“You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
I do not consider myself a total nut job but I invite you and encourage you to listen to this episode of the Daily Source Code podcast for your start to the awakening. If nothing else it’s an eye opener… Taste the red pill.
Daily Source Code #781 for Friday August 8th 2008: Confessions Of A MultiMedia HitMan.
So TwitNotes has been out for a while now and I have been discussing various aspects of the application with users. One of the issues that come up time and time again is proxy support. The proxies supported by TwitNotes v. 1.0.5 are the proxies supported by the Notes version you’re using.
One of the issues I discovered is that the proxy configuration in location documents doesn’t seem to work all the time. Sometimes the proxy configuration is only picked up from the “Network Connections” page under Preferences. Another observation is that only the “Manual proxy configuration” option seems to work.
Your miles may vary and please let me know if you have proxy issues.
Finally solved a problem I have been having with Microsoft Excel 2003 crashing on Windows Vista by disabling the Bluetooth add-in… Read more at forums.microsoft.com if you have the need…
So today is YellowDay and what does that mean? Hmm… I don’t know yet but I’m gonna figure it out! 🙂
Ahhh some of the fun stuff you see when running Notes 8.5 with the OSGi console showing… 🙂
<DWSystem> null [<DWSystem> 11:11:46:590] partial 0.000 - cumulative 0.000 - instantiate controller [<DWSystem> 11:11:48:545] partial 1.955 - cumulative 1.955 - instantiate action dispatcher [<DWSystem> 11:11:48:870] partial 0.325 - cumulative 2.28 - instantiate ComputeAttrs [<DWSystem> 11:11:48:880] partial 0.010 - cumulative 2.290 - instantiate AttrMap [<DWSystem> 11:11:48:910] partial 0.030 - cumulative 2.32 - instantiate distance function [<DWSystem> 11:11:49:855] partial 0.945 - cumulative 3.265 - set incremental augmentor to null [<DWSystem> 11:11:49:965] partial 0.110 - cumulative 3.375 - instantiate executor [<DWSystem> 11:11:50:906] partial 0.941 - cumulative 4.316 - instantiate displayer [<DWSystem> 11:11:50:971] partial 0.065 - cumulative 4.381 - instantiate treewalker [<DWSystem> 11:11:50:976] partial 0.0050 - cumulative 4.386 - instantiate the widget manager [<DWSystem> 11:11:51:106] partial 0.130 - cumulative 4.516 - instantiate instrumentation services [<DWSystem> 11:11:52:021] partial 0.915 - cumulative 5.431 - instantiate the abstraction module [<DWSystem> 11:11:52:351] partial 0.330 - cumulative 5.761 - instantiate the logical name translator factory class name com.ibm.pw.DocWizard.ExpeditorWidgets.ExpWidgetFactory Create ExpWidgetFactory factory class name com.ibm.pw.DocWizard.SWTWidgets.SWTWidgetFactory [<DWSystem> 11:12:01:577] partial 9.226 - cumulative 14.987 - instantiated the widget factory [<DWSystem> 11:12:02:009] partial 0.432 - cumulative 15.419 - instantiate step instantiator [<DWSystem> 11:12:02:597] partial 0.588 - cumulative 16.007 - instantiated the session trace [<DWSystem> 11:12:03:272] partial 0.675 - cumulative 16.682 - instantiated control loop - done initializing DWSystem View initialization done CLOSING SYSTEM
Had to add a couple of Lotus Connections Websphere server processes as services under Windows today and found this nice blog post that describes how: Creating a Windows service for WebSphere AppServer
I haven’t done a SnTT in months (actually the last one was back on 24 May 2007) so I guess it’s about time. This week it’s about cross compiling sidebar plugins for Notes 8.5 and Notes 8.0.2. Enjoy…
Since installing Notes 8.5 I have had a lot of trouble developing in Eclipse 3.4 for Notes 8.5 and having the plugins work in Notes 8.0.x as well. The problem showed itself as a NullPointerException when trying to load the plugin Activator and a “Viewpart is null” message in the Notes UI. Looking at the log trace showed a class incompatibility message (“bad major version at offset=6”).
So far I have been screaming my lungs out, developing in Eclipse 3.4 and building the plugins in a virtual machine with Eclipse 3.2 as I couldn’t get plugins to work otherwise. Now I finally found a solution that lets me develop in Eclipse 3.4 and having the plugins work in Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5.
The issue is that Eclipse 3.4 configured with Notes 8.5 as a target platform is using Java 6 and that Notes 8.0.x is using Java 5 which causes class format problems. The solution is to set the required execution environment in Eclipse 3.4 which will cause Eclipse to build correctly. Setting the required execution environment (J2SE-1.5) is done in the “Overview”-tab of the MANIFEST.MF editor as shown below.
Using the GUI is of cause just a shorthand for editing the manifest manually. As an alternative you can edit your META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file directly and add the following line:
Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: J2SE-1.5
Please note that this is not the default value when creating new plugins in Eclipse 3.4 so you’ll have to pay attention and make sure it’s set correctly. This is of cause only necessary if your plugins need to work on Notes 8.0.x as well as Notes 8.5.
Thanks to Pierre Carlson from IBM for pointers on this.
If you are be sure to listen to Security Now! episode 155 (“How DNS works”) to learn about the DNS exploits circulating the internet these days. Also you might want to test the DNS servers you use to see if they they are subject to the attack.
I know Comcast and some other major ISP’s in the US and England are having problems since they haven’t patched their DNS servers yet.
For quite some time I have been a strong proponent of using VMWare for customer development. I used to have 2 or 3 Notes clients in various versions installed on my laptop with a directory pointer per customer linked into my main data directory. A little over a year ago I switched to using VMWare Workstation instead for all development. This setup worked out great for me.
Some customers had their own VMWare images and some customers shared a VMWare image. This also worked out great. Once Notes 8 was released I moved my Notes 7.0.2 installation into a VMWare image with a directory pointer to my “external” Notes data directory. With “external” I mean outside the VMWare image OS. This works out great when running Notes 7.0.2 or earlier outside the VMWare image but once I upgraded to Notes 8 the problems started. I started experiencing database corruption issues of my mail database which I of cause access from both inside and outside VMWare.
After diagnosing these issues I came the conclusion that this kind of setup just isn’t supported with Notes 8 part of the mix. Therefore I have split my shared Notes data directory into two parts; a customer part which is accessible from inside VMWare and a production part which is only accessible from Notes 8 outside VMWare. This has solved the database corruption issues.
While sharing directories linked in with directory pointers between running Notes instances has probably never been officially supported it used to work and now doesn’t. I just thought I would share.
Afterwards I have changed my setup again and moved completely to VMWare for development. In the new setup I have one or two VMWare images per customer (one for Notes and one for Domino) on an external USB drive with the correct Notes/Domino versions installed. This works great and has really simplified development and testing for customers.