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OK, so I woke up Monday morning and my old router was in fact dead. No one was able to work, so I didn't actually fix my problem. So, we went and returned the new router purchased Saturday and got a D-Link DIR-628 Wireless Rangeplus N router. So far I am very pleased with this router. Everything I've asked from it it has done perfectly. It also has a more robust feature set than the Linksys I purchased and replaced, which is pretty cool.

This Christmas has been a very hectic one. I've got a project with a pretty tight deadline looming so I've been working late to take care of that along with one of my customers trying to re-do his server. With the Christmas season being hectic in general, the looming deadline of my day job along with trying to shop, cook, attend school functions and clean things up around the house I think my customer isn't very happy with me right now. Which I apologize for, he knows who he is.

With the weather today being around 70 degrees it doesn't feel very much like Christmas. Everyone has their lights going, including us, the presents are around the tree, the tree is lit up and the kids are home anticipating tomorrows festivities. So with that I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Quanza or insert tiding here and a Happy New Year. May your families be blessed and be safe this holiday season.

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Technology Holiday At 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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This past weekend has been a frustrating one at best. Saturday it seemed that my old Linksys WRT54G router finally died, or so it seemed. So, we went out and purchased a new router. I've always had Linksys routers so that's the brand I purchased. The new router is/was a Linksys WRT110 and from my experience this weekend is good for nothing other than a frisbee.

My first experience was I couldn't get any of our wireless connections to actually connect. It seems you have to disable IEEE authentication on the connections. OK, fine I did that after a long call with Linksys tech support and everyone was happy. But the router was acting kind-of funny. It took a very long time to load the web pages it serves up for the configuration of the router. I thought no biggie, must just be something with my pc.

Since I now work from home the next task was to ensure that I could actually work. Surprise, surprise Lotus Notes was reporting that my employers servers were down, and so were the Prominic servers. Doubtful as my website was up and functioning. So, after another long call with Linksys tech support I got that to working, or so I thought. I had to enter the required ports in the port triggering section of the routers configuration. After fighting with unusually long wait times waiting on the router to load, save and refresh each page it seems to have worked. But I was still experiencing problems with the routers configuration web pages.

OK, so my workstations can now connect wirelessly, Lotus Notes is working as it should along with the stuff my wife requires to work from home. Now, I host a website for work related documentation so I needed to setup the port forwarding part for that. Well, it doesn't work. I also had to add port 80 to the port triggering section along with the port forwarding for port 80. I never did get this to work properly, also, now Lotus Notes and various other apps weren't working properly, at least this time. The next time I tried them they worked fine, just nothing consistent.

So, out of frustration I tried reinstalling my old router, well it seems that it's now working fine and everything else is now functioning as it should. Tomorrow morning I will be returning the WRT110 for a refund and I must say I am very disappointed with the route that Linksys is starting to take. I've been setting up networks and recommending Linksys products for years. I have a couple of how-tos on this website on setting up your home based website using a linksys router, so I'm very familiar with the Linksys product. But how is someone that doesn't really know anything about setting up a home network supposed to use this product? After all my frustration, I'm thinking I may need to re-think my loyalties to Linksys, which regardless to say is regrettable. But how can I recommend something to a customer that I don't believe in or have confidence in? Linksys, you need to get it together and change the route you're taking, especially if you are to keep me as a customer.

On a positive note, the support I received from Linksys was top notch. The people I talked to, while I suspect were in India or some other country, did provide good courteous service and I didn't have a long wait to talk to someone. I'm just not happy with the product and it will be returned tomorrow.

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Technology At 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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This past weekend I created my first composite app! Due to the nature of the data within the app I can't really show it to you as it's just too much to blur out But I think my major hurtle was that Properties weren't showing up in the Composite Application Editor (CAE) after adding them to the Wiring Properties wsdl file. I spent over half of the time messging with this application just trying to get my changes to the wiring properties to show up in the CAE. The problem is that I had to restart notes for them to show up, which I don't think is very intuitive or productive, it should at least let me know this when I save the wsdl file!

Once I figured out how to get my properties to show up things progressed along quite quickly and I had a working app, albeit a simple one, within a few minutes. The app itself was for a time management utility I created to keep track of how long I spend on a certain ticket. The big problem with this app is that it is in Notes and our ticketing system is web based, so when I receive a new ticket I have to go in and create a new ticket document in my notes application. While I still have to do this I no longer have to jump back and forth between the ticketing system and my little time tracking application, I have them in one location. So, whenever I highlight a ticket it in my notes app it navigates to the proper url in a Managed Web Browser component on the bottom of the page. Pretty handy!

Now, I'm sure that there is a way to get the data from the web ticketing system into notes, I just haven't gotten that far yet. I believe that will be my next step. But I need to take it slow so I understand exactly what's going on.

