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 3, 2009

It sure has been a while!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading — Mike Burford @ 1:12 pm
Tags: , ,

It’s a bit like the confessional thing: “Forgive me for it has been a long time since my last blog …”  I’ve been on a non-Notes/Domino project doing some business analysis work for a client looking at implementing an ERP system.  I’ve spent the last few months interviewing staff and documenting the current and proposed process models for various departments using Tibco Business Studio – quite a cool program.  The thing is, I spend most of the day doing that then have to spend the evenings and weekends catching up on my “normal” work so with that, a sick 10-month old granddaughter at home, and taking on the treasurer position for a church start-up, things have been really full on.  And probably why I’m now sick at home myself.

But it’s been an interesting few months, I’ve set up Sametime and Quickr demos and rolled out a Quickr implementation as a result; I’ve done my first BlackBerry BPS implementation in a Windows 2008 environment (on Exchange 2007); I’ve completed – well, me and the customer’s project team – a year long Notes/Domino 8 roll-out project; and this weekend I upgraded a server with 1,300 mail files to Domino 8.5 and implemented DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) which resulted in 163 Gb of disk space saving – a reduction of 43.5% of disk usage – and there’s still 12 Gb of mail files that couldn’t be compacted so we’re probably looking at a 44-45% saving.

I’ve also read “Now, Discover your Strengths” and completed the online “StrengthsFinder” questionnaire and found it interesting reviewing the various jobs I’ve done, positions I’ve held, projects I’ve worked on etc, in light of what are (apparently) my top five strengths.  I look forward to seeing whether focusing on those strengths in future work/projects makes a noticeable difference to the outcome and my enjoyment of the work.

So that’s me for now, time to go and lie down again.

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