Schrodinger’s Mother-in-law

Tim Davis  August 27 2008 03:30:00 PM

We had a sort of real-life Schrodinger's Cat situation yesterday. We didn't have a cat in a box, but we had an anniversary e-card due to be sent.

It is Gab's parents' wedding anniversary today, and we were planning to send them an e-card this morning. Then we got a phone call from Gab's mother late last night and she asked "Will I be getting an e-card tomorrow, then?"

We said "Now you'll never know if we remembered your anniversary because you won't be able to tell if we would have sent one anyway, or if we are only sending one because you reminded us."

She just couldn't resist. She opened the box, the quantum wave function collapsed and we sent the e-card.

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A New Cocktail To Celebrate The Weekend And A Great Way To Use Up Old Veg

Gabriella Davis  August 15 2008 07:08:32 PM

We're big on making cocktails in this house (well Tim is, I just drink them) and since I discovered half an old'ish cucumber in the salad drawer he made me up a Cucumber Margarita - completely delicious, impossible to have just one and a great start to the weekend.  It even smells of cucumber which is the smell of summer and you can't beat that

tablespoon of fine sugar
1oz lime juice
1/4 cup chopped cucumber

put all of these in your mixing glass and muddle (mash down to a pulp or until you are feeling better)

add
1.5 oz white tequila
1oz cointreau
handful of ice cubes

shake until your shaker (the container not the person) gets icy cold
strain and pour into a cocktail / margarita glass, float a slice of cucumber on top (or put a nick in it and stick it on the glass rim)

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Notes Themes Are Here ! I’m rocking a lovely green right now

Gabriella Davis  August 15 2008 12:40:48 PM

I may be easily pleased or just easily excitable for a Friday but for those of you lucky enough to be running 8.0.1 or later (in Beta) you can now play with changing the theme of your Notes client.  IBM have come out with a handful of new themes (colours, standard fonts etc) which you can install to your client using the public widget catalog hosted on our server.  Here's how to do it

1. The catalog is on www.noteswidgets.com but the Domino server name is Tranquility/TurtlePublic so you'll need a connection document to Tranquility/TurtlePublic using the address www.noteswidgets.com.  
2. In your preferences under 'widgets' enter Tranquility/TurtlePublic as the server name and widgetcatalog.nsf as the catalog name - it should fetch a series of categories when you apply it
3. Choose the category 'Theme' to automatically install the theme feature
4. Restart your client when prompted
5. Now under your Preferences - Windows and Themes - you have new ones to choose from
   
   This is my client with 'Natural' installed.  Much thanks to IBM for developing it and Mary Beth getting it on the public server.

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• Comments [14]

Tips Useful To Know If You’re Planning To Install ST Advanced

Gabriella Davis  August 11 2008 12:08:34 PM

Having spent the past week on installing this in approximately 15 different ways and configurations here are mine

1. Start downloading now.  You have a 1.5GB ST Pre Requisites file a 500MB St Advanced file and a 500MB Websphere Application Server file to grab
2. Make sure if you're installing on Windows 2003 you've got at least SP1, preferably SP2 already installed
3. The Pre-Requisites install DB2, Websphere Message Broker and MQ Series which you need before you can do anything else
4. The ST Advanced install needs to point to the WAS install files - so you need to have those extracted to a directory somewhere but not actually installed
5. During the install you'll need a Sametime Standard server to point to for community services and awareness, a server with LDAP for authentication to point to for logins (I used the ST Standard server for both) and an SMTP server to point to send mail out
6. Decide on your LDAP configuration before you start.  If you're going to use LDAP make sure that you have it correctly configured and tested with binding if necessary
7. The uninstall  process worked once then failed three times, even though it said it had uninstalled and there appeared to be nothing anywhere on the file system or the registry, attempting to install the ST Advanced server again simply prompted me to 'upgrade the existing version' pointing to the directory I was originally installed in
8.  If you use a VM, take a snapshot of the server after the install of the pre-reqs and just as you start the Sametime standard install so you can rollback if you have problems
9. During the install if you get an error saying 'can't connect to database' - go into the DB2 configuration for DB2Copy1 (General Administration Tools - Control Center).  Drill down to the DB2 instance, right mouse click and choose 'Start' then continue on with your configuration
10. Take notes as you go along for all the accounts and passwords you'll need to use or create
11. Once you have finished use the 'first steps' option on the STAdvanced profile which is created under the Websphere program menu to Verify your install and start the server
12. If it won't start and you get an error in your SystemOut.log file which appears to refer to LDAP (along the lines of loginproperties invalid parameter = CN), check again that your DB2 instance is started and if necessary manually start it before attempting to start ST Advanced
13. Websphere configuration, security etc can be accessed once the server is started on http://hostname:9043/ibm/console/login.jsp
14. Sametime Advanced can be accessed once the server is started on http://hostname:9080/StAdvanced
15. Make sure you bring coffee and a good book, you're going to be staring at the progress bar for a very long time

