Jeep Test Drive

I had been waiting to see if they were going to get a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited in as I was interested in test driving it. The local dealership is along my drive to work so I am able to see their inventory. Today was the last day to take advantage of the promotion I previously posted about. The promotion details said any Jeep even though the headline says Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, so I went ahead and drove the only Wrangler they had, a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. Cool. Now 6 weeks or so and I'll have a $75 Visa gift card.

Cleaned up

I waited a couple of days after seeing the Notice placed on the other state agency parking lot and then mentioned it to Capitol Police as I was leaving work, as they patrol the site, I figured they would know who to contact. The next morning when I came in the weeds had been cut. Not sure if it was just coincidence or if my mention of it prompted them to do something. Anyway, it is done.

Weighing In

As far as the METAgroup whitepaper Messaging Total Cost of Ownership: Microsoft Exchange 2003 and Lotus Domino in Small and Medium Organizations I have to say it just doesn't look right. It appears to be lacking detail in areas. I would think that the majority of organizations looking to implement either solution would like to be able to compare them in similar environments, such that one could tell what the TCO for one seat in the Exchange environment costs versus one seat in the Domino environment for the same infrastructure. Having all the possible variables available in the environments studied can easily skew such TCO figures in any direction.

I don't recall seeing the number of mailboxes within each industry cited. If given the same number of employees (mailboxes) within each organization, the size of a mailbox in the Professional Services Organizations utilizing Domino would have more storage costs than all eight of the others combined. If you average the size for an individual mailbox across the four Domino environments you are at roughly 262MB per mailbox and the average size for an individual mailbox across the five Exchange environments would come out to about 88MB per mailbox. A quick glance has Domino TCO at about twice that of Exchange, yet in the scenario it would be supporting three times the mail.

Read through the report

Finally got the hotly debated white paper to download.

I haven't gotten through reading everyone's comments yet, so hopefully I am not duplicating what has been said.

Just some quick observations/ramblings.

Stripping extraneous functionality and making them available in another product, that would most likely have to be purchased or require some kind of extra licensing. Hmm, then the pricing for Exchange would certainly drop, right?

If they are saying hey, if you just want e-mail then e-mail is what you can get. Isn't that basically along the lines of Notes Domino Express. A line of products not even touched upon in the report.

I must have read it to fast, I think I missed the picture depicting the MS path for the future.

When it doesn't appear that Microsoft really plans to be releasing any new versions, then I can see where extending the support would almost be a requirement, not a plus.

I would be curious to see the U.S. market projections alone. Between 2000 and 2008 they show corporate mailboxes close to doubling. Simply from a personal perspective, no data to base it on, I don't think the growth will be that great in the U.S. as e-mail within the corporate environment appears to be pretty saturated and I would not expect a big population explosion within the corporate world.

Microsoft up by 2% in market share and Lotus/IBM down by 7% in market share. I would be interested to see where the other 5% (34 million mailboxes) that Lotus/IBM is projected to lose will go.

I find it interesting that the report mentions the clients of both Domino/Notes and Workplace, but fails to mention Outlook.

It seems the press use to say there was no strategy for the future of Notes/Domino and ever since info has come out on ND7 and ND8 they make it into a bad thing and MS dropping their next planned upgrade and only having patches seems to be put in a good light.

Not sure what significant strain the new releases will put on IT budgets. I know I am entitled to receive all of the updates/upgrades via maintenance for our Notes/Domino environment. Maybe this is in regards to manpower on installations, which I would not expect to be any more of a strain than MS patches.

Customer centric???

MS focusing on security, reliability, and scalability. Can't hold it against Notes/Domino for already having those.

As things stand today, I can't say that I totally disagree that MS numbers will be up and Lotus/IBM numbers will be down, as it is still management that makes the decisions.

As many have Outlook of one flavor or another at home they tend to feel comfort in seeing the same thing at work. I think Hotmail is a plus for MS as well.

Whatever the path ends up being in the IBM/Lotus arena, I hope it doesn't leave a bad taste as the end of the line for cc:Mail did for some.

Broadcast

Paul Mooney mentions a quick Admin tip in regards to broadcast in this post. Being able to broadcast via a dialog box popping up on the users desktop is a nice feature, so nice in fact that Lotus included it as an option via a check box in the more recent versions of the Administrator Client (at least in 6.5.2 - as we jumped from 5.08 to 6.5.2, not sure where it first showed up).




