Category Archives: Old Blog Post

The best Cognac I ever had

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Delamain Vesper 

Theo just blogged about some wine and single malt whisky, which reminded me about a blog entry I had planned to write last week, but then work came inbetween.
Recently my best friend from growing up came over from London on a business trip, so I picked him up at the airportand we went to have dinner at Capital Grille in Dallas. The food was good, if not as good as at Nick and Sam’s where we went at a previous visit. But still good.
After dinner I had a Cognac. I am usually more a single malt person, but on occasion I enjoy a good cognac as well. Capital Grille did not have any really exciting single malts, so I decided to the the Delamain Vesper cognac. At $48 for a glass, it was pricey, but worth it! This 35 year old cognacwas incredible smooth, had a great fruit flavor with a hint of vanillaflavor and a very long aftertaste.
I been looking in the local liqour stores for it, but no luck. Even wrote to the importer, who told me no stores inthe DFW areacarry it. They told me to contact their local sales rep/agent for this part of the country to see if I could buy abottle. So when I get back from Lotusphere, I plan to do that.
If you like cognac, I can not recommend this one enough. At between $120 and $199 per bottle (online prices) it is not cheap, though. But I would say it is worth it.
 

 

New toy just in time for Lotusphere

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As I wrote back in June, I managed to do a submersion test of my (then fairly new) Blackberry Bold. It worked perfectly fine after that. Then a little bit later in the summer I dropped it on concrete and got a small crack in the screen. I checked with insurance, it would cost me $125 to get the phone replaced, and it was not bad enough to spend that money on a new phone, which probably would be a refurbished anyway.
The phone started acting up about a month ago, dropping calls, etc. Sure, could be the network (I have AT&T) but I walked into the local AT&T store and talked to the sales guy. He said it sounded like a problem with the phone, and it should be covered by warranty. He then opened the battery compartment and looked, then said "OK, no water damage. Tell that when you call AT&T about warranty replacement."
So a few days later I called, and was told to open the battery compartment and tell her color of the sticker on there. I told her it was red, and she said that it indicated water had come into contact with the sticker. Oh well, just wonder why the sales guy could not tell. The label is supposed to be white when no liquid has touched it.
I decided to hold off a bit longer. Then the camera stopped working (even if it later started working again, after about a week) and the battery started to drain quickly and teh phone got really warm while charging. Something was obviously wrong.
I called the insurance company on Monday. While on hold, the automated voice mentioned that I might be eligible for an upgrade. So I checked online, and I could get the Blackberry Bold 9700 for just $99 after mail-in rebate. When the 9700 came out, I decided I would stick with my 9000, that it was not worth to spend the money on an upgrade. But now, with the phone acting up and Lotusphere coming up, I had to bite the bullet.
I received the phone Thursday (no shipping charge when placing order online!) and have now been playing with it for 2 days. Here are my thoughts.

  • The phone is smaller. I am still getting used to the smaller keyboard, at least initially I did more typos when texting.
  • The screen has a higher resolution, 480×360 instead of 480×320. This cases my favourite theme not to work anymore. I can download it, but it does not show up in the list of available themes.
  • The trackpad is very nice, but will probably take another day or two to get used to. The nice thing is that dirt won’t get in there to cause problems, like with the ball on the older Blackberries.
  • OS 5.0 installed from factory. Very nice. There are some small details I don’t like, hopefully I can change that using Blackberry Theme Studio. For example, in the inbox the name of th sender is black and bold while the subject is gray and normal, making it much harder to read.
  • The reports say that the battery life is better than on the old Bold. This is of course hard to tell after just 2 days, especially when loading software, transferring files from the old phone through USB, etc.
  • Mini-USB connector replaced by micro-USB. My car charger and spare wall charger won’t work, unless I get some adapters. At just over a dollar each, I will probably get a couple. The shipping is the expensive part, though. My Motorola P790 portable charger that I got for Lotusphere last year is also using mini-USB. Oh, if you don’t have one of those chargers, pick one up! They are down to $15 or less now…
  • My charging cradle won’t work anymore either, since the phone is smaller.

But generally I am happy with the new phone. Just some small quirks, and I am sure I will get used to them or figure out how to address them.
Below is a picture of the two phones side-by-side. Bold 9700 to the left, Bold 9000 to the right.

Blackberry Bold 9700 vs 9000 

 

Dead USB harddisk? It may still be alive!