• Comments [2]

Unlimited Usage, Broadband Monopolies and Beating The System

Gabriella Davis  August 7 2008 03:37:46 PM

I've just discovered the degree to which my 'Unlimited' broadband isn't. We have had home broadband here with British Telecom since 1999 and the size has moved up over time to 8mpbs download on our unlimited contract.  One week ago I was trying to work in the evening but discovered my download speed was only 80k.  I contacted technical support and after several attempts of them trying to brush me off saying it was just very busy I got the call escalated and found that we had exceeded their fair use policy for unlimited downloads that month so they had (without telling us) throttled our network back to a max of 500k.  

• No they couldn't tell me what the fair use limit was per month, only that we had downloaded 100GB
• Yes they could see that this was the first time in 8 years we'd exceeded the fair use policy
• No they couldn't turn us back on, we were blocked for 30 days and then they'd consider it.
• No they couldn't move me to any other contract for any amount of money that would actually allow me greater downloads

When I pointed out that we might as well cancel our service with them and go with someone else I was told that since British Telecom control the entire ADSL network and only license it to other companies, if they block us we stay blocked no matter where we go.  Their only alternative was to have a 2nd phone line installed in the house and have ADSL added to that as well which would be a 2nd account.  

In the end I decided to take out cable broadband as a 2nd service which is 20Mpbs fibre.  So now we have 2 separate "Unlimited" broadband accounts at home, one ADSL and one fibre with 2 different providers, neither of whom will tell us what the fair use limit is.  I'm guessing in their market they don't have to worry too much about customer service.

• Comments [3]

A Day of Waiting - Gardens Broadband and Gas Boilers

Gabriella Davis  August 7 2008 02:17:48 PM

That will teach me to try and be clever.  I arranged for guys come over to slash and burn everything in my garden today, alongside the Gasman coming to give the boiler it's annual check and Virgin Broadband coming to install 20Mbps fibre - all between 8am and 1pm.

Status so far:
Gardeners arrived at 7am !
Broadband engineer arrived at 11.30, installed fibre but left 'to bring back the router'.  Is now apparently down the pub with his phone turned off and no sign of him coming back
Gasman rang at 11 to say he'd be a little late but definitely here by 2.  Still no sign

Update: as I was typing this the Gasman rang to say "yeah I know you booked a job for this afternoon but I only just got given it" (fantastic).  I've rescheduled for 7.30am tomorrow which means I can get on with my day and he can get 90 minutes overtime.  All I need now is the drunk broadband installation engineer to turn up with a wireless router so he can "instruct" me how to configure it *sigh*.

• Comments [1]

Clearing Out The Server Room - A Step Back Into The Past

Gabriella Davis  August 4 2008 08:27:42 PM

It's summer and having got fed up with my need to hoard old kit, an office revolution took place and a bunch of old laptops were cleared out of the server room.  15 different models were dug out including the first two we bought when setting up Turtle 12 years ago and,  since i'm overly sentimental even about hardware,  I went out to lunch whilst most of them were taken to the great Laptop home in the sky.  Our current laptops are all Macbooks or Macbook Pros and it's interesting (to me at least!) to see how far we've come.

