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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

Taking a cue from Gadgetguy, I have burned the most requested feed by running it through FeedBurner. This will massage the feeds, making them easier accessible to people using a browser and various other nice things (like giving me statistics on who is reading this blog - similar to Statcounter, who does an excellent job for tracking the web-usage of this blog. Also it inserts links to “relevant” Amazon books. This of course in a constant effort to offset the cost of me running this blog. If it doesn’t work out (as I suspect it will), this part will be removed again… ...

I will be gone until February, 28th… Don’t expect (m)any updates during that time