When I first saw this feature over a year ago, I understood completely that this would be one of the most important features in the v8.5 release. DAOS basically allows you to move all file attachments from all databases on a server onto a separate filestore. All of a sudden, only one copy of a particular file is kept per server, instead of hundreds of copies in each mail file. All of a sudden, Lotus Notes databases are databases again, and dont have to bloat with file attachments.

This is important. Go off and read this article on DAOS here, print it out, and use it a a very strong case to get your server estates upgraded to Domino 8.5 as soon as your organisation is comfortable. Its going to save you a *lot* of money.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 14:17:22 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Lotus Domino Lotus Notes Attachment Handling Bookmark :              

Apple announced that its sold 1 MILLION iPhone 3G devices. And over 10 MILLION applications have been downloaded from the iTunes Application store.

Since last Thursday.

Think about that. A MILLION devices, and 10 MILLION apps. In just over three days. On a completely new platform. That you had to pay money for. To queue for.

Anyone who thinks the iPhone is uninportant, or is some consumer fad, is talking bollocks. Complete and utter bollocks.

Welcome to the new moble smartphone future. In the blue corner - BlackBerry - supporting the corporate user. And in the white corner - iPhone - aimed initially at the consumer.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 16:32:14 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category iPhone Bookmark :              

The new Pixar movie - Wall·e - is officailly out this weekend. But *cough* thanks to my blagging skills, I got four free tickets. So at 5am, SWMBO and I got up, took the train to Edinburgh, and roused Warren and Kitty out of bed, before heading to the Ocean Terminal to see it.

Excellent movie. It has real *moods* - which did provoke at least one 'howling kid' near the end. (No, it wasnt me). Animation - as we all expect - is fantastic - and their future vision of humanity is spot on. I believe the right-wing in McMerica is up in arms about it, which means its probably right. Even Buy-n-large - the ficticious supermarket chain in the movie - has its own website. So. Go see it. As soon as. I suspect we'll see it at least once more in the cinema, and eagerly await the blu-ray release.

One last thing. Another new Pixar short preceeds this movie - "Presto". About a magician and his rabbit. Five minutes of howling with laughter. Unfortuately this short isnt on the new Blu-ray Pixar Shorts disk we bought last week, which is another recommendation. 'Lifted' in high resolution is even funnier, once you can see all the gags.

Here's a preview of Presto from youtube, setting up the characters:

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:39:38 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Films Pixar Wall·e Bookmark :              

After some calling around today. Aside from the chaps at the AppleStore in Glasgow, that is, who got back to me and mentioned that they have a few 16gb units left. Unfortunately, they cannot do business sign-up for the O2 network - just personal.

And can I just take this opportunity to say how good the customer service from the Applestore in Glasgow is ? Based on one lease of two macs, almost a year ago, Johnny - the business chap - still remembers my darling daughter, the blog, the BlackBerry obsession, etc. And was kind enough to return a call during the week, and send two follow up eMails yesterday and today - during what must have been a fairly hectic iPhone 2 day.. Dell, take note This is customer service.

Now, all I have to do is lose SWMBO tomorrow in Edinburgh, and I might just be able to sneak an iPhone home..

Update: A rather "helpful" Carphone Warehouse person told me yesterday that Carphone Warehouse had received 25,000 iPhones - down from their original allocation of 40,000 iphones - and they were all sold by 11am on Friday morning. The 16gig units disappeared quickly. This doesnt include the iPhones that O2 received, or the fairly small number that the Applestores got at the very last minute. At the stores, they did mention that a lot of folks were upgrading, so this might not all be new customers. Expect a slew of iPhone 1 phones on eBay (524 at 11am on Sunday) very soon.

This does rather indicate that Apple have not been able to keep up with launch demand this time - especially looking at the mobileMe crashes, and the activation server crashes over the last 72 hours.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 19:52:55 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category iPhone Bookmark :              

As a card carrying CrackBerry lover, I have a large number of the devices kicking around the house. Open drawers, and 7110's, 8120's, 8300's all fall out. I've even got the wife and sprog onto BlackBerries.

