populate immediately. Refreshing them made a big difference.

Again, so far, so good (mostly).

Unfortunately I lost the ability to click on a URL and have it launch my default browser (Chrome). Instead, it pops up Notepad (weird!!) and a bizarre little message.

The filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect.

I'm on a 64 bit Windows 7 Professional PC and Chrome is located in;

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

I've already checked my HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\http\shell\open\command key in the registry and it says;

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" "%1"

The related keys look fine too.

If I switch to the browser embedded in the Notes client, it works, but then when I switch back to my Operating System's default browser, it opens Notepad.

I decided to make Firefox, then Safari my default browsers and they worked properly, then when I made Chrome the default again, somehow the problem got fixed.

It's a trap to look out for.

Finding and Adjusting Subtitles on AVI files

2011-08-31T23:53:00.002+10:00

If you enjoy watching foreign films or if you're hard of hearing like me, then subtitles are a must in your movie collection. In my last post, I covered how to convert movies from DVD to AVI for playing on a portable player. In this post, I'll be discussing subtitles.

There are two types of subtitles, burned in and selectable. Obviously the selectable type is best because you can turn them on and off and you can obtain different languages too. Within the selectable type, there are a few formats with the most common being sub/idx files, txt files and my personal favourite, SRT files.

In order to get your subtitles to play in players like VLC VideoLAN and on player boxes like the WD TV box, you'll usually need to put the subtitles in the same folder as the AVI and name them the same. So if you movie is called "Return of the Scary Kittens.avi" then your subtitle should be called "Return of the Scary Kittens.srt". Some players allow you to have multiple subtitle streams by including language codes near the end of the file name (eg: "Return of the Scary Kittens.eng.avi") but if you only have one, it's best to name it the same.

Finding Existing Subtitle Streams online

Why build something that already exists right? You can search for your subtitles online. First though, you need to find out the frame rate of your movie. Right-mouse click on your avi file and choose properties. Click on the Summary Tab and look at the frame rate, it will usually be 23, 25 or 29 frames per second.

Next; try a search on Podnapsi (http://www.podnapisi.net/) to see if there are any subtitles in your chosen language. If you get a few results, pay careful attention to;

(a) The number of frames per second and

(b) the number of people who have downloaded it. (the more the better).

If possible, simply download your SRT file, rename it carefully and put it in the same folder as the AVI.

If you can't find the subtitles on Podnapsi, do a wider google search for; SRT ENG "My Movie Name". This is often also quite successful.

Extracting Subtitles from a DVD

Assuming that you've already ripped your VOB file (as described in the AVI conversion procedure), you can rip the subtitle from the VOB. The freeware you need to download is subrip (from: http://www.subrip.fr.st/). There's no install for this software, simply download and extract it. You can then open a VOB file and you'll be prompted to answer some questions. Since subtitles are OCRed, you'll have to provide a sample of each of the common letters.

If you make a silly mistake like I did, it will make a mess. I said that open bracket "(" was "( BIRDS CHIRPING )" not realizing that I was being prompted only for a single character. Don't worry, you can always open the SRT file in a text file later and do a search and replace.

The Foreign Option

If you really can't find any subtitles in your language, try a language that is close (for example, French is reasonably close to English) and download the subtitle file. Next, go to Google Translator toolkit (http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload) and upload your file. It only takes a few mouse clicks to convert the entire file to your language and download it.

Sure, conversations they sound like yoda sometimes - but they're better than nothing.

Resychning Subtitles

The final thing that you may find yourself needing to do is to resynch subtitles. You need to do this when the subtitles occur too soon before (or too late after) the actual spoken parts of the movie. If this happens to you, play the movie carefully in VLC and make a careful note of the time count when the speaking commences.

Next, close the AVI file and open the SRT file in the freeware Subtitle Workshop (http://www.urusoft.net/home.php?lang=1). Highlight all of the subtitles but scroll to makes sure that you can see the particular line of dialog you mentioned earlier. With all entries highlighted, press Ctrl+Shift+N to shift the time backwards and Ctrl+Shift+H to shift forwards.

When you think it's done, click save and retest the subtitles.

That's it, now you can have subtitles for your movie even if the ones on the original DVD weren't in your chosen language or were not properly synchronised. I will quite often add subitltes for movies in the AVI stage when manufacturers don't bother to make them available on the purchased item.

Converting DVDs to Good Quality AVI Files - Part 2 (The Procedure)

2011-08-15T14:48:00.000+10:00

Forget the why and wherefores of what we're doing - That's part one which you can read here.

Lets get started;

Ingredients

A computer with a large hard drive 20GB Free? Pentium 4 3GHz or Faster and a DVD drive
A copy of DVD Decrypter - it's free
A copy of AutoGK - it's free

DVD Decrypter

http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/

This software allows you to copy the files from a DVD to your hard drive. The project was shut down some years back but it's still possible to get hold of it on the internet.

An alternative to this is DVD Fab. There's a free version and a commercial version. The difference between the two is that the commercial version handles more DVD protection schemes. http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm

AutoGK

http://www.autogk.me.uk/

AutoGK is short for Auto Gordian Knot which describes a knot so difficult to untie that it was cut instead. It's quite apt considering the purpose of this tool.

It's not a single piece of software but rather installs several pieces tied together by a single front-end. As a result, the setup program will spawn other setup programs. Watch them carefully because otherwise windows will get popped over and you'll think the install has frozen when it's really just waiting for input. All of the pieces of software in AutoGK are well worth having.

PART 1: Getting the files onto your PC using DVD Decrypter

Put the DVD in your computer's DVD drive
Start DVD Decrypter - it should detect the disc
It might also prompt for the region code (if it finds RCE protection)
Look at the list of files - they're named confusingly but the first number is the "title" and the second is the part.
VTS_01_3.VOB means
Part 3 of the first title.

VOB files are video
IFO files contain informtation about the VOB files.
I don't know that BUP files are.
You can either manually select all of the series of the largest files or you can click View, Select Main Movie Files plus IFO files.
Next, Click on Tools, then Settings.
Click the tab marked File Mode and in the options section make sure that File Splitting says NONE.
Then Click on IFO Mode and again, in the options section make sure that File Splitting says NONE.
Choose a location to save in.
Then click the DVD to file Icon to start the decryption.
It will take a while, so go find something to do for 15-30 minutes.

PART 2: Converting the VOB to an AVI

Start AutoGK
Click on the little folder icon marked Input file and browse to the folder where you saved the output of DVD Decrypter.
If everything went well, you should have a single VOB file and a bunch of IFO files. Only one IFO file will match the VOB's name.
Open this in AutoGK.
It should read in the VOB and display soundtracks and subtitles.
Click on the little folder icon marked output file and chose a location and name for your output.
Have a look at the audio and subtitle options. You'll want to pick one audio track - usually the top one. It might not matter so much about subtitles unless the movie is in a foreign language. If, like me, you prefer to have a subtitle track, you enable it here but it will be "burned in" to the movie. It's often easier to download a subtitle track in SRT format from Podnapsi later.
Next you'll want to select a file size.
If you movie is about 90-100 minutes, you should be ok with 700MB but if you movie contains a lot of action scenes (or is long) consider increasing the size to 1400MB. You'll end up with much better quality.
Next, click advanced settings and make sure that the resolution is set to Auto Width and the Audio is set to Auto. Note: If you were making a copy for a portable device like a phone with low resolution, these are the settings you might change.
Choose an Video codec. XviD is recommended though DivX works well too.
Leave the subtitles options unchecked and click ok.
Finally, click Add Job and then click Start.
You might think that nothing is happening but it will actually be working. It shells out to a DOS/Command line app for a lot of the work.
Depending on your computer, the settings you chose and the movie you are converting, it could take 3 hours but at the end you'll have a good quality AVI file.

If you right-click on that file and choose properties you'll be able to find the frames per sec. Use that number to find a matching subtitle file on Podnapsi.

Note that if you can't figure out which track is which, you might want to try playing the VOB file directly in VLC Media Player. You can switch audio tracks in there and figure out which one you'd prefer.

Easier Instructions

Of course, I didn't figure all of this out myself and if you'd prefer video instructions, you might want to check out my inspiration on You Tube.

Converting DVDs to Good Quality AVI Files - Part 1 (The Waffle)

2011-08-14T19:01:00.000+10:00

I'm very much a believer in the idea that "files" will be the next big format for video entertainment after DVDs. I guessed right from the start that blu-ray would win the format war against HD-DVD but I never thought that either would take over.

About 15 years ago, after having ridden the music upgrade from LP Records to tapes and to CD, I stumbled across this "new" format called MP3. Back then, there were no MP3 players, just computers but I was enthralled by the idea that with enough storage, I could save my music collection in a way that meant that I could play them without ever having to get a CD out of the cupboard again.

I emarked on a quest to convert my entire library of Music CDs to MP3. People thought I was weird but a few years later as MP3 players became more readily available, I reaped the rewards. I didn't have to convert anything - it was already done.

I see video entertainment as following the same path. As with my early MP3 conversions, the problems were two-fold.

1. Finding a reliable converter/process

2. Storage

Recently, I bought a Western Digital WDTV box (mainly so that I didn't have to burn Doctor Who episodes to DVD when downloading them from the UK). Copyright people; don't give me those accusatory stares - I buy the DVDs when they become available. It's just that the net has a bad habit of "spoiling" the twists when I wait for Australia to screen them - yes, even when it's only one week later.

Of course, I don't want to stop there. It's my ambition to convert my sizable DVD collection to files for discless viewing - and perhaps I'll throw in a few fixes along the way.

Fixes? you say? Huh..?

As a partially (mostly) deaf person, I find that I really need subtitles with my movies - and I'm really annoyed when they aren't provided. Recently I bought Mozart and the Whale. Unfortunately the Australian distributor of this film doesn't care about subtitles. I ripped it to AVI format and then I went looking on http://www.podnapisi.net/ for a subtitle file (SRT format). I managed to get one and now when I play the file in VLC Media Player - or on my WDTV player it works!

The final question is one of quality. We can get close to movie quality in AVI format (with a big enough file - 800MB for a movie) but sound is a problem. It's MP3 format. I used to care a lot about surround sound but since I'm deaf, it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. Still, sound and quality are important considerations. For now, the AVI format will do but I'm on the lookout for something better.

When a royalty-free file format capable of holding, video, 3d video, multiple angles, multiple subtitles, various soundtracks, chapters and display covers appears, I'll jump there pretty quick.

Next time; Enough of the Waffle - Next time I'll explain how to rip a DVD to a good quality AVI file using free tools.

Scheduling Maintenance Tasks on the Domino Server

2011-07-26T17:23:00.004+10:00

I'm sure that most Domino admins have been doing these tasks regularly but if you don't have occasion to touch them often, you might this post useful.

As I mentioned last week, we've been having issues with the JVE running out of memory on our server. One of the "solutions" (band-aids) was to restart the domino HTTP task. I've been experimenting to see how long I can leave it and the shortest it's been is about 30 hours.

It seemed to be a good idea to stop and then restart the domino HTTP service on a timer. In admin-talk, that means a program document.

Procedure

The steps I'm using here are for Domino 8.5.2 but I don't think they've changed in years.

1. Start Domino Administrator

2. Click on the tab marked Configuration

3. In the left hand navigator,click on Server (and expand it)

4. In the left hand navigator,click on Programs

This will take you to a screen where you can expand your servers and see what other regular tasks are scheduled. If you've inherited a domino admin job, this is one of those important things to check out.

Typical things to find in here include;

UPDALL -R
COMPACT -B
FIXUP

Note that the case on the parameters is very important.

There's a good list of the parameters here.

Interestingly, today I stumbled across an old technote from IBM suggesting that these tasks shouldn't be programmed. I'd be interested to hear comments from other people as to whether or not they do them on their servers.

Anyway, enough with the side-notes, we're adding our own tasks.

5. Click on the big button marked Add Program

This takes you to a new screen (a new notes document).

6. Fill in the program name, command line and server to run on.

a. The program name will usually be NSERVER (for Windows Servers) or - apparently - SERVER for iSeries. If you were doing the other tasks mentioned earlier (UPDALL, FIXUP or COMPACT), then the program name would be one of them. I looked for a document which listed the Possible Program names but couldn't find one. (IBM... this should be a picklist).

b. The Command line will change but if you want to run a domino command line, you usually start with -c and put the rest in inverted commas.

I created one document for each of these two and scheduled them 15 minutes apart - with the quit document running first obviously.

-c "tell http quit"

-c "load http"

I could possibly have used Tim's excellent suggestion of "TELL HTTP RESTART" but I was too chicken to try it out on a schedule. Maybe later.

c. Pick your server... Luckily this IS selectable.

7. On the Schedule side of things, pick the days and times for the commands to run. If you don't want them repeating again throughout the day, leave the repeat interval as 0.

8. Finally, Click the Save and Close button.

Now I just have to sit here and wait until 4:15am... just kidding (I hope).

More Fun Ideas to Try

You'll find that you can run several commands at once by redirecting the input from a text file but I'll leave that for IBM to explain.

Domino Resource Issues under XPages

2011-07-18T11:57:00.002+10:00

A couple of weeks ago, we launched a new XPages app. Hopefully the first of many. It was very impressive and we got a lot of hits....

...until the server crashed.

Not a big deal. Our server is set to restart automatically, and it was up and running in no time. Then about 1.5 days later we had another crash.

We've decided to tackle this on a few fronts, first of all we're rewriting some parts of the app to be a bit less intense and to take better advantage of the recycler. That's all cutting edge development stuff, so it's really not "me".

On the admin side, I wanted to see if we could release resources a bit. I checked the server close to a crash but there's no indication on the Windows 2003 side of things. Of course, the Notes Logs tell a different story.

HTTP JVM: CLFAD0211E: Exception thrown. For more detailed information, please consult error-log-0.xml located in e:/Lotus/Domino/data/domino/workspace/logs

HTTP JVM: >>>>

HTTP JVM: The XPages runtime engine faced an OutOfMemoryError

HTTP JVM: You can fix this by increasing the value of the HTTPJVMMaxHeapSize variable in notes.ini

HTTP JVM: >>>>

HTTP JVM: Out of memory exception occurred servicing request for: /publicsite/OurNewXpagesDB.xsp - HTTP Code: 500. For more detailed information, please consult error-log-0.xml located in e:/Lotus/Domino/data/domino/workspace/logs

HTTP Web Server: Command Not Handled Exception [/publicsite/OurNewXpagesDB.xsp] Anonymous

HTTP JVM: CLFAD0211E: Exception thrown. For more detailed information, please consult error-log-0.xml located in e:/Lotus/Domino/data/domino/workspace/logs

So, we decided to try a http restart next time these error messages started building up.

It worked!

Doing a TELL HTTP RESTART bought us two more days of uptime.

To Restart or not to Restart?

We looked around and found that our problems weren't as unique as we'd imagined. There are a few people on 8.5 and above (we're currently 8.5.2) who have this problem.

Apparently also, a Tell HTTP Restart flushes memory but doesn't do much for the JVM.

To flush the JVM, we need to think about;

TELL HTTP QUIT

then after a few minutes

LOAD HTTP

or as the guy in the IT Crowd says "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

We'll be doing this until we get our application sorted but the question is; should this be part of our normal nightly routine? Maybe it's good practice to restart your web server's service nightly - especially if you have a cluster which could take the load while the restart occurs.

Does anyone think that this is "best practice"?

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes - Version 2

2011-05-19T16:12:00.000+10:00

I wasn't happy with the usability of my last post, so I've redone it as a presentation.

You can view it fullscreen here;

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dgxzmfwk_82dp8t8gf5

or embedded below.

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

2011-05-19T13:27:00.000+10:00

Why do one?

In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to).

So, how to do it in Notes?

OpenNTF

The first port of call is OpenNTF (http://www.openntf.org/). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get.

There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes. Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file.

Getting to the Code

The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary).

Unzip the files to somewhere on your hard drive (eg: C:\temp). The version I downloaded had three files;

MailMerge-CreateMerge.lss
MailMerge-SendMerge.lss
Lotus Notes Mail Merge Function.docx

The LSS files are not viewable in Notepad (not sure if this is a problem with those particular files) and I couldn't find any means of importing them into an agent. If you attach them to a mail message in Lotus Notes though, you can right-mouse click on them and choose VIEW.

From there, you can copy and paste them.

I copied and pasted both LSS files into text files for easy reference.

Creating the Agents

1. Open your mailbox in Lotus Domino Designer

2. Expand Code and double-click on Agents.

3. Click the Button marked New Agent

4. Give the Agent a Name, (Either Mail Merge\Send Mail Merge or Mail Merge\Create Mail Merge depending on which agent you're putting in). You're going to have to do this twice anyway.

5 . The new agent will start with a bit of comment code in it. Just highlight and delete it

6. Copy and paste the entire code of the relevant LSS file out of notes viewer (or notepad). Don't worry, the routines should all find their correct places.

7. Depending on how things go, you might end up with errors (I obviously did). These aren't code errors but are either related to the way that the Notes viewer displays things or the way it pasted from Notepad.

To fix these errors, follow the little red circles with crosses in them.

Wherever you find a line which ends in &_ the notes client expects a line immediately below it. My paste had blank lines - so I just removed them all.

8. When the Agent is free of errors, press Ctrl+S to save. If it saves ok, you can close it and repeat steps 2 - 8 for the other LSS file.

That's it. You're done with the Installation.

Preparing your Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is simply and excel spreadsheet with TO SUBJECT FIRSTNAME and whatever other columns you want to merge. Note that I left off the CC column (it still works but it's probably better to include one).

Save your spreadsheet as an Excel File (eg: C:\temp\Merge.xls)

Preparing the Email

Next, we go into Lotus Notes and write an email. Don't bother with the TO, CC or SUBJECT because they'll be overwritten.

Just write your email and if you want to include any fields from your spreadsheet, just add them in square brackets.

Save your new email as a draft and close it.

Generating the Merge

Go into the drafts area of notes and make sure that you've got the right draft selected. Then choose Actions, Mail Merge and then Create Mail Merge.

You'll be prompted to select the file which contains the mail merge data. Browse for the excel file you saved earlier.

You'll get a nice little warning screen (if you forget the CC) and you'll get an ID for your mail merge. Make sure that you write this number down somewhere.

Click Ok to Continue.

Hopefully you'll get a message that says that you encountered 0 errors.

Your drafts area will also get a bit busier because there'll be more documents in it.

Sending the Messages

I'm guessing that you could send the messages individually if you wanted but it's best to simply select all of the documents in the draft area. You can do a Ctrl+A and even select those which aren't in the merge (they won't be sent).

From the menu, select Actions, Mail Merge and then Send Mail Merge.

You'll be prompted for the ID number that you wrote down earlier.

When you click Ok, your emails will be sent.

Final Bits

Just a reminder, before you send to a large group of people, make sure that you do a test first and make sure that you remove any test text from your email and spreadsheet - we all know about the "Dear Rich B@st@rd" letters that one particular UK bank sent out years ago.

Thank You

Finally, a really big thank you to David Turner and Sacha Chua for developing such a worthwhile project. IBM ... this should really be a feature in the default Notes Mail Template.

BTW: I used Version 1.0 of the Mail Merge utility, Notes 8.5.2 and Office 2003 to do this.

How to Turn off Local Encryption by Default in the Notes 8.x Client

2011-05-17T09:23:00.002+10:00

What's this All About

If you have a test environment for your Lotus Notes applications, then chances are that you regularly find yourself copying (not replicating) from Production to test - and probably via a Local connection.

If you do this a lot, then chances are that at some point you've forgotten to deselect the default local encryption. This is a great security feature but it's quite embarrassing when you arrive at your test site with a database which won't open.

Did you know that you can change the default. It happened sometime in release 8.x but I don't know exactly when. I just know that I changed it a while ago and a few times since I've had developers express surprise because they didn't realize that we now have that feature.

Here's How to Turn it Off by Default

In your Notes client;

Click File then Preferences from the Menu
On the left hand side of the preferences screen, expand Replication and Sync.
Click on Default.
In the middle of the Preferences Panel, deselect [_] Encrypt Locally Using.
Click the button marked Ok.
The Change will take place immediately.

If you were buying a PC today...

2011-05-12T09:28:00.000+10:00

I'm often asked to tell people what to look for in a PC and recently I was asked to provide something in writing for all our staff members. These people aren't serious gamers and generally aren't all that computer literate (or computer-adventurous for that matter). I thought I'd share it with the rest of the world.

Note that prices are in Australian Dollars and specs are as at 11 May 2011. I've ignored netbooks even though I personally find them cool. I've also mostly ignored non-windows platforms because as I said, these people aren't adventurous. Finally, where I've mentioned brands it doesn't particularly mean that they have my overall endorsement or condemnation. It's just my experience with them - and the "vibe" I get from other people who use them.

What for?

Throughout this document, you need to be thinking about the use to which you intend to put your computer. Is it just an office machine? Is it only for the internet and word processing, spreadsheets etc or will you want to run specialised software on it, like MYOB. Will you be running games? If you have kids, how long do you expect your computer to last and will you eventually give it to them for games?

Windows?

There are three main systems for computers; Windows, Mac and Linux.

You don't need to buy a Windows computer. The other types will run office applications and the internet just as easily. It's mainly a matter of choice.

If your computer will be used for games other than simple ones like solitaire and Angry birds, then you probably need to go Windows. Games run well on the other systems but there's much less choice.

Mac and Linux computers are safer than Windows ones but nothing is 100% safe and they'll still need protection (anti-virus, firewalls etc). Don't let any vendors tell you that it isn't needed.

If you choose an alternative system to windows, you'll still be able to run windows on that device too. Macs and Linux PCs can "dual boot" allowing you to choose which system you want to run and both can also run virtual machines (ie: a Windows PC in a window).

Macs are generally well known for their speed and ease of use while Linux computers are known for their speed and security.

Windows XP is no longer being sold, so you can't buy that. It's immediate successor Vista should not even be considered. Windows 7 is much better. It's important though to make sure that you get 64 bit windows 7, not 32 bit. The 32 bit windows 7 will only use between 2 and 4 GB of memory regardless of how much is installed in your system so you'd have to convert someday. It's better to start off converted.

Brand Names

HP is arguably the best brand of PC at the moment with Sony being the best notebook brand.

