Real World Computing

Youtube (http://www.youtube.com) is an excellent source of video material. I guess most of us already know that. Most people also probably know that you can download videos from there if you use Keepvid (http://keepvid.com/). I don't trust things to stay where they are on the internet, so if I see something I like, I grab it. Hence Keepvid works really well for me. Recently I found that I'd downloaded quite a lot of things that I wanted to compile into a single DVD. That way I could watch them on the TV. I looked around for something to convert the Flash Video format (FLV) used by Youtube and I found RivaVX (http://www.rivavx.com/). Now, I can't vouch for the commercial product, since the freeware product did all that I needed, but I think it's worth mentioning that video conversion software that comes without bundling and without awful watermarks is rare. So RivaVX are to be congratulated - check them out if you want to do something similar. So, to summarize:...

I've just come from the "IBM LotusSphere comes to You" Presentations in Sydney. It was a refreshing change from the last few years. Nobody used the word "workspace". Yay! IBM committed to working harder on publicity but one thing irks me... Given that the event was free of charge, why didn't they take out a huge advertisement in the SMH or on some bulletin boards around Sydney. It seems to me that the event was designed mainly to keep existing customers, rather than stir up new interest in the community. There were a lot of interesting things there, but my greatest interest was on Notes 8. I've heard lots about it, and watched some demonstrations when it was Hannover but it was interesting to see some of the new features in action... - Built-in Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentations all capable of Reading/Writing MS Office, Open Document Format (and several other formats too). - Built-in 99% compatible web browser (or you can tell it to use E...

I know that it is a rule not to apologize for not blogging but since I haven't blogged in about two months, I guess I should break that rule and apologize. Recently, I have been very busy but have not made any Domino-related breakthroughs. I have however, spent quite a bit of time playing with Google and the new toys they have provided for us. I am going to talk about a number of Google tools but won't give URLs for all of them as you can access them via the More >> link on the front page of Google. The following page should contain them all. http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/options/ Google calendar At first, I couldn't see a good reason for using this. Eventually though, I decided to place a Google calendar control on my customized Google home page. This control displays upcoming events only, not the full calendar. Of course, you can click on it to access the full calendar. Why is this calendar any better from my notes calendar at work? Well, I guess the answer...

Since my last post, I've been busy with a lot of things, but one of the most important things has been change management. The problems I, and most other IT people always seem to face is the constant influx of half-baked ideas from Management filtering down without proper paperwork. It has always been a policy of mine to not say "NO" to people without giving their problems/solutions serious thought. Unfortunately this takes quite a toll on my time. This has been a good policy and I'd strongly advise anyone who has Juinor IT staff, particularly helpdesk people, to take a policy like this onboard. Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite so well in IT Management. Here, we need to take a tougher stance. One of the worst aspects of being proactive as well as responsive to user requests is that it encourages plausible deniability. Users who get into trouble about a project, or change their mind about it, can easily deny having asked for it in the first place. It does...

We're having a lot of trouble at work at the moment over business ownership and change management. Here's how the cycle works... 1. Something goes wrong 2. Blame IT 3. Say that IT Needs proper "change management" and authorisation 4. Make IT Write a Business Process for Change Management 5. IT Writes about Business Ownership and Signoff 6. IT Presents it to Management (Personally) 7. Management agree that this is good, but a lot of work 8. IT Takes it to a committee who decide that it's too much work 9. Committee says "we don't want to be bothered with this kind of work" 10. IT is required to rewrite the procedures so that minimal authorisation is required (Everything chuggs along again happily until something else goes wrong - then the cycle restarts). Sorry if this all sounds very negative. I'll have some more constructive thoughts on change management once I get a little more time to report it.

What a disastrous week we have had! Last weekend, we upgraded one of our most critical systems on the Domino server. The system in question is primarily transaction based and as a result records are being added and deleted constantly. The upgrade went well and all our post-implementation and testing was great. We all went home on Saturday feeling much relieved that the upgrade had gone as planned. On Monday, the first day in which the system was going to be used by our clients, we received a phone call to say that they were able to create a record with the same primary key as another record in the system. We commenced an investigation to see what the extent of the problem was, not expecting a great deal of trouble after all of the testing we have done. We were surprised. There were quite a few duplicate records, many of which were very similar but not exactly the same. The dates on these records varied considerably making it even harder to identify a pattern. In desperation, we r...

In the light of my recent blogs, I thought this was worth relating. We have one very critical system running on the Domino server. Everything else could fail for a while without problems, but not this one system. The system has had the most extensive testing possible at our environment with a several test periods of several weeks each. This may not sound much, but it is a long time considering that the system isn't overly complex. The way this system works is that requests are submitted over the internet for number allocations. These are processed internally and passed through a manual approval phase. Upon approval, there's a certain amount of time that must elapse before it is legal to use these numbers in production environments. Recently one of our people had a clock problem on their PC. They fixed it themselves (our policies don't restrict users from touching their PC clocks - though the clocks all re-synch at startup). In fixing the problem, this user managed to c...