Busy Busy Busy

Sorry there has been so little activity on here so far this year but things have been very busy and writing blogs has fallen right down the priority list. So a quick update to keep things ticking over…

Lotusphere build up is well underway. I am sure that everyone has now received their email about Lotusphere Online it’s looking prety good this year. The performance is not too bad, mail and the forum are working fine. Of course don’t forget to Opt In to the public directory so that your colleagues can send you mail etc. The venue of the Wednesday night party has been confirmed as Sea World which I am looking forward to as it’s one of the few parks I’ve not been to before, hopefully it’ll be a little warmer than last year though.

Work-wise I am writing a ton of documentation, getting Notrix jobs changed, we’re starting a new development round for another application, and I’ve been beavering away on some code for one of the OpenNTF applications which is looking pretty good so far. All of this I am trying to get done before next Wednesday (and this is the main reason for the lack of posts). After all, who needs sleep anyway?

With regards to the documentation I am working on, we are basically doing a brain dump about how to run and support a fairly large 5,000 user global CRM application. Obviously noone enjoys writing documentation but for the first time I am using a Wiki (Domino Wiki of course!) to store everything. To be honest I really don’t know why I haven’t done it this way before. The strength of Wikis is the ease with which they can be written and updated, and the code handles all of the organisation and cross-referencing itself. I’d really recommend using Ben’s template if you are wondering how to document an entire system.

And finally this weekend the family is off en-masse to Nottingham for my niece’s christening. It’ll be good to catch up with everyone.

Roll on next week so I can get on the plane and relax for a few hours!

January 12, 2006 by 0

Back to the real world

After a really relaxing long Christmas and New Years break it’s back to the real world with a bang. A few jobs have built up while I was away so I have to get the old brain ticking over again properly. It’s amazing how quickly your mind atrophies if you are doing different things for a while. For example, I couldn’t do the Times Su Doku’s on the train this morning, normally I have ten minutes or so left over before we get into Liverpool Street.

One of the things I have been meaning to do but could never find the time was check out Bittorrent. More specifically I downloaded Azureus last week. It really is very good, I have caught up on the programmes which I actually choose to watch (the West Wing mainly) and I’m left wondering if I shouldn’t get rid of my Sky subscription. The two things which are holding me back are the sports channels and Sky+. Maybe I should have another look at Tivo? Is there anyone out there who has experience of both? If I do go that route then I’ll also need to revisit my broadband supplier. Currently I have a 40gb monthly limit on traffic and what with this site and torrents I would be pushing that every month I think. So again, any recommendations on good packages that people use would be appreciated.

Anyway, Happy New Year to everyone, hope that your first day back at work goes OK. Just remember, only 19 days until Lotusphere!

January 3, 2006 by 0

Happy New Year

Well I’m just off to London for a New Year’s party. Unfortunately there is a Tube strike just starting up so there could be some fun and games getting there but should be worthwhile.

Wishing you all a great New Years Eve, see you on the other side in 2006.

December 31, 2005 by 0

Happy Christmas

Wishing the readers of 11TMR (all three of you) a very happy and healthy Christmas. See you in a few days.

December 24, 2005 by 1

Christmas Party

It was our team Christmas party last night so there are some sore heads this morning all round. It seems that everyone has (eventually) made it into the office which is quite impressive given the mission that some people were on.

We went up Tower 42 (there are a few pictures here) and then for a classic Christmas curry as is the team tradition but everything seemed to go on later than usual. I made my excuses at 1am but there were still a few people raring to carry on to a club.

There seems to be a general opinion that the best hangover cure today would be to go to the pub for lunch, so there’s really not much work getting done today!

December 20, 2005 by 0

Coldplay Live

A few months ago I managed to get hold of some tickets to see Coldplay live at Earls Court in London (always good to see big websites running on Domino isn’t it). Well the date sort of snuck up on me last night so what a nice pre-Christmas surprise.