Other good brands include Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba (notebooks only).

Acer and Asus are lesser brands but still good.

Most computers these days are built by the lowest bidder in a single factory. The main differences are in the casing and the brand label. Internally, they're all quite similar.

While you can go for a no-name brand, this will reduce your costs but increase risk. It's not recommended.

Cost

Desktop Computers typically cost between $700 and $2,000. You should not pay outside this range. Notebook Computers are always more expensive and typically range from about $1,000 to $3,000

Processors

The current intel processors are expressed in terms of Core I series.

As a general rule, the I7 is more powerful than the I5 but actually any of the I-Series processors is fast enough for all but the heaviest CAD/Design and video editing usage.

So long as you get an I Series, you'll be ok.

Memory

Most computers these days are being sold with about 2GB of Memory. This is not nearly enough. You should consider 4, 6 or 8 GB of memory. Memory is installed in "slots". If you're going to stay with 2 or 4 GB, you should talk to the computer salesperson to find out if there will be spare slots. If there are no spare slots then you'll have to throw the old memory out and buy all new memory once you decide to upgrade.

Since smaller amounts of memory are often cheaper, you may find that a PC with four slots and 4 GB of RAM uses 4 x 1 GB sticks. This means that you're at your limit. If you later decide to upgrade to 8GB, you have to throw all your memory out and buy 4 x 2GB chips. On the other hand, if your system was originally populated to 4GB using 2 x 2GB sticks, then you've got two slots free and you just need to buy an additional 2 x 2GB sticks when you're ready to upgrade.

Hard Disk

Most computers these days are shipping with about 160 GB of hard drive space. For most users, this is ample though Gamers and video editors may want a little more. 160 GB should store all of your documents and music without any trouble.

If you're planning to store a lot of video there (ie: saving your whole DVD collection on hard drive), then you'll probably want to consider more. It's not a great idea though because you'll still have to back it up. Instead, consider getting a couple of 2 Terrabyte USB hard drives ($120 each). You can back all of your data up to them. Note that I said TWO - that's because you'll want one for "real" and one as your backup.

While I'm on this point, you'll need to learn how to disconnect your USB drives. It's not just a matter of pulling out the stick. If you keep doing that, you'll eventually corrupt the data on the drive.

Network Card

All computers these days should ship with a gigabit network card. This should be sufficient. You might also want a wireless card added particularly if you're using a notebook. I haven't seen a wireless card in a recent computer which doesn't comply with standards so any new card should be ok.

Sound Cards

The sound cards which ship with modern computers should be perfectly adequate unless you're planning to use your computer to replace your entertainment system. In that case, you'll probably want to check for DTS and Dolby Digital 6.1 sound.

Video Cards

This is the biggest trap in new computers today!

If your computer isn't going to be used for gaming or design then the video card that it ships with is fine. If you're a gamer however, you'll need to get a decent graphics card.

It doesn't end there though because although you can easily replace most of the other components in your computer, the video card usually needs a dedicated slot. You'll find that many computers including the big brands like Dell will skimp on the slot if they don't have to supply a card.

If you're planning to add a game card later, make sure that you inspect the computer's motherboard to ensure that there is a slot available for you. Get the salesperson to help. These days, the slot is called a PCIe slot.

CD/DVD

At the minimum, you'll want a "DVD Burner" DVD-RW, DVD+R etc. This ensures that your computer is capable of reading and writing DVDs and CDs. You might want to pay extra to get blu-ray capabilities particularly if you like watching movies on your computer. If you've got spare money, a Blu-Ray writer may come in handy.

Other Slots

Most of the other slots on your computer are pretty much the same from one computer to the next but you'll want to check that you have enough USB slots and that they support USB 3.0.

You should have about 4 USB slots in the back of your computer two in the front. That's the minimum. More is even better. Don't make it a deciding factor though because so long as you've met the minimum, you can easily add more via a little gadget worth about $10.

If you've got a digital camera, you might want to check to see if the computer has slots for these cards (Usually SD, MicrosSD, XD or CompactFlash). It doesn't matter if it doesn't though because an external USB card reader will set you back about $15.

You should also make sure that your computer comes with both a DVI and a VGA video slot. You'll want the DVI slot for higher quality video. Having both also allows you to have two monitors connected if you want.

Bluetooth - this is a good thing to have on a notebook but it's not essential unless you already have a bluetooth device you want to connect.

Software

Aside from Windows, you shouldn't rush out and get software unless you actually need it. Bundles are good but make sure that they're entirely bundled and not just trialware. Microsoft Office and Anti-Virus packages will often ship as trial software and they will stop working after a few months unless you pay money.

The free Microsoft Windows Defender is as good as any anti-virus software on the market today. I know, I've tested it and it found viruses that McAfee missed (on several occasions). Don't be tempted to have Windows Defender AND a commercial anti-virus package on your computer. It won't make it any more secure and it will slow it down.

Microsoft Office isn't free but there are some very good alternative systems which are not only free but also compatible with Microsoft Office. In some cases, they're better (Libre office includes a really good drawing package). They're all easy to use and it's recommended that you check them out before spending money on software you don't need.

Libre Office (Previously Open Office) (http://www.libreoffice.org/download/ )

IBM Lotus Symphony (http://symphony.lotus.com/ )

Warranties

Most desktop PCs come with a one-year warranty but a lot of Vendors like Harvey Norman and Dick Smith will offer to extend these for a price. It's usually worth doing but a PC which survives the first year will generally survive for much longer. Check the warranty to see if they'll come out and fix the computer (on-site) or if you have to send it away.

Notebook computers are a different story. You should get the longest warranty possible because these computers are more prone to failure (due to their rougher handling).

Some other Alternatives

Finally, if all you want is the internet, you might want to investigate some other options. Netbook PCs are under $500, Old PCs can be converted to fast internet-only PCs by installing GoogleOS or Ubuntu Linux and then there's the plethora of tablet devices like the iPad and Android. If you're willing to wait until mid-June, Google will have their new PC and operating system out by then.

Best of luck shopping for your new computer.

Book Review "IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques" by Richard G. Ellis (Part 2)

2011-05-10T08:31:00.002+10:00

In part one of my review, I looked at the opening and closing chapters of this book. They're fairly non-technical and provide a very useful set of guidelines for the development and testing of Lotus Domino applications - and they're just as relevant to XPages development.

In part two, I want to look at the middle chapters. These chapters cover CSS and JavaScript as it relates to forms, views and agents. The book talks about some features which are only available in Notes/Domino 8.5 but it never discusses XPages.

If you're already a domino developer and you're looking to move into XPages, then this book certainly isn't for you. If however, you've been using Notes and want to quickly port some applications to the web or if you're familiar with classic HTML, CSS and JavaScript but want to get some Domino projects off the ground, then this is the right book.

Of course, if you're on a version of notes/domino prior to 8.5 with little prospect of upgrading in the near future, this book will help you to get the best development potential out of your existing systems.

The book offers a lot of great web development advice and code. It covers basic design rules mentioning some stylistic considerations which many web developers seem to overlook. It looks at form validation, usability and export functionality.

The book exposes each increment in usability/design one step at a time. This will provide people new to domino with an understanding of the effect of each of their changes. It's a great way to cover these topics.

There's also a whole chapter dedicated to navigation. It covers action buttons (how to style them, where to put them and when to use them). It provides tips for adding better URLs to your applications and provides some great coverage of the "go forward" navigational strategy.

This is a really good book with great explanations and good technical detail. If this book had come out three years ago, it would have been a bestseller. Sadly though, XPages is taking over (at least in the minds of cutting domino developers) and this dates the technology in the book a little.

If you're not going XPages yet and you're interested in classic domino development, then this is easily the best book I've seen on the subject.

IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques is available from Packt Publications and Amazon.

Honesty Clause: I was provided with a PDF version of this book free of charge for review purposes.

Book Review "IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques" by Richard G. Ellis (Part 1)

2011-05-05T09:17:00.002+10:00

I'm doing this review in two parts because the opening and closing chapters of this book are vastly different from the rest.

I have to admit to wondering, when I was first asked to review this book, exactly what the market was that it's aimed at. After all, aren't all domino developers heading towards XPages now? Could a book on "traditional web programming in domino" still be relevant today?

Well, surprisingly it is.

The opening chapters deal with issues and requirements that our developers and I still constantly struggle with . They cover version control, issues logs, staging servers, commenting/documentation, standards and the big killer "scope creep". There are sections on using the "champions" in your office to drive projects, maintaining consistent URLs and setting up a developer test environment.

These are aspects which affect all domino development regardless of the technology level (XPages, Notes, Pure HTML or JavaScript/CSS). If you regularly contract domino developers to develop applications for your environment, those first chapters are absolutely required reading. They're not overly technical and are very suitable for management level reading.

The last two chapters of the book cover Security, Performance, Testing and Debugging. Again, these are mostly high-level. The security sections discuss planning for security, ACLs, reader and editor fields, the problems of hidden fields and sensible additions such as edit prevention after approval and logout facilities. The performance sections discuss archiving, code optimisation and the measurement of response time. The testing and debugging chapter talks about the requirements and limitations of user-testing and suggests various ways this testing could be improved. There are also some great sections on debugging which will help those new to domino to track down issues in their applications.

As for the rest of the book, I'll cover it in part two of this review suffice to say that a long time ago, my favourite domino book was a web development guide written for release 4. The book was amazingly useful all the way up to release 6.5. This book feels, in every way, to be a sequel to that book, picking up more or less where it left off and delving into CSS and JavaScript with a specific domino slant. All that's missing now is a book which covers XPages as neatly.

This isn't a book for the seasoned domino developer but if you're new to Domino or new to CSS and JavaScript or if you're a technical manager overseeing domino web development projects then this book is definitely for you.

The book is available from Packt Publications.

Microsoft's "Killer" Update for Powerpoint 2003

2011-04-21T12:11:00.002+10:00

This morning I got a call from a colleague who was having problems opening one of our Microsoft Powerpoint files. After quite a while of saving back and forth (My newly created and not-yet-updated PC had no problems with the files), we discovered that it affects everyone in the office - in fact, everyone in the world.

As it turns out, Microsoft issued a "Killer Update" on 12 April which causes Microsoft Powerpoint to fail when opening presentations or presentation templates which have a graphical background (like our company logo for instance).

Microsoft's "Workarounds"

They've acknowledged the problem here.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2464588

Their fix generally suggests that you upgrade;

Workaround 1: Open the Affected file in Powerpoint 2007 or 2010.....
Workaround 2: Open the affected file in PowerPoint 2010....
Workaround 3: Open the affected file in PowerPoint 2007...
Workaround 4: After the error message is displayed, save a copy of the presentation, and then perform edits on the copy.

Workaround 4 is the only one which doesn't specify the need to upgrade Powerpoint. It's bad for two reasons;

They're expecting you to basically redo your presentation.
It doesn't work anyway - saving in Powerpoint 2003 only causes it to freeze.

In all honesty, I don't believe that Microsoft was that oblivious to the problem - don't they test these fixes. I think they were using it as an underhand tactic to get people to upgrade.

How to Fix the Problem without Upgrading

Microsoft reported the problems at least two days ago and still there's no fix so I'm writing to highlight the issue and to tell you how to get Powerpoint 2003 working again.

These instructions are for Windows XP but should work on other platforms too.

Make sure that you close Powerpoint before trying to do this update.
Start Control Panel (Start, Settings, Control Panel)
Double-click on Add or Remove Programs.
Make sure that the box marked Show Updates (at the top of the screen) is ticked, then scroll down until you find Microsoft Office.
Look for an update under Microsoft Office called "Security Update for PowerPoint 2003" which was installed on 15/04/2011 (or thereabouts) and click on it.
Click the button marked Remove.
You'll be prompted to remove the program. Click Yes.
The process should take seconds and then you'll be able to use Microsoft Office again.

Just a Reminder

Of course, no post about Microsoft's underhand forced-upgrade antics would be complete without a reminder about the alternatives - specifically that;

If you're a Lotus Notes 8.x user, you probably already have Open Office Symphony Loaded and that may open your office files in Notes without issues.
If you're not a Lotus Notes user, consider IBM Lotus Symphony - it's FREE
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
Alternatively, there's OpenOffice (which is now called LibreOffice) - Also FREE
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
If you'd prefer the Google Track, try Google Docs - It's FREE too.
https://docs.google.com/

...and all of these are compatible not only with each other but also with Microsoft Office.

Lotus Notes 8.5.2 and Microsoft Windows 7 64 Bit

2011-04-21T08:16:00.003+10:00

We're currently testing Windows 7 - Not because we actually see a business need. It's not about support, applications or even new features. It's simply that it's too hard to buy PCs with Windows XP loaded on them these days.

Over the last few months, I've learned one very valuable lesson: There is NO benefit in Windows 7 unless you go 64 bit! Of course, that doesn't mean that there are many 64 bit applications out there to run on it.

Why is 64 bit so important for Windows 7?

Well, like all new Microsoft Software, it uses a bit more disk space and a bit more memory that its predecessors. Unfortunately, there's a 2GB memory limit in 32 bit windows - and it still applies to Windows 7.

That means that now Windows itself takes up more space but your maximum memory remains the same. Even if you have a PC with 4, 6 or 8GB RAM, 32-bit Windows will only use 2 GB.

Windows 7 64-Bit is a different story but weirdly, the limits aren't imposed by the bit-space but by Microsoft themselves - and it's different depending on which version of Windows you're running;

Starter: 8GB
Home Basic: 8GB
Home Premium: 16GB
Professional: 192GB
Enterprise: 192GB
Ultimate: 192GB

Where's the 64 Bit Version of Lotus Notes

Good question. There doesn't seem to be any answers on this one and even the IBM Helpdesk tech I spoke to yesterday was surprised that it didn't exist. I'm sure they're working on one though.

So.... The short answer is that There is NO 64 bit version of Lotus Notes 8.5.2, you need to use the 32 bit version instead.

But wait .... there's more.

I tried and Lotus Notes was so slow that it barely ran at all.

I've since applied Fixpack 1 and Fixpack 2 and it's back to normal - perhaps better than normal because it's got more memory space to run in (Windows isn't taking a big bite out of the 2GB space).

In reality, I think you only need fixpack 1 but it's good practice to add both.

Summary

Another short answer; When using 32-bit Lotus Notes 8.5.2 on 64 bit Windows, make sure that you have Fixpack 1 and 2 installed.

I hope this saves some people a bit of time since it's not quite so clearly stated elsewhere.

(and in the meantime, keep petitioning IBM to hurry up with the 64-bit version)

What do I have on my Blackberry?

2011-04-20T08:38:00.002+10:00

A couple of weeks ago my Blackberry Bold suffered misfortune during a canoeing event with the Scouts. I had to temporarily revert back to a barely functional pearl. Now however, I've got a replacement Bold and I'm reloading all my "stuff" onto it.

I could have simply restored my settings from a backup of my old Blackberry but I figured that I'd rather exclude applications which I haven't used. So I did a manual reinstallation.

I thought this might give me a chance to talk about some good blackberry apps. So... what have I got on my blackberry now?

The Default Applications

It goes without saying that I have mail, calendar, SMS, Messenger (which I never use), MemoPad (which I use heaps) and all of the rest of the default Blackberry apps.

Google Applications

Google Mobile App (http://m.google.com/search) - FREE

This is usually the first thing that I put back on the blackberry. It gives you a google search portal but more importantly, it's a great starting place to launch the installs for Gmail, Google Maps and Google Sync. I'm a big Google junkie and these apps are my lifeline. When set up properly, Google synch will synchronise your Google contacts with the phone - that's a nice feature and very handy to have if you need to suddenly restore data.

I should point out that I don't synchronize my Blackberry and Lotus Notes contacts (so I never sign into Notes via the Blackberry Desktop software). I don't do this because our corporate contacts are all in our server's address books and I find it's much easier to manage personal contacts via Gmail.

Also in the Google App is;

Google Talk - FREE

Since Gmail is my platform of choice, I use Google Talk. There are other apps for Yahoo and Windows Live - and even apps which combine them all but I've converted most of my chat buddies to Gmail, I don't need them.

Google Maps - FREE

This has been an amazing resource on my driving and scouting trips. It gives you satellite maps and street maps. I don't have a GPS so this is the next best thing.

Other Applications

Moving away from Google, we have;

OperaMini (www.opera.com/mobile/) - FREE

This is a much better web browser than the one that ships with blackberry (although I'll admit that the BB one has gotten a lot better). If you find that your blackberry browser sometimes runs out of memory downloading a page, then try Opera-Mini. You'll find it works there. It's also very good practice to have a second browser at your fingertips.

Blackberry App World (http://mobile.blackberry.com) - FREE

This is a great launch pad for installing lots of Blackberry Applications. For some reason, it doesn't seem to be installed by default on Blackberries. Since I'm a fan of free stuff (who isn't?), I'll usually sort items by price.

From Blackberry App world, you can install lots of great apps. I haven't included URLs for these because you can simply search for them in Blackberry App World.

Applications from Blackberry App World

Twitter for Blackberry - FREE

If you've used twitter this is fairly self explanatory. You can set your status, view other people's tweets and watch trends.

Facebook for Blackberry - FREE

If you've used facebook this is fairly self explanatory. You can set your status, view and comment on other people's status, mail your friends and upload photos from the blackberry camera.

Evernote for Blackberry - FREE

This is (hopefully) my cure for constantly sending myself emails. If I need to remember anything, I simply type it into EverNote. I have Evernote on my work and Home PCs too so it's easy to look through my outstanding Notes.

The Weather Network - FREE (has adverts down the bottom of the page)

I've tried several weather applications but so far this is the best. Unlike many weather apps, it includes weather outside of the US. You can get short and long term forecasts. Even better, it displays an updated icon on the blackberry desktop so you don't even have to open it (if you want current conditions).

LocalPedia - FREE

This is a weird little app which allows you to look up a town and get information on the facilities. I'm not entirely sure that I'll use it a lot but it's good if you're in a new place.

Mobiola xPlayer - FREE but has Adverts

This has a bit of a weird interface which takes a little getting used to but it's still a great player. I find that I like to listen to music and to talking books on the blackberry but I don't like having to constantly juggle playlists and sort order settings. Instead, I set the blackberry media player up to play randomly (and point it to my music playlists), then I set the Mobiola xPlayer up to sort by filename and play my eBooks using it. It works a treat!

More....

Well, that's it for now. I'm going to see if I can reload Sametime on the blackberry although I hardly ever used it. What I am surprised about is that sametime isn't in Blackberry App world - and also that my old instructions no longer work. IBM, are you listening?

How to get your Notes Webmail working in Firefox 4

2011-03-28T13:36:00.009+11:00

Note: This isn't my solution, all credit goes to "nickbeee" who posted a couple of lines on the firefox site. I've had to document this for our internal users and figured that other people may benefit from a more detailed explanation.

Also: I'm a stickler for long explanations with pictures....

It seems that the new security features in Mozilla Firefox 4 prevent Lotus Notes/Domino Webmail from working. Here's how to get that functionality back.

First: The problem that you see looks like this;

It states on the webmail screen simply (and cryptically)

A problem has occurred which may have caused the current operation to fail.

The problem seems to be that firefox has security-blocked your webmail. In order to unblock it, you need the Remote XUL Manager extension.

To get it, browse to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/remote-xul-manager/

and click Add to Firefox.

You'll be prompted to install the extension and then you'll be told to restart Firefox.

After the restart, the Remote XUL Manager will appear in the tools menu.

Note: To get to the menu in Firefox, press the Alt Key once.

Click Tools, then Remote XUL Manager.

A mostly empty dialog box will appear.

Click Add.

A text input box will appear. Type your mail domain in here and click Ok.

If you use several domains, you may want to add the others in now.

When you've finished adding domains, click the X on the top right of the Remote XUL Manager box to close it. Don't worry, it's saved.

Now, you should be able to refresh the page or simply put your cursor in Firefox's address bar and press Enter - and your mail should appear.

The Perfect Storm: How a Combination of Random Events can lead to Disaster

2011-02-12T16:01:00.000+11:00

No, this post isn't about that Wolfgang Peterson & George Clooney movie but it does borrow from the concept in a business sense.

This week we skirted close to disaster but the rest of the business was completely oblivious to the danger.

I wasn't worried, it was all under control but my boss said to me later, "we nearly had the perfect storm today". I thought about his words and realised that he was right.

I was wondering just how many times we, and other businesses nearly have the perfect storm and don't even realise.

What is a Perfect Storm?

In the book and movie of "The Perfect Storm", the storm wasn't a cyclone or any kind of normal severe storm event. It was just a normal storm in which several other conditions were perfect. It's simply the combination of several unlikely events which results in disaster.

Our Experience

Factor 1: Backup

This week we've struggled a bit with backup. We had a faulty tape which meant that we missed out on our backup job for one night. I replaced the tape for the next night and tried to run the backup again. It failed again - this time because the previous night's tape had left a bit of gunk in the drive. I cleaned the drive but although the system was ready for backup, we now had two days worth of "unsaved work".

Factor 2: Backup ISP and Server

Like many critial businesses, we have offsite redundancy. In our case, we have an offsite domino server which is part of our cluster. Our offsite provider had told us a little while ago that they needed to switch ISPs and re-run our infrastructure. We were told a month ago that there was no pressing urgency. Of course last week, on the night of our last successful backup, we were told that it was starting to become urgent.

You can imagine our surprise when we came into work on Thursday to find ourselves disconnected. Our main systems worked, the internet worked, everything was Ok. It's just that our redundant server was no longer accessible.

Factor 3: Board Day

I work at one of those lucky companies who don't have board members in attendance every day. In fact they're usually only around on monthly basis. Guess what.... the day of the storm was a board day.

A Lucky Escape

We were careful, we took precautions. Earlier in the week we'd had some work done on our main production databases but on that day, they were out of bounds.

Like I mentioned earlier, nothing happened. The production servers all stayed up, we eventually got our offsite server back and we got a backup that night. All was well but you have to think...

If anything had gone wrong on the day, we had no backup and no offsite server. We were hosting one of the most critical meetings of the year and the most important people in our company were all onsite watching.

The question is; would you recognize the perfect storm if it started forming near your company?