Oh. But the iPhone 2 is out in 17 minutes time. And its extremely lust worthy..

Sigh. I'll just have to carry two phones..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 23:42:04 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category iPhone Bookmark :              

20 years ago, on July 6th 1988 Piper Alpha blew up:

10:20 p.m. Tartan's gas line (pressured to 120 Atmospheres) melts and bursts. From this moment on, the platform's destruction is assured. 15 - 30 tonnes of gas are released instantaneously and immediately ignite. Gas bursts out at ½ a tonne per second, equivalent to the entire domestic consumption of gas in the UK. A massive fireball of 150 metres in diameter engulfs Piper Alpha.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 12:14:22 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Bookmark :              

Yikes. Slimy politicians are trying to slide in an amendment to a European ruling which means that ISP's can switch you off after three strikes. So much for net neutrality, eh? More here

Time to eMail your MEP!

Update: Use TheyWorkForYou.com to keep tabs on your MP/MSP, and WriteToThem.com to contact your MP/MSP/MEP..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 14:01:46 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

How does the internet work? Well, aside from the tubes, there's the DNS - Domain Name Service. Someone holds all the TLD's - Top Level Domains - such as .com, .uk, and so forth. And we 'buy' names off of DNS registers (I use BulkRegister.com). However, we need to find someone to host DNS entries for us. NOT webspace, just someone to actually hold our DNS entry. In my case, Prominic.net do my Domino hosting and my DNS hosting - so I just get them to do it all for me. (And they're very good)

So this DNS stuff. What is it ? Its a 'name' - such as billbuchan.com - that resolves to an IP address. My server(s) have static IP addresses on the internet, making like a bit easier, so all I need to do is point billbuchan.com to the public IP address of my server. However, there are more than one type of record. There's the 'Host' record - for web traffic - which tells your browser where to go. And there's the MX (Mail Exchange) record, which tells your eMail where to go.

In my case, I have Postini spam-scanning my stuff, so the mail goes there first, and then ends up at my server. A good example of web going direct to my server, and mail taking a more indirect route.

Now, theres a new-ish thing on the anti-spam thing called 'SPF' (short for Sender Policy Framework). This means that my DNS entries has some extra text entries, which state that mail has to come from a particular place. This *should* cut down the amount of spam that appears to come from my eMail servers (I hope).

One really useful site (And the point to this entire post!) was to point you at mxTookbox.com which gives you the tools to query MX records, and to create valid SPF records for your domains.

Phew. And you thought that hosting a service just meant slapping a server onto the internet, and switching it on, eh ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:05:50 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category MX Records Bookmark :              

Doo-Dah news:

Posted by Bill Buchan At 10:43:57 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Wow Bookmark :              

This technote was invaluable today. Today, I had to add self-signed SSL to a domino server. This 30-step odd process was the clearest technote on how to actually enable SSL and add *any* sort of certificate.

I'm not kidding when I say it still took three hours, and four attempts to get right. Okay, aside from me being a developer, and it being Friday afternoon (and I can *smell* the Caledonian 80-shilling on tap from the bottom of the garden), it still requires using Certificate Authority (the 'CA' process), AdminP, creating random databases, and copying server keyring files to the server hard drive. Sacrificing the odd chicken helps, as does screaming AAAAAUUUGGGGGH at the moon when I got to the end and I'd misspelt the domain.

Please, can someone please tell me why it has to be so bad? Can someone acually justify designing a process this horrible?

At the end of this process, as I'm too tight to pay for a proper keyring from Verisign or someone else (Who's the cheapest, BTW?), the users STILL get prompted and warned not to use the SSL key. Is it worth it ?

