Passport

Lotus/IBM finally did it to me. They moved the Passport Advantage Customer page to an IBM address. Hmm, https://query.lotus.com/passport wasn't to bad, but come on, https://www.ibm.com/software/howtobuy/passportadvantage/paocustomer isn't the shortest url to remember.

Add a link to the main IBM page or the main Lotus page. Sure I can bookmark it, but I'm not always accessing it from the same machine. Make it easy for those that you are getting money from. Don't make me go hunting around or searching ibm.com just to find a page that I can follow to finally get where I need to be, such as search on passport or passport advantage and take the first hit, then follow one of the two links I find on the page that say Passport Advantage Customer (Site) that simply takes me to a page that has links to the Passport Advantage Customer Site, which actually takes me to the page I wanted to go in the first place.

Architecture Meeting

I attended my first Architecture Meeting on Monday. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has some information online about Missouri's Adaptive Enterprise Architecture if you are intersted.

Hmm, it appears that we are at least having a problem accessing the the main state web server box from within, not sure if the outside world is experiencing the same thing. I'll try to post more on the meeting later.

IntelliPrintPLUS Update

Not sure why, but it appears that the issue we were experiencing with IntelliPrintPLUS that I mentioned in a 5/21/04 post was specific to that application. Our other application utilizing IntelliPrintPLUS did not display the same issue. We also tested it with 4.0 and it worked fine. When the new Notes clients are installed on workstations we will go ahead and have the newer release of IntelliPrintPLUS installed as well.

Gay Marriage

A very hotly debated topic across the nation, the debate on Gay Marriage itself has been overshadowed as of late in Missouri, as the political machine argues over when the vote on the topic should take place. I would guess that all of Missourinet's free live feeds will be exhausted for the Special Session of the Supreme Court that will take place Tuesday, June 1, 2004 at 2:00 p.m. CST.

From Missourinet:

The State Supreme Court will hear arguments in the the gay marriage ban initiative that will appear on the ballot either in August or November. The Supreme Court extended that deadline for ballot initiatives by calling for arguments to be heard next Tuesday at 2:00 p.m.. The oral arugments will be streamed live and archived.

You can see a bit more on this topic in the 5/21/04 post on Legislature.com's blog.

Missourinet and Legislature.com are both a part of Learfield Communications.

Can you say MS Blogs?

Of course, you probably already know that there are a lot of Microsoft employees that blog, such as Robert Scoble (Scobleizer). You can find many at blogs.msdn.com, and Mary Jo Foley has listed many on Microsoft Watch.

There has been question at times if Microsoft is for or against corporate blogging. I would say from this article on BBC News, Gates backs blogs for businesses, that Microsoft is for blogging.

Mr Gates made a point of dwelling on blogs and said that although they started in the technical community and have come to be a broader social phenomenon, businesses can use them too.

They had advantages over more traditional ways of keeping in touch such as e-mail and websites, he said.

E-mail messages could be too imposing or miss out key people who should be included, said Mr Gates.

Websites were a problem too, he added, because they demand that people visit them regularly to find out if anything has changed and require regular updating to avoid going stale.

These problems could be solved, said Mr Gates, by using blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), that lets people know when a favourite journal is updated.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," he said.

"The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it."

So what are you saying Bill, don't buy MS Exchange, or IIS, or SharePoint Portal Server???

Hmm, can you say Microsoft SharePoint Blog Server?

Hello

So far I only have one complaint about Hello. It may be lack of knowledge of the user, but I don't see a way to post mutliple photos to a blog at once. Of course, one can go back and edit posts and delete extras, but not the ideal way of doing it.

Maybe time to hit the Online Help, Online Support, or Online Forums.

The Great "A Visual Life" Relaunch!

Much like Blogger had their "Great Blogger Relaunch", I am relaunching my photoblog. I switched templates and reposted my photos, many at a higher resolution, since using Hello I don't have the space worries that I had hosting my own photos. It did take a bit to do this, although I saved some time as I didn't take the time to go back and date all of the posts with their original post date. Sorry. I must say that Hello made it easier and will be a quick and handy tool for future posts.

Logs

I must say knowing your logs on the server side as well as the desktop can be a handy thing.

See Ed Brill's post, "MSD2D: Who's reading my mail?" and the link from his post to Brien Posey's, "Who's Reading My Mail?".

E-mail from Ziff Davis - DevSource

You're invited to visit DevSource (devsource.ziffdavis.com)
the new Web resource for Windows developers from Ziff Davis
Internet.
Here's what you'll get from DevSource:
* Specific how-to advice, from people who've actually done
these things
* Product reviews by programmers, for programmers
* Interviews with the "rock stars" in the Windows
development industry
...And a community of developers, helping other developers
get the most from their tools. With some Microsoft folks
stopping in, every so often.

Politics, Politics, Politics

You can check out a bit of the political happenings in Missouri on this corporate blog.

Linux

A couple of posts, "Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.5" and "Ken Brown's Motivation, Release 1.2" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam regarding Linux. Interesting.

You can also read more in this News.com article, "Is Torvalds really the father of Linux?".

To cool!