Compaq 20MHz Intel i386SX / 2 MB (non-removable)  / 20MB HDD	Tecra Pentium 166Mhz / 32MB / 2GB HDD	Apple iBook G3 366Mhz / 64MB / 10GB HDD
Dell P3 1.1Ghz / 256MB / 48GB HDD	Toshiba P4 2.1Ghz / 512MB / 60GB HDD	Alienware P4 2.8Ghz / 1GB / 40GB HDD

• Comments [1]

More Flawed Research And An Unquestioning Media Driving Me Mad

Gabriella Davis  August 4 2008 08:00:00 AM

An article on the BBC news site yesterday was gushing over some piece of MS research that performed analysis on Messenger traffic to establish a 'degrees' of separation pattern between individuals. To do this they analysed 30bn IM mesages sent via Messenger worldwide in June 2006 and assuming a single message between 2 people made them 'acquainted' they calculated the number of links to connect any 2 pairs.  The results were 78% of pairs being connected within 7 links.  The original '6 Degrees of Separation' research was published by Stanley Milgram in the US in 1978 and to quote from the BBC site

"The Microsoft researchers said that, to their knowledge, their study had for the first time validated Milgram's theory on a planetary scale"

So generally a standard gushing and over-excited BBC 'technical article' and as usual just a reprint of a press release.  Here's what was missing to my frustration

• Is no-one going to ask what right MS had to analyse the IM traffic conducted by people who were behaving perfectly legally (and yes I"m sure they have the legal right under their terms and conditions but stupidly I was thinking of the moral right)
• I'm sure that's not all the research MS are up to using the data they have at their fingertips and equally sure it's not being done for altruistic purposes
• I'm also sure that MS aren't the only company doing such a thing but why aren't we, and the media, questioning our right to privacy and how easily it's being relinquished
• 78% of pairs being connected by 7 links or less being presented as exciting results - has no-one at MS or the BBC heard of the 80/20 rule?
• commenting that the research confirms the 6 Degrees of Separation theory "on a planetary scale" is either disingenuous or stupid - planetary? really?  That's if everyone on the planet had a computer, was connected to the internet, used MS Messenger and was sending IM messages via it in June 2006.  Then again that might be a worrying insight into how MS sees the world
  

Original Article Here

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The Mystery Of The Disappearing and Reappearing Filed Messages

Gabriella Davis  July 30 2008 04:59:02 PM

I've been troubleshooting a seemingly random problem at a customer for a few months now which was proving difficult to define so almost impossible to investigate.  Of about 600 users on one server, a handful were reporting that on some days messages they filed from their inboxes would reappear a few minutes later.  The users were on a mixed variety of Notes clients from 6.5.4 to 7.0.2 and 8.0.1 and the problem didn't appear to be consistent across any version or template.  The mail server was clustered but those 2 cluster mates had been in place for years with those files on them and never had a issue.  In addition the servers had been upgraded to v8.0.1 some months before the first report of the problem.  

Eventually we did establish that although the message appeared back in the inbox it did also appear to stay filed in the folder it had been put in. Once we got there we could identify the problem as matching SPR DCOE7FNNCV which says that behaviour is a result of the 8.0x streaming cluster replication (SCR) technology (and doesn't appear to be the only problem with it).    Turn off the setting for cluster replication to use SCR and force it to fallback on regular 7.x cluster replication and the problem goes away.  The issue is scheduled for fix in 8.0.3 but in the meantime DEBUG_SCR_DISABLED=1

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Civil Partnership Ceremony - Not Quite There

Gabriella Davis  July 29 2008 12:27:59 PM

I had the pleasure of going to the wedding of 2 friends of mine who were finally able to get married after 13 years together thanks to the new Civil Partnerhsip laws in the UK.  The whole ceremony was lovely despite the actual wording the registrar himself has to use which is all a bit bloodless and un-romantic

I declare that I know of no legal reason why we may not register as each others civil partner. I understand that upon signing the document we will be forming a
civil partnership with each other.

Compare to the wording for a civil ceremony for a wedding which starts

I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment   why I ..................... may not be joined in matrimony to
 ................... and  I call upon these persons here present  to witness that I  ................. do take you  ...............to be my lawful wedded wife  /  husband

You can only register a civil partnership if you are in a same-sex relationship and it's not permitted for friends who are living together to do so but the word 'wedding' is not allowed either (I assume because someone would have to re-define the meaning of 'wedding' 'husband' and 'wife' in countless laws and no-one wants to do that) but surely we can come up with suitable wording that can be used in both cases.

Highlight of the evening was the first dance - the theme tune from Minder (a british TV series from the 80s).

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