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Composite Apps At 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Over the past 24 hours I've been trying my hand at composite applications. Needless to say I haven't been making much headway. I've found several tutorials on them but the tutorials already have some of the wiring properties, code and property assignment to actions in the demo databases. Also, going through the tutorials, they don't explain why you do something a particular way. I'm the type of person who needs the why in order to learn something new.

I'm only starting to comprehend what's supposed to be in the wiring properties, kind-of, but I've still got a long way to go. I started down this road because of a project I'm currently working on. I thought combining all the databases that kind-of go together and rely on one another into a composite app. Plus it would be a good learning experience, especially with a real application instead of one I just toss together.

But, I was hoping that maybe someone could point me to some other resources that may help me understand the "why" of wiring properties and/or a visual layout of how things work for composite apps. I've already found quite a bit on them that has helped a lot (at least now I understand what a composite app is). But I still need something else to help guide me to composite app enlightenment.

Here are some of the sources I've found so far:

• Building composite applications for IBM Lotus Notes V8
• IBM Composite Application wiki
• Notes 8 Application Development Resources
• Tutorial - Building a composite application in Lotus Notes 8

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Domino Compsite Apps At 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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My place of employement is starting to roll out Lotus Notes 8.0.1 standard. I've been using it now for a few weeks and thought I would post up my initial impressions and a quick review.
Likes

• The UI is gorgeous, but we all knew that.
• No problems with backward compatibility, so far
• Composite apps, more on that later
• The sidebar able to accept Google Widgets

Now, I know all of that is old news, as is Lotus Notes 8x and these are things most everyone likes. In the few weeks I've been using it I've encountered on a couple of issues and they were mostly my fault. But these are the things that I don't like about the Notes 8.0.1 client
Dislikes

• The toolbar doesn't stay the way I put it, everything is in a different place everytime I start Notes 8 (See below screenshot)
• Sometimes you have to play gently with it or it'll crash on you
• That freakin' huge java console screen when the client crashes, it's bigger than my monitor
• Some widgets I remove from the sidebar come back

Overall I'm really enjoying Notes 8. I mean the things above that I don't like don't happen that often, except the toolbar thing which is really annoying. Now, we just need the designer client to be in Eclipse which will be available for Notes 8.5, but until then I can live with this

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Domino At 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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This weekend I installed Lotus Domino 8.0 on Open SuSE Linux 11. The install process went pretty flawlessly and no errors were encountered until I went to start the Domino Server, with the exception of a warning that SuSE 11 isn't supported, but I'll get to that in a second. My Linux box is a basic computer with a Pentium celeron processor running at 1.8 GHZ with 700 MB RAM and 3 disk drives totalling about 350 GB. This server is serving the roles of the home Lotus Domino server for documentation storage, testing, etc. It's also a web server running Apache for setting up and testing some of my customer's test sites and also a file server running Samba. All of this is behind my firewall and not accessible from the outside.

I've been without a test environment for quite some time now and I must say I'm happy to have it back. The internals of this server had been sitting under my desk forever, running but not really serving a purpose. It also just had 35GB of disk space that wasn't allocated very well so was pretty much useless. Now I had all the hardware from my old server that this website used to run on also sitting underneath my desk, but the processor fan stopped working on it and it basically overheated something on the board and/or the processors. So, I just took the best hardware from each machine and combined them into one. This was pretty painless with the exception of finding graphics drivers for the ATI graphics card that wouldn't lock up the machine. But I got to thinking that I really don't need a GUI so I just start the box at runlevel 3 which prevents it from loading X and gnome. So far I'm happy with the setup.

Now, even though I did receive a warning that SuSE 11 wasn't supported I proceeded along anyway. The setup routine ran flawlessly with no errors. I did a custom installation of Domino as since this is a stand alone server and I'm pretty much the only user I didn't need scheduler, replication, smtp and all that stuff (but we may revist SMTP for sending mail) so none of that was enabled. I also chose Remote Server as the configuration option and used the Remote Server Setup program from my Windows box, especially since the GUI was giving me issues. Once the installation was completed the listener service for the Remote Server Setup client started without hitch. I connected and setup the server to my liking. Once completed, the listener service stopped and I then attempted to start the Domino server. This is where I ran into issues. I tried starting the server from the notesdata directory with a command line like "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80010/linux/server", this immediately produced an error. The error was complaining that libnotes.so couldn't be found. I verified that libnotes.so was indeed present and that the permissions were properly assigned (root.root 755). So, I started searching the web. I didn't really get very far as I found a lot of people complaining about the error but no real solutions as how to fix it. After reading this post on Declan 's site I wandered around following links and found that I was using the wrong path to start the server So, to make a long story a little bit longer to start the server you should be running this command from within the notesdata directory "/opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server" this will start the server without the libnotes.so error. Hopefully this little gem of information will save someone some hair pulling.

Once I figured that out, things went pretty quickly. No problems were encountered and everything is now running as it should. I moved everything off of my windows box where I had Domino 8.0 beta 3 running onto the new linux box and I also moved all of my working files, icons, installations, etc. It's so nice to have a working, non-jerri-rigged test server again. I didn't realize just how handy a test server is until I did without one for awhile.

