Nice feedback

I’m using Skype for all my conference calling (which has been a lot lately) and noticed a new status message I thought was very nice and that I haven’t noticed before. Skype now tells you if you’re talking but your microphone is muted.

AT

It’s frightening but this link pretty much sums up my day…. A day I’ll never have back! 🙂

Rearming Windows Vista

While cleaning up today I found an interesting piece of information in the Microsoft Action Pack material. It appears that the 30 day grace period of Windows Vista can be extended to 90 days by rearming the installation (you should also disable auto-activation during the installation). This is great for testing purposes.

To rearm Windows start a command-prompt with admin. privileges and run

cscript %windir%system32slmgr.vbs -rearm

The script can also be used to active Windows using the -ipk switch followed by the 25 digit activation code.

TwitNotes – OSGi console commands

I’m continuing to improve TwitNotes and to make it a killer demo application for Notes 8. Last night I added OSGi console commands so you can interact with the application from the OSGi console running underneath Notes 8. Thanks for Bob Balfe from IBM for sharing info on how to do this.

The example in this case is a little far fetched but it serves the point of demoing some of the capabilities you have with the platform.

SWT@Notes 8: -console

As partly addressed by Bob Balfe there are numerous ways to debug Eclipse/SWT components in Notes 8 or Lotus Expeditor. One is as Bob mentions to launch the client using the -console switch so the OSGi console is displayed. While confusing at first the OSGi console is really your friend when developing applications. From the console you have direct access to the OSGi subsystem of Eclipse. But it isn’t just for the Eclipse stuff. Since some Notes 8 components such as the property broker and topology manager have console commands you can interact with them from the console when troubleshooting/debugging.

To launch Notes 8 with the OSGi console create a new shortcut and use the following command (change the path if Notes isn’t installed in c:notes8):

"c:notes8frameworkrcprcplauncher.exe" -config notes -console

Besides the -console switch the the rcplauncher.exe executable takes a number of interesting arguments. One of the really cool ones is that you can supply a port number after the -console switch to make the console listen on a telnet port. This way you can connect to a remote client using telnet.

"c:notes8frameworkrcprcplauncher.exe" -config notes -console 23

Cool, cool, cool.

If you’re developing Eclipse components I really suggest you look into the OSGi console as it can assist in troubleshooting bundles that fail to load due to unsatisfied requirements.

Were to start? Well when you have the console available try out these commands:

  • help: Pretty self-explanatory
  • ss: Shows all the bundles installed with their status (be aware – there’s a lot of them)
  • setlogrlev: Sets the log level of individual loggers. I’ll have an upcoming blog post on logging.
  • pbsh: Work with the property broker e.g. see defined wires etc.

Re: Lotus Expeditor samples

So where are the samples you ask? When you have installed the Lotus Expeditor toolkit into your Eclipse environment search the plugins directory for two plugins called com.ibm.rcp.tools.samplegallery_6.1.1.20070731 and com.ibm.rcp.tools.samplegallery2_6.1.1.20070731. Each of these two directories have an archive directory where you’ll find the samples.