IBM Celebrations at Packt Publishing (20% off)

2011-02-08T23:16:00.002+11:00

In case you've missed it, Packt Publishing is holding an IBM Tuesday celebration because;

They're publishing four IBM books on the same day
IBM is turning 100 this year.

To celebrate, they've got 20% off IBM books for the entire month of February.

Go here to read all about IBM Tuesday.

It doesn't end there though because they've got a competition which is drawn on the Tuesday of each week, the prize for which is a years subscription to PacktLib, their online library.

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

2011-01-31T09:59:00.000+11:00

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation.

WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT?

Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs.

Notification can be;

via a sound
via a pop-up box
via the system tray (where the computer clock is)

The pop up box looks like this;

Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off.

CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS

To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client;

On the Menu, click File, then Preferences...
On the left hand side, click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options.
Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving.
In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications.
If you untick the box marked [_] Display a popup alert, you will stop those annoying (for some people) pop up boxes.
If you don't like having your computer make a noise when mail is received, you might also want to disable the option above it - or browse to find a quieter noise.
Click OK to save your changed preferences.

Resolving the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 (and Higher) Attachment Issue

2011-01-06T10:30:00.000+11:00

A long while ago, November 2009 actually, I posted about an Attachment Problem which was introduced in Lotus Notes 8.5.1. At the time, I pushed IBM for a solution and they eventually produced a half-solution (slightly better but no cigar).

Since then we've been living in pain.

Recently a commenter named "CIS" left a note on my original post to try putting AttachmentsUseCaption=0 in the notes.ini. It worked **THANKS** - you're my hero of the hour!

I decided to describe the problem and solution here in case others were in the same boat.

Here's how our attachments used to look prior to using the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 (and higher) clients.

At 8.5.1, the text under the attachments disappeared completely. This left me with a screen with two PDF files and no description. Not a good look for our extranet service.

We halted our Notes 8.5.1 rollout until IBM provided a fix but when they did, it wasn't a particularly elegant one.

Here's how it looked;

The attachment text (file names) stopped being under the icon and started being to the right of the icon. It might have been ok, if IBM didn't still keep invisible spacing under the icon.

It probably would have looked great if I could just left align the icons but it was not to be.

When the problem was still present in Lotus Notes 8.5.2, I decided to start upgrading our clients. I wasn't happy with the fix but at least we had descriptions for our attachments again.

A couple of days ago, following Cis' advice, I edited my NOTES.INI file;

C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\Notes.ini

The location may vary for you - especially if you're using the Multi-user install.

I opened the file in Notepad and added the line somewhere near the top.

AttachmentsUseCaption=0

Then I restarted the Notes client and detached and reattached a file.

The result looked like this. (File No 1.)

Yay!! We've since added the line to our policies, so all our clients will get it when they reboot.

Now all we have to do is detach and reattach everything we've done since November 2009 - Thanks IBM, at least now nobody can say they've got nothing to do.

Getting Real Business Value out of Cheap eBook Readers

2011-01-04T17:25:00.010+11:00

Everybody wants an iPad but if we're really honest with ourselves, most of our reasons aren't exactly business reasons.

The iPad has a lot of great uses but it's amazing how often I see its business use limited to email and web browsing. If you've already got a work supplied mobile phone with these capabilities, blackberry for instance, then what is the business case for duplication?

Right now, the iPad is still a little pricey for mainstream business use but it's not a bad idea to start building your usage patterns with a cheaper device.

I recently picked up an eBook reader (from MiGEAR) for under $100. For comparison, the iPad costs about $700 here. The main advantage of the eBook reader over the blackberry is proper PDF file support.

The eBook reader I got didn't support DRM (although I've since downloaded and installed a patch which fixes this). I'm not bothered though because as a business tool, it doesn't need to support DRM.

I'm finding that it's very useful for saving all kinds of quick-reference data on. Sometimes in text format and sometimes as PDF. There are plenty of free PDF converters/printers available for download and the capability is now built-in to Lotus Symphony, Open Office and apparently, Office 2010.

Some of the great things you can store on your eBook reader for easy reference include;

Lists of important IP Addresses in our system
Contact Lists
Our Disaster Recovery Plan
Important Notes.INI settings information
Redbooks from IBM

When iPads (or their sucessors) eventually become standard issue at my workplace, I'll be ready but in the meantime, the eBook reader is getting me used to working "portably".

You might think that a reader is no good for taking notes on but the fact is that most of my notes, including this blog entry, are done on the blackberry while using public transport. I don't need a larger device to write, only to read.

End of Year (2010) IT Wrap-up

2010-12-23T12:00:00.002+11:00

Excuses and Stuff

Once again, I've reached the end of yet another year of minimal T-related blogging. It's frustrating because there's so many things I want to talk about and so little time to do it in.

It's not that there's nothing going on - we're busier than ever and we're doing some fascinating things with domino and with other systems.

I've been dying to talk about our three-plus year painful but ambitious domino project but it's just not ready yet. I can't talk about it until it's all humming along smoothly.

The List

So where have we been going with our computing stuff this year?

Well, there's the ambitious domino project that I mentioned which is aimed at putting together a CRM which doesn't simply use our NAB for lookups, it actually controls the NAB - and according to a bizarre and complex set of business rules. It's happening but our rules are very complex and we're learning a lot about the difference between implementation and test cycles on large compared to small domino installations.
We've been back-ending some of our domino applications with Cognos. Nothing fancy yet but there's some interesting web work here and a lot of possibilities.
We've been keeping up with IBM - Our clients are all on Notes 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 and the servers are 8.5, 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 (nothing like a little variety).
We're still sitting tight on Microsoft Office 2003. I can't see a reason to move to 2007 and so far, I've been able to open everything that has been sent to me - usually using my current version of word but sometimes (amusingly) it turns out that Notes is more capable of reading older and newer word documents than word itself.
We've managed to resist the call of Windows 7 and are staying put on Windows XP. I know it's unsupported but how good is Microsoft support anyway? We did put a couple of Windows 7 computers out there but we've seen no performance gains and it's getting hard to make a viable business case for the upgrade.
I've been following Google endlessly - I'm very impressed with their drive and direction. Their sudden backtrack on the Wave project was interesting and it's great to see that they're already starting to reuse the technology as shared spaces. I'm excited about the upcoming Chrome OS too.
On the browser front, it looks like Google's strategy is paying off. No, they don't actually want to move everyone to Chrome, they just want to lift the browser game. Chrome's my main browser but I also use Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and if I really have to, Internet Explorer. In particular, I'm using the beta versions of Firefox and Opera.

The current version of Firefox is abysmal and has to be losing them a lot of market share but the upcoming version 4 looks and feels great. Safari has had a massive overhaul too. Chrome is constantly being updated and I'm glad that extensions finally appeared this year. Surprisingly though it's Opera which has seen the biggest improvement in the beta version. Wow. That's going to shake up a few things when it gets released.
I've been watching the whole ipad and eBook reader thing with great interest and amusement. I haven't got an ipad. I think I'll wait for an android device. In the meantime though, they're revolutionising the user interface. It just needs to make the transition from pleasure to business.

I did get an ebook reader but I went for a cheapie with a colour LCD screen. It doesn't even support DRM. Surprisingly though, that hasn't bothered me. I've got so many books to read that I can't see myself needing to buy anything online during the life of that device. The business possibilities are impressive too. I'm PDF-ing everything and saving it there. I've got meeting documents, the DRP and even my scouting books. I took the device on a scout camp recently and was able to read while the cubs were asleep - and reference various scout materials, maps and game rules during the day. People need to move on from DRM and remember that "just being able to read your own documents without a computer" is sometimes an achievement.

That's about all the main waffle for the year.

Thanks everyone for reading and for your help throughout 2010.

Have a great Christmas (or alternative end-of-year celebration) and see you next year!

Book Review: IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper

2010-11-14T20:39:00.007+11:00

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide

by Karen Hooper

Paperback : 296 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]

Release Date : August 2010

ISBN : 1849680205

ISBN 13 : 978-1-849680-20-2

I've just finished reading Karen Hooper's excellent IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide and it's awesome. In fact, this book is so good that I'd already gone online partway through the third chapter and ordered a print copy for my workplace library.

Of course, it helps that PACKT Publishing is having an IBM Month this November. There's a bunch of special offers but the ones to really take note of are;

20% off all Packt IBM print books
25% off if you purchase 3 or more books
30% off all Packt IBM ebooks

Back to the Review...

So, who is the audience for the book? Well, it's the layperson, the employees who are new to Notes or who need to brush up on their skills. That's not to say that there isn't good material and tips for the techies out there - but that the best value gains will come from the non-IT staff.

When reviewing technical books, I always have a goal in mind. In this case, my goal was simply to feel like everything had been covered yet still take away at least one "wow" moment where despite my long history with Notes, I pick up something new.

In this book, there were several wow moments. In fact, several times I had to put it down and get in there and have a go just to prove to myself that these "new" features worked. I'm impressed!

A Notes 8+ Book

If you're still using Notes 7, then you've got the wrong book. This is very much a book about the current Notes product. There have been massive changes in Notes 8 - 8.5 and this book walks through each of them in detail.

There are the usual chapters on mail, calendar and to-do lists but there are also sections dealing with RSS feeds, widgets, the sidebar, sametime and more. Thankfully the book is free of QuickR, Sametime (full version) and Connections references. This is a book which respects its core subject and concentrates its full attention on it.

There are a couple of ambitious chapters near the end which cover more on replication and database creation than I'd usually want my users to know but it's refreshing to see this material dealt with so simply. It's a book that you can hand up to the less technical management band and know that they'll come away with the right concepts.

Finally, the book ends with a chapter dealing with Symphony. I'd have preferred this chapter to have been two chapters earlier (in front of the technical stuff) and I'd have preferred it to go into more detail. It does however point to some very useful online resources - and since it's slightly off-topic, it's probably in the right place.

This book is brilliant. It belongs on the shelf in every IT department running Notes 8 and above. It also belongs in HR and there are whole sections which probably should be presented as part of a staff induction.

In fact, as soon as my print copy arrives (I read the eBook version), I've got a long list of people I want to circulate it through.

Don't hesitate - the IBM November specials at PACKT Publishing aren't going to last - get out there and get this book. It's the best Notes Client book I've seen in years.

Honesty Clause: I was provided an copy of this book at no charge to review. Even so, it was good enough that I really did buy it before I'd finished more than a couple of chapters.

Coming Soon - A Review of "IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide" by Karen Hooper

2010-11-10T17:10:00.003+11:00

I've just downloaded the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper from PACKT Publishing and will be reviewing it shortly - it's going to take me a little while to make it through the 296 page tome.

My first impressions though are good, very good. This isn't a book for developers wanting to learn XPages. It's a book for the users in your organisation, something that has been lacking in the notes world lately.

You can obtain copies of the book at the PACT Publishing Website (http://www.packtpub.com/).

Stay tuned, I'll have the review here shortly.

Patch Tuesday - There is no SOE

2010-10-14T10:03:00.002+11:00

So, once again Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is breaking all records and we're in a quandry.

We can either accept the risk of applying 28 untested (by us) patches to fix 49 vulnerabilities or we can accept the security risks of not applying the patches.

Both choices are difficult but in the end, I'm always going to accept the "upgrade risk" versus the "security risk".

Gone are the old days
So, why don't we just delay it a bit and test it all out? In the old days (and certainly in a much larger company) this would have been possible but right now, we only have a small IT department and a constantly shifting Standard Operating Environment (SOE).

As I've said before - there is no longer such a thing as a SOE in today's computing environment. We start out with an idea of the software to be loaded and the options and location in which it gets loaded, that's standard. Then, all the applications upgrade themselves at different intervals and suddenly, each machine is unique.

We could probably use a whole lot more policy controls and we could introduce greater client security but I've seen where that road leads. In fact, many of our customers are still on that road. They're still on Internet Explorer 6 and they're incompatible with a whole host of sites. Their users don't even have the ability to change the time on their own systems - so if it's wrong and it's an emergency, there's nothing they can do.

If they go overseas and something needs fixing - too bad. They don't have rights to change anything on their own computers.

Nope. That road is for larger organisations only.

More than Microsoft
It's not just Microsoft either. These days, Acrobat and Flash seem to do a couple of upgrades a week and Google Chrome is constantly (but silently) upgrading itself in the background (though somehow I'm ok with their upgrades because they're so unobtrusive). Then we have Quicktime and Real Player and the Anti-Virus systems.

It seems that there's just no escaping upgrade hell.

If we tested everything properly we'd need a huge IT department. Sometimes it's best to just read the bulletins, warn your users and keep your fingers crossed.

Today's Upgrade
So this all leads me to today's upgrades. I'm getting quite used to the fact that everytime Windows upgrades my PC, it sets the resolution back to something the monitor doesn't like (which results in fuzzy patches). It's ok. I have the correct resolution written on a post-it note at the bottom of my screen and it's a couple of minutes work once per month (and sometimes more frequently if there are urgent patches) to fix it.

Todays "surprises" were a little different though.

Today, Microsoft decided to replace my default email client (Lotus Notes 8.5.2) with outlook. It also completely rewrote the winword.exe file so that my Kaspersky Firewall didn't recognise it and had to prompt for further instructions. It doesn't bother me - I'm an IT professional. What DOES bother me is the fact that I'll now have to go around the organisation and hand-hold all of our clients through their logon process this morning.

Thanks Microsoft. I needed more work.

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2: Upgrading your Icons from 16x16 to 32x32

2010-09-08T10:12:00.004+10:00

I've upgraded my client to Notes 8.5.2, sure it took a couple of goes and I ended up having to completely uninstall and reinstall - but I got there.

I've since done an upgrade on a different PC (but that one didn't have designer) and I didn't have the same problems - so, maybe it was just a glitch on my PC.

So... What's new in IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2? Well, if you really want to learn the answer to that question, ask IBM. There's something about XPages too I think but the really important bit is ... the icons..

no, really...

We've been waiting ages for this. Let's hope it won't be another 18 years before we get 64x64 icons.

So... the first thing I did in the 8.5.2 designer was upgrade my Smurf. Yep, the database that I've had as my best friend for the last 15 years of my working life has an excessively blue smurf as its icon. A "choked smurf".

I decided to restore him to normal colour - and it's easy.

All I did was;

Find a new 32x32 icon
(You do know that you can do a google image search for 32x32 pictures right?)
Save the Icon locally; C:\temp\smurf.png
Open my database in designer
Expand Resources
Double-Click on Icon
Click on the button marked Browse
Choose my new Icon - and presto... it's done.

and here are the pictures...

My Smurf can breathe at last.

Our IBM/Lotus Renewals and TCO

2010-09-03T07:41:00.003+10:00

I've just finished the IBM/Lotus renewal cycle for the year and either IBM has made some changes for the better or I'm losing my grip on my sanity. Whatever the reason, this year the process actually made sense.

The Cost and the TCO
We're actually quite a small domino shop but our annual renewals would have covered the cost of a 4WD vehicle from a reputable dealer.

This is at least in part due to our office technology mentality. We have our main domino server which is capable of running pretty much everything and we have a second server that we use to run one of our more intensive apps (which I'll talk about in another post).

On top of all this, we have an offsite business continuity server which we've never actually used "for real" - only in test situations. Domino is too stable for it to be a necessity and it's really only there to guard against ISP or "location" failure.

Then we've got a development server and a test server. These are new but welcome additions because having a separate server encourages us to be more daring in our development projects.

The bottom line is simple; if the TCO has blown out, it's our fault for choosing multiple levels of safeguards instead of lower costs.

Upgrade Assurance

Of course, we've also got the option not to renew at all. That's right, we can save all that money by not renewing and still be entitled to use the software in perpetuity. I think that the maintenance entitles us to helpdesk support, which I almost never use because frankly, it's not very good. I find that if I blog about a problem (and if I read everyone else's domino blogs), I get better results than if I complain to IBM. It's a pity really.

So, for us, the maintenance really boils down to nothing more than upgrade assurance. If we pay it, then we're entitled to upgrade. If we stop paying it, then we'd have to buy the software outright again in order to upgrade (that's about three times the cost). If we stayed on the same version of Notes/Domino for three years and then upgraded, we'd probably break even. Four years and the strategy would start to pay off.

Once, there was a time when this was feasible. Once, IBM wasn't putting out many upgrades and in fact those upgrades weren't really worth a whole lot of effort. I guess I'm talking around Notes versions 6 & 7. This has all changed with version 8. IBM now has a good strategy and each upgrade introduces worthwhile features while moving Notes/Domino closer and closer to its true destiny, the web.

IBM are also bundling more and more into the package with Traveller being the most obvious newcomer. It's a great system and I think that it will soon be replacing Blackberry at my workplace. We're also getting a bit of use out of the bundled sametime, though not enough to justify the full package.

I recently learned that there's some sort of entitlement to websphere. Apparently... I've not heard of it before. It's an IBM secret and I've yet to hear it confirmed from an official source.

Sitting on Old Infrastructure

During the negotiations for our upgrade assurance, it always crosses my mind to not bother renewing, though admittedly the lure of new versions keeps me coming back. This year I made a joke about those poor people who are still on Notes 5 & 6. To me, these guys are the laughing stock of the computing world because they're constantly complaining about a product they haven't bothered to update. It's their own fault - not IBMs.

Of course Notes 5 compares unfavourably to the current offerings of the competition. Compare Notes/Domino 8.5.2 with the MS offering of 1999 and you can be sure that IBM/Lotus will come out on top.

I said jokingly that enough water has passed under the bridge that they could pay their maintenance this year and get upgraded without "penalty" and I was told that there was a company out there, on Notes 4.5 who HAVE been paying their maintenance every year but still haven't upgraded.

My jaw dropped.

Wow.

If all you're really getting for your money is software assurance, why would you pay for it and then not use it? It just doesn't make sense.

Maybe IBM needs to do a survey to find out what versions its "assured" customers are running and then get in there and upgrade them.

How to Install the OpenNTF Document Management Plugin for Lotus Notes 8.5.x

2010-08-31T13:54:00.002+10:00

There's now a great new OpenNTF document management plug-in for Notes. I'm interested in seeing if I can move away from MS Office and this little utility seems to me to be the best way to start. It allows you to work on documents in folders while still keeping things available for users who prefer to access folders directly. The only caveat that I've found so far is that it wants everything to be stored in OpenDocument format and will convert the imports accordingly.

So... I've just installed this plug-in and in typical "dumb-user" fashion, I had to ask a number of questions of the authors.

I thought that to save others a bit of time and to illustrate the whole procedure, I'd make the procedure available here. Even if you're not interested in this particular plug-in, you might be interested in some of the others which are available. (like the awesome FileNavigator project). These steps might just be the ticket to installing them.

My instructions worked on Lotus Notes 8.5.2 but should work on other some versions too.

1. Download DocumentManagement.ZIP

Click here for the project page for DocumentManagement. In theory you can download it from OpenNTF. I think you have to be logged in first. For some reason, I've been finding it difficult to download anything on OpenNTF recently, so if you experience difficulty, head to their blog post and use the download link there.

2. Extract All files to a folder:

In my case, since I put all our Widgets together on a corporate drive, I extracted all of the files to X:\IBM\Lotus\Widgets\DocumentMangement. Your setup is probably different so just extract them wherever you want (and remember where you put them).

Note that I had to separately unzip the updatesite sub-folder. For some reason it's a zip inside the ZIP. Notes didn't want to read it when I first tried, so I unzipped it.

3. In Lotus Notes client click File, Application, Install on the menu.

What? You don't have a File, Application, Install menu option? Sometimes you don't. I'm not sure why. It might be an 8.5.0 or 8.5.1 thing because I didn't need to do it in 8.5.2.

To enable the Eclipse update manager UI in Lotus Notes, use these steps...

a. Close your Lotus Notes client

b. Start Notepad or your preferred text editor.

c. Open the \framework\rcp in the Notes Application Directory
In my case, this was, C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp

d. Look for a file called plugin_customization.ini and open it.

e. Add the line

com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true

anywhere in the file.

f. Save and close file

g. restart Lotus Notes

Thanks to Christian Petters at www.cubetoon.com who first saved me from that gotcha.

Ok, detour over... let's resume...

3. In Lotus Notes client click File, Application, Install on the menu.

4. Choose the option maked (o) Search for new features to Install and click the button marked Next.

5. Click the button marked Add Folder Location...

6. Browse to:

X:\IBM\Lotus\Widgets\DocumentMangement\Updatesite

(or wherever you saved your files to back in step 2)

and click Ok.

7. You'll be presented with an "Edit Local Site" dialog box, just click Ok.

8. Click Finish. (this button lies - seriously... there's a long way to go yet)

9. On the next screen, select DocumentManagement/updatesite

For some crazy reason, it defaults to unticked ... then click Next

10. Click (o) I accept the terms in the License Agreements, then click Next.

11. Click Finish. (Guess what, this button lies too - we're not finished yet).

12. On the next screen, select (o) Install this Plug-in

This is another crazy default because it defaults to do not install the plug-in. If you weren't paying attention, you'd have to start all over again - I've been there before... more than once.

Click ok.

13. Watch Bar Graph

14. Restart the Notes Client

15. I got this lovely message when the client restarted

Failed to login

CLFRJ0010E

I don't know what it means but it went away and hasn't come back, so hopefully it's nothing to do with the install procedure.

16. In my installation, this was where I made a big mess. I kept expecting to see a sidebar plug-in and when it wasn't there, I tried reinstalling. Don't do this. It's not the correct procedure. :-)

Click on your Open menu and hopefully you'll see a Document Management option.

Don't click it... I didn't say to click it.

If you did, you'll probably get an error message about the root directory when you first start the application. Don't worry, it's alright. Just click ok. Then close the Document Management window.

17. From the Lotus Notes Menu, click File, Preferences. Look for a Preference called Document Management and click on that.

18. Choose a folder to manage and click Ok.

19. I think the document management app opens up automatically after this but if not, click Open and then Document Management.

If you've got some ODT documents, you might want to drop them in the folder you nominated and then click Refresh. You'll then be able to work with them in the document management facility.

You can also import files and categories (folders) - and everything seems to be updated on the server's file shares in real-time. Now that I've had a quick play, I'll point to something bigger.