Another nice feature in 6.5.2 is the web administrator. Looks very much like the client itself and even allows one to view all of the notes.ini from the web administrator itself. Cool!

Radicatti Recommends Yahoo!

Have you seen the latest, Radicati Group Recommends Yahoo! E-Mail Over Gmail. You can see the Article on Messaging Pipeline - some excerpts below. Radicati links to it from their main page as well.

"With storage becoming lesss of a factor"..

Hmm, is lesss even less than less? (I know it is just a typo.)

I guess the inference is that it is less of a factor because other services are bumping up their storage.

Radicati's analysis acknowledges that Gmail represents an important competitive threat to the free e-mail services vendors both because of its innovative search tools and because of the huge, 1,000 MB, free storage allotment given to users. But the company notes that Yahoo! was able to very quickly answer the storage challenge with a 10 MB free offering, as well as a two GB premium offering, before Gmail came out of beta testing.

Wow! Yahoo answers 1,000 MB with 10 MB. I can relate to the logic of how that is a real counter punch. Hey Radicati, all of these nickels I have are bigger than those dimes you have, you want to trade?

Of course, I am just poking fun, this is simply another typo, it should say 100 MB in the article in regards to the free Yahoo account size, but I would seriously say that storage is more of a factor and not less of a factor. If it were less of a factor then why turn around and caution IT managers.

"As free e-mail storage increases, hosted e-mail may become a greater threat to in-house corporate messaging software."

The older free e-mail service also allows users to integrate POP accounts from other servers

I was thinking that was only available in the paid account, but even so, wouldn't that simply be making the case for even more storage as well.

If you would truly be looking at e-mail messaging only, or if available storage is your #1 priority, then I am not sure I agree with the following either. If you are looking for more than just an e-mail messaging environment then possibly.

"With storage becoming lesss of a factor, users should look to other features, such as service performance, added features, and more," said the report, which goes on to report that Yahoo! offers a variety of services that make it a better overall e-mail messaging environment than Gmail. They include a contact manager and calendar program that can synchronize with desktop programs.

Analysts say that Yahoo! users are better off staying where they are, despite some appealing things about Gmail.

Of course, one could also do what many have done and simply add a Gmail account to your collection of other accounts. Invites aren't as hard to come by as they use to be.

6.5.2 Notes Client

The proposed plan for our client installations starts on 8/2/04 and should be complete by 8/20/04. At that point our whole environment will be at 6.5.2. Now that we have moved to the Intel platform I don't think we'll have all of the issues (none of which were really technical) we had getting the upgrades put on in the mainframe environment.

As far as our mail environment, Outlook/Exchange, we are still on Outlook 2000 and Exchange 5.5. The state is still forging ahead with a planned consolidation on Exchange 2003. Active Directory is supposedly the biggest issue to get lined out to begin that endeavor.

Notice!

Kind of humorous. City Truck.

The occupant of the truck was just pulling away after posting the notice below.

The City put the notice about the overgrown weeds and grass on State Property. Nice communication between the State and City Government, huh.

The Doors - new hit?

Okay, it is simply a Linspire commercial. A parody based on The Doors song, "Light My Fire". It is kind of funny although some appear to take offence where Peter F made mention of it in a post on Channel 9.

Tombstone

I think this might express the thoughts of some reading the IBM Lotus & Microsoft Corporate Messaging Market Analysis report by The Radicati Group, Inc.



If you want, you can create your own tombstone via JJ Chandler's tombstone generator.

Bloglines Mobile

I am home sick today. Yuck. Anyway when I finally began to move around some this morning I grabbed my cell phone from the night stand and did a bit of reading via Bloglines. This is another feature of Bloglines that makes it a handy reader. You can try it on your mobile device at http://www.bloglines.com/mobile.

Sysinternals

Not sure if you have ever been to the site. It is one I have not been to for a while, but thought I would mention it as they do have some handy utilites, some with source code. Anyway you might take a look.