So many things happening all of the time it is hard to keep up with them all. Blogger/Google/Blogspot/Gmail or whatever you want to call them today has the ability to do photoblogging much simpler. Hopefully I'll have time to try this out this weekend. One of the biggest hassles for me on my photoblog, A Visual Life, has been editing pictures, uploading to a site and then linking to them as I utilize the free blogger account. Now I won't have to. Free picture hosting. Might have to read the fine print and everything as you might be handing the rights of the pictures over too, as well as your first born. Isn't that what they say has been happening with gMail? ;-) Not sure on that. It uses Hello to send your pictures to a bloggerbot. You can read more about it here and here.

Now if they can tie your photos in to your gMail account where you could administer and organize them (maybe give another gig or two for them - or unlimited would even be better) that would be alright. Maybe another partnership is in order to help pay, say maybe Kodak. Hmm, I ought to get a Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n or Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c just for coming up with the idea, shouldn't I.

I'm sure Kodak would be more than happy to have a link for you to purchase some professional quality prints of your photos ($$).

IntelliPrintPLUS issue

Everything has looked great testing our apps on 6.5.1 until one of our developers tried an IntelliPrintPLUS report working with date ranges. It was excrutiatingly slow. That was with IntelliPrintPlus 3.6 or 3.7 via R5.0.12 client and R6.5.1 client hitting R6.5.1 server. Downloading 4.0 Build 5.1 made all of the difference. Need to do some more testing, but the page pops right up now. It also shows the percent done and the bytes read as well. Whew!

ID Theft

In "Study: ID theft usually an inside job", Bob Sullivan mentions a report coming out that shows up to 70% of ID theft is usually an inside job. That doesn't surprise me.

The article also has links to other organizations that may be of some help when your identity has been stolen.

You might also see his article, "When ID theft hits: What to do". Some of the info is redundant to the first article.

You might not even realize there are items out there that are at risk such as Ed Brill mentioned his experiences with a sleeping credit card in his April 25th Post and subsequent April 29th Post.

Some links:
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ID Theft Home
Department of Justice (DOJ) Fraud Section
DOJ Identity Theft and Fraud
DOJ Identity Theft Quiz
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse - Identity Theft
Michigan State Identity Theft University-Business Partnership
Identity Theft Resource Center
Missouri's Statute regarding Identity Theft
Equifax
Experian
TransUnion

Error Rate

I wonder what the error rate of U.S. Technology Reporters is versus that of Technology reporters in other countries.

Papers

In regards to my previous post you might also be interested in some of the other papers avaialble at Center for eBusiness@MIT.

Offshoring

Peter Coffee comments on Offshoring in his article, "U.S. Coders as Capable as Offshore Counterparts". He somewhat points at a report by way of a Google search. Of course, now that his article is out there more instances of comments on his article, etc. show up, such that the paper he refers to is no longer the second hit. Not sure if that is a Google endorsement trying to get people to look for it in that fashion or not. Anyway, you can get directly to the report he refers in his article by clicking here.

As Dutch Mandel (AutoWeek) states, "but wait there's more". I had read article in the digital of eWeek. For posting purposes went to the online article. Upon looking at it closer I find the following appended. Mark another one up for online - It is a bit harder to make such a note in print or a digital copy after they have been deployed.

Note: This column has been widely quoted, so I feel obligated to note here that the statistics I cite were affected by a data reduction error. That error has since been corrected by the research team at the MIT Center for eBusiness. Actual defect rates, it turns out, were generally higher than stated here, and the U.S. rate was notably higher than the rate for other regions, but there are reasons why that comparison may be misleading: I'll discuss these in my column of May 17.

I regret any confusion resulting from my reliance on the initial report, which was not labeled as a draft or working paper, but which was revised before publication in the journal IEEE Software for November/December 2003. The continued presence of the earlier version on the MIT Center's Web site, I'm told by one of the authors, was unintended.

—Peter Coffee

When I get a chance I'll try to look for the updated paper and point to it. If you have a link for it feel free to let me know via the comments. Thanks.

Update: The original paper is dated June 2003, the updated paper is dated December 2003. It appears that the only difference in the URL to the paper is the addition of a space in the newer version. Wonder if they actually meant to replace the older copy. Anyway click here for the newer paper.

The first report helped support the case against offshoring a lot better.

Peter's May 17th article is titled, "Setting the Programmer-Error Record Straight"

E-mail flowing

Got an update this morning stating that e-mail to and from the Internet was flowing again.

No Communication with the Outside World

Due to a problem in the Data Center, we are experiencing difficulties sending and receiving e-mail from outside of our Department. Monday's are always fun days to have stuff like that happen. NOT!

Committee Member

I am now representing our Department on the State Government PC Software Development Architecture Committee (at least that is my understanding of what it is). Hopefully I'll get more information on it from our CIO before I attend my first meeting.

Yeah! Okay, maybe that is not the way I really feel, as it often seems that the outcomes from these committees are not what you hope for them to be.

Extreme Programming

I noticed Andrew Binstock's article, Not So Extreme Programming, in SD Times.

It looks as though James Robertson has some discussion taking place in regards to the article on his blog, Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants.

