Real World Computing

The 8.0 Client In previous years, I'd have jumped onto the new Notes/Domino within six months of release. This time however, things have changed. First of all, there's the fact that the whole Notes 8 client is a rewrite using eclipse. It turns the 18+ year old product into a version 1.0 again - at least for a little while. My first attempts with the Version 8 client showed that the system was so slow that I could make coffee faster than it could start - and I mean proper plunged coffee, I quickly realised that you could gain some massive speed improvements by turning off the anti-virus program - great... but is that really a good idea? After a while of having both 7.0.2 and 8.0 on my PC, I found myself using the older client pretty much exclusively. 8.0.2 and Hard Drive Concerns Ok, so there was an 8.0.1 but I blinked and it passed on by. At 8.0.2, I decided to give things another go. First of all, I tried installing the client on my PC. I had almost no space at all left on ...

Microsoft, of all people, have released a "Unified Communications" survey tool. If anything, I'd have thought that their suite is dis-unified, since every component likes to run on it's own separate server. Perhaps that's why they're pushing virtualisation now? In any case, I decided to have a go of their survey - answering questions based on our usage of Lotus products. Note that we don't use SameTime at all yet, so I wasn't expecting a great response. I rated at the top end of "Basic". If there's anyone out there who is using the entire Lotus product range, I'd be really interested to see how it rates. The assessment takes about 1 minute - if you're a fast reader. Microsoft Unified Communications Assessment http://www.microsoft.com/australia/business/uc/assessment/assessment.aspx The assessment also comes with a download package containing case studies, whitepapers and other "goodies". IBM, this is one area where ...

Musings on What I'd do about my Partition Problem Yesterday afternoon, I spent a bit of time backing up my work PC so that I could try a few tricks to get the System partition larger. I keep all my data and apps on a different partition but nevertheless, they still like to dump files in the Windows directory on the sysetm partition. In addition, there's the fact that Windows Update keeps wanting to increase it's stranglehold on my C: Drive. I didn't want to do a reformat and reinstall because I would have to reinstall all of my apps too. I also didn't want to do an entire system image because that saves things in a proprietry format. I wanted to be able to get to my files on DVD if and when I wanted to. My Partition Troubles When I first installed Windows XP I figured that 10GB would be sufficient space - especially since I upgraded from Windows NT which had problems recognising system partitions over 10GB. How wrong was I? For the last few weeks, I've been enga...

Installing Domino 8.0.2 Yesterday, we did some tests on Domino 8.0.2. I wasn't expecting any real problems given the ease of the last few Domino upgrades - up to 7.0.2. I guess I was wrong. First of all, the initial attempt at installation failed with one of those non-specific error messages. I rebooted the server and tried again - no problems. I've seen this problem a few times though - it's something to do with the JVM being held open on Windows Server 2003 even though Domino itself has been closed. Upon starting Domino, I chose not to upgrade the designs of the databases. Ideally you should not upgrade the designs until your last production server is on at least the same "major" version - in this case, 8.x. I then did a bit of testing. As usual, I found no problems. Domino is one of the few systems I know which can be upgraded and tested (albeit roughly) in 15 minutes. The Problem Then I found the problem. Our most critical database refused to render web ...

I've just finished filling out a survey questionnaire for Michael Osterman and I noticed that the same sorts of things just keep on cropping up. I can't figure out why these things are "issues" in this day and age. Certainly, they're not problems for us. I was just wondering if people have email problems because of poor implementations, poor policy, low expenditure or because they're on other systems with less resilience than domino. The Problems Discussed The problems mentioned in the survey were as follows; Spam Outbound Confidential Material Archiving and Retrieval System Management Time Mail File Sizes None of these are issues for us. Spam After struggling for a few years with the Symantec Anti-Spam solutions, I finally redirected our mail through a cleansing service. This service runs our mail through several different Anti-Spam solutions. Anything considered spam is sent to spam@myorganisation.com while all other mail goes to it's rightful reci...

You may already have used google alerts to keep an eye on various technologies, companies or other objects of interest but did you ever think of using it to keep tabs on yourself? If you're into social networking or find yourself frequently adding comments to articles around the net, then you probably have a significant web presence. Certainly more than you could handle doing spot checks via Google search. What's great about Google alerts is that it doesn't show you all your web presences, just the new ones - or those recently updated. This makes it easy to see if someone is using your identity or to re-locate a site you put a comment on to check for follow-ups. You might not be able to stop someone from falsely putting comments on sites using your name but at least you'll know about it and you'll be in a position to request its removal or post a follow-up correction. If you have a gmail account, then you already have access to google alerts. How to Set up the Ale...

There's no doubt that most people with any kind of computing background would agree that the most forward-looking and influential IT company in the world today is Google, some may say Apple but most would say Google. Microsoft, once an industry unto itself no longer holds that coveted position. They didn't so much lose direction as, fail to take the correct turns along the route to today's platforms. While the world is heading towards open source, platform independence and service orientated architecture, Microsoft is more tightly bound to proprietary systems on the windows platform than ever before. A little whinge about IBM's Marketing So where is IBM in all this? Well, to be perfectly frank, they're not in the sweetest of spots even though they deserve to be. Why? Because although in my opinion, IBM's technology is more than a match for Google's, they haven't yet caught the attention of "Joe Public". Their marketing team has the "kil...

The question "can you run version 8 with older versions of notes?" appears with surprising regularity on the Domino 8 Forums. Today, I noticed that someone had provided a very impressive link to a web page containing a picture showing someone running ... and I quote.... "Notes R5, 6, 7 and 8 Standard running concurrently on one Windows machine, and side by side the Notes Client, Domino Designer and Administrator of each version - no image manipulation (besides scaling), no VMs, no tricks... " It's so impressive that it deserves a referral. Well done guys! http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Running-Notes-R5-6-7-8-concurrently

Introduction Since the release of Google's new "web browser", Chrome yesterday the web has been buzzing with speculation about how Google will be hurting Mozilla. The funny thing is, that if you read the comic about Google chrome, you'll see that it is being positioned more as an operating system than as a browser. Cloud Computing The idea is that the Web browser will become the operating system of choice for cloud computing . The Google Chrome "browser" has certain advantages over the current generation of browsers, particularly in the area of robustness and multithreading. The browser changes are similar, in a way to the fundamental chanages from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Under Windows 3.1, all applications shared the same address space and one faulty application would result in the dreaded "General Protection Fault" message and would often pull the entire system down. I see that kind of behaviour all the time in Internet Explorer and slight...

Today I downloaded and installed Google Chrome Beta from; http://www.google.com/chrome Installation The download was fast (it's a fairly small file) and installation is simple... Too simple in fact. It doesn't give you much choice about where you put things. There's also not much available in the way of configuration at the moment. What was nice is that it correctly recognised Mozilla Firefox 3 as my main browser and imported my bookmarks etc. One thing that may annoy is that it modifies the registry to run Google Update on Startup. When it starts, it gives you an option immediately, to change your search engine - or keep google, that's a nice touch. Google is obviously trying to appear as if they're not a monopoly. Disclaimer It's important to remember that this is a beta product and in no way represents the final finished product. General Look and Feel At this point it's very rough around the edges, though I'll admit that the tabs are nice - even i...