10-Digit SSN

Someone mentioned to me today that the Chair of the State VB User Group mentioned something about a new 10-digit Social Security Number. I said I had not heard anything and one would think it would be big news if that were the case. The Social Security Administration's Website had no info, and a quick Google search didn't bring up anything of any relevance, so I feel a bit safer now. Just think how many systems such a change would affect. In my search results I did see something that mentioned how to find Jon Udell's SSN. That name sounded so familiar and then I realized where it was familiar from. It is Jon Udell from InfoWorld. The individual posting this was Gary Burd. And it has been a circle since.

When catching up on my blog reading via Bloglines, Jon Udell's post on Sunday mentions Bloglines and Mark Fletcher. He also mentions Gary Burd in the post. Then today, Mark posts about Jon's post.

Whew!

I have posted about Bloglines before and would also recommend it. I really like it. It is rather intuitive, although if simply wanting to add a folder alone, it seems as though that requires more effort with the updated interface, but most will probably add the folder as they add the feed.

OS

I followed Chris (Slackware Linux), who followed Paul (Amiga), who followed Chris (Windows 98). I guess it is you're turn now.


Which OS are You?

I am definitely not fashionable, but it does explain why I can kind of see through myself when I look in the mirror. I'm a bit transparent.

JibJab

Maybe I have been under a rock, but I had not heard of JibJab before. It does get tiring hearing some of the political shots from both sides, but regardless of what your stance, for some reason it is more fun to watch when animated. Enjoy.

Sandbox

Have you checked out what's in the Sandbox lately. You might take a look. Lookout is already listed.

A bit surprised. Not the sandbox that most of us are familiar with. I was a bit surprised when I saw it. I don't know the origin for the use of the Sandox term in IT, so it may be commonly used as it has been by Lotus for years, but I was a bit surprised seeing it on MSN. If you want to get to the Lotus(IBM) Sandbox you can still find it here.

Words that don't go together.

I don't recall seeing it before, but I must admit I had only glanced at the store when they first put it out there. Have you ever heard words and thought they just don't sound quite right together. I was wondering if that might be the case with "Team-TSG" and "Classic Thong".

(No it's not a joke, click on the image to go to the store.)

Just giving you a bad time Team-TSG (Joe and Duffbert).

Another Candidate ;-)

I guess the gubernatorial candidates I mentioned in a previous post could be facing some stiff competition. You have to remember there is always Candidate Zero and he even has his own blog.

I wonder how many write in votes Candidate Zero will receive.

On a serious note, don't only take the time to register to vote, VOTE!

Unknown error message.

Why can't I ever get the other error message. You know, "We apologize, but a known error has occured.". It is always the unknown one. Oh well.

I agree with Schobleizer - Cool Tool

This (Media Browser) really is a cool photo app (3-D, bins, show similar, etc..). Microsoft I think you should add it as part of the software available via an MSN account to let some try it out.

Mary Jo says, "MSN Makes Good on Hotmail Promises"

Mary Jo Foley says, "MSN Makes Good on Hotmail Promises". As the link she points to is a PC Mag article stating that the 2GB mail storage for MSN Hotmail Plus subscriptions was launched in 30 markets worldwide (7/21/04). It goes on to say there is no release date for upgrading the free accounts to the 250MB as has been stated, so I think saying that they have made good on their promise is a bit much. Maybe "MSN Partially Makes Good on Hotmail Promises" or "MSN Starts to Make Good on Hotmail Promises". Maybe I am taking issue simply because my Hotmail Account hasn't increased! Funny thing though, if I go to the hotmail site and click on the MSN Hotmail Upgrade link it shows "Sign up now -- It's FREE!". It states that you get a 250MB inbox. The other option is the Hotmail Plus at $19.95 a year and it states the 2GB. After signing into my Hotmail account a looking around I do find something that says, "All existing MSN 9 Dial-up, MSN Premium and MSN Plus subscribers will receive 2GB of online storage and the ability to send 20MB attachments at no additional cost when it becomes available this fall. No action is required on your part."  I am doing fine.  I am at 34% on my 25MB file right now, but hey I am paying for MSN Premium, give me my 2GB.

Oh well.

Political Websites

I noticed that the top three (2 Dem - 1 Rep) running for Governor in Missouri each have their own political websites.

