Mazda..er..Jaguar R-D6

Even though it looks like Ford is stealing from one to help the other (can you say Mazda RX-8), I like the looks of the Jag concept and am not put off by the diesel as many Americans appear to be.

Twin-turbo Diesel. 230 bhp / 396 ft lb torque

Here are some Mazda pics for comparison:

Still waiting

We are still waiting for our Domino environment to be upgraded. Evidently a lot of the time waiting had to do with the shared Data Center getting a contract in place to upgrade from 5.x on the s/390 platform to R6.5. Our request was actually put in prior to the release of 6.5, mentioning in the request that 6.5 was due out shortly and that we wanted to be upgraded to the latest version. Now 6.5.1 is out and we still wait. Time to see if I can get someone to turn up the heat.

Exchange Woes

Ironic. I was sending a note to Technical Support requesting some cable pulls for some equipment and upon hitting send a message pops up stating "Operation Failed". Great. The Exchange Administrator is just a couple of cubes outside my door, as I was going to the Support Center to let them know he was standing outside his cube so I asked him about it. He stated that he was rebooting the server. If you follow my posts you probably saw that our Exchange server was down for a couple of days recently. Not sure what went wrong this time. They are slowly moving the mail boxes to another server. I believe approximately 150 a day (we have about 1,800). It is believed the problems will be alleviated once everything is moved to the new hardware. I guess we'll see.

Blue Linux

Check out the article here on PC Magazine's site.

Lotus Notes/Domino 6.5.1

Funny the Notes/Domino Fix List Database shows that 6.5.1 is to be released in January, but it appears to be in Stage 4 - Gold Candidate, but per my Passport account, I just downloaded it. The posted date is 1/28/04.

Wild and Crazy. From the time I started typing this post to now it has gone from Stage 4 to Stage 5 - Gold Build on the site.

e-Pro Article

Checkout e-Pro Magazines article (requires a login), "Preparing Domino Shops to Fight Off Exchange".

I must agree with one of the statements in the closing paragraph:

Unfortunately, in some corporate settings, logic has little to do with how decisions are ultimately made.

Politics do have a way of winning over logic sometimes.

Lotusphere blog

A bit surprised. I found Lotusphere blog -- "From the floor" on the Lotus site, but it is not as up to date as the blogs of many of those in attendance and presenting. You can find more current information on the site in the daily digest and photos though, such as a report by David DeJean. Not a complaint or a problem, but seems a bit backwards in practice from what one might expect. One might expect to find the more current information in a blog and less frequent updates to a site.

Domino faithful feel back in the fold

See the article here.

Microsoft shelves aging software

Excerpt from Microsoft shelves aging software article:

Other products on the chopping block include SQL Server 6.5, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Server, and Internet Information Server 4.0.

The worst part of that is that we are still on SQL Server 6.5, Windows NT 4.0 Server, and IIS 4.0.

As Microsoft's director of security, product support services, Andy Erlandson puts it, "The risk to customers who remain on a product that is no longer supported is that a situation might arise where a security vulnerability is discovered which cannot be fixed."

Wait a second, you mean that is a possibility with a Microsoft product. ;-)

IE and User Information

Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and HTTPS URLs. See Knowledgebase Article 834489.

How nice of them.

Volvo's New S40 T5

I like Volvo's new S40 T5. Find out more here.

Nice bike

Looks like Yamaha has a nice new bike, the FZ6 that might compete with Suzuki's SV650S.

Removed myRSS Feed

I have not had a lot of luck with the RSS feed that I setup through myRSS. Maybe it is a reflection of my reader or something, so I would suspect that if anyone else has tried my feed they have not had very good results, and once again, I was going the free route, so updates by myRSS aren't as frequent. Well, upon making a change to my template today (a fairly transparent one), I noticed upon publishing that Blogger published an Atom file, so I checked it out and it appears much nicer. Bloglines appears to read it well too. Not that I really want to read my own blog, but want to see how it may look to a subscriber, so I have removed the RSS link I had on my page. If you are using a reader that doesn't support Atom and really want the RSS feed setup via myRSS then you can find it here.

Microsoft new language : XEN

Read about it here on Extreme Tech.

Are you willing to pay for your searches?

See the PC Magazine article "Out-Googling Google". More on Grokker2 here.

orkut

I don't get it. It sounds a bit like a gated blogger community. You can move in too, once you receive an invitation.

Fun with Domino

Domino the new spectator sport? If it were women on a primetime comedy show they would say it is a cat fight, so what is it with men, a dogfight? Anyway, click here and you may have as much fun as watching a good boxing match.

Interesting - Microsoft Zeros in on Lotus

See the e-Week story here.

Submit/Tracking Issue

The issue I had getting to the submit/track a problem website was fixed by ESR support. Yeah. I was able to go and look at the ticket that was closed out now. Hopefully it will continue to work if I need to submit or track another problem. Thanks Lotus/IBM support!

Day 4

It is back up. They are bringing in the 28,000+ messages that have built up in the queue in a bit at a time. The system stayed up all day. Someone from Microsoft came in last night. The system was brought back up on the same hardware. They are actually looking at moving to new hardware this weekend. It is a long weekend for us. Hopefully everything will be fine come Tuesday.

Day 3 - The Saga Continues

Our Exchange server is still down. Actually they did get it back up around 5:45pm last night, then approximately 7:15am this morning it went down again with an error on the Information Store. Lets hope they can get it back up and running (for good).