The Notes UI and Sending a Link to a File - Part 2

2010-08-25T09:42:00.009+10:00

Thanks to everyone who responded yesterday. I've considered and tested the responses to find the method which will be simplest for our users.

What follows is a set of instructions....

We start our instructions by identifying the file we want to link to. Often for me, this will be a MPEG, AVI or giant PDF (because why else would you link rather than attach?) but in this example, I'm just using a MS Word Document.

You can see my path here is:

M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts

and my file name is

Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc

Thus; my entire path and filename would be;

M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts\Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc

Already by working the actual filespec out we're stepping slightly beyond the boundaries of the typical user.

Next, we type our email and highlight the words we want to link to a file;

Then we click the new "LINK" icon in Notes 8.5

This gives us a nice little box in which to type our URL. If this was a web link, it would be easy. Of course, being a file link, it's a different story.

You might think that at this point, you could simply paste a link to;

M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts\Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc

but you'd be wrong. Notes will throw this out to the operating system as a URL. If your browser accepts all kinds of different URLs, (like Google Chrome does - and I presume future browsers will) then it won't know what protocol to use.

Just pasting the path in caused a lot of problems for me.

So... this is what you need to do to modify your URL.

Prefix it with file://
Change all backslashes to forward slashes (actually this should happen automatically).

Your new URL should look like this;

file://M:/Dept/IT/2010/Development/ExtraNet/Concepts/Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc

Paste your new URL in and send your email. It should all work. Well, mostly work... If your users have firefox, you might discover that it actually blocks local links for security reasons unless you use these workarounds.

I'm not sure whether to provide these instructions for my users or not. In my opinion, it's still too difficult for them. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to create a button which did it - or even better, if IBM were to adjust the links button in future versions of Notes to allow browsing and selecting files on local resources.

The Notes UI and Sending a Link to a File

2010-08-24T10:00:00.004+10:00

Yesterday I found myself explaining to a new but technical user that Notes/Domino is, like Blackberry. An amazingly powerful and capable piece of software capable of everything that the competition is capable of - plus a whole lot more.

....and hampered by what is still one of the worst user interfaces in the world.

Sorry Notes UI team - I know you're doing your best. The same goes for the blackberry team. I know that they're doing their best too. It's just that the user interfaces have so far yet to go.

So, this morning, the same user asks me how to send a link to a file on our common drives without sending the attachment everywhere.

He's already cleverly tried attaching the .LNK file, but our policies don't allow that as it's considered to be an executable file.

I said to him that I didn't actually know. 18+ years of using the product and I still really don't know how to do this. I know several workarounds but I don't know of any one all-encompassing method.

It's sad.

Even sadder is the fact that as I received the call I was clicking the SEND button on a PDF I was sending around in the required manner.

How did I do it?

I added a button into my mail and dumped a chunk of code which uses the windows ShellExecute API call into the lotusscript section.

I looked around the notes client to see if there was a new way (like that wonderful new way of adding web links). Nope... I couldn't see anything.

I tried Create as hotspot... it spat the dummy about spaces in the file path.

I enclosed in quotes and tried again... this time it almost worked. I changed the beginning of the path to "file://" and it worked - but of course I know that some browsers won't accept file:// urls for security reasons.

I'm none the wiser.

I did a web search and found the following;

A set of instructions...

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Using-Lotus-Notes-1427/send-link-via-Lotus.htm

Nope... I'm not telling my users to do that. It's too hard and I'd rather tell them that they can't do it. Try again.

An External Application

http://www.virtualobjectives.com.au/notesdomino/linkhotspot.htm

You're kidding right? I mean, kudos to the guys who found an empty market niche but there's no way I'm going to accept that we need to install a third party app for this. It should be built in. In any case, the application does a sort of manual DAOS (Domino attachment and object service). It still stores the attachment in a second place - inside a database in the notes/domino system.

My Code

I guess I should make my button code available for everyone - well, everyone who has a designer client - so, not the majority of my users...

1. Add a button.

2. Change it to Run on Client - LotusScript

3. In the declarations section put this code...

Declare Function ShellExecute Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "ShellExecuteA" (Byval hwnd As Long, Byval lpOperation As String, Byval lpFile As String, Byval lpParameters As String, Byval lpDirectory As String, Byval nShowCmd As Long) As Long

Declare Function GetDesktopWindow Lib "user32" () As Long

'CONSTANTS

Const SW_SHOWNORMAL = 1

Const SW_SHOWMAXIMIZED = 3

Const SW_SHOWDEFAULT = 10

4. Create a new subroutine as follows;

Sub RunShellExecute(sTopic As String, sFile As Variant, sParams As Variant, sDirectory As Variant, nShowCmd As Long)

'EXAMPLE: Play wav file with associated app RunShellExecute "Play", "c:\windows\media\Notify.wav", 0&, 0&, SW_SHOWNORMAL

'EXAMPLE: Play avi file with associated app RunShellExecute "Play", "E:\VB Graphics\avi\Cogs.avi", 0&, 0&, SW_SHOWNORMAL

'EXAMPLE: Open txt file with associated app RunShellExecute "Open", "c:\My Documents\rundll.txt", 0&, 0&, SW_SHOWNORMAL

'EXAMPLE: Open txt file with notepad RunShellExecute "Play", "C:\windows\notepad.exe", "c:\My Documents\rundll.txt", 0&, SW_SHOWNORMAL

Dim hWndDesk As Long

Dim success As Long

Const SE_ERR_NOASSOC = &H31

Const vbTextCompare = 1

Dim HashPos As Integer

HashPos = Instr(1, sFile, "##" , vbTextCompare)

If HashPos > 0 Then

sTopic = Left(sFile, HashPos -1 )

sFile = Right(sFile, (Len(sFile) - (HashPos+1)))

End If

'The desktop will be the default for error messages

hWndDesk = GetDesktopWindow()

Print "RunShellExecute: " + "Topic=[" + sTopic + "]" + " File=[" + sFile + "]"

'Execute the passed operation

success = ShellExecute(hWndDesk, sTopic, sFile, sParams, sDirectory, nShowCmd)

End Sub

5. Write the click routine as follows; (with the LaunchPath pointing to your file).

Sub Click(Source As Button)

Const LaunchPath = "L:\Videos\IT\Hacking Fraud Example.avi"

RunShellExecute "Open", LaunchPath, 0&, 0&, SW_SHOWNORMAL

End Sub

There.... Easy! ... erm... not.

DAOS

The new Domino attachment and object service helps a lot in this regard. It only stores the attachment once - and without any user-intervention. It's almost a solution but not quite.

You see, in this day and age, we often want to make video and audio recordings of our conferences available to our internal staff without having to store even a single copy on our mail server. After all, sometimes these recordings are several gigabytes because the conferences can last for days.

Sometimes we just want to point people to a particular folder and not to file.

No Answer?

Well, that's it from me. I've been using Notes/Domino for longer than I was at school and yet I still don't know an easy way to send a link to a file.

Has anyone out there got any ideas?

Article: 5 Million Web Sites Served Malware for at Least 3 Months - And Nobody Noticed!

2010-08-18T14:27:00.004+10:00

I really want to direct your attention to the following article which appeared today;

Malicious widget hacked millions of Web sites

Parked sites hosted by Network Solutions spread malware since at least May

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081610-malicious-widget-hacked-millions-of.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_security_2010-08-17

Essentially the article says that up to 5 million web sites have been serving up malware for at least the last three months - and nobody noticed.

Even worse, it appears that nobody was safe;

"The widget turned every infected domain into a drive-by attack site that launched the multi-exploit "Nuke" toolkit against users running Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera"

Typically, the malware seems to only affect Windows PCs. Roll on Chromium OS! I'm not sure how much longer I can continue to support windows environments for anything other than games.

There's also the fact that the cleanup hasn't been completed.

"Although Network Solutions has disabled the widget on all parked domains and has taken the GrowSmartBusiness.com site offline, the widget remains on approximately 5,700 active sites that manually installed it, Huang said. Nor has Network Solutions scrubbed the malicious script targeting users with IP addresses located in Taiwan and Hong Kong"

Anyway, I've also got a bone to pick (as usual) with certain Anti-Virus vendors because yet again this month, I've seen known viruses just wander in past McAfee's defences. I'm not happy! Sadly, Microsoft's free Windows Defender is still much better at detecting viruses than the paid McAfee product. If you're not running it, you should get it now. This month I learned the hard way that you can't install it on an infected PC running in safe mode.

In the meantime I was just wondering what exactly this article means for cloud platforms of the future. Google Apps, IBM Lotus Live and Microsoft Azure? Surely none of these will work if the browsers don't come with anti-malware defences built in.

Also... what part should the ISP's play in defence I wonder?

Our Lotus Domino Cluster Failover Problem

2010-08-16T09:25:00.004+10:00

In certain computing circles, "clustering" is a dirty word. I've heard of situations where, far from providing business continuity peace of mind, it creates more work and greater risk than it would if it were not involved.

This is not the case with Domino clustering. Done properly, it is extremely reliable

Our Problem

Recently, our cluster seems to have "picked up a slight flutter". Actually, I think that perhaps the rules behind it may have changed sometime around our 8.0 or 8.5 migration.

So, first I want to cover off basically what our cluster looks like;

Ok, this is quite a simplistic view and there are servers missing. I'm concentrating on the problem area only.

We have an onsite and offsite clustered Lotus Domino server, both running Lotus Domino 8.5 HF 1021. We'll call them "Onsite" and "Offsite" for ease of reference. The servers are quite a distance apart because we're clustering for business continuity purposes.

The theory is that our onsite staff members should access the onsite server unless it is down. The majority of our agents also run on this server, as does an intranet, extranet and several web sites. It's a busy and powerful box.

We discovered recently that many of our clients have been using the offsite server but we don't know exactly why.

It seems that if you open a database for which you don't already have a desktop icon, then the Notes client will default to opening it from the offsite server. What has exacerbated this problem is that we upgraded our clients to 8.5.1 and blew away their desktops. Now, suddenly all the computers are trying to access everything off the offsite server.

The reasons?

We don't know but were thinking that it was either;

Alphabetic: Because "Offsite" is lower in the alphabet than "Onsite"

Task Related: Because the Onsite server is much busier than the offsite one.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how we could go about finding out?

Quick Rant: Why does Blackberry Discriminate against Australians?

2010-08-12T12:31:00.004+10:00

I've noticed this on Blackberry a lot over the years and it always irritates me. Today, I thought I should post a quick rant to pass that irritation on.

See the picture...

Why the discrimination against Australians and South Koreans?

I'm sure I could bypass this with the right IP filter but that's not the point. Why do we get picked on. What have we ever done to Blackberry?

The Problems of Real-World Collaboration in Legal and Financial Industry

2010-06-01T07:42:00.004+10:00

Collaboration is the main buzzword in the computer industry these days and there are offerings from all the major vendors; IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Google.

Their collaboration bundles have all recently leapt from the desktop into the web 2.0 cloud and seem to be the answer to all our business problems - but are they? I think that the answer is very industry specific.

I have no doubt that collaboration is a boon for the computing industry and I can see how the sharing of code and the discussion of bugs and product features can provide huge benefits. I can see similar benefits for project management in other industries such as mining and manufacturing too.

The benefits for big business, particularly big "distributed" businesses with offices all around the world are obvious but it's one thing to look at collaboration within the business. External business-to-business collaboration however is a whole new ballgame. It's what collaboration is really all about. Who doesn't want to seen the benefits of industry-wide collaboration on issues such as government, banking and environmental protection?

I can see some amazing potential benefits in the finance and legal sectors but while the potential is there, the money is there and to a certain extent, the capital investment is there too, collaboration is going nowhere fast.

I've got a few theories on why this is the case but sadly, no easy solution presents itself. It's not that the tools that are flawed but that the business structures themselves don't lend themselves to a collaborative environment.

A few years back, we spent quite a bit on building better collaboration tools into our systems. Our document database templates were upgraded to include forums; blogs and wikis were introduced and social bookmarking and improved contact management tools were brought online.

Everything went well in test mode where we had some excellent facebook style discussions about non business items but when we went live, the social silence was deafening.

What went wrong?

I don't think that we can pin the problems down to a single cause but there are several very obvious contributing factors;

Writing Style

The Web 2.0 requires a certain "aggressive" writing style. In order to facilitate discussion you can't simply sit on the fence in an arguement but have to take one side or the other. That way people can either agree or disagree with you. In essence, this is the whole point of the "like/unlike" facilities which are so popular in the facebook and google worlds. Even if someone has nothing to say, at least they can indicate support by simply clicking a link.

This is quite different from the normal rules of engagement for business where you need to tread carefully so as not to scare off potential customers or attract lawsuits.

Our writing teams were still writing to a static audiences. Their messages took the form of announcements rather than debates and no feedback was encouraged. Personally, I don't feel that the same team should be running both your corporate announcements and your web 2.0 interaction. It's more than just retraining, it's a matter of perspective.

Legal Obligations

Then there's the legal issues which abound in discussions between companies. Unlike Facebook where the worst that can happen is that someone "unfriends" you for saying the wrong thing, business discussions which stray off-topic can result in people getting fired or sued. Everything needs to be traceable and every step is like walking on eggshells. Sometimes it's simpler just to keep quiet.

Hierarchy

It's a funny thing but I often find that many of the best "immediate fixes" for business issues are already known at the bottom of the food chain - even when the problems aren't fully understood by the top people. It's a fact of life that those closest to the work are usually more likely to appreciate the day-to-day processing problems than management. The workers tend to think about these problems more and it shouldn't be surprising that they quickly find solutions - even if they don't always consider the big picture.

For some reason, management often has issues with the "bottom-up" approach. They feel that it makes them look less competent and they often try to suppress work-discussions between "little people". They need to maintain their hierarchy. In the world of meetings, this works well. The operations team have "team" meetings, the supervisory teams take the best ideas to the supervisor meetings, again the best ideas transfer to management meetings and so on, up to the board meeting.

Except of course, that it only takes one link in the chain of management to either dislike an idea or fail to understand it and the whole improvement process breaks down. The idea becomes lost.

One of the problems(?) with today's social networks is that they don't maintain these hierarchies. A "little-person" is just as capable of posting their thoughts on an issue as a member of upper management. Even worse, if their place in the hierarchy isn't understood by all the readers, their suggestions may even be listened to.

For this reason, managers and supervisors who feel threatened by this behaviour often try to block access to these systems. Often inappropriate use of company time and resources is cited. The result; the voices with the knowledge are removed from the system and there's little for the management teams to discuss.

Head Hunting

One last problem that we've encountered is head hunting. Unlike traditional systems where employees speak through management and the sources are obscured, inter-company collaboration tools makes it clear who the experts are in a given company. Going one step further and including instant contact details for everyone in the system makes them instantly approachable.

This makes it so much easier to recruit experts from competitors than via agencies. One of the first requests we got after our systems began to move into the collaboration sphere was to remove contact details for participants. It didn't take long for the recruitment sections to discover new sources of personnel.

These problems are just the tip of the iceberg but I think they make it clear. The problems we face in collaboration aren't technical. They're social. A lot of businesses may have the tools but they just aren't ready to collaborate.

Another Anti-virus Rant

2010-05-20T15:18:00.003+10:00

This post is going to be an easy read because I don't have any time to update the blog at the moment - so just look at the pictures.

Most people who've spent any time with me on the computer know that I hate anti-virus products because I think that they spend too much time slowing down the system without any guarantee of actually fixing the problem.

Here's an example which just happened about five minutes ago.

I received an email containing an obviously bad file. It passed neatly through our external scanning system which consists of SEVERAL different anti-virus and anti-spam filters.

I knew it would be a virus, so I saved it to my hard drive.

You can see that it has a Microsoft Word icon but that it ends in .EXE.

If you accept the windows default to hide extensions for known file types, you'll never see the EXE and you might even be fooled into thinking that _doc is the same as .doc.

So...

I right clicked on the file and chose scan from the context menu.

As mentioned before, I've got too issues with anti-virus software.

The first is that they waste time. It took ages to scan this ONE file because the engine had to scan memory AND 65 other files (which it should be scanning as part of it's normal procedures - not as part of my ad-hoc request).

The second issue is that they tend to miss viruses.

You can see that this one didn't find the virus.

Even worse, I updated the anti-virus signatures only seconds before initiating the scan. This is something that most users won't do.

I chased the virus up on other sites and found a note to say that McAfee knew about it (though they didn't call it by the same name). A quick search on the internet found this at a different anti-virus site...

They've known about the virus (or a variant of it) at least since March 2009. That's right, more than a year ago.

I found information on the virus going back to 2005.

Since we pay our license fees and since we do our updates, why aren't we entitled to detection?

Why do we have these anti-viral CPU and RAM hogs anyway?

Computer Malware - How well did the System hold up?

2010-04-10T16:22:00.002+10:00

I recently had the first virus infection on my home computer since the early nineties. It was a particularly nasty Java exploit called XP Internet Security 2010.

This seems to be quite a widespread thing, easily catchable, you just have to visit a web site that has various advertisements on it and according to some reports it has even infected the advertising on the US White Pages sites.

So, I guess that what was interesting about this whole thing is how well the anti-virus and anti-malware systems held up.

McAfee

I used to say that McAfee protects my system but now I'll just have to say that it's resident on my system - at least until it expires. Then again, since it was about as useful as an umbrella on a battlefield, it might not even last that long. McAfee's firewall and Anti-virus didn't even pop up a speech bubble during the entire infection episode. Talk about pointless software - All it seems to do is slow the system down with pathetic real-time scans.

Symantec

At work, we used to be big Symantec users until a series of faults in several of their software products and their sudden abandonment of some expensive hardware led me to abandon their entire platform. Nevertheless, I started looking for a Symantec solution as soon as it became apparent that McAfee was insufficient. Unfortunately, all of my googled searches kept finding the same page.

To cut a long story short, on this page, a user offers a convoluted (and dangerous) means of removing the infection and all the other users talk about how Symantec's products are still unable to detect the malware. The last post was 5 days prior to my own searches, so it seems that Symantec is not much help either.

Browsers

Before I start talking about using other tools to fix the problem, I just want to make a point about browsers. I use Google Chrome, which supposedly is immune to this sort of stuff. It obviously isn't. I noticed the problems when they first happened and followed steps to remove the problem. I thought I'd got it but obviously hadn't.

The thing is, that my computer worked fine for a few more days. The only noticible change was that Internet explorer was back on my Start bar as the default browser. I checked the settings in Chrome but it was still the default.

Eventually, I decided to click on IE just to see whether it would start Chrome or try to take over. That was when my real problems started.

The lessons from this;

No browser is completely safe but Chrome is certainly safer than many.
Internet Explorer is almost completely unsafe. I used version 8, with all the latest service packs and updates. It was still completely vulnerable and exposed my system. Nobody should use Internet Explorer for anything other that Microsoft Updates (and even then, if we're ever allowed to use a different browser, switch immediately).

Microsoft Security Essentials

This performed a full system scan - in fact, it's still doing it as I write this. So far, it's found nothing and it's been running over an hour (and looks to be about 10% complete). A fast solution it isn't - but I have hope that it's thorough.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor

I've always had a bit of a bias against the windows version of PC Tools. I guess it's because I got burned by the DOS version somewhere along the way, or because it fights with McAfee and causes our systems at work to freeze. In any case, I decided to give it a go, not expecting much.

It did the fastest scan out of everything I tried and detected the malware within minutes. It then popped up a dialog box telling me that it would only fix the problems if I paid for it first.

The price wasn't too bad and I was seconds away from paying for it but given that I've got known and active malware on my computer right now... do you REALLY think I'm going to put my credit card details in? Maybe I'll still buy it but I decided to look for a free solution first.

Spybot Search and Destroy

This software has always had a place in my heart. It's free and it's very good. I've had it on all of my computers but since this one has only recently been reloaded, I forgot. I downloaded it and ran it.

It's still running as I type but at least it's already identified some problems.

Microsoft Lunacy

First of all, it's identified two of those fantastic Microsoft Windows Registry Keys which have been modified.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\FirewallOverride

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\AntiVirusOverride

What is this crap!!

Seriously... Who puts these registry keys there anyway? Why are they even possible?

This is completely a Microsoft Problem. It's like Ford building a car and building in special provisions for something to disconnect the temperature warning gauge. It's complete rubbish. It's building a system to fail.

Resolutions

After running for about 70 minutes, Microsoft Security Essentials finally detected...

Trojan:Win32/FakeRean

It suspended the task and asked me if I wanted to remove it. I did and it's gone (I hope). Of course my Task Manager is still screwed but maybe a reboot will fix it. In any case, Microsoft Security Essentials scan is still only at about the 25% mark so perhaps there's more to come.

Thus far the answers are;

Download and run Spybot Search and Destroy. No Windows PC should be without it.
Download and install Microsoft Security Essentials.
Make sure that you have a firewall and Anti-Virus program but don't rely on them. Also; remember that it's not necessarily true that on-access scanning is "better" than regular (nightly) full scans.
Take Regular Backups - and maybe make Windows Rescue Disks (although in all honesty, I'm yet to see a situation where they actually work as intended).
Use a safe(er) browser like Chrome but don't rely on it as 100% foolproof.

IBM's Weird Domino Strategy

2010-03-30T10:27:00.003+11:00

We had the re-badged "Lotus Comes To You" event in Sydney a couple of weeks ago - "collaboration something or rather...."

As usual it was an interesting event but I couldn't help getting some strange vibes from both the business partners and from fellow customers on the Lotus brand.

I figured that this was as good a time as any to share them.

The "Package"

One of the greatest things about Lotus Notes/Domino is its swiss-army knife style ability to do just about anything. ROI in the domino world is a great thing. There's fewer servers to buy, less software and amazing integration.

Any existing Domino server can be converted to a different type of domino server without the need to reinstall. For example, it's simple to convert a mail server to a document database server and/or a web server.

Such a thing would never happen in the Microsoft world.

I guess we've all used the swiss army knife analogy at some point. It's a key strength.

Similarly, we've all had a good chuckle over the Microsoft strategy of; "a server for this, a different server for that".

We love to talk about how replacing Domino with Microsoft isn't simply a matter of replacing the domino server with an Exchange one; it's a matter of adding Exchange, Sharepoint, Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft SQL Server and a whole bunch of other software, much of which requires its own separate hardware.

What then is IBM doing to Domino?