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Abouttwo years ago I bought my first1 TB harddisk, an external USB-drive from Hitatchi. I been having it connected 24/7since then. It have mostly been used for backup purposes, Isyncronizeall my photos there from the internal drive where I normally store them. But I have also beenusing it to download files, especially when the other drives in my computer were full. At times I used Bittorrent to download things (like ISO images ofUbunty, SUS, etc), and since I then shared the files for a while, there were a lot of read and writes.
About 2 weeks ago I noticed a worrying clicking sound from the drive. I turned it off, let it cool off and turned it on.The sound got worse, and theexternal indicator was spinning for minutes instead fo seconds. And of course the computer refused to see the drive.
 
So what data did I lose? All the pictures werecopies of the ones on the internal drive, butI might have some other files on therewhich I did not have backed up. ISO images and similar could be downloaded again, but I hated to not know what else I might have lost.
I assumed I had to go buy a new drive, I need that space for files and I want somewhere to store a copy of all my photos. Iwent to the Hitachi website to check on warranty, even if I knew the warranty most probably was expired long time ago, but does not cost to check. Yep, expired. No surprise there.
 
Then it hit me. What if I could open the case, take out the physical drive and hook it up to my computer using one of my USB adapters? I started looking more closely at the drive. No obvious screwholes, butthere were two labels on the back, with teh text "Warranty void if removed". Feeling on them I could tell they were covering two screws. 30 seconds later the case had been opened. Another 60 seconds, and I was holding a 3.5" 1 TB SATA drive in my hands.
 
I hooked the drive up to my SATA & IDE to USB adapter, plugged in the power and connected the adapter to the computer. The drive showed up fine, I could look at the files, and running the hard disk diagnostics in Ubuntu showed that the drive was fine.
It seems like it was simply the electronics in the USB case that had died.
 
Then, just 2-3 days later, a friend called me intears. Her 500 GB external USB drive (Western Digital MyBook)refused to show up in her computer. It had made some sounds earlier,which she ignored. Now the drive was dead, and she was missing all pictures from the first five years of her daughters life. No other backup, of course, the USB drive was her only copy.
I did the same operation on her drive. It was much harder to open and had more screws, metal and junk inside. But finally I had a SATA drive in my hands and plugged it in to my computer. When I texted her a minute later that I was able to get to all her files, she was extremely happy!
 
So if your USBharddisk dies, it may just be the electronics. Buy a $20-30 USB adapter (should be in your toolbox anyway!), hook the drive up that way, and chances are that the datacan be saved. Also, don’t use a USB harddisk as only storage for important files…
 

"Project Ubuntu @ Home" – First Impressions

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About two weeks ago I decide to switch my main operating system at home to Ubuntu. By using VMware I was going to be able to run the handful of Windows applications I needed, and at the same time get better security, etc. I had a couple of small problems, that were eventually solved, and now I have been running this setup for a few days.
For the most part I like it. I am still having to look around a bit long for where different things are, I miss being able to right-click on the desktop to change all settings related to it, and instead have to select several different items under System Preferences.
I tried to get Epihpany Empathy working as my IM client, but it did not take/store my different accounts. I then installed Pidgin instead, which works fine. Only problem there is that many nice functions I am used to in Yahoo and MSN Messenger, like webcam support, is not available. I also can’t just drag-and-drop a file to the chat window to send it, I have to click my way through the directories. And Pidgin does not let me browse network drive, just local drives for some reason.
Some websites I visit are clearly more designed for Internet Explorer, but I have not had any real issues with Firefox.
I still have not installed Notes or Domino Designer/Admin. Waiting for my network admin to download 8.5.1 for me. Hope to get that installed soon too.
I have been sick most of the last week, so not been doing that much. But this far I like my new setup.
 

Project "Ubuntu @Home" – weekend update

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As I mentioned the other day,I am planning to start using Ubuntu as my main operating system at home, and use VMware to run Windows applications when needed.

 

Late Friday evening I started by emptying a 250 GB IDE harddisk from files, and then I unplugged all drives except the empty one as a precaution. I put the CD containing Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") in the computer and turned on the power. The install went extremely smooth, and I even found some new things I really liked compared with 9.04 that I had installed on my son’s computer this pastsummer. For example, you can now select "United States" and then "Central" as time zone, instead of having to set the location to either Chicago or some small town i never heard about. Why a large city like Dallas is not in the list baffles me, though…

 

The operating system found some hardware, but not the wireless network card. I actually tried both a Xyxel G-302and a Netgear WG311, none of them really unknown cards. I then (thanks to the online help) found out how to use a Windows driver, and I got the Netgear card to work. I choose that card since I was able to find the driver CD in my messy office. :-)

I then installed the Nvidia graphics drivers. This is where i had some problems. I have a GeForce 7900 GS card, so with some help from Google, I found instructions on how to get the latest drivers, and installed them. I think I had to do some recompiling of parts of the operating system as well. I got the drivers to somewhat work, but then something went wrong. In the end I just re-installed the opearting system and started over. I then found out about Envy, and it was a breeze to get the drivers installed.