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Linux Domino At 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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This article over on Business Week states what I've been preaching to small companies for quite a while now.

JasperSoft is thriving as other vendors struggle because it provides software at a lower price than competitors. In fact, JasperSoft supplies the basic software for free, making money by selling support services or additional features. Its annual fees can be as much as 85% to 90% lower than its competitors. "We're seeing more interest from companies looking to replace an older software product they can no longer afford," says Chief Executive Officer Gentile.

Open Source software has a lower TCO than proprietary systems. Of course, if you have a medium sized company or plan on using all the features of an Open Source platform, I highly recommend you purchase the support to help solve problems when they arise and to support the Open Source company to ensure future support of a product you're starting to become dependent upon.

These Open Source companies are able to provide free software because they can keep their staff low and there is a wealth of developers improving their software for free, these new features and fixes can then be incorporated into new versions. The staff can then be dedicated to helping the paying customers who call in for support of their software.

JasperSoft can afford to sell its reporting and analytics software for considerably less because it relies on what's known as an open-source model of development, wherein the source code—essentially the blueprint of a software program—is openly shared. The company's product benefits from the input of some 90,000 developers worldwide who volunteer their time writing code to enhance the program, though few work for the 80-person company.

With these economic downfalls and with more companies looking to Open Source software to help shore up their budgets could this be the beginning of more software products moving to an Open Source paradigm? If so, the people questioning whether there is room for growth in the Open Source market, do they question because they really don't see the potential or because they have an alternative agenda? I think you know what I think.

I believe that Open Source is the way of the future and that everyone that don't embrace it in some form or another will be left behind. It's already been proven that the Open Source paradigm can be profitable (i.e. Red Hat, Apache, MySQL, Google, etc.) as long as the old ways of thinking a software company should be run are left behind. But no matter what I think the future of Software will be in the future it'll at least be very interesting to watch and be a part of in the years to come.

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Misc OpenSource At 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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I found an interesting article about Ray Ozzie over on wired.com. It talks about his vision for collaborative software and how his career has progressed to where he is now the CSA at Microsoft. One of the more interesting quotes in the whole thing:

At that point, Ozzie unveils the new products that he's been laboring over for more than two years: a top-secret set of initiatives designed to make Microsoft as dominant in the cloud era as it was in the days of the desktop. First up is a new operating system for Web-based applications, codenamed Red Dog—it's Windows for the cloud. (See Editor's update below.) Then comes a demonstration of Live Mesh, which will allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want. Finally, another engineer demonstrates how Microsoft will make even its legacy apps accessible via the cloud. It's a shocker. After years of Microsoft insisting that the desktop is the only proper place for its crown-jewel applications—the venerable Office suite—it appears that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will levitate from the desktop and become services as well. In this demo, an Excel spreadsheet is running in the cloud with almost all its functionality intact, including features like auto-complete and auto-formatting as well as built-in collaboration and a way to link the spreadsheet results to emails and Web pages.

The problem here is that even with these forward steps Microsoft will still be behind the curve. Writely was doing this long ago and has since been purchased by Google and thus spawned Google Docs and there are a couple of others that are doing similar things.

Now I do like the statement of built-in collaboration. But with it being Microsoft, how versatile will it be? Can I chat with my friends from AOL, GTalk, IRC, Yahoo!, etc. or will I be limited to the Microsoft Instant Messenger client? What about other collaboration tools like twitter, forums, wikis and such?

Also, what can I do with an OS that is only for Web-based applications and services? Can't I get that functionality currently in the form of a browser? Do I really need an OS geared towards my internet activities? How will this change the way I work today? Of course the Red Dog OS could be geared mainly towards people who just read email, surf the web and keep track of friends and family via the internet. If so, most of those types of people would be well served by an OS that was geared for those things.

I think the very long article was interesting to read and does provide some insight to the future of Microsoft but I believe it's going to be very difficult for them to get away from the Vista flub and win back customers. We've already decided as a household that come time for new PCs we're going to start purchasing Macs. I know a lot of other people have also made this decision. So, will Ray Ozzie's vision save Microsoft or will it be too little, too late?

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Technology Windows At 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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Here's another freebie for you. A simple little app that doesn't even save any documents but provides a means to lookup users to see what groups they're a member of or to lookup groups to see who is a member of them. It'll use the Domino Directory on whatever server the database resides. Pretty simple really. But you can find it over in the downloads section.

Enjoy!

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category Opensource Domino At 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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We're just starting to test Notes 8 Standard at my place of employment. This morning while messing around with the side bar and looking at (Go Go) Google Gadgets I found one to display the contents of your Outlook Inbox/Calendar/To-Do/Contacts. Since I have Notes Mail and Exchange Mail (joys of being an offsite govt. contractor) I added the gadget and wa-la, Exchange mail in the Lotus Notes client. How cool is that!?!

Posted by Keith Strickland in Category None At 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)