Real World Computing

Well, the weekend daylight savings changes went mostly ok... except for the Blackberry Enterprise sever that is. I was out at a children's birthday party last weekend and was near another Blackberry user from a different company. His phone Luckily, I found this article fairly quickly; How to prepare the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for IBM Lotus Domino to support DST changes in 2008 . It was on a forum, so I had to register in order to get to the ZIP file download. I quickly registered downloaded and extracted the files. The next step was to run a command line; BBDBUpdate -n -db -input LoadSyncDeviceConfig.sql then... well then, nothing happened. After a bit of stuffing around, we decided that Coffee was the best answer to our problems. Sure enough, while we were making Coffee, the BES Server completed its internal updates and reset the time accordingly. All is right. Other Fallout It does raise a few interesting concerns/questions; Why doesn't BES set it's time Zone a...

Yesterday we discovered that there are changes to the Australian Daylight Savings dates coming into effect this weekend (it will continue when it would normally have ended). There are lots of repercussions, but the worst (ones that could affect the business) relate to the Lotus Notes Calendar. There are two things to do to prepare ourselves; Windows Updates on our clients (WinXP) Windows Updates on our servers (Win2003) We can handle the servers ourselves but how do we know if the clients have done their updates? Simple, we ask them by sending a button around so they can determine the answers for themselves. Creating a Button that can be mailed to Notes Users Here's the LotusScript code on my button; Sub Click(Source As Button)   Dim vDSTText As Variant   Dim Session As New NotesSession   Const CorrectDST = "10,1,1,4,1,1"   vDSTText = Session.GetEnvironmentString("DSTLAW",1)   If vDSTText = CorrectDST Then      ...

I have found a great E-Book reader for the Blackberry. It's called Mobi Pocket Reader , and its free. It's available for a lot of other phones too. You can download books "over the air" or you can copy them to your Blackberry using the desktop manager software - MobiBooks looks in the Ebooks folder (although this can be changed via the options menu). Getting Books I have been enjoying some of the many E-Books available as free downloads in Mobi format from ManyBooks.Net . If you're not a fan of classics, there are also a lot of commercially available books in the built-in libraries. Creating and Converting Books It doesn't stop there though. There is free MobiPocket Creator Home Edition software available for creating MobiReader books from a variety of other formats, including, text,html, pdf and doc. This means that the entire resources of Project Gutenberg are open to you as well as a lot of online fan-fiction and business documents, whitepapers etc...

I recently began having trouble with Nero creating stuttering "coasters" when I convert YouTube video clips to DVD. The stuttering problem was present in both versions 6 and 7 - I didn't try 8. I contacted Nero and asked for assistance but they didn't seem able to help. I eventually narrowed the problem down to Nero's annoying habit of recoding everything. My data files were playable in every other player except Nero Showtime. I needed to save in a better format. Yesterday I discovered Internet Video Converter (Standard) a free video file converter which handles a lot of different formats. Unlike a lot of conversion applications, this one was very straightforward (literally 3 button pushes) and I was able to convert to DVD. Better than that, it even supports encoding to PAL DVD - used in Australia and the UK. Nero still wanted to re-encode the video files but at least they came out on my TV without a stutter.

I've just returned from the annual IBM mind-blowing (LotusSphere comes to you) session in Sydney. Strangely, it feels different this year. In previous years, I'd come back all excited about some new technology, or perhaps a little apprehensive (in the days when they were pushing workplace). I'd always be able to take some comfort in the fact that we were only one or two versions behind the new features. Now however, I'm looking at Version 8.01 of Domino from a standpoint of 7.02 - only about a year's difference - but it might as well be 10 years. I don't know exactly how IBM have managed to take such giant strides in only a year when everyone else (Google excepted) seems to be standing still. I'm impressed - but I really don't know where to start. One thing is for sure... there won't be any Domino 8 for us until Blackberry gets it's fixes out there. It's frustrating, because about half of the attendees seemed to have Blackberries, so that m...