I now had the drivers installed, and even gottwinview working.

 

There was just one problem. The resolution was just 1152×864 on each monitorat the most, while I was used to 1280×1024 in Windows. The second monitor, a Samsung, was able to go up to the resolution, but my CyberVision C92 was not recognized. After some googeling, I figured out that I had to modify the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf in order to provide the hsync and vsync values. I changed the values, after I figured out that I could not just use the editor gedit from the menu, I had to go to the terminal and start it from the command line using sudo in order to get full access to the system. Why there is no right-click and "run as root", I don’t get…

I restarted (I am sure there is a way to restart X without restarting the whole computer, but I am a noob and my computer restart really fast anyway) and now I could use the Nvidia control panel to set the resolution. Oops. The settings did not stick, I had to svae them. OK, no problem, click on the "save configuration" button. Nope, could not save the file. Again, I had to go to the terminal and do sudo nvidia-settings in order to run the settings program as root. Why even add it to the menu then, when it can’t be used from there? Well, let’s be clever and change the rights to xorg.conf using chmod.

 

Anyway, I changed the resolution, restarted, and… WFT? Just aconsole login prompt? OK, something is wrong… Did I corrupt xorg.conf like I did before? I tried all different ways of cleaning it, creating a new blank one, etc. The easiset way for me to do this was to boot using the Live CD, mount my hardddisk and use sudo gedit to edit xorg.conf on my drive.

Spent several hours trying to get this fixed. Finally I realized the problem. When I changed the rights, I had modified all the files in the /etc/X11 directory using chmod 666 *. You probably spot the problem. Yes, I had removed the execution flag for X. So sudo chmod 777 X and restart, all set! I told you I was a noob! :-)

 

Finally I was all set, running two monitorsin 1280×1024 side-by-side. I installed VMware, imported a (clean) Windows XP virtual machine I had built earlier and made sure it was fully patched and thateverything worked: networking, sound, etc.

I connected the other drives, mounted them and made sure I could read them. No problems. I then figured out how to mount them permanently, so they were available after each startup.I set them up as VMware shared drives as well, so my guest operating systems could map to the drives. Now I was pretty much done with the OS install.

 

I created a clone of the Windows XP VM and designated it forimage and video editing. I installed Photoshop, Nero, Sony Vegas and DVD Architect, as well as DVDshrink, Divx 6 and a few other utilitiesI use. No problem there this far. Tonight I plan to do some final testing to make sure I can render movies correctly.

 

The nextstep is to build another VMfor development tools. Might even do separate ones for Visual Studio Express and Eclipse, not decided that yet. And of course one for Notes 8.5.1, where I can install Domino Designer and Administrator.

I plan to install the Notes 8.5.1 klient in Ubuntu as well.

 

There are some issues with Ubuntu, as I see it. Mainly issues with it not being as user friendly as Windows. Right-click and "run as root" would make sense, for example. I understand that Ubuntu have a concept of "restricted" drivers, i.e. "non-free" drivers, and that is why the Nvidia drivers are not installed automatically. But it is still annoying. And if I want later versions of the driver (version 185 is included as a restricted driver, while Nvidia have version 190 on their site), it is even more complicated:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa
sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys CEC06767
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-190-modaliases nvidia-glx-190 nvidia-settings-190 

All this from the command line, of course.
 
Sure, Ubuntu is very powerful and safe, but it is still missingquite a few of the features that make Windows so popular and easy to use. I am not bashing Ubuntu (or Linux overall), just stating the facts as I see them. I am (this far) happy with Ubuntu on my computer, it start faster than Windows (much faster than the almost1 year old installation I had running until Friday), and have the equivialent to many of the programs I use on a daily basis.

 

I will come back with a report in a few days when I have everything installed, configured and have had some more time to test drive the whole system.

Update: This entry somehow got corrupted. Thanks to Chris Whisonant, he helped me by deleting it last night so I could restore it this morning. Sorry if you tried to read it while it was missing.