Bob Holden - incumbant - Dem

Claire McCaskill - Dem

Matt Blunt - Rep

I thought it was a bit interesting that none of them meet the requirements for Bobby AAA Approved status. None even met AA or A requirements either. They also fail on the requirements for Bobby Section 508 Approved status.

IE Blog

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team has a Team Blog now. It is IEBlog (XML).

1st e-voting lawsuit

Phil makes note of an e-voting lawsuit in his post today. That could be interesting.

NOTES.INI Reference

Many of you already know about it, but I thought I would mention it for those that don't. There is a notes.ini reference that is kind of nice. There are additional features as well, such IniGen, which is an ini generator and IniDiff, which will compare two ini files and display the differences. The ini generator will group the items in your ini file if you wish and give recommendations as well. Best of all it is free. You might get some e-mail (you can even have the generated ini file sent to your e-mail), but hey, you can signup with your Gmail account.

Words of caution. Before making changes to your .ini file, make a backup, test your changes, and for your sake document the changes (so you know what you did). I have not gotten into it to much as I am not the Notes Administrator, so I am not sure if all items listed are IBM/Lotus supported (yes, there are some undocumented ini file settings out there that aren't supported - some which come and go from release to release).

Thanks DRC Consulting for having it available. I have not used any of their other products, but since they are nice enough to host this reference free, I guess I could give them a plug and mention that they also have products (such as no.Spam.domino) available for purchase and you can replicate the ini reference database for a fee.

I must admit that I am still a bit paranoid about things like this and do dummy my server names and the like before submitting for it to generate the ini for me. Just note if you would do the same you have to change them back before trying to use it. They have been offering this for a long time though and I have not seen anything bad about them, which does raise my trust in them.

Lulu

As Matt mentions in his comment on my post about his Cisco Manual, his new book is right on schedule. You can look for the new two-volume set on August 1st.

I am posting this as I find the site that his book is available through to be a bit interesting as well. It is Lulu. I have not made it through the whole site yet. You can find out more about it here. If you were to join you probably want to make sure you read the entire membership agreement and read more in the area that you would be publishing to make sure you understand everything, such as what is meant by royalty free, etc..

Sun Blogs

Did you see that there are several Sun Employees blogging at Blogs.sun.com

Upgrade complete

We completed the move from the S/390 to the Intel box and upgrade from 5.08 to 6.5.2 about 4:15pm (CST).  One small gotcha in the .ini file, which simply kept the NAB from having the design updated.  We simply replaced the design on it and all was well.  Now for a quiet weekend.

Upgrade Day

Our move from the S/390 to the Intel blade server while at the same time upgrading from 5.08 to 6.5.2 begins at noon (CST).  Hopefully all will go well.  I have the support number handy.

It was a Fun Day for a car lover

I had my first drive in a Mini today and needless to say it was a Mini Cooper S in BRG (British Racing Green). What could top that.  A big thanks to Mellodie!

Hot Topic - Notes/Domino Beta 2

You see mention of the ND7 beta on many of the Domino Blogs.

Will any of the additonal features (click on the pic below to see the beta feature list) change the mind of the 11% from the e-Pro survey that say they are working with the beta, but don't see a compelling reason to upgrade?

New addition to blogger

Upon posting this evening I notice that there is an extra tabbed window. It use to simply have an edit html box.

Now it has a compose box. It is basically a WYSIWYG editor. Switching back and forth between the tabs is quick.

Yet it still has the preview feature as well.

Lexus LF-C: It stands for Luxury Future Coupe.

Pics from e-mail from Lexus.  Pretty hot.
 

Lotus Notes Network (LNN)

I posted a comment on Paul Mooney's site in response to his May 26th post, "Lotus Notes Knowledge Base" (You could say I am a bit behind on my reading). He asked about getting the Knowlegebase on CD or if he could replicate it. I think it use to be limited to Business Partners and I believe they still get additional content, but if you do have enterprise/priority support of some sort I think you can connect and replicate the Knowledgebase as well. I do.

As I mention in my comment I do recall that I did have to contact Lotus as the information I found a couple of years or so ago (I can't find what I had) was rather outdated at that time. I think it talked about dial up connectivity throughout and Notes 3 and 4.

I think it would be nice to see this promoted more as I think there would probably be some Notes shops unaware of it that would be happy to have this capability.