So off it was to west London to see Richard Ashcroft (off of the Verve) as the supporting act. To be honest he wasn’t great but when the old Verve tracks like Bittersweet Symphony were rolled out everyone sang along and it began to get the mood up. He must have been a bit disappointed because the arena was barely half full for him, still the sing along was pretty impressive by the end of his 40 minute slot.

It was a good half hour wait for the main act to begin as the stage techs did their stuff but it was well worth it as there was a huge screen erected at the back of the stage which threw out some incredible light shows. It was a really impressive showcase of just how many songs that have become modern standards they have released. The fact that Yellow could be used so early on in the evening just demonstrates there is some depth of material they can call upon. Pretty much every track was a huge audience participation event always building towards Fix You as the finale which just sent shivers up your spine.

It’s the first concert I’ve been to in quite a while and my first ever at Earls Court, but it’s definitely got me in the mood to see more bands live again.

I’ve put a few pictures up this morning on Flickr (only a few as most them were so shaky you couldn’t make out what they were of!) and tonight I’ll stick up a few bits of video. here is a bit of video. I wouldn’t watch it if you’re motion sensitive, I really am not a threat to any professional TV camera men!

December 16, 2005 by 0

New Server

After a week of building servers at work, I have spent today building my new home server which hosts (among other things) this site.

The old machine which I had been using for a few years finally got too snail-like so I have gone for a new Windows box with Win 2003 server plus Domino 7.0. It always takes a while to get everything going properly hence the downtime this afternoon. But I think we are there now. The only thing which confused me a bit was setting up the SMTP task. Because this server is hosted via a dynamic DNS provider, I have to provide authentication to the SMTP server which I use to relay mail out to the rest of the world. Not something which you can do in Domino as far as I can tell (although I am a truly amateur administrator so I would like to be proved wrong). So after some reading and finding a tip from Volker I downloaded SMTP Auth which handles the authentication across to mail.btinternet.com for me.

For the web server side of things I am very happy with quite advanced server config changes but if a professional admin saw the way I have everything to do with mail configured they would end up in tears (whether of laughter or pain you can decide) but everything seems to be working OK so I will leave well enough alone.

This is really the beauty of the Domino server – most things come pre configured out of the box so that even an admin numpty like me can get the thing going.

Anyway, if you spot any problems please let me know, otherwise this server will now sit in a cupboard and we’ll see what how long it can chug away without needing a reboot.

December 10, 2005 by 0

Server rebuilds

One of our test servers died in spectacular fashion earlier in the week so we have spent the last couple of days partially rebuilding the environment to support some high priority systems integration testing with a new application which is using our data as it’s main starting point. The damn thing has taken so long because a couple of the databases are just huge, I have been rebuilding views and indexes for over a day now! Hopefully we’ll be done in time for a well deserved trip to the pub after work tonight.

Other than that the run in to Christmas has started with my first party over the weekend after which they come in quick succession until Christmas itself. So productivity is going to drop off markedly and sore heads increase in the same proportion.

December 9, 2005 by 0

Problems with DWA 7 and Firefox 1.5?

I don’t know if this is just me but ever since I upgraded Firefox to 1.5 I have been having problems with DWA 7. I can’t compose new emails and several view options are not working. Has anyone experienced the same issues and more importantly does anyone have a solution?

Update It appears that a few other people have come across the same issue (it also affects the web admin client). Apparently, according to Vowe, cross frame DOM browsing has been disabled. Although I would guess that the rich text editor does not use that so this might well be another issue.

Update Thanks to Christian for noting that “This problem has been fixed in Firefox and is not reproduceable with Firefox 1.5.0.4.”

December 5, 2005 by 2

Increasing Font Size for Notes on the Mac

Now that Ed has bought a Mac and finally managed to get Notes installed I thought it might be a useful moment to mention a really useful little tool called Ninix which allows you to edit the Notes.ini file (which is binary on the Mac for some reason). The most useful feature of the editor is that it lets you increase the font size to something readable on a larger screen. So, you simply download the tool and then on the Fontsize menu there is an option to “Increase 1”. Do this twice and you have a much better and more usable Notes client. (Especially in conjunction with Silk font smoothing which he has already discovered).

November 27, 2005 by 0