I think a lot of people do as R. Aaron Zupancic mentions in his post and often pick and chose those pieces that fit in their environment and work for them best.

Free VB.NET 2K3 SE

Boy that is a mouthful even when you abbreviate the heck out of it. Anyway, if you want a free (not-for-resale) copy of Microsoft's Visual Basic .Net 2003 Standard Edition you can get it (if supplies last) simply by watching and rating the simple training videos here on the MSDN site.

Slow and Steady

I received approval this morning for the blade server and OS if I can get it done this fiscal year. For billing purposes that basically means I have about a month to get it all done. As it stands right now, it doesn't appear that should be a problem.

Last Track Meet

T had his last track meet of this school year today. He got first in one of his relays and took first in the 200 meter dash. Way to go T!

Server

I should find out tomorrow if we were approved for purchasing a Blade Server. I'll try to post the specs and our experiences if we get approved. One additional hurdle in moving from the S/390 platform to the Intel platform on Windows is that Microsoft wants there money too. Meaning we'll have to order an OS for the server and everyone hitting it will be required to have a Windows Client Access License (CAL). As the Department looks to move forward for the State E-mail Consolidation Plan of utilizing Exchange Server 2003, our Tech Ops area is already in the process of purchasing these. Yeah! That is ~$4,000 I don't have to worry about having to get approval to purchase for our Notes users.

ID Badge

I have my ID badge back. It has started coming apart at one corner. It might cause problems when using the mag stripe, that is if we actually used the mag stripe for something, but we don't. I noticed they have done away with the mag stripes altogether on the newer badges.

Lost ID Badge

Just got back from a meeting and noticed my ID badge had come off of the clip. I retraced my steps to see if I could find it, but had no luck. As soon as I logged on to my computer I noticed I had a messsage that someone had found it. Judging by the time on the note it evidently came off on the way to the meeting.

I still have the old badge that we use to use. It has seen better days.

ComputerWorld IT Executive Summit Series

Just received and invitation to the half-day summit on Business Intelligence in Chicago from ComputerWorld. I won't be able to attend, but if you are interested and want more info on the summit you can get details here.

Issues with Transaction Logging and Backing Up

Evidently there are some issues with backing up the transaction logs with Tivoli Storage Manager without an additonal piece (connector) for Domino. Hopefully I'll get that issue checked into today as we have been trying to get transaction logging going for some time as well.

Blade Pricing

I have a meeting today to see what the Shared Data Center will charge for use of a blade server in their environment. Hopefully it will come out reasonably and we can move ahead with our upgrade to 6.5.1.

Goodbye Haloscan

Haloscan is good about giving more detail and allowing one to review all of their comments in one place including the IP address information of the poster, etc., but now that the free Blogger supports comments itself, I don't see a need to try to juggle both.

New Template

With the new look and feel of Blogger, I figured it was time to update the old template. Please excuse the mess as I tweak things. Thanks.

Blogger Relaunch

I hit another blog today and noticed the Blogger icon at the bottom of their page was a bit different, so I wasn't as surprised as I might have been when I logged into Blogger today and noticed the interface had changed dramatically. It is still intuitive, but once again it is different. You can read more about it here.

Looking for a good resource?

From the looks of it the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon appears to have a lot of information in their Software Engineering Information Repository, although you do have to register and preferably participate/contribute. Everything from Aquisition/Risk Management, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), IDEAL - Based New Technology Rollout (INTRo), Measurement/Metrics, People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM), and Personal/Team Software Process (PSP/TSP).

Gmail

Sent my dad an invite to Gmail. Figured he could use a place to dump a gig of e-mail.

I am getting tired of all of the hype regarding privacy concerns. Read the agreement and if you accept it then live with it. If you don't want to accept it then don't and don't use it. One of the newest articles, "Does Gmail breach wiretap laws?", is on News.com.

DaimlerChrysler and Domino

In the May 3rd, 2004 Issue of eWeek, see the article entitled, "Taking the road to IT success".

Excerpts of Interest on the Domino/Notes side:

One of the first projects was unifying both companies' e-mail systems. Where is the e-mail system today?

We are 100 percent on one e-mail system today. We use [IBM's] Lotus Notes. We picked it primarily for the groupware function. Before the merger, there were 17 different e-mail systems. We're on Notes 6.0 at this point. We have close to 10,000 different applications on Lotus Notes, from product development to manufacturing to sales and even after-sales.

The print version has a couple of sidebars, "Global XP rollout in progress" and "Chrysler portal eases access".

Excerpts from each:

Establishing IBM's Lotus Notes as a corporate e-mail and groupware standard was a first critical step. Subsequently, "we had a number of different middleware products, and we standardized on [IBM's] WebSphere," said Morotti. Proving, however, that DaimlerChrysler (corrected typo in print version - they had it as DaimlerChrylser) is not in lock step with a single vendor, the company has embraced Microsoft Corp.'s .Net architecture for applications that use Web services.

The DealerConnect portal is a Java-based suite of Web application. PCs running Web browsers access Solaris servers running applications developed under IBM's WebSphere 3.57 running on IBM's DB2 Universal Database.