Might be a good item for Ed to put on either of his blogs (work/personal) or someone over at e-Pro to put in an e-ProWire. I am not sure which one to limit it to (Dev Tips, Informer, Sys Admin Tips) as I can see it being of benefit to all.

Until that happens here are a couple of links that might help you if you are in pursuit of this capability.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21099019
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/support/lnn/

I might also mention that one can replicate the Discussion Forums, Fix List Database, and other Lotus Developer Domain databases. Info on how to do that can be found in the LDD Today article "Viewing the Lotus Developer Domain in its native Notes format."

Ask Jeeves' Excite joins the e-mail capacity war.

You don't hear about Excite much anymore, but they are joining the e-mail capacity wars as well. See the e-mail below for details.

Google Search Results Follow-up

I am losing it. I found the 2,000% thing I was thinking I had seen on Google. It is in the MSN Search box on My MSN.

I guess the search on the Top Movers items is simply stating that those specific items have increased 2000+% for the day.

You can see the MSN Search results by following the links. (I hadn't realized Isabel Sandford from "The Jeffersons" had passed away.)

Top Movers:
Isabel Sanford
Tori Spelling
Matrina Campins
Rebecca Budig
Cameron Diaz




Popular searches:
credit report
cash advance
cruises
hilton head
mortgage lead
internet provider
home owner insurance
hammock
adware
tanning bed

These changed as I was looking at them. Not sure how they determine the popular searches and how often the list changes. Anyway you can try it out to see what Microsoft's search is like if you haven't before. I don't think Google has to worry (yet). MSN has their own toolbar as well.

Oh well. I knew I had seen it somewhere.

6.5.2 Test

We tested our combined hardware move and software upgrade on Monday. We moved a test server from the S/390 running 5.08 to an IBM blade server running 6.5.2. All told, basically three hours and that included walking through the notes.ini. I think moving the production server could actually go quicker already having the notes.ini ready will save some time. We'll find out on Friday. If all goes well then we can get Tech Support started on client upgrades.

Our State CIO says, "Don't was my time"

This is in regards to vendors. You can see the story here on FCW.COM

They also talked to Rock Regan, the CIO for Connecticut, and have another story about him stepping down as CIO on August 1st.

I have got to get this program.

Frank Patrick points out a piece of software on his blog, Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Business Blog, that I have to have. HA!

Check out the menu options below.

Orkut. Funny.

Funny, it seems that Orkut is a hot topic once again. At least in the Domino Blogger community.

There are several communities devoted to Lotus. I point out a few of the ones in English below (sorry you'll have to be an Orkut member to see them):

Domino Bloggers - This one, added by Rob McDonagh aka Captain Oblivious, is new and has prompted some of the discussion in the Domino Blogger community

Notes/Domino Professionals

Community for ex-Loti worldwide

Teamstudio

Lotus (A community I wish I could truly become a member of.)

Super 7 (Another one that would be cool to be a true member.)

Domino's Pizza (Had to much of this one in college)

I have commented on Orkut in past post and more recently in a 6/22/04 comment about Gmail on Ben's site.

2/6/2004 Post: Social Networking - Online Communities

1/23/2004 Post: Orkut

Bloglines redesign

I do like the Bloglines redesign. Haven't really tried the new clippings feature yet.

Cisco Manual - Free

It appears that Matt Basham a Computing instructor got tired of making suggestions to Cisco on their training manual and wrote one himself that can be freely downloaded.

See the story here.

It has a link for downloading, but you have to sign up, etc.. If you can live with the Version 1 manaul or want to get an idea of what might be in version 2 without having to go through the sign up process you can download it from Matt's site here.

Upgrade Status

We finally got everything that we needed to do a backup on our Development Server, which is what was keeping us from getting the upgrade put on. We backed up our current server to a different Tivoli Storage Manager node, did the upgrade to 6.5.2 on the server, deleted the filespace on the node we normally use for backups and ran a complete backup of the upgraded server. Things are looking good so far. We will be testing moving our test server from the s/390 platform to a blade server on Monday. If all goes well with that test then we will probably shoot for moving and upgrading production on the 16th.

Note: I previously posted about two scenarios for our upgrade. We will be going with Scenario one.