And you'd think by 8.x that we'd have a wee page on the admin client that said 'create me an SSL keyring, for ALL my domains and install it for me please'.. ? Instead of tramping through this nightmare process for EACH domain..

The pub is now calling..

Posted by Bill Buchan At 15:47:00 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Hint. It wasnt American. But it was based around what could only be Hursley.. Come on folks..

Hint: Sylvia

(Dammit: I thought it was the first hacker movie..)

Posted by Bill Buchan At 23:46:55 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Hackers.. Bookmark :              

Sometimes when doing complex tasks, its tempting just to clear out an entire databases's contents and buiid everything up from scratch. Sometimes through laziness, or sometimes because you cant actually get a decent reconcilliation in terms of documents.

Its bad - it leaves a deletion stub - that is, a tiny document fragment just containing that documents UNID - hanging around so when it replicates, the 'deletion' action can be pushed around. Its an extremely efficient design mechanism for replicated databases - as long as you dont routinely generate hundreds of thousands of documents, then delete them. Every 30 minutes.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 18:26:33 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Lotus Notes AntiPattern Dont do this at home Bookmark :              

During a recent engagement, a particular client had an issue where they would bill for Lotus Notes applications hosted on their environment. (Charging for server disk space is a good way of ensuring that applications dont hang around on the servers after they've stoppd being useful). However, there was little faith on the catalog.nsf database containing all items, and little appetite for a globally replicated solution. So how can you do this ?

• Start off by writing an agent which sends 'sh dir -xml' to all servers' consoles from LotusScript. This returns the server directory as an XML stream, and is extremely fast. It also causes very little load on the target server, and little network load.
• Parse this XML into memory (which in LotusScript is pretty horrible) and build up a memory structure (using Lists and Classes) which bind individual databases together (using Replica ID).
• So by this time, we now have a very up to date directory listing on all servers. We can now impose order. For instance,
  • if its a mail server, and the database is in a 'mail*' directory, then its a mailfile..
  • If its on an application server, in the 'apps' directory, then its an application.
  • If an application has a second-level directory, then its a complex application comprised of more than one database.
  • If its on a hub server, then its on a globally replicated application.
  All of these rules are easy to write once the items are in memory.
• Now spit this out as an Excel spreadsheet. Ah. Now only an insane person would wish to load a copy of Excel onto the server, so the scheduled agent can construct an actual excel spreadsheet. So spit out a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. most office/openOffice users associate *.csv with the spreadsheet program.

I guess it boils down to having decent standards for your mailfile and application deployments.. How do you do yours ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 17:14:35 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category Lotus Notes Global Catalog Bookmark :              

Sometimes, I get all maudlin, and wonder "what if".. What if I didnt slavishly follow Lotus Notes as a platform, and use my skills in other fields. What if I actually shut my mouth sometimes and became employable.. What if I could actually work in an office, 9-5 each day, pushing boring bits of work around. What if IBM actually Marketed Lotus Notes (Oh, let not talk about impossibilties, here!) What if I could actually be content?

This has recently got a bit of a hammering, finding out that a number of very senior folks in very large firms whom I thought were enormously happy and content with their jobs, voicing disassfection, etc. So I guess when I saw this cartoon, it kinda summed it all up for me:

Whilst I might be poor, lonely, and listening to Radio 4's womens hour each day, at least I report to one person - SWMBO - who although is technically insane (she married me) and violent (she set fire to me), isnt as mad as some of the decisions routinely handed out by large corporations.

Guess I should actually start trying to enjoy my work a little more, and stop moaning about developing cool stuff whilst wearing shorts, looking out over half an acre of lovely garden, and seeing the local pub at the other side of the garden fence.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 13:46:36 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :              

Sigh. Some of the customer servers are in Belgium:

So the thousands separator is the decimal point, and the decimal point is the comma. But othe servers run American internationalisation. Aaaauugh!

Posted by Bill Buchan At 11:32:42 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)    | Category None Bookmark :