Lucky after all

I had already got over the disappointment of not getting a speaking slot at Lotusphere. But judging by this thread over at the Turtle’s site it appears that even if you did get approved you still have to pay for your ticket. Surely that can’t be right? If it is then what benefits do speakers get (other than the kudos and CV fodder) for all of the effort which goes into preparing their presentations?

Ill advised upgrade

I’ve been using Protopage as the home page in my internet browser for ages now. It was great because I switch between machines so much (virtual, different boots and physical), all of the links could be kept up on a server and I didn’t need to worry about it. Unfortunately they have decided to upgrade the site this week and add all sorts of bells and whistles. The reason the old version was so good was it was very lightweight, but the new site takes ages to download each time I go to it, it looks awful and the new widgets are of no use ot anyone.

So I’ve migrated everything there across to a new wiki on this site. Of course I’m using DominoWiki. In all it’s taken 30 minutes from creating the database to being done. Wikis are just great.

Cool Tool of the Day

I was having a problem with a huge FOP PDF template this morning, a change I had made last week was causing problems in certain circumstances. The problem was how to find the change (my memory is absolutely appalling). Enter WinDiff, a very useful little utility which compares two ASCII files, shows you what has been inserted, removed and moved and where the changes have been made. I recommend adding it to your tools library.

House move progress

My buyers have finally had enough of all of the delays so I’ve had to agree to a completion date, which at the moment is looking like the 5th of December. It means for a brief period I’ll be homeless, staying at my parents until my solicitor can finally sort out my new flat in London.

It’s probably not a bad thing, the logistics of trying to move out of a house and into a flat in London all on the same day were beginning to look a little daunting! The big hope is still that everything will be done before Christmas but this whole process has gone so badly that I wouldn’t count on it.

First Christmas Party

It seems far too early this year but last night was the first Christmas party of the season. My contracting agent took us all out to the Gaucho Grill in the west end of London and, stupidly, gave me the wine menu. Well given how much was consumed and the lack of headache this morning I think it was a good move, quality wine = vastly reduced hangover.

I ducked out at about 11:30 as the others were heading off to a night club and that’s just not my thing and given the lack of people here this morning I’d guess they had a pretty good time.

From now until Christmas I have at least one party a week to be going to, plus I’ll be moving in a couple of weeks, sometime around the 6th of December is looking likely at the moment, oh and some work needs to be fitted in amongst all the fun and games. Going to be a busy couple of months.

SOX Audit tool for Notes and Domino

I’m involved in my umpteenth SOX audit at the moment and was looking for a tool which could tell me all of the ACL settings for all databases on a server. As ever the best place to look is on OpenNTF. Now this isn’t a project, just a simple code download but it is, quite frankly superb.

Great credit must be given to Stan Uptagrafft for this code, I think maybe people have missed it as it’s not a full project but it’s just saved me hours of work!

And the geek of the day award goes to…

When I got to work this morning and had a quick scan of my Bloglines feeds, there was an error report from Feedburner saying that this site was down from about 08:45. Odd, thought I, for the new server is a meaty old boy and shouldn’t be crashing at any time, let alone the quietest period of the day.

Well looking at the console HTTP had conflicted, for some reason (which Fasthosts are looking into) IIS had taken over listening on port 80 in place of Domino. An easy fix normally, but from within the firewall of the office we can’t get at the server admin console. Queue true geekiness and my new phone, a Nokia E61. It’s got a pretty passable web browser on it, and a 3G data connection which allowed me to remotely control the server over the phone handset. I know this shouldn’t impress me, but it does, we truly are moving into a period where an always-on data connection is possible.

I got stick from the other guys here for being too much of a geek, but I just love this stuff, how cool is it that my mobile phone can talk to my web server, tell it to stop IIS and start nHTTP instead?

Admin Tip of the day

Showing my developer credentials here, I have only just realised that I can type "tell http refresh" to pick up changes in the configuration of internet sites, or indeed completely new internet sites. In the past I’ve always used "tell http restart" which works fine as well but kills any open sessions on the server etc.

So if you’re a bloody idiot like me, then maybe this will be useful!

VMWare Disk Mount to the rescue

So, I spent a large portion of the weekend (close to 20 hours) starting a new application for a client and all was going wonderfully well. That was until I got to the office this morning when I tried to fire up VMWare to copy the new database onto the client’s dev server. The virtual machine which runs the Domino server on my laptop just refused to start, it kept on blue screening and wouldn’t even start in safe mode. Boy was I worried, but luckily a colleague pointed me in the direction of a VMWare utility called Disk Mount which, as the name suggests allows you to mount a virtual disk as a share in Windows and read it on your main machine as though it were a second hard drive.

It worked without a hitch and I’ve been able to recover the database I was working on, cue much relieved brow mopping. Not the way to start a Monday morning!

Session Preferences

If you’re registered for Lotusphere, yesterday you’ll have received an email asking you to fill in your session preferences. Looking through the list it appears that of the three abstracts I’ve submitted only one is on the list of choices (unless session titles have been changed as a couple look very similar to my ideas). But I haven’t been notified of any abstracts being rejected yet. Can anyone shed any light on when we’ll hear either way?

Update: Well I got a couple of emails overnight, 2 of my sessions have been rejected, but one is still on the possibles list. Ed noted that he’s slightly uncomfortable about this sort of thing being discussed in public. The reason I posted yesterday was that I was just unsure of the process and I certainly don’t take the rejections personally. Seeing the list of sessions that we were asked to choose from it’s very easy to see the choices each of the track managers have had will have been very difficult to make.

All I can say is roll on January, it looks like it’s going to be a great week.