InVisible

One of the things that bugged me about writing the blog, is that I usually have time to write when I’m not online (in the train). Recently, this has changed due to the availability of fast (and expensive) GPRS/EDGE, but the prices Swisscom charges for internet access are prohibitive high. I was toying with the idea of running a Lotus Domino based blog, but inertia has kept me from going down that route. While I’m not that happy with my current MT setup, a change is a lot of work. ...

I admit it. I have switched. The Mac Mini was just the beginning, since last week I have a 15" PowerBook. I really, really like it. I will not bore you to death with all the details of why the Mac is better – you have heard those things before. I have to keep my trusty Dell Inspiron for the Lotus Notes development I’m doing, but most of my work day is spent in front of the PowerBook. ...

This is the view I’m enjoying right now. Looking out living room window of our holiday-flat in a little village in the mountains south-west in Switzerland. This is a really small village, some 1300 inhabitants and almost non-existent tourism. But there are sheep and goats and this village happens to have the highest vineyards in Europe, so the supply with cheese, meat and wine is endless and excellent. And the people are extremely friendly. Great area for quiet holidays or working days. ...

I’m sitting in front of two clustered Notes servers that have died on me when I tried to diagnose a problem using the OpenLog log database. I added some unsupcious looking code to circumvent a problem that of course failed. In order to get more informtation on what failed, I decided to use OpenLog to pinpoint the error. The moment, the agent ran with OpenLog enabled the Domino 6.0.4 server died. The following restart had it hanging on a consistency check. Killing the server with nsd -killand a subsequent nfixup -j -S c:\domdata brought up a lot of “interesting” error messages: ...

Mike Clark has an incredible powerfull idea: Learning through testing. He describes how he uses unit tests to learn a programming language (Ruby in this case). Each unit test encapsulates a bit of language knowledge he has aquired. Writing the unit tests, he explores a bit of the language. Also, there’s a written trail of things he has done and explored. I find this an extremely compelling way of learning a language and keeping track of what you know, so I guess this will go into my: “Things to try out” stack. ...

2600+ pages…. It is over – I want more