May 2014 – TexasSwede

Things we don’t want to think about

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Karl-Henry Martinsson Posted in Financial, Life, Personal 11 Comments

Two separate incidents are leading me to write this blog entry. First, the way too early passing of Tim Tripcony just a few days ago, as well as as the loss of Rob Wunderlich, Jens Augustiny and Kenneth Kjærbye in just a little over a year. All of those members of the Lotus Community left us way too early. The second one is a more personal one, as I am going in for surgery in a few weeks. All surgeries carry a small risk of complications (this particular one supposedly has less than 2% mortality rate).

But what this leads me is to the subject of this blog entry. Life insurance.

Most of us who are employed have some kind of life insurance through our work, and perhaps like me also have an additional life insurance policy. I am sure that most of self-employed also have purchased some life insurance themselves. So we all know we need life insurance, to provide for our children and/or spouses.

But what should happen with the money, in case the worst happens? In my case, I am divorced, and have a 13 year old son. Should a 13 year old inherit half a million dollar or more just like that? Or even if the child has to wait until age 18 to get the money, and it is managed by the other parent for some years, what would that lead to? I have heard stories about young adults that inherited a large sum of money after the death of a parent, bought a fast motor cycle or sports car and killed themselves within a year. Or who started using drugs/alcohol and either wasted the money on those things, or were killed by the substance abuse. I also know about women who lost their husbands, and within a few years used up all the life insurance money on houses, new cars, cosmetic surgery, all while not working.

So how do you make a real impact on the life of your loved ones left behind? In my case, I am in the process of setting up a trust that will handle the investment of the money, as well as spend it in a way consistent with my wishes.
The trust will handle the payouts of the child support until my son turns 18, and it will cover his college education (tuition, books, living expenses) for up to 5 years, etc. It also have all kinds of other provisions, like a cash payment to help with his wedding (only one, and after the age of 27!), matching payments to him for what he puts into a Roth IRA every year, financial help to buy a car and a house, etc. Even little things like extra money for birthday and christmas gifts are listed there. In addition, the trustee will have some personal discretion to help out when needed, and of course any medical and educational expenses will be covered as needed.

There are so many little details that one has to think about. Until my girlfriend Chrissy brought this up a while ago, I had not really been reflecting much on all those things. So I recommend that everyone sit down and think through how you want your life insurance to be handled if the worst happens. Just having life insurance isn’t enough to ensure they’ll be ok.

Too much of a windfall could be a problem for someone who is not ready to handle it. Knowing an inheritance is coming could even discourage a child from going to college because they may think they won’t need the education. Most parents do not consider the negative impact it could have on a young person to receive a large amount of money at one time, but we should.

While we may not always be able to be there for our kids if the worst does happen to any of us before they are grown this is a way to make our wishes known about their choices. This trust is important to me because I can continue to parent him at the same time as I provide financially for him. Setting up a trust lets my son know in writing what my wishes for his life would have been if I had been here. A college degree, saving for retirement, marriage if he wants it but not until he’s mature enough to handle it, buy a house and I’ll match your down payment and even limiting access if he ever gets into legal or substance abuse trouble. These would be things I will do as long as I am here physically for him too.

As I plan for this surgery it allows me to feel like I’d get a say in raising him through the stipulations of a trust, even if I wasn’t here anymore. That knowledge calms me enough to face surgery without worry about my son. Not just in financial terms but also in respect to all the other things a parent provides.

Tough to think about, but so very important.

In memory of Tim Tripcony

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Karl-Henry Martinsson Posted in IBM/Lotus, Lotusphere, Personal, XPages 2 Comments

A couple of hours ago, I was reached by the terrible news that Tim Tripcony is no longer with us.

Tip Tripcony at Lotusphere 2009

I have known Tim for several years, and meeting him at Lotusphere (later Connect) was always a treat. He is one of the most brilliant programmers I have met, and he always had time to talk to me about some question I had or just discuss some technical concept. Every time I met Tim, it felt like a little of his intelligence rubbed off on me.

A couple of years ago, I started looking at XPages, and when I ran into a problem, I asked Tim for some help on Skype or Sametime (don’t remember now which one it was). As the helpful and generous person he was, he took the time out of his busy day to help me with my problem.

Tim was one of the early adopters and champions of XPages, and I have been reading his excellent blog and been to his sessions at Lotusphere. He is one of the developers I admired the most, and that is no easy feat, with all the brilliant individuals we have in the ICS (“Yellowsphere”) community.

Tim, thanks for all your help and ideas over the years. My thoughts goes out to your family, your friends and co-workers, and to everyone else who were fortunate to know you. You will be missed.

Code snippet – Disable agent using external file

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Karl-Henry Martinsson Posted in Lotusscript, Notes/Domino, Programming Leave a comment

Yesterday I was asked to create a way to let us disable agents running on a Domino server in an easy way before the Domino server comes back from a crash.

The reason for this request is that for a while we have been having one particular agent crash, taking the whole Domino server down with it. It only happens occasionally, and seems to be related to the document being processed. When the server comes up after a crash like that, a consistence check is done, then the agent manager launches the agent again, causing the server to go down again. I added code to the offending agent, so it would flag the document before processing and un-flag after processing is done. This way, when the agent encounters an already flagged document, it will be skipped as it was processed during a previous crash.

For some reason this did not work yesterday morning, when one of those rare corrupted(?) documents was encountered. The logic in the code was faulty, because the document was of a new type, so it was never flagged as being processed. The same document was processed over and over again, taking the server down every time.

So I simply created two functions, put them in a global script library where I keep utility functions used in many places, and added 3 lines of code to each agent where I wanted this functionality.

The first function is simply to check if a specified file exists. I am using en error handler to catch any error (for example missing directory).

Function FileExists(filename As String) As Boolean
    On Error GoTo errHandler
    If Dir$(filename)<>"" Then
        FileExists = True
    Else
        FileExists = False
    End If
exitFunction:
    Exit Function
errhandler:
    FileExists = False
    Resume exitFunction
End Function

The second function is the one where I check for the existance of a file named the same as the agent, with an extension of .disabled. If that file does not exist, I check for a file with the extension .enabled. If that file is missing, I simply create a blank file with that name. This way, the first time any agent is executed, the file will be created for us, and I don’t have to sit and manually create them all.

Function DisableAgent() As Boolean
    Dim session As New NotesSession
    Dim agentname As String
    Dim filename As String 

    agentname = session.CurrentAgent.Name
    filename = "D:\NotesAgentControlFiles\" + agentname + ".disabled"
    If FileExists(filename) Then
        DisableAgent= True
    Else
        filename = "D:\NotesAgentControlFiles\" + agentname + ".enabled"
        If Not FileExists(filename) Then	
            Open filename For Output As #1
            Print #1, ""
            Close #1
            Print "Created control file " & filename
        End If
        DisableAgent= False
    End If
End Function

Finally, in each agent I want to be able to disable like this, I add this code in the beginning:

'*** Check if disable-file exists, exit in that case
If DisableAgent() Then
    Exit Sub
End If

Just a few lines of code, but hopefully it will save someone a few minutes of work. Of course, you ca use this technique for many other things, your imagination is the limit.