 

 

OpenSUSE blocked by Postini – "Illegal Software"

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At my work they use Postini to block websites in categoriesthat the management does not thinkanyusers should have access to. Webmail of all flavors, Facebook, twitter and many more sites.
Today I was looking at differentLinux distributions, and decided to take a closer look at OpenSUSE. The main page loaded fine, but when I clicked on the link to learn more, I got the following message:

Guess Postini thinksLinux is illegal software…

 

New project – Ubuntu at home

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Last night Istarted a new project at home. The other day I wiped my son’s computer, running Ubuntu 9.04 and installed the new version, 9.10 Karmic Koala. I got everything working, so I thought I would try something new. Since Erik mostly go to Youtube, Wikipedia and some educational sites, he does normally not need Windows. But he have some Windows-based games (mainly MS Flight Simulator)he like to play, so I thought it would be nice if he could play them on his computer instead ofusing mine. So I installed VMware Workstation on the computer, and it worked really good. I quickly copied a Windows 98(!)virtual machineover to his system and it loaded up without any problems. I am now in the process of building a Windows XP VM for him.
So obviously the next thought was: "Why don’t I do this on my main computer?".It is about time to reinstall the system anyway, it has been a year and the system is starting to run slower. Many of the things I do on a daily basis I can do in Ubuntu. And if I create a couple of virtual Windows XP machines, I can even separate different invironments from each other.
The plan is to get a new drive and install Ubuntu on it, then add VMware. I plan to have one clean Windows XP VM, which I can use as a base system. Then I will build one where I install Photoshop, Sony Vegas and DVD Architect, DVDshrink, Nero (yes, I know there are tools in Ubuntu to burn CD/DVD, but I have the impression Nero have more functionality, and it integrates with DVD Architect and DVDshrink) and a few more related tools. Another VM will contain development tools (Eclipse, Notes 8.5.1 with Domino Designer and Administrator, perhaps Visual Studio Express). If I want to test some new programs,I just load up a new VM, test it and delete afterwards if I am not happy.
So tonight I will finish testing the setup on my son’ts computer, and then I will start preparing my main computer. I will have to cleanup or get a drive where I can install Ubuntu, with enough space for a number of VM images.
Will see how much I will break. :-)
 

 

My first email address

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Carl Tyler wrote about him realizing it was 21 years ago he got his first email address:
The day after my 40th birthday, I realized it had been exactly 21 years since I got my first email account. It was if I remember rightly Tylerc2@NossVM6. This was my IBM PROFS address and I was given it the day I started there. 
That made me think back at my first email address.I got it when I started working at Microsoft, in late August 1988, so just over 21 years ago for me as well.
I was fresh out of thegymnasium (the Swedish equialent of theCollege Preperatory High School in the United States), and the Systems Programming education I had just started was cancelled and postponed for a semester due to lack of students. So I applied for a job at Microsoft, despite never using any MS products. I was using CP/M-86,WordStar and and Turbo Pascal 3.x in school.
During my first week they gave me the address karlhenr@microsoft.com. Notice the missing y in my name, they could not handle my long/full first name. The limit back then was 8 characters.
We had to login to a Xenix-based system to read our email… I also had a FidoNet address, but I did not get that one until a year later.
 

 

Domino Designer – Free or "Free"?

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With the newlicensing of Domino Designer in Notes/Domino 8.5.1, there have been a lot of questions.
Ed Brill answered most of them the other day. As we are using the Domino Express license where I work, I put together a short executive summary for my managers, and I wanted to share it here.
  • Domino Designer 8.5.1 can be used for free (no license needed) to develop local applications.
  • In order to deploy applications to a Domino Enterprise Server (regular license or Express, does not matter), an Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) is needed. The Messaging only CAL can not be used, nor can the Collaboration Express license.
  • Any developer in a Domino Collaboration Express environment need (in addition to the Express license) an Enterprise CAL in order to use Domino Designer. The cost is $159. The Express license is $142. Both prices areaccording to Ed Brill.
  • A license for Domino Designer used to be $864, so it is still a substantial cost reduction,$705 to be precise.
  • For a customer using the cheaper per-seat and no serverchargeDomino Express license, the cost savings will still be large, even if Designer technically not is free in that environment.
  • Previous versions of Domino Designer are not free. Only 8.5.1 and later.

In my personal opinion, I think IBM should make all versions of Designer free. No extra license needed to deploy applications on any servers. Each developer will still need either an Enterprise CAL or a Domino Collaboration Express license anyway.

I hope this is a beginning of getting Domino Designer out there, and making developers aware of the tool. I can see a need for plenty of good books/wikis/reference material for new developers, though. I still believe in books. You can read them in the bathroom, in bed, on a flight (even during take-off and landing). Revisit the R6 Developer Redbook and publish a new version of it, updated for Designer 8.5.1…