link: IBM takes a stand against bad standards

I am biased in this OOXML saga, I admit. But what happened with the adoption of OOXML as a standard, using the fast track process instead of the normal one, is not fair.

And I am saying this just by looking into what happened in Romania regarding the vote, which is summarized by more enthusiast fellow looking at the process.

Since it appears Romania is not the only country whose committee was influenced (political or not), and due to the fact the people like me can publicly expose their thoughts, I think these signals were received.

So, IBM is taking a stand on these standardization bad practices : http://www.linux.com/feature/148750

So it should do.

piece of Portal 6.0.x I learned today

sometimes I have to dig/test/dig some more/test again/curse a little/ to get something done with this piece of Portal.
But when it's done, it's done. And little lessons can be added to this blog :)

So, what did I learned today ? That you actually need to perform a check-out/check-in ant tasks for WMM (WebSphere Member Manager) in order to have your changes effective.

I wanted to change the LDAP login attribute from 'cn' to 'uid' for a Portal Cluster install I'm working with right now. So I found this note:

Which is pretty explanatory, except for the fact that it didn't said you need to do these steps, in order:

> ./WPSconfig.sh check-out-wmm-cfg-files-from-dmgr

within /wmm/wmm.xml, change userSecurityNameAttribute from "cn" to "uid".

> ./WPSconfig.sh check-in-wmm-cfg-files-to-dmgr

Of course that's not all the story, but the part dealing with WMM should at least be listed as above. Which reminds me how poor these Infocenters are designed. All the information is there, but in pieces scattered within hundred of pages.

hmmm ...

change in reaching me

I've changed the About section of this blog, since the spammers found my gmail address and I currently have about two hundred spam messaged daily. Fortunate, gmail spam handling is pretty good so only a couple of these get by.

Related to this, guess what's in the attached picture ...



u're right, this is a Lotus widget displaying my Gmail account.
Just a good illustration of Lotus Widgets actually working, not that I'll be using it, since the Firefox plugin Better Gmail is a lot better :)

wish list

- I wish to be able to quit smoking. Starting now and marking this point to the blog as to remember it. Quitting is all about my brain and my will.

- I wish IBM will implement the IBM Installation Manager into the WebSphere Application Server, so updating and applying a fixpack for either WAS and/or Portal to be a breeze, not a torture as it is right now.

- I also wish for a Canon xSi D450, which is an entry-level DSLR photo camera. I discovered this summer trip to Greece that I have a new hobby. The Sony DSC-H9 is no longer taking good photos, for me. So I think, I have a lot to learn.

- Related to above entry, I wish for Romanian merchants to be less thieves. The Canon 450D worth almost double in Romanian shops than in similar eBay, US, UK and AT shops. OK OK, taxes and transportation, but it is still too much ripping-off. As they say, I need to call a friend or wait for the next trip abroad.

picassing and random thoughts

Two things:
1. I uninstalled Chrome. Because I saw some privacy concerns on some blogs, because I didn't liked it and because FF is too much great of a browser. As somebody said somewhere, if FF plugins will work with Chrome, its speed might be an argument. But Google has a long way to make it an useful browser. And I no longer have the time to test things just for fun. I'm sure it will be a good browser in a year time-frame from now on.

2. Instead, I've installed Picasa 3 beta. And I'm gonna keep it. If not for Picasa itself, it will be for the Picasa Viewer. Yes, now there's a viewer of most common picture files. And it's the best one I've seen so far, because it's fast. Real fast. Two smart things I've noticed: a) large pictures (2MB) are previewed instantly. b) rotation of a picture is not saved in the picture itself, but in picasa.ini of the picture's folder. This is causing your picture to stay unaltered, but preview them with the wanted rotation. And I think EXIF rotation makes it preview the picture with the correct rotation, just as IrfanView is doing. But I still have to confirm this.

And one last thought: Google, IBM and MS are giants in the software business (generally speaking, though domains are different). We should fight the giants and their monopolies. But how come I do have the impression that nobody's fighting Google and IBM, but only MS ?

And here's a possible answer: because both Google and IBM do clever stuff, from time to time. MS have clever people, but their clever results are hidden. Or maybe I am biased.

But Picasa 3 is good. It's a clever stuff. So it's Notes 8.5, AIX, Websphere, Portal, Connections, Lotus Forms and I could go on like this with IBM's stuff. With MS ... let's see: Active Directory. And ... come on, another cleverness for MS ... oh yes, the OS I'm writing this post on, aka Windows XP. But that's pretty much it. Or maybe I'm biased.

Notes Search not working as I expected

Now with the summer vacation gone, it's time to plan the winter vacation :)
But this is another story, I'd better focus on this topic's subject ....

So, I am using the 8.5_M2 version of Notes client as the business mail client. Overall it's better, however I am still frustrated. I don't get it, I expect the "Search All Mail" to perform the Full-Text search on my Local mail replica as well as in all Local mail archives.

What I do and what I see in the client:
1. I am enabling the Search Toolbar:





2. Now I see this field, with Search Scope, on my toolbar:



So, the flow I expect, which is not happening, is:
- enter the search keyword(s)
- Notes would check current Location, see that I've got a Local replica of mail.
- Go into the local mail replica and check/see that I also have one, two of more Local mail archives.
- Perform the freakin' search into all these mail dbs and return the results page in the Notes 8 style.

There maybe some programmatic limitations to this scenario, I no longer do Notes/Domino development to think if it's possible to aggregate document links into one page/folder/whatever. But I still don't get it. If it's not supposed to work as I've described above, why the Search Toolbar ? At this moment it's absolutely useless (ok so we have the google/yahoo/connections search in the embedded browser...).

But we'd better have the full mail search before other searches. Right now I am still using IOPES for full mail search (this is the Omnifind Personal Mail Search), which btw it is working in 8.5_M2 as expected. But it's adding a local web server and around 1GB RAM of processes when running. Just to perform a task which should be performed by the Notes client itself.

Does anybody know if we'll finally get to search in all mail dbs ?