To the Top of the Capitol

I usually don't promote my photoblog here much, other than the link off to the right, but I got to go up in the Missouri State Capitol yesterday afternoon and thought I would mention it here as well. Follow the links below if you would like to take the tour.

Inside the Missouri State Capitol

The Journey up to the Whisper Chamber

Whisper Chamber

The Journey to the Top

Views from the top of the Capitol

On the way back down


This is one of those tours you cannot just drop by and take, so I don't have many pictures of the interior of the building, as one can drop by and get some of those at any time (this was more a result of me saving memory for pictures of the trip to the areas you can't just drop by and visit).

Way Back

I go the the Internet Archive WayBackMachine occassionally. It is interesting to see how things have changed on our Departmental site at times. The archive doesn't always have all of the graphics, etc.., but still gives one an idea. It helped me find an old link on another state page today that I knew use to be there.

I have been around long enough to know what pages I need to put in for our site.

http://www.state.mo.us/dor
http://www.dor.state.mo.us
http://www.dor.mo.gov

Here is one that some of you might remember:

See the list they have for Lotus, Notes.Net or Microsoft. You might want to see if they have an archive of your site.

American Idol

American Idol is big business. I just saw on the scroll of a news channel that Fantasia Barrino released her first single, "I Believe", and it released at #1. That is definitely big business. I wonder how long it can last.

Google Search Results

One of those things that you really don't think about until you don't see it anymore. I know in the past when using Google there use to be something on the results page that I don't see now. I believe it showed the top searched items in the upper right portion of the search results screen. Usually not what I was looking for, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. I always thought it was odd that usually all five or so items listed showed like two thousand percent. Not sure what that meant. Now that I don't see it I wonder.

One can still find out information about some of the top pages (Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google) by going to Google Zeitgeist, but I am not sure what the overly high percentages that use to show were about. Maybe if I see them again, I will check them out further.

Last week it looks like the top items were:

1. fahrenheit 911

2. jeri ryan

3. kevin federline

4. michael moore

5. mary kate olsen

6. maria sharapova

7. ryan gosling

8. mega millions

9. spiderman 2

10. mattie stepanek

I don't recognize all of the names or what they might be searched for as I did not look. I know that Michael Moore tends to peak individuals interest with his documentaries, so easy to see why he and his movie show as top items, especially with political campaigns as they are. Not sure I get the Mary Kate Olsen. I believe eating disorders are a real problem, but I don't really want to go out of my way to search for people that have them. Not sure the deep interest by some in celebrity problems, maybe they feel it makes them more human. Hey, just so you know, they are just people. Last year at this time if someone would have introduced many to Fantasia Barrino they would have been polite and simply shaken her hand and gone on with life. Now some of those same people would go crazy, screaming, etc.. She could probably sing pretty good a year ago too. There may be celebrities that I like, but I don't know that I get the whole fascination with celebrities thing. I guess it may not be much different than my fascination with automobiles, but I can realize that they are just a bunch of metal, plastic, rubber, etc.. when you get down to it. Worthless compared to family and friends.

The results page doesn't show the top auto searches for America, but they do show the five for the United Kingdom.

1. ferrari

2. nissan

3. lamborghini

4. porsche

5. mercedes

Window Resizer

I would imagine sizer could be a handy item for web development. I haven't used it so I don't know how well it works. I'll have to point it out to our developers. One of them simply created a wallpaper for his desktop that had different colored blocks representing the different resolutions basically cascading over one another that he could pull the browser up to and resize quickly to get an idea of how something was going to look at that resolution.

CSS

Passed this site on to one of the web developers working on a redesign of our Departmental home page. She is utilizing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and was pleased to have other sites to look at for ideas.

Blogroll

Updating my blogroll a bit. Really just concentrated on the biggest portion, which are Lotus related blogs. I standardized a bit and dropped down to the name of the individual blogging on most rather than the title of the site as I had on some, which took up more space. In doing so I noticed that I have Michael Sobczak down twice. I figured I hadn't really linked to two different Michael Sobczaks, that I must have duplicated it. Upon looking at them closer it appears that I did not duplicate, but yet it is the same Michael. It appears that he has both the Lord Lotus site and Punk'd by Notes (I like the title on that one). It appears that they both have the same posts, although not always in the same order.