Musings

Actually - I’m not sure if he’s dead yet. I have an aquaintace that I met online and that I have seen in real life maybe two or three times. We share one common interest, but not much more (as far as I know). Yesterday I talked to a good friend of mine (met through the same on-line channels, sharing the same interests). She knows my aquaintance much better than I do. And she told me, that he has severed all connections to our online community. He has deleted his email accounts, deregistered from the forum, quit the chat. There is no online identity any more. ...

Microsoft has aquired Groove Networks. There are some more details on the website. Does this mean that Ray Ozzie has more time to blog? And does that mean, that Groove has been lost for the Mac community forever? I have been using Groove right from the start, before the 1.0 version (and wrote about it on the Heise Newsticker back then). We used it extensively when we were building Ivorix. I think it was way ahead of it’s time then. Unfortunately, the 2.0 release was slow & bloated. I have been using less and less of it over the years - also due to the fact, that basic features like search and printing were missing. So it has disappeared from my Toolset - unlike the other brainchild of Ray, Lotus Notes. ...

Kathy Sierra writes a wonderful blog all by itself with thoughtful and interesting short essays on how to create passionate users. The current entry on multitasking your brain is as good as ever. If you want to get more done, be mindful. If you want to have more time, be mindful. Mindful means one thing at a time. Something to put on my 43 Things list: be mindful

Of course I know about the openNTF website that collects open source Notes applications. Also I read about the OpenLog template, but I haven’t used it - until 2 weeks ago when I needed some information why my agents were failing suddenly after a Domino 5 to Domino 6 migration. I remembered about the OpenLog database and decided to give it a try. What can I say: I’m a fool that I haven’t used this much sooner. The installation and implementation into my applications was a snap and within minutes I had the exact error message and place of where the code failed. Fixing it was pretty easy. In the last weeks I have OpenLog enabled all the Notes applications I currently support and I expect that this will make my life much easier in the future. ...

From the “my external memory dept”: One of the simplest way to debug SMTP problems is to talk directly to the SMTP server using a shell (Telnet): Frodo:~ jcf$ telnet smtp.domain.ch 25 Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx... Connected to smtp.domain.ch. Escape character is '^]'. 220 smtp.domain.ch ESMTP ready. MAIL FROM:name@domain.ch 250 OK RCPT TO:joe@doe.com 250 Accepted DATA 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself and then the message you want to send (including the headers) ...

If you need to find out which process is listening on a certain port, use the following: Linux netstat -natp | grep :80 Solaris lsof -i | grep :80 On Solaris, you need to have compiled lsof that you can get from Sunfreeware.com