That was the message I got from the people on the ground at LCTY in Sydney 2010.

IBM's Microsoft-Style Agenda

So, here's the crux of the problem. IBM seem to be intent on breaking up the swiss army knife into separate pieces of cutlery. The problem is that it just doesn't make sense. It takes away their corporate advantage and in all honesty, the last people they should be following are Microsoft.

Lets have a look at where IBM seems to be going;

Lotus QuickR
Lotus QuickR provides some excellent document management facilities but really, there's very little that QuickR can do that IBM Domino can't already do. Perhaps QuickR does it more neatly but why wasn't the QuickR budget spent on improving the Domino product?
Connections
What is connections but a glorified contact management solution? Again, it's stuff that already existed in Lotus Notes/Domino. Why do we need a separate product (and a separate server) to do it.
Sametime
Admittedly, Sametime has been around for a long time but ultimately, it too is a glorified extension of Domino. In this case case, it deals with instant messaging.
Traveller
Another name, another product. At least it's being bundled with Domino.
WebSphere
This one has been an issue for me for ages. It's a web server - Domino is a web server! Enough said.

What's worse is that most of these products needs to be installed on a separate server thus killing the famous Domino ROI.

Strangely enough, about the only thing IBM seems to be keeping as the core of Notes/Domino is email... and if I had to pick a long-time weakness in the product, that would be it.

One last thing. If I were IBM, I'd be considering offering "Lotus Licenses" and treating the entire Lotus family as parts of the same thing. Instead of worrying about whether a user needs QuickR or Websphere or Domino, why not concentrate on;

Lotus Clients
Lotus Web Clients
Lotus Servers.

A Lotus Server could provide entitlement to run any or all of the Lotus Servers but be limited by the number of users or CPUs. Users would be a better measure since the CPU limitations doesn't consider "tomorrow's" technology. A Lotus Client would be a Notes user (including sametime, quickr etc. client) and a Lotus Web client is "web entitlement to the products".

Surely having only three licences for the entire infrastructure would clear things up a lot.

IBM; Perhaps a clearer strategy?

Book Review: IBM Lotus notes and Domino 8.5.1 - The Upgrader's Guide

2010-02-03T19:28:00.006+11:00

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1: The Upgrader's Guide

by Tim Speed, Barry Rosen, Joseph Anderson, Dick McCarrick, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf and David Byrd

Published by PACKT Publishing.

This book clocks in at about 336 pages which is nowhere near enough to be a complete administrator's guide to the gigantic field that IBM Lotus Notes and Domino has become. Fortunately, it identifies its market well and restricts itself firmly to its stated objectives.

The book aims to introduce Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 to people who are already familiar with earlier versions of Notes/Domino. It's not a dummies guide and it's not an administrators handbook. It's purely and simply an upgrader's guide.

As someone who never actually bothers to read the "what's new" section of the help files which ship with IBM products, and who instead relies solely on the blogging community (and Lotus-Comes-To-You) to highlight the main interest points, this was always going to be a difficult review.

In introducing the new features of Notes/Domino 8.5.1, the book leaves no stone unturned. It covered everything I could think of - and much, much more.

The book starts off with a review of the new Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client features. I found this particularly interesting because there were a few features I'd missed. The illustrations are relevant and the text is easy to read. In fact, the first chapter is crying out to be given to a group of users as a mini-book in it's own right.

I have read some comments from people suggesting that this isn't a great idea simply because it will get your users excited about Notes and have them demanding that the features be made available immediately. I'm not so sure that this is a bad thing - it's a great chapter and one that should be read by pretty much everyone using Notes and Domino.

One thing that I noticed is that the book doesn't generally give tips for the best settings and doesn't always highlight potential pitfalls. At first I was a little bit confused by this but then I realized it isn't a best practices guide it's an upgrader's guide. Ultimately these omissions actually make the chapter more presentable to end-users. They just want to know "what's new" not details.

The second chapter focuses on Service Orientated Architecture. This was very high level and included links to an external resource which I didn't check out. The book provides quite a number of these links, they allow the authors to provide more information without increasing the page count. You won't be able to build SOA applications merely as a result of reading this chapter but at least you'll have a fair idea of what it's about and you may begin to formulate business plans which involve it.

The chapter on productivity tools is generally about Symphony. I got the feeling that perhaps a little too much marketing Kool-Aid had been swallowed, particularly with the phrase; "No matter what the complexity of the documents that you are creating or editing, this productivity tool can handle the job." but the chapter does give a lot of information on the products.

In particular, there is some great information that I haven't seen elsewhere such as information about where to store the templates for IBM Lotus Presentations and how to use policies to decide whether or not macros can be run.

Chapter 4 deals with changes to the Lotus Domino server. In particular, it looks at message recall, the out-of-office agent and mail threading. In these cases, it delivers more than simply "What's new" information and often shows you where exactly the settings can be changed.

Chapters five to seven deal with deployment enhancements and the actual upgrade itself. It was quite interesting to read Chapter 6 because it focuses on the migration strategy more than the migration itself. In our company, our users are lucky to even get warning other than an outage notice when we do an upgrade. The migration strategy talks about getting CEO/CIO support, user training and making decisions about individual component upgrades. Chapter 7 covers coexistence between various Domino releases.

Chapter 8 deals with the changes to domino designer and the new methods and facilities available. I think I was expecting a whole chapter on xpages here, and little else but I was quite surprised. The chapter covers composite applications, DB/2 integration and the changes to designer. Xpages only gets a single introductory page but it is enough to whet your appetite.

Once again, the authors have looked at the big picture. I was surprised to find that they covered, JavaScript controls, HTML generation and even the ID Vault. Most impressively, they even included a few formula language additions which I would've otherwise missed. My favorites being; @Command([CopySelectedAsTable]) and @Command([OpenInNewWindow]). I have been waiting for these for a long time and was totally unaware that they were now available. It's not the sort of thing that gets covered on the channels I usually visit.

The chapter concludes with coverage of Lotus component designer, a quite detailed explanation of how to setup RSS feeds, coverage of the blog template and some information on expeditor. All of this is very good and very useful stuff. It was very tempting to put the book down there and then and go enable all my RSS feeds.

Chapter 9 covers integration with other Lotus/IBM products, in particular, Quickr, Sametime and Lotus Connections. Chapter 11 looks at some third party add-ons; Pistolstar, Intelliprint, IONET Incremental Archiver and CMT Inspector.

Chapter ten looks at the enhancements to Domino 8.5.1 and includes a lot of detail on DAOS, the Domino Attachment and Object Service. It also covers the Notes Shared Login, Domino Configuration Tuner and overlaying Google Calendars - another exciting prospect.

Overall, "IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1: The Upgrader's Guide" is a great book for a specific purpose. It won't replace your "dummies book" or your "administrators guides" but it does cover a suprising amount of ground and is recommended for people who are upgrading from older versions of domino.

The book is available from PACKT Publishing as both a physical and an Acrobat PDF eBook.

http://www.packtpub.com/ibm-lotus-notes-and-domino-8-5-1-upgraders-guide/book

Book Preview: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1

2010-01-23T15:27:00.004+11:00

I was only recently lamenting the lack of Notes 8 books in Australia, when I got sent this one to review. It looks interesting and it certainly will fill a gap. I'll bring you a detailed review when I've had a proper read.

In the meantime, if you're interested, jump right in and get it - it seems very comprehensive.

IBM Notes and Domino 8.5.1

by Barry Rosen, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf, David Byrd, Dick McCarrick, Joseph Anderson, Tim Speed

Chapter 8: What's new in Notes/Domino 8.5 Development is available for download for free (in PDF format). It's a good place to start.

Click here for further information;

Overcoming Password Woes - A Presentation

2010-01-13T08:30:00.002+11:00

With our recent change to everyone's password and the hardening of some of our standards, we've understandably got a bit of internal confusion over passwords. I decided to not only sort out our internal problems but also give our users some great tips for their internet passwords.

Here's a presentation I've prepared for our users. I've stripped off branding and names so that

you can use it in your own organisations. You have my permission to reuse it as you see fit.

Our Infrastructure Upgrades - Domino (Part 1)

2010-01-04T09:29:00.002+11:00

Our Domino Infrastructure upgrades were originally scheduled to take place in early 2009 but when we discovered that Notes 8 closed the "duplicate subform" loophole which, as it turned out was used by one of our mission critical apps, it was put on hold.

In fact it was put on hold for so long that 8.5 and then 8.5.1 were released in the meantime. After a careful look at both, some unresolved issues in 8.5.1 led us to a decision to deploy 8.5.

The Notes 8.5 Client

The rollout of 8.5 client was done quietly, one person at a time. Given that this is such a major change to the client (eclipse), it's hardly surprising that there were issues - some of which are again, still unresolved.

We did quite a few experiments in that initial rollout;

Networked Data Folders
We tried putting the data directory on the user's home drives (network shares). It's an old trick which works to provide better (more complete and seamless) roaming than Notes itself provides. Unfortunately, notes still "hammers" the network connection - even at 100mbps - last time I tried this trick, I had it working (most of the time) at 10mbps - under Notes 4.

A partial network install of the eclipse version of notes generates a great deal more traffic than it's R7 counterpart. This is because while the previous versions of Notes were one big .exe file with a few toolbars and icons, the eclipse version contains hundreds of little files and resources, all of which are loaded on demand. This bandwidth utilisation which runs in direct competition with scheduled replication tasks can add minutes to the notes startup.

The other downside to running this type of notes install is that the client needs constant uninterrupted access to the desktop8.ndk and cache.ndk files. If the access drops, even for a second, the notes client goes into a loop from which the only escape is to end the task. There is actually a way of moving the files but we didn't bother trying it.

It was obvious that the method was "no-go".
Standard Multiuser
The next install type we tried for the clients was the standard multiuser install. This gave much better network performance but restricted our roaming options slightly. It was still supported but you had to do a Notes setup for each user on each machine.

While this method was certainly faster and more stable than the networked method, it still wasn't as fast as we'd like.

The reason? Well, it's again related to having all those little files instead of one big one. Normally when you start an application with a big EXE file, there is only one delay when the on-demand anti-virus scanner gets hold of it. When there are hundreds of little startup files however, the on demand scanner doesn't know what to get until the app "reaches" for it. The result is that it introduces a delay on every file. As the number of files being read increases, the delay becomes increasingly significant.

There is only one way around the problem - remove the on-demand scanning. Now obviously we're not willing to do that, so the next best bet was to disable it for the notes directory. I was still a little uncomfortable with this idea but we tried it and got significant improvements.

The improvements still were nothing on the speed of my designer client and after a little investigation, we discovered that the on-access scanning was still doing the notes DATA directory. We tried disabling this via policies but that didn't work - we couldn't specify the folder names because of that stupid Microsoft profiles folder naming convention;

The data folder was in;
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Settings\Lotus.

Since the folder was different for each user and since our McAfee software doesn't take variables in exclusion folder names, it wasn't possible to set a policy. I wasn't even going to consider adding the entire "Documents and Settings" folder to exclusions - if you do that, you might as well turn off the anti-virus altogether.

In the end, we asked ourselves how important the casual roaming ability was and decided that it was less critical than everyday startup times. We're now converting to a standard single user install and have perfected a procedure for moving without a reinstall.

Wow - that post was longer than intended, so I'm breaking it up. Next time I'll go into detail about our client settings (what we changed and why) and talk about our server and design installs.

My thoughts on the IT Year in Review

2009-12-24T07:08:00.002+11:00

I'd like to say that I've reached the end of our changes, fixes and upgrades for the year but it's simply not true. Work is increasing drastically as we try to make use of the "quiet business period" to install new systems and have outages. Look out for a bunch of posts early in the new year to describe some of the best and worst of our installations.

In the meantime, it's Christmas eve. Instead of doing a completely off-topic post about a holiday which might not appeal to all my readers, I thought I might wrap up the year with my "layman's" (generally ignoring the finances) perception of how the computing giants have performed this year. In the meantime, if you're accepting well-wishes for the season, you have mine.

Quick Disclaimer: Everything here is my own personal thoughts - so don't place too much reliance on it - and don't try to sue me. We're all entitled to our thoughts, so get over it.

2009 has been an amazing year in IT circles with some unexpected ups and downs.

Google

Google has been a clear winner for me as a technology company over the last few years and this year was no exception. Gmail has consistently surprised me with innovative new features in a technology-space I thought had exhausted all possibilities. It's also brought back some old domino ideas (like labels instead of folders) making it clear that sometimes the old ways are best.

The rest of Google's technology is equally amazing and innovative with only a couple of exceptions (Orkut, I'm looking at you, you facebook wannabe). The social technology which is growing in blogger, those amazing gadgets and of course, Chrome and Android, leave absolutely no doubt as to who the next great technology leader is.

2009 was the year that Google started proving that it was ready for serious business users. I'm not entirely certain that they were 100% successful (there were some serious outages while they bedded down their systems) but it's clear that cloud computing is the way of the future and Google have the best and most complete cloud platform thus far.

Microsoft

On the flipside, 2009 was the year that Microsoft burned for their sins. They copped flack from all sides, whether it was from users (still) rejecting Vista, Apple taking their OS sales, Google (and the courts) eating away at their Office business, IBM finally defending itself against the Exchange/Outlook FUD and most recently, Firefox 3.5 taking the mantle of "world's most popular browser" from IE7.

Microsoft's woes prove two important things;

It doesn't matter who you are or how big and powerful you are, you've gotta have friends, not simply followers. This is a pitfall that Google needs to tread carefully around. Monopolies can't last - equilibrium will always reassert itself. If you keep taking business off your colleagues, you'll eventually make enough enemies to get yourself defeated.
Leadership is best done by those with enthusiasm, not people who should be in "services departments". I guess that I'm saying that the best leaders for technology companies are "technology people", just as the best leader for a legal firm would be a lawyer. Bill Gates was undoubtedly a technical person, Steve Ballmer isn't.

IBM

Then there was IBM. The sleeping giant has woken and is now actively supporting, even marketing the Lotus brand. In a nice touch, IBM threw a backhand swipe towards many of the business partners who had been backstabbing it. Hopefully now, the days of being grudgingly sold an IBM system by someone who doesn't understand it and wants to replace it in the near future, are ending.

I know a lot of people are quite upset by this move claiming that it's unfair but as an end user, I applaud it. Companies who don't fully support the technology they install are "unfair" from my point of view.

IBM also released some great new technologies under the Lotus Brand, particularly Notes 8.5.1 and Traveller (which is already making us consider throwing out our Blackberry infrastructure). This year, I installed Notes 8.5 on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Linux, Debian and GoogleOS. I was very impressed with the fact that it ran so well on all of those platforms. There's no doubt that Lotus Notes is still amazing software. What I'd really like to see from IBM in 2010 would be a commitment of resources to "modernize notes". I don't simply mean from a technology development perspective though, I'd love to see IBM locating every business on a 6.5 client and going in to show them the wonders of the 8.5 world.

Of course, with the rapid upgrade cycle, there were quite a few bugs this year and my initial days of Notes 8.5.1 had me building a list of five ways to crash the client in under 5 keystrokes. None of them have been resolved yet but I'm now much more careful about which keys I press. I also had some struggles with IBM tech support this year which demonstrate that it's no better than it was in the nineties, perhaps worse. At least my PMRs are now on the fix list.

It's unfair though to slam IBM's technical support - after all, I daren't try Microsoft's now (their web "help" messages are bad enough) and Google's is almost non-existent, which is acceptable for the price ($0). All in all, it's great to see IBM waking up, hopefully they'll keep the pressure on in the new year.

Apple

Apple is yet another success story this year, having clawed it's way back onto the desktop via the iPod and iPhone. It amazes me that technology so tied up with digital rights is so successful but it just goes to show how much appearances and usability counts in the IT world.

I'd love to be saying that the desktop of the future belongs to free software like Ubuntu or Chromium but it's not going to happen. If the desktop manages to move from Microsoft, it will go to Apple but it's much more likely to stay "diverse" and simply migrate the apps and data to the cloud.

Regardless, Apple is gaining momentum and I'd say that about 80% of the computer purchases by friends and family were Apple purchases - and a great many of these were Windows migrations. Even better, everyone I've talked to after a migration seems happy - much happier than they were on windows.

The Rest

There's so many other technology companies I could talk about but I'm rapidly running out of space (well, not exactly but longer articles discourage readers). Here's a quick wrap-up.

Linux: It's becoming obvious that linux is never going to be able to make the moves that take over the "popular desktop". I'm not saying that it isn't good, it's great. I've used Ubuntu quite a bit this year - I'm running Notes 8.5.1 under Karmic Koala in a VM on my WinXP PC at the moment. It's just that Linux is still too techy. It lacks the polished user interface of Apple. Without that, it will never be able to take over.
Sony: Who leads these companies anyway? Seriously, Sony had a great shot at relevance when, with Microsoft's XBox 360 stumbling, the PS3 launched to rave reviews. It couldn't hold off the competition from the Wii with it's gimmicky interface (which is now sliding because the gimmick only lasts for a while and interferes with playability). Even worse though, the PS3's main competition was with the PS2 - and the PS2 is still the undisputed winner. Sony was clever for not completely retiring the PS2 (like Microsoft did with the XBox) but then they shot themselves in the foot by removing PS2 compatibility from the PS3. Now I have a Wii at home. I don't particularly like it but there was no compelling reason to buy a PS3 (other than Blu-Ray). Sony's removal of PS2 support moved the PS3 from an "upgrade" to a "new" system - and made it just as easy to switch platforms. Great leadership Sony... (duh...).
Blu-Ray: Far from consolidating their position as the dominant format, Blu-Ray simply sat on the border of irrelevance. After all, what could it offer over DVD? Certainly not the same amount of advantage that DVD had over VHS. It looks like the future isn't in the disc format at all but rather, in online storage whether streamed from the web or from local storage. Only time will tell.

There's a lot more I could review but I guess it's time to close. I'm going to be seriously busy with those upgrades for the next month so I'll probably not post until 2010. All the best everyone - and thanks for being great readers!

How to block your number (for Caller ID) on the Blackberry Bold 9000

2009-12-01T13:27:00.004+11:00

I was asked to help someone with this today and I spent ages searching for the option (because it's not in the obvious place). I didn't get a lot of help online either, so I thought I'd put a post out there to fill in the gap.

It's not on the spanner icon (settings) where you'd expect it to be.

Procedure

From the front screen of your Blackberry
Push the green phone button
Push the blackberry button
Scroll through the menu to find "Options"
Choose "General Options"
Scroll down to "Show my Number"
If it says, Yes, then your caller id displays when you ring people. If no, then it doesn't.
Change it to whatever you want by pushing the pearl
Push the Blackberry button and choose Save.

It should take effect immediately.

Bear in mind though that lots of people won't accept calls from unlisted numbers - though if you're having trouble getting people to accept calls from YOU on a listed number, maybe going unlisted is a better option.

Notes 8.5.1 Attachment Issue - Help?

2009-11-24T09:55:00.005+11:00

I've been chasing a simple attachment issue in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 with IBM support for a while now but we're not really getting "engagement" yet. I thought I'd document it and see if we're the only ones with this problem.

The Problem

What we've discovered is that if we attach a file using a Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client, everything behaves as per normal in the Notes client but if we use a web browser to look at the NotesDocument, the file name disappears.

It's best illustrated.

On the left, you can see how the attachment renders in the Notes client using a standard discussion database. On the right, you can see how it renders in the web browser. There is no filename. It's not white-on-white, it's simply not there.

Our Parameters

It only happens when we use Lotus Notes 8.5.1 clients, but it's not a problem with 8.5
I've only tested the problem on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3
It happens on lots of computers, regardless of brand, configuration and memory.
Our Domino server is currently still 7.0.2 (this might be the problem?)
It happens with customised databases and with the standard R7 and R851 templates.

IBM Support

As I've said before, I haven't used IBM support (other than online discussion databases) in the last ten years because the online community was so much better than support. I opened two PMRs recently mainly to test support.

I've been sending a few emails back and forth but I'm running out of ways to describe the problem. Right now, we're just six days shy of the one-month anniversary of my original submission (I'm glad I marked it urgent) - hence my comment about not really getting engagement.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

Twice in One Week - Disaster Recovery beyond our Control

2009-11-04T23:01:00.003+11:00

It has been a busy week for disaster recovery so far - we had an outage on Monday and we had another one today.

Monday's Email Outage

On Monday, we lost our e-mail services. No, it had nothing to do with the Lotus Domino server. That was fine.

At first, it looked as if we'd forgotten to renew our domain name. This was quickly followed with a back and forward check of various DNS services out there on the Web, our domain registrar and our Internet service providers. All seemed ok with our domain name but there was definitely something weird happening.

Eventually we discovered that our Internet service provider had their DNS running off a domain which they had forgotten to renew. Since they were providing our primary DNS, all of our inbound mail was getting confused when it went to resolve our domain.

After being told by us (yes, they were unaware of the situation despite the fact that it had occurred during the night and it wasn't noticed immediately in the morning), they quickly got to work renewing their domain. Of course, given the sorts of problems associated with domain name propagation, our problems persisted in one form or another for several hours.

Years ago, such a problem would've been effectively "over" within a matter of hours but unfortunately, more and more companies are outsourcing their services overseas, and it takes more than fixing the local domain services to resolve the problem.

Today's Building Outage

Our Wednesday problem occurred while I was at lunch. I hurried back and arrived at a darkened building. Luckily, since we moved offices, we aren't as high up as we used to be and I only had to run up six stories worth of stairs (although immediately after lunch, it felt like more than that).

It turned out that the entire local grid had lost power. Our domino server and our main file server were happily running off UPS but unfortunately the UPS handling our communications gear was not up to scratch. It didn't matter because there was no way that the UPS would be able to power our systems for more than 30 minutes. Even if this was possible, the temperature inside the computer room was rapidly climbing now that the air-conditioning was off.

We had no choice but to start shutting down the servers. It took us a little while to make that decision because we knew we had a little time and we were hoping for the power to come back on. Of course, as soon as we got halfway through the shutdown procedure, the power came back on. This was after a 45 minute outage in the centre of Sydney's CBD.

