B’musings

January 29, 2010

Bold 9700, Garmin GPS, DAOS scare, and Blink!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading,Technology — Mike Burford @ 7:53 pm
Tags: , , ,

Okay, so whilst I’m on a roll (and the baby’s asleep and nobody’s telling me to come in from the office):

Bold 9700: Recently upgraded from my Curve 8310 and am loving the 9700.  It’s taking a bit of getting used to the new keypad but the screen is very impressive, WiFi is great, I reckon the trackpad is an improvement over the ball, and overall I think it’s a great device.

Another new device is the Garmin GPS my father got me.  It’s a nuvi 1390 and although I don’t have a great need for the navigation assistance around Christchurch on a day to day basis, with the recent law change on the use of phones in vehicles the bluetooth connection and phone functionality works really well.  I’ve only used a TomTom GPS when in Australia so I’m not an expert on GPS units, but the ease of use, software integration, and look and feel of the Garmin will have me recommending it to anyone who’s interested.

I’ve been going through a bit of a nightmare with DAOS at a client site over the past week.  Over Christmas the mail server started generating a whole bunch of “nsf directory manager pool is full” errors, but we couldn’t reboot the server as the customer has a change freeze over the holiday period so we had to wait until that ended.  So when that lifted the weekend before last I connected in and rebooted the server and after it came back up again initiated the upgrade of the ODS of the mail archive databases.  The archives are on a separate server to Domino so when the server was upgraded late last year we left the archive databases to last whilst we fine tuned everything else.  What I didn’t realise at the time was that the archive databases all had the DAOS setting enabled and the ODS upgrade kicked off DAOS in the background, but this became rapidly obvious when I got a frantic call to say that the server was losing 100Mb/minute of available disk space.  The archives are on a separate server, the DAOS files aren’t!  The organisation’s primary mail server dropped to 6Gb of available disk space and daily email consumption is just over 1Gb of disk space!

Easy fix I thought, stop the compact process, restart it with the “daos -off” option and when all the attachments are back in the archive databases, prune DAOS to just the other side of the backup.  Not so easy, every time the prune tried to run it would stop because the DAOS catalog wasn’t synchronized, even if we had just “successfully” completed a three and a half hour resync and daosmgr reported that the catalog state was synchronized!  IBM support helped and running a log analysis on “DAOS object count” identified a bunch of mail databases to run fixup against, but three and a half hours later the prune task fell over after only running for a minute so we’ve got a corrupted DAOS catalog.  The only fix for that is to shut down Domino, rename/remove the catalog and cfg databases, restart Domino and run another resync.  That’s tomorrow (Sat) night taken care of, if I pick up any more tips I’ll post them in here.

And just to finish off in case this is the last post I make for another 6 months, I really recommend “Blink”, another great book by Malcolm Gladwell:

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

He describes this ability as “thin-slicing”  and as per Wikipedia:

Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce.

There’s plenty of info about it on gladwell dot com and Wikipedia so I won’t repeat it here, but I found it to be a fascinating book, easy to read, and some of the examples he gives are really eye-opening.

Time to head inside and see if I’m still entitled to dinner.

June 14, 2009

Migrated from Domino to Exchange for an iPhone

Filed under: Technology — Mike Burford @ 5:51 pm
Tags: , ,

Well, that was a first for me.  A small company – 8 users with Domino and BES on SBS 2003 – had one guy who bought an iPhone and didn’t want the Web access to his mail so the company ditched Domino for Exchange!  One of the other guys from our company did the migration with Exchange and Domino side-by-side on the same server (it went very smoothly, I was quite impressed) and I was called in to migrate BES from Domino to Exchange for the other company members.

They were only using Domino for mail, but all the same, how do you justify a business case for this based on a single user’s desire to use an iPhone?  And you know the real kicker?  The iPhone user is the only one in the office with a Mac, so he’s running a Windows emulator for Outlook!!!

February 9, 2009

Michael Sampson comments on “How to manage your business in a recession”

Filed under: Collaboration,Technology — Mike Burford @ 5:19 pm

Just because Michael used to be my boss doesn’t mean that I’m at all biased towards his writings, much. :)  Michael puts out some good stuff and I usually don’t need to link to it because a whole bunch of other people already have, but in this case it’s well worth repeating.  He has taken two (so far) of the ten principles Geoff Colvin listed in his Fortune magazine article “How to manage your business in a recession” and analysed them based on collaboration strategies.  Well worth reading both Geoff’s article and Michael’s analyses:

#1: Reset priorities to face the new reality

#2: Keep investing in the core

December 17, 2008

“IBM launches a Linux based virtual desktop”

Filed under: Lotus,Technology — Mike Burford @ 12:06 pm
Tags: , ,

I missed this news from IBM, but David Marshall has written about the new Linux based virtual desktop from IBM.

November 3, 2008

Interesting comparison of Email system uptime by Google/Radicati

Filed under: Lotus,Technology — Mike Burford @ 3:43 am
Tags: , , , ,

The “Official Google Blog” has posted an entry titled “What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud” that in itself is an interesting read, but something that I found intriguing were the figures reported by the Radicati Group comparing downtime between Gmail, GroupWise, Lotus, and Exchange.  The Radicati Group’s report is way too expensive for me to have a look at, but I wonder how many Lotus systems they evaluated that aren’t running on Windows?

Update: Volker and Jack Dausman raise the issue re. the credibility of Radicati’s figures

October 26, 2008

Good familiarisation, practice, demo site – Lotus Greenhouse

If you need a good place to review various IBM Lotus software products, check out Lotus Greenhouse.  It’s got pages for Lotus Connections, Quickr, Sametime, iNotes, Lotus Forms Turbo, Websphere Portal, and IBM Mashup Centre.  You can either use it for learning how the various products work, or work together, as a demo site for clients, or, as in my case, for showing my Microsoft workmates how Lotus products can look and feel.

October 17, 2008

Great discussion re. Mac vs PC for Business use

Filed under: Technology — Mike Burford @ 11:31 pm
Tags: ,

There’s been an interesting, though not surprising response to Michael Sampson’s announcement re. switching back to PC from Mac for business reasons.  There are some great comments on his blog, the discussion has continued at vowe.net, and Eric Mack has followed up with some good observations of his own.

The reason this is of interest to me – apart from the fact that Macs have always intrigued me and I have often wondered what it would be like to own one, but haven’t been able to justify the cost to find out – is because one of my colleagues at work has recently purchased an iMac for home and has become an ardent Mac supporter, for home and business.  Nothing so remarkable in itself if it wasn’t for the fact that he is a senior, highly skilled and qualified Microsoft technician.  He will connect in remotely to work from his iMac for after hours work or support and has stated that he has been able to find software or ways in which to achieve all that he would have been able to do in terms of work requirements on his PC, from his Mac.  Needless to say, much could be achieved via VM or remote access to a Windows machine then using Windows from there, but it will be very interesting following his progress as someone who is technically competent in a windows environment as he tries to apply his technical skills and interests within the Mac world.

Theme: Rubric. Blog at WordPress.com.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.