Support - Is there such a thing anymore?

The Past

Remember the days when you could call support somewhere and you would get an answer. A couple of good examples of that was WordPerfect (The good old days of WordPerfect for DOS) and Lotus. Remember when you would call Lotus Support, get a person on the phone and they would stay on the phone until the problem was fixed. Ahh, the good old days.

The Present

Of course, like many, we are not using WordPerfect anymore. We are using Lotus Notes/Domino for some applications though. I had asked the local IBM rep a question on what would be the best way to attempt to get to some specific data knowing our environment and all the many connectors (Ex. DECS, LEI, LSX, etc.) available for Notes/Domino. He past it on to another local rep, who got back with me basically stating that all of the different connectors were possible solutions. That didn't move me to a solution any quicker. He also sent a note to another IBMer in Colorado. She responded that she did not know much about what we were trying to do, but pretty much the same thing, DECS, LEI, LSX, MQSeries, etc.. might be possible options. She also went on to state that as we have a current Domino Support contract that we should simply put in a support incident as they could answer how to questions.

"Since you're a current Domino customer, for "how to" questions on what solution above would be the best for your environment, you can call the Lotus Support application development group. They now handle these types of questions and can point you in the right direction. To reach them, call (800) IBM-SERV. Follow the prompts to Lotus, enter your support ID number, and follow the prompts to application support."

Tried that. The tech said, no we don't do that.

I stated that I was under the impression that they did from the e-mail that I had received. The tech asked who told me that. I believe that got the manager of the tech, the IBMer in Colorado, and the local IBMer all e-mailing each other.

It basically ended up being stated that they don't do that kind of "how to" question. They will do something along the lines of tell you what will happen if you change this value to that on a parameter or something more along those lines.

In the end the local rep basically gave two suggested routes if we really wanted to pursue it, but stated that he thought the effort to accomplish this would basically outweigh the benefit.

Another words, a lot of time and effort past before getting a somewhat indirect answer to our question.

You may be asking yourself, what were they trying to do. In a nutshell we were looking at getting to information in a database (not SQL based) from Notes/Domino. There is another system (written in C, which our developers are not versed in) that currently does this by kicking off a CICS application that makes the request to the database and returns the information to the C program. Of course, the underlying piece is trying to do this without spending any money, so what looked to be the easiest route was kicking off the CICS app from Notes/Domino.

After having put the ticket in online and changing my e-mail address in the four or so different places that I needed to within the IBM/Lotus framework of websites/contacts, I did receive the e-mail that the ticket was opened, but upon going in to view the ticket the contract no longer shows up for me to select to view the ticket online anymore. The tech on the ticket said to send in an e-mail as mentioned on the site. This happened once before and the e-mail got me know where. One of the local reps finally got it fixed after a few months last time. I will do as requested and see how it goes. Oh well.

---------------------------
This is one time when I wish history would repeat itself and good support would come back to being common.

Estimate

The Manager over Technical Support stopped by and stated that he expected mail to be flowing in the morning. Keep your fingers crossed.

Communication is definitely lacking during this situation. I left a note on his desk giving a couple of options that might be looked at for disseminating information during such outages. As a result of the note he stopped by to say that he would like me in on some meetings to discuss the topic and at that point gave me the update. Otherwise, I would have simply kept watching the sign that says Outlook (Exchange) is unavailable.

Hmm, follow up.

My drafts are intact. If I filter on Drafts only they show up, but if I filter on Everything as I normally do, they don't. They did in the past and one would still assume that they are part of "Everything". Oh well, nothing lost.

End of mainstream support

Ironic how it is a couple of weeks after the mainstream support for Exchange 5.5 ends (12/31/03) that our environment crashes. Ed Brill has mentioned the Exchange 5.5 support ending in a couple of his posts, Exchange 5.5 end of support is this month!!! (12/11/03) and CRN: Microsoft Exchange gets new boss (1/13/04).

Ugh! Day two.

We are headed into day two without the Corporate E-mail system working. It is my understanding that there were some disk issues. OUCH!

I believe in recent discussions the issue of any type of clustering was discounted because of the budget situation. As the downtime of a corporate communcation system being down for 2,000 employees is sure to add up to some real loss of productivity, I would suspect that discussion of redundancy, disaster recovery, etc., for our e-mail environment will come to the forefront. Amazing how quickly issues like these can change in priority when situations like this occur. I would guess that management now has a better appreciation (for a while) of what it means to when one talks about these types of issues.

Trojan Virus!?!

It is kind of funny. McAfee is throwing up a VirusScan Alert now because of my HP photo contest post showing the URL spoof exploit.

Ugh!

It could be one of those days.

The day started out at the Dentist office. I had a piece of a tooth break off on Saturday. I was scheduled to go in to have work done on the tooth in February. Here I sit with a temporary crown on it now. I'll get to go back in two weeks for the permanent one. I guess the plus is no root canal.

I had started a post on Blogger in draft about a week ago and it appears to be gone. Oh well.

Our Exchange (5.5) Server has been unavailable all morning. Thank goodness for offline folders as I have been able to work with e-mail that I had received up until closing out at the end of the day yesterday, reading mail, queuing replies, and unlike most people in the Department being able to see my appointments is nice. Most are not setup with Offline Folders.

Hmm

The Draft Feature isn't working for me today.