Once again, the problem was "environmental" and out of our control. We could have switched to our offsite systems but it is a hard call to make because although our systems are clustered, we have a few special requirements which make a partially manual cut-over desirable. When the cut-over is not automatic, it becomes very difficult to make a decision as to when to flip the switch.

Out of Control Problems

The thing that these stories brings to mind is the fact that I keep reading anti-cloud computing "horror" stories from various vendors. In particular, they talk about Google's Gmail outages. I don't personally understand how people can think that cloud computing is any more or less unsafe than normal computing. As I said before, the problems had nothing to do with the Domino server. In fact, I can't remember a time when we've had an outage due to the Domino server.

I can remember plenty of times when we had hardware failures, ISP failures, power, air-conditioning, gas leaks and DNS failures. We've had problems with Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam services running on the domino server - and when we moved them off the server, they still caused us the occasional problem at the gateway. We've even had problems because of Windows itself and device driver updates. It's never domino though. The server product is entirely stable.

In some respects, our Domino mail is in exactly the same position as Gmail. It's not the product that is at fault, it's the underlying infrastructure - and it's out of our hands.

With friends like these... (Business Partners and support)

2009-11-02T15:20:00.003+11:00

Some time ago, Graham Dodge posted a great discussion point on business partners and brand loyalty. (See: When is an IBM Business Partner not a real partner). Today, I got to experience this first hand.

Today, we had a discussion about Active Directory. It's something we need to install, mainly to tick the business continuity box, and not something I'm particularly keen on. It's a messy rip and replace job with very little business gain. As is often the case for Microsoft products, there's no upgrade path. That's right, we're going from Old Microsoft product to New Microsoft product and the only way to do it is to throw our baby out with the bathwater and start again. I'm not happy, but it's no worse than I expected.

Messy Introductions

Our contact arrived during a painful ISP outage (more on those amazing adventures in a different post - soon). We explained about the outage and he started telling us about how he'd been head hunted by them and was considering his options.

Observation No 1: If you are a business person trying to sell a service. It's probably not wise to let potential clients know that you're thinking about leaving the company.

Product Knowledge

Discussions moved on to our systems and I mentioned that I wasn't particularly keen on Active Directory and that overall, it wasn't critically important to us except to tick some boxes. "We're primarily a domino shop", I said, expecting him to understand. I went on to suggest that although we currently have file shares, we'd probably want to replace them with something like Quickr eventually.

Our BP then launched into a giant spiel about how it was dangerous to deviate from the Microsoft Windows platform and how "maybe you know these systems really well but when the time comes to replace you, there'll only be people with Microsoft certifications about".

I stopped him and explained that our Domino servers were running on Windows but that it was great to have a choice and not be tied to a single platform. The BP went a little loony and started talking about this dangerous Quickr thing "whatever it was", and how cloud computing would fall apart as soon as your ISP did something stupid.

I had to stop him again and ask... "Are you guys really IBM business partners?". He briefly answered "Yes" and then went back to flogging the MS view of the world.

Observation 2: If you're going to use the word Business Partner to describe yourself, then you must at least have a passing familiarity with your BP's products.

Observation 3: Nobody likes being told that their roadmap is "incorrect" - particularly not by people who aren't privy to it. That sort of behaviour doesn't sell services.

I have a bunch more observations but they essentially say the same things. As a customer, I demand product loyalty from my service providers. Sure, it's ok to not be happy about moves that a parent company makes (I whine about IBM too - as I'm sure people have noticed).

There's a big difference however between whining and betrayal.

What is wrong with IBM's Definition of Free?

2009-10-30T07:47:00.008+11:00

I don't want to come over sounding "all negative", after all my last few posts were (justifiable) rants about installation issues but there IS something wrong with IBM's definition of FREE.

It's not the product. Both Lotus Notes and Symphony are great full-featured products. The problem is the fact that IBM is obviously very uncomfortable with giving things away for nothing.

I'm reminded of the sort of routine you see all the time on sitcoms, where one person gives another a gift but refuses to let go. There's that awkward silence and then, after what seems an eternity, the gift-giver finally let's go.

Compare this to the Google approach of showering you with gifts when you walk in the door.

I'm not suggesting that IBM should be like Google. Much as I admire Google, I can't help but think that their business model is ultimately flawed. Eventually, the rain of free goodies will have to stop if they want to turn a profit.

So, where and how could IBM improve?

Here's a few examples;

1. Don't be so desperate to get contact information that it prevents your users from downloading your software.

Let's look at the differences between downloading Symphony versus OpenOffice.

Open Office

Go to http://www.openoffice.org/
Click "I want to Download OpenOffice.Org"
Click Green arrow marked Download Now (the system choose the right version for you).
Click Save.
17 Minutes download (Really).

IBM Lotus Symphony

Go to http://symphony.lotus.com/
Took forever to draw the page?? huh? I'll overlook that as a problem at my end.
Choose Lotus Symphony 1.3 (Download)
Presented with 1-5 of 5 Results (I just want one... can't it autodetect then give me an option to change?)
Found "Windows" and clicked on it.
Choose a language (English)
Click Continue
Arrive at Confusing IBM ID Screen ... (wtf)
Click proceed without an IBM ID
Entered First and Last Names, Email Address, Region,
Tick Privacy thing.
Tick Licence Thing
Click I confirm.
Click Download
"Please select a file for download" - the file you've just selected comes up as not ticked. (wtf2)
Tick the file and click Download Now
IBM Download Director Runs (and is the default) - (wtf3)
Fortunately it worked for me, but only because I finally unblocked it on my firewall. Mosty users won't know how to do this. It took me ages to disable it on the corporate firewall.
Time Remaining 21 Minutes (really)
I suspect that if I'd chosen HTML It would be much longer and less accurate time-wise. After all, the "two hours" it took to download notes via html were at least 180 minutes long.

Does anyone else see a problem with this download procedure?

OpenOffice pops up an optional registration screen when you first run it. That's what IBM should be doing.

2. Your Software is Brilliant - stop being shy about it.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Lotus Notes 8.5.1 is the single most powerful and flexible piece of free software available for computers today.

So why isn't IBM shouting about it?

IBM seems to think that Lotus Notes is no good without a server but that's rubbish. It's amazingly adaptable, it works on all three of the main clients (windows, mac and linux), is portable via USB stick (remember Nomad) and you can build all kinds of great registers and databases using it. I know, because the company I work for runs many critical banking systems using purely Notes/Domino technology.

For the last 16 years, I've maintained a document database of everything IT in Notes. The database contains the inventories of all our PCs, details of software licensing and product keys, how to build our SOE, how to operate our various systems, great code examples, contact lists for support and other services. Everything IT is in one secure and searchable database. How's that for a DRP?

The IT Manual: Everything lives here. The possibilities for local databases are endless, users could for example, have their family tree as a series of linked documents with a whole history about each person, photos, attachments, the works.

Then there's other databases. Have a look on CNet and you'll find a whole heap of shareware databases for collectors of stamps, dvd's, books etc. Most have a price tag attached and limited support. It's also unlikely that they're usable on other operating systems, and even less likely that they're data-compatible with eachother. It's a certain that none will work on twenty years worth of various operating systems.

My movie database doesn't just have the normal views of title, director, actor etc. I can sort and categorise by date purchased, ratings, awards won, running time, country of origin, easter eggs, extras etc. Best of all, I can add new views whenever I want without waiting for a new version of the product to come out.

Here's a sample document in my DVD movie database. I've chosen a "familiar" film. There's no limit to the sort of stuff I can put here. In fact, the record shown goes on quite a bit longer containing a detailed review of the DVD (culled from a web site), Memorable Quotes and Goofs sections. The fields you see here are picklists and the graphics draw automatically (in read mode) based on selections made. The database itself contains 2,205 DVDs (don't tell my wife!) and no. I don't need a server for it. It's a pretty good database even when only used locally.

With Notes, you can roll your own, you can add fields and views to your heart's content and you can get a whole heap of benefit - without needing a server.

So why isn't IBM shouting about it!!!

When it was first announced that Domino Designer was FREE, I tried to get info from IBM about it. I've wanted to jump and shout about the benefits of Notes to my friends for so long but I can't because IBM remains confusingly "frozen" on the product.

I've been told that it's free to developers but that it's really a trial product and "useless without a server" and I've been wondering why? Did IBM "unbundle" designer from the client? Do the licensing arrangements preclude this?

So far, I have no answer, except perhaps a feeling of unease that IBM really doesn't "GET" the power of their own product.

I suggested that to provide the notes client for free and say that you're not supposed to use it except to learn development is akin to providing MS Word for free but saying "it's only so you can learn VBA - don't try to use it for letters".

That statement was intended to galvanise IBM into a proper response but the stone giant remains steadfast, telling me instead that "we can't give everything away for free" and talking about why they can't give server CALs away - as if that had anything to do with my question.

All I want from IBM is some assurance that I can give the product to my friends along with databases and data that would be of interest to them - in a purely "local" sense. I'm not sure why I have to fight them for this assurance.

3. Users Sell the Product - Not Developers

Finally, there's the question of developers. IBM needs to realise that systems are sold by satisfied "users" not developers. If the reverse were true then linux would have overthrown windows long ago. Just look at the inroads that the iPhone has made over blackberry in the last couple of years. It's not the developers selling it. It's the users. If you want to sell Notes, you have to convince the users.

So why not be a bit more excited about getting your free product out there and running locally on users machines. It's not about servers... I've said heaps of times before, if you just want mail and calendar, then GMail and Google Calendar are much better alternatives. Notes is powerhouse software and it's strength lies in its applications.

IBM Lotus Notes Designer 8.5.1 Installation Issues Update

2009-10-29T09:18:00.003+11:00

I finally got to the bottom of the problems with the 8.5.1 installation and I believe that they're related to my use of the Google Chrome Web Browser.

The Hard Way

At work, after five unsuccessful uninstalls and reinstalls of Notes 8.5.1 (with some - always successful - reinstalls of 8.5 in between), I finally did two things.

Switched my primary web browser back to Internet Explorer (don't worry, I didn't actually use it for the duration).
Decided not to reinstall the single-signon service.

It worked!! I later switched back to Chrome and then reinstalled (did a repair) to add Single Signon. It still worked. I was in business.

The Easy Way

Once I was on 8.5.1 at work, I decided it was time to update my home computer. I don't have single signon there, but I do have Chrome as my default browser. I wasn't expecting the same installation issues to occur but they did. It's obviously Chrome.

This time, I decided to try a different approach.

Following an anonymous tip in the comments of my last post - (Whoever you are - thanks!!!), I decided to make it difficult for Notes to find the C:\Lotus\Notes\Framework folder.

I closed Notes, and renamed the folder from Framework to xFramework.

Then started designer.

I was expecting it to fall in a heap, but it worked, albeit not particularly well. Still, this was the first time that designer had actually started.

I closed it down again and renamed the folder back.

The next time I started designer, it worked perfectly. Problem solved.

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1: An Update and Reinstall No 5.

2009-10-21T08:21:00.002+11:00

Knowing (hoping) that I will receive a call from IBM today to follow up on my Lotus Notes client installation issues, I figured that I had better go back to 8.5.1. Of course, this means that I have to survive the entire day without designer.

This time, I decided to make a note of my steps.

They are as follows;

Part 1: Knocking the Old One Off

Start, control panel

Go to add remove programs and remove Lotus Notes

Close everything down... literally everything, notepad, chrome the whole lot.

The removal took 9 minutes and this was with my antivirus and firewall shutdown.

I then went searching through the file system to locate any old directories which may have contained Lotus software. I found one on my profile under application data and I found another under program files. I deleted both of these. I also killed my old installation files.

After this, I started the registry editor and did a search for "Lotus". I killed the majority of entries except for those which were obviously irrelevant. Amusingly, I even killed desktop theme called Lotus. I think that one might ship with Windows but it isn't yellow.

Reinstallation

The next step was to reboot my PC, wait until it came up again and then shut down the antivirus and firewall services.

With nothing else running, I started the 618MB CS5S0EN.EXE setup file. Despite the fact that I don't like the default unpack settings, I decided not to change them.

In most cases, I left everything as default. The exception was in the program selection area.

Here I added;

The Client Single Logon
Designer
Administrator
The Composite Application Editor

Everything else, was left as default.

The installation process took precisely 8 minutes.

After installation, I gave the system a generous minute of time to settle itself before starting the client. I was able to connect client server fairly quickly and got to my mail with no issues. Once again, administrator loaded quite nicely but designer... it obviously didn't want to be there.

For background information, my PC is an Intel dual core 3 GHz Dell Precision T3400 with 4GB RAM and 9 GB of free hard drive space. It's running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3.

Installing IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1 - Or Maybe not

2009-10-20T14:15:00.003+11:00

I've just had a terrible user experience this morning with four failed attempts to install IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1. I'm usually not one to give up but I have lots of work to do, so I'm going back to my old faithful 8.5.

I'm not the only one either it seems. I've talked to a few others and I've had a good look around the internet. There seems to be a very high percentage of people with 8.5.1 installation problems.

The problems themselves are varied. In my case, I got the core product working (after an extremely long installation - that bit, apparently, is common to everyone) but although I got the Administrator client running, the designer (and really my only reason for interest in the upgrade), simply refused to start.

Other people seem to have different problems and indeed there's a whole list of them in the comments on vowe.net. (http://vowe.net/archives/010922.html).

I tried uninstalling, deleting folders, running NotesKill and a whole host of other things to no avail.

A History of Bad Installs

What makes this particularly annoying is that after years of having (in my own words about version 3), "the worst installation program of any piece of software on any computing system", IBM/Lotus was finally starting to get things right. Now, they're right back to square one with the first installation program I've used in years where I've had to give up on the product.

A Matter of Timing

The other problem of course is the timing. Of all the times to have a bad installation, IBM would have to pick the version which they've released FREE** to developers.

So, have I lost faith in Notes? No, I guess I'm a sucker for punishment and every company is allowed to have at least one Vista or one Windows ME moment.

I'll still be here to report (hopefully) astounding success on perhaps 8.5.2 - Hint: IBM ... don't even think about giving us a post-install fixpack.

** Don't even get me started on their definition of FREE.

How to Create a Bootable DVD Using Nero Burning ROM 9

2009-08-18T10:36:00.003+10:00

I often need to create bootable CDs and DVDs but it's weird because I frequently end up buring myself a new coaster instead. It's not that the process is difficult, just that nero has a few too many options and I forget which ones to choose and end up picking the wrong one. I figured that the best way to avoid this mistake in future would be to write the steps down.

Procedure

Insert CD or DVD into your DVD Burner.
Start Nero Burning ROM 9
Choose DVD-ROM (Boot) or CD-ROM (Boot) depending on what you're creating
You'll be prompted for a disk image source. Choose a Nero Source - you'll usually find them somewhere like this...
C:\Program Files\Nero\Nero9\Nero Burning Rom\DOSBootImage.ima
Leave the Boot Locale as English - unless you really need a different keyboard layout
Tick the box marked [X] Enable Expert Settings
Choose Hard Drive Emulation and leave any other settings as they are.
Click the button marked New
Add any files you want but don't try to add operating system files. You don't need to add Command.com because it's already on the Boot disk.
When you've finished, choose Burn.

That's it.

When you boot from the CD/DVD, you'll find that it starts as Drive A: and only contains a bunch of DOS Files.

Drive C: will probably be your hard drive - which may or may not be readable/writable (depending on whether it's formatted as Fat32 or NTFS).

Drive D: should be the other part of your new disc - all of the files you added.

Good Ideas for Boot Disks

Ghost Images

If you find yourself creating lots of Ghost images to reload PCs you might want to consider using the -SPLIT=650 or -SPLIT=4096 parameters to get the Ghost Images to create files which are the sizes of CDs or DVDs respectively. If you copy the Ghost image and Ghost.exe onto the CD/DVD, you can simply boot the PC off the CD/DVD and start installing without delay. Because I'm a bit of a perfectionist, I'll usually also include an autorun.inf file which launches notepad or a html file when the CD/DVD is inserted in a Windows environment.

Game Boot Disks

Want to play those old DOS Classics without the drag of Windows? Consider creating a boot disk which also contains the install files for some of the best. If you've got a good boot image and a lot of spare RAM, you might want to make a bootdisk that sets up a RAM Drive (you can make your own IMA files using WinImage). Playing a game from a RAM Drive will make it much faster but remember to copy your save game data somewhere or you'll lose it.

YellowDay 2009 - What do I use Domino for - and why is it great?

2009-08-11T09:44:00.008+10:00

It's officially YELLOW DAY today and that means that it's time to talk about IBM/Lotus Domino. I suppose I really should give some tips but offhand I can't think of anything that I'm sure most people don't already know. Instead, I'm going to talk about how I'm using Lotus Notes/Domino and why I believe that it's still relevant today... and into the future.

Bias

First of all, I'll state my bias. It's worth a history lesson. I first got involved with Lotus Notes with version 3 on Windows 3.0 (on Novell). I didn't like the product much then but my boss had seen some demonstrations and decided that it was the future. It wasn't long before I stumbled upon the biggest bugbear of Lotus Notes - and a problem which still dogs it today...

What the %#@* is it ?

Today, I still don't rightly know.

There are a million answers to this question which depend widely upon your usage but to me, it's always going to be the "swiss army knife" of application development.

My bias is that I've been with the product for about 18 years but I've never worked for Lotus or IBM or for any computing firm which provides Lotus Notes/Domino products and services. All of my experience is as an "end user" with specific non-computing end products in mind.

Why is Lotus Notes/Domino great?

Longevity
Notes was there at the start of Windows, before any of the competitors of today. More importantly though, it's still there for the future - IBM have some very impressive roadmaps and it's obvious that it will be around in years to come. More importantly though, the longevity has been stable and our code is secure. By this, I mean that applications written for version 3 of Notes, still work perfectly 18 years later on Notes 8 - and without any modifications being neccessary. None of the competitors can do that. In fact, most of the competitors don't seem to be able to manage even a year or two of compatibility. Of course, the future isn't just about compatibility but it's the right place to start. Just looking at the changes wrought in Notes 8.5 should be enough to confirm that IBM has a brilliant future planned - I'm not going to go into it in more detail because I'm sure IBM will put out their own publicity later on today.

Choice
Not only is there a great deal of choice surrounding the version of Notes/Domino - yes, there are people out there who are still running versions 5 through to 7 (when they should be upgrading to 8) but there is also a choice of platforms. I can't say that I've tried them all but I've run Domino on several windows platforms and AIX. I've also run the Notes 8.5 client on Windows, Mac and several variants of Linux - and I've been very impressed with the results.

Versatility
Whenever I hear people complaining about Notes, I find that they're complaining about Email and they're usually using a very old version of the product. I'd love to shout out to the world that "it's not an email platform". Seriously... If email and calendaring is all that you want - go to Gmail. Why would you drive around the city in a 4wd when you could just as easily drive a mini. I consider it a major-league sin to own a 4wd and not use it's capabilities - and the same goes for Notes/Domino. No; I don't mean that you have to go driving on rough terrain, just use the extra features. In Notes terms, this means that you don't have to build a giant extranet but if you have the product then at least use the document libraries. Not using this brilliant functionality is a waste. I could go on and talk about the various development languages but I don't think that it's necessary.

Scalability
One thing that really blows my mind about Notes/Domino is just how scalable it is. Replication wasn't some facility that was added in later... this system was designed to replicate. About ten years ago, I had the pleasure of working in a place with 48 Domino servers scattered globally and all replicating happily. It was not a scenario I could have imagined with any other technology but it worked amazingly smoothly and efficiently. Replication isn't just a server-to-server thing though. It amazes me how easily I can backup data to my own computer and how quickly I can make copies of large databases. When I want to work remotely over a slow link, I make local replicas of my databases and go offline. The flexibility of this approach is mind boggling. Then, there's clustering... "replication on steroids" and proof that IBM doesn't stand still on its achievements but is constantly moving the product into new and exciting territories.
Structured
I remember a discussion years ago on the things that made Notes/Domino great. We were all citing languages and the other kinds of things I've already talked about here. We thought we had it all covered until someone started talking about how maintainable the code structures were and I realised what an important point it was. It's possible to write applications in various langages to do the various things that Notes/Domino can do. You can write your own travel booking system with workflow using whatever tools you want but in the end, someone else will have to maintain it. With Domino, you can build thousands of different applications but all of them will have the same basic building blocks. They will all have forms, views, agents, framesets, outlines etc.. In each of these components, the same methods will always be available. Agents will always have an "initialize" section, Forms will always contain a webquerysave function. Sure, you won't necessarily use those methods but they are always available. The structure imposed on your code makes it infinitly more maintainable and readable than code written from scratch. Even better, the methods available often allow you to "cheat". You don't have to write window handling or view sorting code because Notes already contains it by default.

What do I use Notes/Domino for?

Mail/Calendar
Duh... no I don't think this is the best part of the system but it works and there is nothing quite like having the ability to Forward pages from your other databases, write deployment scripts/buttons into your mail messages or send view, database, document and web links as part of your message. Similarly, it's nice to know that I can replicate my mail anywhere and that I can easily read it via webmail without a notes client and on the Blackberry. Of course, mail doesn't stop there for us, because in 2005 we purchased some great domino extensions which allows us to journal, categorise and archive our mail with the result being total legal compliance.
Document Databases
For the last fifteen years, every bit of IT documentation I've ever written has gone directly into a Lotus Notes Database. It's secure, it's clustered, I've got local replicas and I can forward pages of instructions, code and examples to people whenever I choose. The one database contains my company's hardware and software inventory, the product keys for our software, contact details for our vendors, code examples and libraries, computer policies and our core disaster recovery plan. Even better, since the database itself can be so easily replicated, our disaster recovery plan can be stored together with the latest sets of installation instructions and troubleshooting guides. It can be sorted in various ways and even better, it's full text indexed.
Web Sites
At my office we have four separate web sites being powered off a single Domino server. Some of these web sites are hosted inside domino databases with workflow and change management while others are simply hosted html. It's amazing to have the flexibility to choose our format.
ExtraNet Systems
We use Domino to power an extranet consisting of about 200 databases, with 3800 external users. The databases perform a whole heap of different functions including document storage, navigation, blogging, wikis, form filling, statistics collection/generation, surveying and utility tasks. Whenever we're asked to provide a new facility, our first thought is, "will this work in Domino?". Invariably, the answer is yes, and this allows us to leverage off our existing secure, clustered and tested solutions.
Specialist Systems
Our specialist systems are designed to perform specific and complex tasks. To describe them here would take more space that I could possibly afford. Over the years, I've implemented a number of these ground-up systems, including ones to collate decision papers from meetings, product testing systems, foundry materials inventory management systems, banking systems and relationship management systems. The capacity for expansion in domino is simply amazing.
My Own Projects
I've always been a big fan of movies and have one of the largest DVD collections of any of my friends. I've often been told jokingly that I "support" the movie industry with my purchases. Such a large collection needs categorisation and Notes is the perfect tool for the job. I initially started building my DVD database as an experiment to teach myself domino development because believe it or not, I've never yet attended a domino development workshop. I've just picked it up as I went along and asked the right questions on the right forums. Today, my movies database contains views by title, actor, writer, director, year, duration, genre and even special features. It's replicated at home and on my PC at work and I can access it on the web and via my blackberry. If I'm in a store and I want to know if I already have a film, I can look it up on the blackberry in seconds. All the movies in my database have quotes, ratings, blooper lists and cover scans. What's more, because there's no development committee to bow to (it's my database after all), I can implement whatever experimental code I want (after backing it up first). Quite often, the code I implement and test there ends up in our corporate databases.

So... happy Yellow Day Domino.....

I really can't imagine an IT landscape without you.

Preventing Domino from Filling up the C: Drive

2009-07-22T10:35:00.003+10:00

I love learning new stuff, though usually I prefer not to learn about new things during disaster recovery, particularly if they're the cause of the problem.

Today, I learned something new about Domino.

Keeping Domino off C: Drive.
We all know about keeping domino off the C: Drive of our servers. It's one of the first things you learn when setting up any windows server, Keep the operating system on C: drive and put the apps and/or data on D: drive.

It is possible to put Domino on C: and point the data directory to D:. I've heard of people doing that in the past but it's not really something I'd like to do. For a start, there's the crashdumps... Since they vary a little from one release to the next, how do I know where they're going to be stored?

If you fill up D: drive, the applications and users will experience some irritation. If you fill up the C: drive, your server is dead. You'll have to move data under less than ideal conditions.

So, my general rule is "keep stuff of C:".

I have enough problems just dealing with the fact that the Windows operating system seems to double in size with service packs every six months.

I was therefore quite surprised to find domino complaining about space restrictions on drive C:

Nasty Windows Defaults
The message I got was;

21/07/2009 11:14:31 AM Unable to use optimized view rebuild for view 'All Requests|vwAllRequests' due to insufficient disk space at C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\notesA5BA53. Need approximately 5831 MB for this view. Using standard rebuild instead.

I looked at it and said... hang on... this is C: drive.

I checked my c: drive and we still had 3 GB available. No panicking there but WHY was domino touching my C: ?

It turns out that when domino is rebuilding views (updall -R) or when users open views for which the index has been deleted, domino needs to generate temporary files to sort the data.

IBM recommends using a different drive to the main domino data drive to distrubute disk I/O, which is fine with me.

What is NOT FINE with me is that they've automatically assumed the right to access my system drive and are using the default Windows Temp folder for this operation.

It turns out that the fix was pretty simple;

Just add the following setting;

View_Rebuild_Dir=D:\REBUILD

to your server's Notes.ini file (and probably restart the server).

Of course, the D:\REBUILD folder needs to exist and if you've got an E: drive to point to ... even better.

BTW: Thanks Glen for doing the investigative work for this one.

Where have the cool "Powered by Domino" Logos gone?

2009-07-20T09:58:00.003+10:00

I was making a couple of changes to our sites on the domino server and I decided to update the "Powered by Domino" button. So, I did a quick google image search and came up with .... nothing.

Anyway, not being someone who lets unavailabilty of things stop me, I quickly made my own;

Of course, my art skills aren't anything to rave about... but if anyone wants it, feel free to grab it and use it.

IBM... how about some buttons done by professionals?

How to Send a Rich HTML Newsletter Email via Your Domino Server

2009-07-20T07:36:00.001+10:00

Recently, the company I work for decided that they wanted to send out an electronic newsletter with a nicely rendered html email.

We got some offsite designers to provide us with a html file but it just wouldn't render correctly when sent from Lotus Notes. We were creating the email by creating a new memo then putting the cursor in the body and selecting File, Import.

The resulting import was close, but not perfect.

On a whim, I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird (it will be a cold day in hell before I use outlook), and set up the outgoing mail server as a SMTP server with our domino server's address.

I ignored the POP settings because I wasn't trying to get inbound email.

Finally, I tweaked the from address on the email so that it would come from our domain and sent it to our distribution group. The mail went smoothly and correctly formatted. Since my "from address" was an internal mailbox, all replies/bounces will go to that address.

People often forget that you don't have to use a Notes client to send mail via a domino server.

How to Write from Domino to File Servers without Extended Rights

2009-06-19T10:48:00.006+10:00

The Problem

We have a file on our data file server which is used by our Microsoft Word templates to generate a whole bunch of different documents. Until recently, updates to this file have been mostly manual but now we're getting one of our new systems to perform them directly.

The problem is that the file is on a different share and a different server. The agent runs fine manually but when it runs on the server, it fails.

BTW: All our data servers and domino servers are currently Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

Why it Fails

It doesn't matter who is logged onto your domino server when you're write out a file from an agent running on the domino server because it won't be using their credentials. Since Domino is running as a service, it will be running using a different set of credentials entirely - most likely; "System".

Since "System" is a local (to the server) user rather than a domain/directory user, you can't grant it access to the rest of your network. Even if you could, this would be a very dangerous thing to do since it would grant everything running on the server access to your network.

Option 1 - Upgrade the Rights of the Domino Service

I really can't recommend this option because in my opinion, it opens some nasty security holes. I'm mentioning it mainly because in the course of my investigations, I discovered that some people use this method.

The way this method works is simple, you create a domain account with "logon as a service" rights and then modify the properties of the Lotus Domino Service (in the services control panel) to logon using these credentials.

That's it. Simple, no fuss - easy.

The main drawbacks to this method are that;

Instead of simply granting your one application access to the resources you need, you've now granted your entire domino infrastructure write access to your file servers. In the unlikely event that your server is compromised (or the more likely event that one of your apps has some dodgy code) you could erase files on your file servers, or even fill up the hard drives and cause them to crash.
If for some reason, you expire, change password or adjust the rights of the user being used by the server, you may suddenly find that your domino server stops working. If your Domino and Windows domain administration teams don't communicate well, they may be completely oblivious to the reasons for the failure.

Option 2 - Write Local, Move Via Service

This was the option I ended up using. It's more complex than the original method but it's more secure and easier to fix if a problem occurs.

Write Locally

First chose a folder where you're going to write temporary files on your local domino server. D:\TEMP is a good choice, though you should consider having a sub-folder for your app. (eg: D:\temp\travelplanner).

Note that C:\temp is a bad choice. You should avoid writing temporary files to the operating system drive of the server - if you fill it up, the server could crash.

Create a Batch File to update the file

You can run the batch file from your domino server or from a file server. It doesn't matter.

Here's mine;

-----------------------------COMMUNITY.BAT--------------------------------------

@echo off
cls
echo Checking Templates INI file on Community and M Drive.
echo n | COMP \\domino4\D$\temp\Community\community.ini D:\Data\Public\Templates\community.ini | FIND "Files compare OK" > nul
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO NOTSAME
IF ERRORLEVEL 0 GOTO END
:NOTSAME
echo Copying Templates INI file from Community to M Drive.
copy \\domino4\D$\temp\Community\community.ini D:\Data\Public\Templates\community.ini
echo.
:END
echo.
echo.

END-----------------------------COMMUNITY.BAT--------------------------------------

Explanations

I'll just explain a few things....

You shouldn't have line numbers, I've only added them so that you can more easily see which lines wrap and which don't.

The source file on the domino server (written by domino) is called;

\\domino4\D$\temp\Community\community.ini

The Target file on the file server (used by internal users) is called;

D:\Data\Public\Templates\community.ini

Note that since the target is a local reference and the source is a UNC Name, it implies that the batch file is being run by the target server. This makes sense since we really don't want to introduce additional processing to the domino server.

In step 4, we don't want to copy the file if it hasn't changed, hence we do a COMP (DOS file compare). The COMP command produces silly prompts, so we're piping it to a null device.

In lines 5 & 6, the DOS Errorlevel command is a very old facility that lets us work out what the outcome of the COMP command was. You need to always check for the highest errorlevel first. (ie: 1 is higher than 0).

All of the echo statements are irrelevant but useful if you need to see what's going on during testing. To test, add the word pause on a line of its own at the very end - but don't forget to remove it when you start scheduling it.

Scheduling the Process

So, we now have a batch file that will copy our file from the domino server to the file server. The next task is to schedule the batch file to run at regular intervals - and with correct rights. Here's how;

You should do this on the target server (not the domino server), unless your batch file is changed to work in the opposite direction.

Start the scheduled task wizard; Start, Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks, then click Add Scheduled Task
At the introduction, click Next.
Browse and Select your application (the batch file)
Give your Task a name
Select the time to run as Daily (we really want to run every half-hour) but we can't do that in this section.
Choose a time (6.00am is good),
Choose Weekdays and set the Start Date to today.
Click Next
Put an appropriate domain/directory user name and password (with rights to run as a service) in, then click finish.

You now have a scheduled agent which will run once daily. If something goes wrong with the password, then only the copy script will fail - you can still copy manually. Plus, the extent of the security compromise is limited to the batch file (which hopefully you've stored somewhere where only IT people can change it).

Modifying the Scheduled Task

To modify the scheduled task, simply click Start, Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks, then locate your task, right mouse click on it and choose properties.

You'll notice an advanced button. Click it and make some changes.

In particular, you might want to click the [X] Repeat Task checkbox and fill in a regular repeat interval (30 minutes) and an Until time.

I'm not sure what happens if you don't have an until time but I have visions of a new agent starting every day (so that you have 5 by Friday). I'd recommend that you put one in. If your task is supposed to run 24x7, you might repeat until 11.30pm and then kick off a new task at 12.00am.

So; that's it! You can now run your task whenever you want. You might find that the newly created task doesn't kick in until midnight - if so, check your date, Windows has an annoying habit of putting tomorrow's date in when you select daily task.

If you're after more comprehensive info on scheduler, you might want to check out this site;

http://www.iopus.com/guides/winscheduler.htm

My Experience (Nightmare?) with DELL

2009-05-25T15:19:00.000+10:00

I'm not a person who does a whole lot of product bashing here on my blog but right now, I'm pretty miffed with DELL and it will be a cold day in hell before I give them yet another chance.

My first Intel/AMD PC was an IBM XT and I was pretty happy with it at the time. A few years later when IBM went down the Microchannel route, their brand name got so dirty that I thought I'd never see myself going back to it. I was therefore quite surprised when their hardware turnaround (they abandoned microchannel and came back to the fold) produced such great devices. I stuck with IBM until they stopped making PCs - and never regretted a minute of them. Those were classy machines.

When IBM sold out to Lenovo, I had to find another brand name. It's fine to buy some brandless junk for home but when you've got a business to support, a brand name is everything - and they usually come with a SLA. Unfortunately, there weren't many brands left in the PC market.

I decided to get myself a DELL for home. The first and last computer I'll be buying for myself over the internet. At the time, I didn't have a lot of spare cash, so I figured I'd skip the 3D graphics card and go with the onboard one until I had enough cash to pick one up later. Imagine my surprise when I opened the box to find that there was no graphics card slot. They'd also taken all my expansion slots and left me with one. This disappointment in DELL caused me to look elsewhere for my brand name PCs at work.

I tried HP/Compaq but we had a few machines die after a couple of years, so I wasn't impressed. I found that the Sony Vaio was unbeatable as a laptop but a couple of years ago, they moved to Windows Vista and wouldn't sell us one that ran XP for our corporate environment. At the time, DELL were the only one who would, so they got the sale. Of the five DELL Laptops we bought about a year ago, two have already had their motherboards replaced and the rest are still going, but are often the subject of complaints from staff. In fact, the Sony Vaio fleet which is about 18 months older than them are still running rings around the DELL in terms of speed and comfort.

Despite some misgivings, I stuck with DELL and bought seven desktop PCs. One was dead on arrival but DELL refused to replace it and instead decided to play swap-shop with refurbished parts. A second had a hard drive failure within the first week of use. After a few quibbles, the DELL technician swapped out the hard drive. The other five are still going luckily. One really irritating thing though is that the two dead PCs now refuse to take our SOE image. This is the same Ghost image that we successfully stamped across the other five. After arguing with DELL people for quite a while, I got someone here to inventory the devices. It was interesting to note that the serial number and model number of one of the devices did not match what was written on the box. The internal architecture is different - an SOE killer.

Admittedly I haven't chased the whole DELL thing as hard as I probably should have because I've been busy with other things but this morning, with several people away and a new starter in our company, those spare PCs were looking tempting. (the two DELLs which have been sitting in a back room, dead more or less since their arrival in August last year. Both DELLs once again failed imaging, so I've provided our new starter with one of the "retired" five year old IBMs. It's doing a pretty good job considering.

Meanwhile, I grabbed the DELL CDs and loaded Windows XP SP3 onto the machine. There was no restore CD to speak of, just a Windows XP install. After installation, there were no drivers, so I put the driver CD in - and got nothing. Apparently only Vista drivers are supplied. I eventually got a network driver for Vista of the CD and made it work. It was a shame I couldn't do that with any other drivers. the video drivers were Vista specific, I had to find XP Drivers somewhere. I went to the DELL site and tried to download it but the site uses FTP, which our firewall dislikes. I didn't find a http download option. Eventually, I got a driver that worked from the NVIDIA site. Unfortunately, this trick didn't work with SoundMax - Time for a new strategy.

I unblocked FTP on the firewall and went back to DELL. I knew the drivers were probably SoundMAX because the DELLs in the image had them. Of course, this being a wrongly labelled PC, it could mean anything. I ran the DELL driver detect software on their website and it identified the correct driver and offered to download it. I accepted and for some reason it took about twenty minutes to download a 13MB file. I knew it wasn't our connection, or the PC itself because after a while I got bored and downloaded the Google Chrome browser. It was downloaded and installed before DELL's driver reached the halfway point.

Finally, it all downloaded and I looked forward to having a functional PC. Alas... The driver quit installing complaining that it wasn't really the right one after all.

Today, I'm writing a memo to management stating in less detail than this post, "No DELL hardware - never, ever again."

How to Add a "Contact Me" Form to your Blog (or Website) without exposing your Email Address

2009-05-14T11:59:00.006+10:00

A long time ago, it was common practice to simply put your email address on the web using a mailto url link. Unfortunately, this practice results in a ton of spam coming your way courtesy of spambots.

A Potted History of Methods

Over the years, a lot of different methods for getting around this problem have become available. These include the low tech methods, such as having text which reads "send email to myaccount at hotmail dot com" and needs to be reinterpreted by the reader.

The use of escape codes (try http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php for an example), and several other ways of encoding the address in javascript.

No method has been more successful than simply giving people a blank form to write their email in. Now, in Lotus Notes/Domino, this is simplicity itself but when it comes to html, you need to write a bit of code - and even then, you need to be careful not to expose anything on the web.

Getting External Help

It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel when there's a free service available.

Kontactr (http://kontactr.com/index.php) is a service which allows you to pop up a form on your site for email. You receive the email within minutes and the only caveat that I've found so far is that they include a small advert at the end of the email being sent to you. The users of your site don't get presented with Ads.

Procedure (for Blogger)

Go to the Kontactr site and register.
Open your blog and click Layout, then Page Elements then Click Add a Gadget.

Google will pop up a dialog box for you to select the appropriate gadget. Choose the HTML/Javascript Gadget. (note: If you haven't had a browse through these gadgets, you really should - there's some fantastic stuff there).
You will now be prompted to put some code into the box. Switch back to the tab that you have Kontactr open on and choose either the embed widget or the buttons code. You may need to experiment to see which code works best for your site.

As a general rule, the Embed widgets are best used in the middle of the page while the buttons are best in a navigation menu.
Copy the code from Kontactr and paste it into your google gadget.
From here on, it's just a matter of clicking Save a few times..
You might want to preview your blog before saving it though - and you might want to consider dragging your new gadget around to a more suitable place on the page.

That's it.

These gadgets never cease to amaze me.

Lotus Foundations in Australia

2009-05-12T10:17:00.004+10:00

After a seemingly interminable wait from IBM, it looks like Foundations is finally released (and moving) within Australia. This article from Australian IT looks at the benefits and low cost of implementing the solution.

Flexible EPSI takes the Lotus Position
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,25462866-24169,00.html

If I were starting out with a small business, there's no question as to what I'd be recommending because unlike the competing products, IBM Lotus Foundations will give tech-savvy businesses room to grow.

Their comments on the use of a hosting solution (which would be one of my other choices) are particularly interesting;

"We went to the shared environment, but we grew reasonably quickly and it just became more expensive as every licence was a lot more money and the bandwidth we were consuming was costing us money," EPSI co-founder Nigel Wilson says.

"We wanted more flexibility to do more things, and this hosting organisation was just not set up for that. "

BTW: Well done Graham.

Trusting the New Document Formats

2009-05-05T15:55:00.003+10:00

Today, I read a brilliant article;

Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html

Rob Weir has repeated a series of tests he did a couple of months ago. This time on updated software. Specifically, he's testing to see how well spreadsheets transport (with their formulae intact) between the various Open Document Format (ODF) compatible applications.

The results of his earlier tests were quite encouraging and it was exciting to see that Microsoft were coming to the party with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 offering support.

But what kind of support exactly?

Well, it turns out that they're VERY incompatible and very dangerous too. They happily import values into Excel but they lose all the formulae. Nasty. Imagine importing a critical financial spreadsheet without knowing that the formulae are gone.

There's a couple of Notes on the site for IBM Lotus Symphony to correct but since they concern the beta release, I think IBM are excused.

A Microsoft/Dell Glitch Inspires some Creative Linux (GOS) Work

2009-04-17T15:52:00.006+10:00

A bit of Dell and Microsoft Bashing
This morning when I arrived at work, my computer had installed a Microsoft Windows XP update (for Office 2007, which isn't even installed on my PC - it's running 2003) and rebooted. The result was that my screen was now partially blurry. Something had screwed around with the video drivers. I wasn't sure if it was a problem with the video card or the monitor but there's an easy way to find out. I booted from a handy Ubuntu boot CD (my trusty Bart PE didn't seem to work on the DELL).

These boot CDs are brilliant. They let you get work done without having to install an operating system. In my case, I was able to connect to the network and open some large documents to assure myself that the monitor blurriness was gone. When I booted back into Windows, the blur came back too.

I called DELL and explained my actions and was given the extremely helpful advice (NOT), that since it was obviously not a monitor or video card problem, I could either put in the DELL System Recovery CD, or Reload the Operating System manually. The analogy of rebuilding your car because you find a pot hole in the road springs to mind. I don't know where DELL get their technicians.

A Unique Temporary Fix
Well, I was in a hurry but I wasn't about to tolerate the blur either. I grabbed a PC that I found lying around and put in one of my Random OS CDs. (If you have to do this, you might as well have a bit of fun). In this case, it was the Google Operating System (GOS) which is based on GNOME Linux. My terminology is probably all wrong here because I don't know much about Linux - but that's one of the points of this post. The solution was quick and easy - even for a dummy like me.

I booted into GOS, then clicked the Install Icon on the desktop. After a few questions about my Country, Language, Machine Name and after selecting a user name and password, it started copying files. Eight minutes later (on a very old machine), I was booting smoothly into my new Operating System, already preloaded with goodies. The system informed me that there were updates - 279 (332.4 MB) to be exact. Since I was going off to get a coffee, I figured that I'd let it run. It took 40 minutes, but most of that was downloading time.

The next step was to remote desktop my windows PC and see if it came out blurry.

Getting a Remote Desktop
This was a bit tricky at first because the Google OS ships with a "Remote Desktop" already installed. Unfortunately, it's for VNC (which requires additional software on your PC). I wanted a Native Windows remote desktop. The answer was surprisingly simple.

All you have to do is click (GOS - which is the GOS equivalent of the Start menu), then choose Add/Remove...
A dialog box appears and you type Remote Desktop to search for it. The "windows" remote desktop is called Terminal Server Client.
Simply tick the empty checkbox to the left of it and click Install.
Everything else is automatic.
After the installation, you can start the utility by clicking GOS, then Internet, then Terminal Server Client.
In the computer name, I put the IP Address of my Windows computer and in the username, password and domain boxes, I put my normal logon credentials. That's it. It all just worked.

Of course, the screen was a bit small, being 640 x 480 but I soon discovered that if I clicked on the other tabs in the Terminal Server Client, I could set some sensible defaults. Now I had my Windows system back, and no blurry screen. That meant that I could continue work until I get around to resolving that other problem.

Notes 8.5 on the Google Operating System
It's a perverse thing that I can't help myself. I'm always interested in what Notes can do. I decided to install the notes client onto GOS. It worked first time, so here are the instructions.

Put in your CD where you've saved your carefully downloaded Linux version of the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Client.
Copy the file C1W0TEN.TAR to your desktop (I remember from ubuntu that it didn't like running from CD).
Double click on the file and Extract IBM_lotus_notes - 8.5.i586.deb to the desktop
Double click this file and it should launch into Installer.
As usual you'll be prompted for your administrator password but then the software will install.
To launch the software, click GOS, then Office, then Lotus Notes 8.5. Of course, you'll have to go through the usual setup routine, and you'll need your ID File but most of us can do those steps in our sleep.

After that, it should just work. I'm impressed. Chalk up another tested OS for Notes.

And here's an annotated picture of it all working happily together...

Spouting Gobbledygook (IBM Licensing)

2009-04-16T15:12:00.003+10:00

All companies have internal buzzwords and gobbledygook but most are fairly conscious about providing an intermediary translation before shooting it off to their customers.

This little gem? from IBM was so bizarre that I felt it was worth sharing;

I received an email today indicating that IBM had decided to make some changes to their licensing. As a customer, I try to be careful about reading such things because sometimes they highlight problems and sometimes they give us extra benefits.

The email consisted of a two page "covering letter". The first page of which said very little other than suggesting that a licence change was happening and giving a rough date. It pointed you to the attached document (the second page).

The first paragraph just tells you very little other than identifying that it's to do with IBM's Passport Agreement Programme (I'd already figured that part out). It's the second paraphaph that prompted this post.

I've reproduced it in full below because quite frankly it's one of the best examples I've ever seen of "over-use of internal buzzwords in an external communication".

Expanded list of eligible products and elimination of unique parts for Sub-capacity licensing

IBM has recently expanded the number of products eligible for Sub-capacity licensing (“Eligible Sub-capacity Products”) and announced the elimination of different part numbers for Sub-capacity licensing. All Processor Value Unit (PVU) Products are now Eligible Sub-capacity Products , unless they are specifically listed as not eligible on the Sub-capacity licensing web site at the link below. Your existing PVU Sub-capacity license entitlements will not be converted to PVU license entitlements, but can be used on an “as if converted” basis using a ratio of 1 PVU Sub-capacity license equals 1 PVU license. Your existing Software Subscription & Support (S&S) entitlements for PVU Sub-capacity products will be migrated to PVU S&S entitlements on a 1 for 1 basis at your next Software S&S renewal date on or after July 1, 2009.

Maybe that means something at IBM but it means nothing to me (the customer).

The file attachment is described as

Sub-Cap_Notification_Letter_InternationalEnglish.pdf

I'd suggest it be renamed;

Sub-Cap_Notification_Letter_InternalGibberish.pdf

More isn't always better - next time IBM, just send me a one-liner in English please.

Registering and Deregistering the Lotus Domino Server Service

2009-04-15T16:14:00.004+10:00

The Scenario

We have a test server which is used for development test purposes only. It was set up with Domino on the C: drive (which normally I prefer to keep clean for the operating system). Domino was apparently later installed on D: drive but the old installation was not removed and the Lotus Domino Server service remained in startup.

As a result of the old service still being installed, the new one did not get installed - I'm not sure if this was a notes problem or if the person doing the installation had "cheated" and simply copied the folders to the new drive. It was only a test server after all. Regardless of the cause, the issues became;

There was an old service which was disabled
To prevent the wrong domino server from accidentally being started, the folder C:\Lotus was renmed to C:\Old-Lotus.
The New Service was not installed
This meant that everytime the server was rebooted, the domino service had to be restarted manually - and also, whomever started the Domino server, started it on their login. Anyone using a different login would not be able to get to the console (except via the Notes Admin Client) to monitor, run server tasks or to shut the service down neatly.

This post is all about how I managed to resolve the problem.

Knocking the Old One Off - Gentle Method

There's a nifty little uninstall routine for de-registering Lotus Domino services in Windows. All you need to do is;

Go to a command prompt
Change to the domino folder
C:
CD C:\Old-Lotus\Domino
Run the Service installation program with the -d parameter.
ntsvinst.exe -d
You can read more about this here..
Of course, you shouldn't get your hopes up because this didn't work for me. I'm sure it works fine with a normal notes install but if you've mucked around with the folders since, it doesn't.

Knocking the Old One Off - Rough Method
Luckily, for us, there's a windows equivalent for removing services. It's called the Registry Editor. Here's how;

Start the Registry Editor (Start, Run, Regedit.exe)
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services
Look for the folder/Service called Lotus Domino Server (LotusDominoData) and right mouse click on it.
When the menu appears, choose Delete.
(BTW: You'll notice in the right hand panel that the file path to the service is displayed, so you can actually check before you delete).
When prompted to confirm deletion, choose Yes.
You can close the Registry Editor now.
You'll notice that this has had no effect. That's because, this being a Windows System, we have to reboot.
Once rebooted, the service will no longer be displayed.

Putting the Right one Back

Now we can make use of that nifty little install I talked about earlier, only this time, we'll use the -c parameter, which creates the service. The instructions are more or less the same.

Go to a command prompt (start, run, cmd)
Change to the domino folder (the real one this time)
D:
CD D:\Lotus\Domino
Run the Service installation program with the -c parameter.
ntsvinst.exe -c
This time, it works a treat - and no reboot is necessary. You can start the service from service manager in control panel and you can set it to be "automatic".

A happy ending. (BTW: The Server was Domino 8.5 on Windows Server 2003 but the instructions should work for several older versions of both).

The Next Generation of Browsers

2009-04-03T16:40:00.002+11:00

It's been noted all over the place that the browser wars are starting again (well, they've been going strong for the last few years). I've been a long-time Firefox user ever since I forced myself to live with the browser for a month just to try it out. I coudn't go back to IE.

I've tried Safari, Opera and Chrome without feeling too tempted. I was impressed by the design of Chrome but the lack of familiar features (add-ons and scripting) failed to win me over. I'll admit though that I've found Opera to be the browser of choice on the Blackberry.

Recently, I decided to give IE8 a go. Ok, so it was on the morning of the FIRST day of release but that doesn't mean I'll be lining up for any other MS products. I decided to see how well it worked doing the normal things I do every day.

It almost made 45 minutes but then it crashed and I haven't used it much since then.

I then switched my attention back to the Chrome 2.0 beta browser I had been testing. I've been using this as my main browser for nearly three solid weeks now. I've left it running overnight on most nights and it's still as fast as ever. Remember, this is a BETA product. I was willing to tolerate some crashes but thus far, I haven't experienced one.

I also expected to have problems accessing some sites but I've had no problems so far. I've been right through all the major Google apps, iNotes and many of the major news and social networking sites. It also works with our intranet and extranet.

I'm impressed.

I'm not sure that I can live without Sharaholic or my "Copy as plain text" menu option but I've discovered that I need to start Firefox up for one of these less than three times per day. I'm also missing my Google Toolbar (for some reason it isn't available in Chrome).

I'm not ready to dump Firefox for Chrome yet - but I don't want to dump Chrome 2.0 either since it has proven to be even more stable than Firefox. I can't afford to have three browsers, so I guess it's goodbye IE8.

The Memory Problems with the Blackberry Bold

2009-03-16T16:01:00.002+11:00

I've been complaining for some time about the horrible memory problems on the Blackberry Bold. I've been running most of the same applications on the 9000 as I did on the 8800 and it's clear that there's a massive memory leak.

Not only that, but the battery life has been abysmal compared to the the 8800.

Well.... no more.

Problem Solved
Blackberry have released a patch for the Bold which updates the firmware to 4.6.0.365

I've been running for several weeks on this patch and haven't had to reboot once since applying it. The battery life is back up to the 3+ days I've come to expect from the Blackberry too.

Notes 8.5 How is it?

2009-02-19T08:41:00.004+11:00

Well, I've been using Notes 8.5 since it was released now and I figured it was time to say a bit about it.

First of all, after my disappointment with 8.0 (which was very slow) and 8.0.2 which was very unstable compared to 8.0.1, I have to say that 8.5 is rock-solid and "fast enough for me".

You may remember that I posted an article on Using Ubuntu for Real where I said that I nearly had the whole thing working and that if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't get Notes working on it, I'd have been happy to use Ubuntu as my OS.

Well, things have changed. I took the Ubuntu version of Notes 8.5 home and (without any decent knowledge of Ubunutu - I've still never looked at a manual), I got it running in only a few minutes. The only hitch in the whole procedure was that the install wouldn't launch directly off my CD. I had to copy it to my desktop first.

Impressive.... Really Impressive.

In fact, the whole thing was so impressive that we stopped our tentative rollout of Notes 8.0.2 and updated the image to 8.5 - We're using Windows XP at work of course. We're rolling out with two icons, the Notes 8.5 icon and the Basic icon (you only do one install but you create a second icon that points to "nlnotes.exe"). I'm not even starting the basic client anymore - the eclipse one is working well for me.

I'm still not sure that I'm entirely over my future-shock with the designer client and I think that the default settings could be improved a little (like maybe enabling widgets) but at this stage, you'd have to pry the 8.5 client from my cold, dead fingers.

Well done IBM.

Using a Google Gadget to get a Productivity Boost from Notes 8

2009-01-13T17:01:00.008+11:00

Improving Productivity
It's all great news that Lotus Notes 8.0.1 and above support Google Gadgets. A brilliant move IBM.

The problem is that most of the demonstrations show you how to add really useful things, like personal fish-tanks to the Notes client. (Thanks Alan Lepofsky - a brilliant demo btw) rather than business productivity applications. It was hard to see the immediate business value of gadgets and even harder to sell it to the business.

Thankfully now, I've got a good and simple example.

I'm not sure if my behaviour is unique but somehow I expect that it's not. I often find that when I am working in Lotus Notes and other applications that I am constantly copying data to notepad and making notes around it. On other occasions, I am following a particular list of requirements (again, usually part of a document pasted into notepad).

Not too long ago I got myself a 22 inch wide-screen monitor. This has proved to be fantastic because I have been using notes in a normal square screen and having notepad arranged down the right-hand side. As I went to set this arrangement up yet again this morning, I thought to myself, why don't I get a pre-existing Google Gadget to do this for me?

I went to add a Google Gadget to do this but I'd already forgotten how to do it and when I looked at Alan's excellent instructions, I couldn't even find the icon. This is because I have completely reinstalled Notes 8.5 on my machine and the default is to have Google gadgets off.

Turning Google Gadget functionality on
From the Lotus Notes menu select file and then preferences. In the left-hand column select widgets and then in the right-hand panel click the checkbox marked [X] Show widget Toolbar and the my widgets sidebar panel. Click on apply and ok.

The Widget toolbar should now display.

Adding a suitable Widget
Next, we have to find a suitable widget. Click on the getting started with widgets (jigsaw puzzle) icon. This will bring up a dialogue box.

In the first dialogue box, choose Google gadgets and click next. In the second dialogue box, choose browse the Google Gadget directory and click finish.

Lotus Notes will now display a webpage, the Google gadgets directory. My Web browser is set to Firefox but notes was smart enough to know that I needed to displayed in the notes client. Well done IBM.

It took a few goes to find a suitable Gadget and at first I was using the word notepad to search. When I changed this to "text editor" I found a good online text editor called edit pad. I clicked on this gadget to read more about it.

The last step is so simple that I kept missing it and wondering what I was doing wrong. With the webpage displayed, all you need to do is click on the Add to Sidebar icon on the widgets icon bar.

So now, I have a notepad embedded in the Notes client that I can use.

I'm sure that someone is bound to suggest that I could have written a notes app to do this but I'm sure it would have taken longer and in any case, I haven't yet tried to write a sidebar app.

Getting Started with IBM Lotus Notes 8.5

2009-01-12T09:27:00.004+11:00

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 got released last week and I eagerly downloaded it on Friday for a quick play. Fortunately IBM seem to have made a few changes to their download site in the last few months and I had no trouble at all finding the software (well done IBM).

I downloaded the Windows 32 bit version, the Mac OSX version and the Debian Linux version.

Ubuntu Linux
Normally I can wait for software releases to become accepted but in this case, I was keen to get my hands on the Linux version. My earlier attempt at installing Notes on Linux had ended in failure and I'd heard that IBM had improved things with 8.5.

I was not wrong. I'm truly a beginner on Linux. I don't even know the commands properly and I've deliberately not read any books or technotes on the subject. How else am I going to figure out how "people friendly" the OS is?

I put my downloaded CD in and proceeded to klutz my way though, simply double-clicking on things. Nothing much seemed to be happening from CD but when I copied the file from IBM onto the desktop, suddenly it all just worked. The installation from this point onwards was smoother than any Windows installation of Notes I've ever had.

I logged in, accessed my work server remotely and started playing with databases. The interface was brilliant. I coudn't see any real differences between the linux and windows versions of the product and my notes applications (some written quite literally under version 3 of the product more than 15 years ago) worked like a charm.

Is there any other product which can run applications written 15+ years ago on not just an older operating system but an entirely different platform entirely. I doubt it. Lotus Notes is unique.

I'll probably do a few more linux installations (and try something using the new Google version of the OS). After that, I'll see if I can post some instructions.

One last comment about the linux install. The laptop I used was very old. It takes 5 minutes to boot into Windows XP and I really didn't expect Notes 8 to work at all. I was surprised. Not only does it work but it runs at a decent speed too. Brilliant. I'm not quite sure why I'd pay money for an OS again.

Windows
My windows install of Notes 8.5 went well too. Well, actually it failed a couple of times but that was because I was so eager that I burnt the EXE to the CD before it was finished downloading. Using the finished file made a big difference.

Mac
Sadly, I don't have a mac to test this on but I've got a few colleagues at work who do. I'll be trying to get them to test it for me over the next week.

Starting the Year with a Clean Notes Inbox

2009-01-06T14:28:00.008+11:00

I was reading my daily blogs this morning when I saw an article on Matt Cutt's blog about starting the year with a clean Gmail Inbox and I thought.. Why not do that for Notes?

So... here's the procedure.

Open Your Lotus Notes Mail to the Inbox.
From the Menu, select Folder then Create Folder...
When the Dialog box appears, type a name for your folder like "Old Inbox" or if you're really obsessive compulsive like me, 2008 Inbox. Then click Ok.
Next, tag all of your old mail in Notes by dragging the mouse down the left hand side. If you've got a lot of mail, you can do this step in chunks or you can choose Select all (Ctrl+A) and simply deselect the new stuff (the 2009 mails).
Finally, click on the action bar menu and choose the new folder you created and click Move.
Your old mail will move to the new location (where you can easily access it - it's only one click away) and you'll be left with a nice clean inbox ready for the year ahead.

How to Get the Notes Bookmark Bar back in Notes 8

2009-01-06T08:01:00.004+11:00

One of my biggest gripes about the Notes 8 client was the fact that they'd removed the bookmark bar and replaced it with the "start-menu wannabe", the Open Menu. I figured that eventually I'd work out how to get my bar back but in the meantime I was too busy to bother hunting.

This morning, while trying to find a different feature, I noticed an option called "Dock the Open List" under the View Menu. I clicked it and my faithful bookmark bar returned.

This is so simple and so usable that I figured it was worth sharing. It made my week.

Why McAfee has Completely lost the Plot

2008-12-12T08:16:00.002+11:00

(warning... this is rant - I know you're not supposed to blog about things when you're irritated but I've been irritated with McAfee for ages and it's not going away).

My irritation with McAfee's Anti-Malware technologies has slowly been building for the past six months.

For a start, I find myself disabling their firewall more often than I leave it enabled. The thing constantly tries to chew up 90+ percent of my systems resources. What's the point of having security software if, for usability reasons, you have to constantly turn it off?

Whenever I start Lotus Notes 8.0.2, I have to remember to stop the McShield service (from the services part of control panel) before I double-click the icon. If I forget, my PC slows to a crawl and I can make filtered coffee and still get back with plenty of hourglass watching time.

It would be easy to blame Notes for this but it performs so well when McAfee is off. In addition, several of my other bits of software perform much better without McAfee. The new Blackberry Desktop Software v4.6 which shipped with the Bold is completely unusable with McAfee running, as is our Nortel PABX Telephone system. In fact, it seems that anything using Java is dead in the water with McAfee.

To add to my irritation, McAfee doesn't even seem to stop malware. They're still in the mode of "we do anti-virus and firewall - not anti-malware". If I want to check against malware, I have to get something like AdAware or Spybot Search and Destroy. I'm sick of having to buy a different product for every different security menace on my PC. If it's designed to keep the PC secure, then one product should do the job properly.

Then there's the reporting. I used to complain about the reporting from Symantec but all I get from McAfee is that x% of your computers aren't protected. Well Mr McAfee ... why AREN'T they protected? You're the Anti-Virus Software and You're supposed to be updating. Why was I so wrong in thinking that I could set you to automatic-update and then do other work? I've got work to do... I can't sit around babysitting an anti-virus app which can't auto-update properly on its own.

Of course, the think that really, really irritates me is SiteAdvisor. This used to be a good product until McAfee started blocking whole domains. I've spoken to them on about three occasions about blocking the ENTIRE BLOGGER domain. That's right... the whole of blogspot.com. Every single blog on blogger.

First they refused to see the issue, then they tried to say that it was my fault... that my version of the "self-updating" SiteAdvisor was wrong... both on my work computer and on my home PC. Well, as from today, I can safely say that I'm on a brand new PC with a brand new version of site advisor loaded. (though not for long).

It's their problem - and they refuse to deal with it.

How do I reward that kind of customer service....

I think it's time I started looking for a new anti-malware vendor.

Finding the Blackberry Bold Call Logs and Combining the SMS's with Mail

2008-12-08T10:37:00.003+11:00

I've had quite a few people ask me about the call log on the Blackberry Bold but as yet, I haven't found it.

I did get this little tip from Craig Wiseman's blog;

Blackberry Call Log - Can anyone help?
http://www.wiseman.la/web/cpwBlog.nsf/dx/blackberry-call-log-please-help

Apparently the calls really are there in with your emails but they're almost impossible to see. To see all your calls do the following;

Go into your main mailbox
Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu
Scroll all the way down (past the bottom of the screen) to highlight Search and Click on it.
Scroll to the bit at the bottom that says type and click on it
Change it from Email to Phone
Press the Blackberry button to open the popup menu
Click Search
Your blackberry will now be showing you all of the calls.
When you push the Esc/Back button, it will return to normal.

Thanks Craig, not only for helping me to find the calls but also because he highlighted a very useful set of Blackberry features I hadn't been aware of. There's a lot more features in the search that you might want to take advantage of.

Seeing SMSes in Your Mail
I don't know about other people but I really miss getting the SMSes directly in with my other calls. Instead, I have to go to the SMS applications. Well, no more. Now you can mix them up again.

Here's how;

Open your main Blackberry Mail.
Click on the Blackberry button to access the pop up menu
Choose Options from the menu (you'll have to scroll a bit)
Choose General Options
Scroll down to the menu option that says SMS and Email Inboxes and click on it.
Change it from Theme Controlled to Combined.
Click on the Blackberry button to open the menu
Click Save
Press the Back/Esc button twice and you're back to your main screen.

Now your SMSes should start coming through your mail.

How to Lose the Icons on the Front Screen of your Blackberry Bold 9000

2008-12-02T15:48:00.003+11:00

So... you've got yourself a nice wallpaper background but those icons on the front screen are spoiling it.

Wanna get rid of them? Here's how.

A Warning
The procedure described below will move your desktop icons around a little, change your existing blackberry wallpaper and move all non-standard applications back to the download folder. If you can't handle this, then don't proceed.

Also note; this procedure gets rid of the icons on the front page of the blackberry but it doesn't remove the shaded bar at the top of the screen.

PART 1: GETTING THE THEME ONTO YOUR BLACKBERRY

First we need to obtain a theme that doesn't contain those icons
Here's a link to one on Crackberry.com. I'm not sure if you need to be logged in to get it or not.

http://forums.crackberry.com/attachments/f83/6737d1228167408-any-way-make-home-screen-totally-clear-all-icons-com_plazmic_theme_no_icons.zip
Download and Unzip the files - there should be an .ALX file in the archive.
Next, Connect your Blackberry to your computer via the USB Cable
Start Blackberry Desktop Manager
Click the icon marked Application Loader
Click the button marked Browse...
Browse to where you unzipped the files and select No_Icons.ALX
Click Ok.
Click Next
Click Finish
Wait a minute... it took literally a minute on my blackberry - so don't panic.
Close out of Blackberry Manager (and stop the blackberry services and disconnect your device).

PART 2: SELECTING THE THEME

Go to the Spanner icon (options)
Click on Theme
Choose No Icons
Then Close everything back to the main menu and presto... it should be clean.
Don't forget, you'll have to reset your home screen picture and icons.

Did I mention that you can find lots of pictures (and use a great wallpaper maker at crackberry.com)?

Using Ubunutu for Real

2008-12-01T21:24:00.002+11:00

Over the years I've made quite a few tests on Ubuntu to see whether it was ready for general consumption. Until now, it's never lasted more than a few hours on the device I've loaded it on because I've either had no time to test it properly or I've become too frustrated with driver setup problems to continue.

This time, I loaded it on a laptop which just didn't seem able to run Windows XP. The results were astonishing.

The Good
For a start, the laptop which has 512 mb of ram runs quite well now. On XP SP2, it took literally about 5 minutes to boot, under Ubuntu, it take about 15 seconds.

Google and Firefox
Similarly, Firefox was already installed and all of my favourite google apps and bookmarks worked a treat.

VPN and Remote Desktop
I found some instructions for VPN setup and was remote desktopping onto my work PC within a few hours. Between Remote Desktop (to Windows) and the web apps that run in firefox - and of course Open Office which was also already installed, I've got 90% of what I need on the laptop.

The Bad
Wireless Network via PCMCIA Card
Tried it, found very little assistance on the internet and gave up. I'm going to stay "wired". I can live without it.

Lotus Notes
The web is full of pages which tell you how to install Notes on Linux and I tried installing according to several different versions of instructions but they were all a bit unclear and since I'm being a "typical unthinking Windows user with no patience and no Ubuntu experience", I figured it best to forge on without trying to learn anything.

I don't know much about Linux at all, and about all I know is how to extract the Tar to a folder and then run it. The Notes installer started working then suddenly bombed out with a message "The installer is unable to run in graphical mode. Try running the installer with the -console or -silent flag."

I tried the -console flag and things looked promising for a little while. Then it failed with the same message.

I can live without Notes on the laptop. It would have been nice but I can live without it.

This reminds me of an old adage from my information science days;

"If it's harder for people to obtain information than it is to go without it, then people will go without it."

This is true for systems too. I don't know if I'm looking at a Notes problem or a Linux problem - probably a bit of both. In any case, that's why they both "fail" the dumb user test (IMHO) for now. I believe work has been done on Notes 8.5, so I'll give that a go eventually.

Conclusions
Ubuntu is ready for use by low use computer people (or retired people, like my parents) who only want office and internet apps. It's not really ready for people who use their computer for other types of applications, or who rely heavily on Windows integration.

If I could sort out the Notes problems - and I'm sure that in time I could... I just wanted to install as a moron for this test - then I feel that, Ubuntu would be suitable for several people at my office. Perhaps I could use it to revitalise the older laptop fleet?

All in all, Ubuntu has come a long way but it still needs a good look-over by someone who specialises in UI's.