Friday 31 October 2008

Good article on Newsnight - Global warming by computer

Here for those who have a spare 13 minutes to watch

http://tinyurl.com/6zddgr

Ubuntu 8.10 ( Intrepid Ibex ) and VMware Workstation

Just tried to install VMware Workstation 6.5 ( VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-110068 to be precise ) onto my freshly squeezed installed Ubuntu 8.10 machine, and hit a nasty surprise. In essence, the script that runs when you first run VMware ( used to be called vmware-config.pl ) failed to run with a "File not found" error. I did a quick Google, and found this known Ubuntu bug.

In essence, it directed me to download a new build of VMware Workstation, build 118166, from here.

Once done, alle es goede.

Wednesday 29 October 2008

Migrating from Portal Document Manager (PDM) to Quickr Document Libraries

Here's a nice summary of the options involved in moving your document
libraries from Portal Document Manager in WebSphere Portal v6.0 ( and
below ) to Lotus Quickr in WebSphere Portal v6.1.

The article is located on the WebSphere Portal wiki here: -

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/portalwiki.nsf/dx/migrating-from-portal-document-manager-pdm-to-quickr-document-libraries

Monday 27 October 2008

More from the land of the Ibex

Well, following on from my earlier post I've just popped my Vodafone 3G PCMCIA card into my Thinkpad and, quelle surprise, Ubuntu recognised it as a mobile broadband card WITHOUT NEEDING TO INSTALL ANY OTHER SOFTWARE.

This is amazing, considering the fun n' games that I've had in the past with Vodafone drivers on Windows XP. Even under Hardy Heron and Gutsy Gibbon, I had to download and install "special" Vodafone drivers.

Added to this, suspend/resume *appears* to work oob ( after one test thus far ).

Right, in Starbucks for the final coffee of the day, whilst I update Facebook :-)

Intrepidly going where no one ( apart from an ibex ) has gone before ...

Well, I had some free time this PM, so I downloaded the Release Candidate code for the next Ubuntu release, Intrepid Ibex ( aka 8.10 ), from here.

Seems good so far - interestingly, I had 110 MB of updates to install once I'd installed the RC code, which kinda makes sense given that the GA is due in three days time.

Network Manager seems to have improved somewhat, although it still didn't want to work with my company's LEAP wireless network. Will see how it manages when I'm back on the road later this week.

Other than, it looks pretty good - Firefox 3.0.3 installed oob, along with Evolution ( which I'm going to try and get along with as an alternative to my favourite client, Thunderbird ). Interestingly, Open Office 2.4 is still included, rather than 3.0. Again, this might be a RC vs. GA thing.

Will see whether the suspend/resume and projector support has improved and update this post later in the week.

Have just installed the beta of Notes 8.5 so am going to fire up and see if I've got any real work to do :-)

Tuesday 21 October 2008

Proving Technology

Those nice folks at IBM Hursley Park are hosting a pair of Proof of Technology (PoT) events in November: -

10-12 November Discovering the value of IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1

Introduction

Web portals allow partners, employees and customers to choose their user experience, with personalized applications based on role, context,
actions, location, preferences and team collaboration needs. IBM® WebSphere® Portal software provides a composite application or business
mashup framework and the advanced tooling needed to build flexible, SOA-based solutions, as well as the unmatched scalability required by
any size organization. IBM portals also provide the ideal platform for addressing the needs of varied audiences, via accelerators that simply
‘snap-on’ and extend the capabilities of your portal implementation as needed. In addition, a wide range of IBM Business Partner
solutions and IBM services are available to further address your needs. Accelerators for WebSphere Portal help deliver business value and
faster time-to-value by addressing specific project needs.

  • Business Process: An end-to-end solution comprised of electronic forms, workflows and portlets to accelerate process automation.
  • Collaboration: Instant messaging, Web conferencing, team services and social networking.
  • Content: End-to-end enterprise Web content management and search.
  • Dashboard: Real-time, active, performance dashboards.
  • Enterprise Suite: Integrated set of capabilities supports multiple portal projects. Includes Web content management, collaboration, electronic
  • forms, dashboards, and rich client support.
  • Learning: A portal-based solution that delivers learning resources on the desktop.
  • Self-Service: Direct access to personalized self service information and transactions.
This Proof of Technology (PoT) offering is designed to demonstrate the exceptional user experience provided by WebSphere Portal software
with a focus on business value and solutions, and the exciting new web 2.0 features it enables and leverages, Additional focus areas include
administration, infrastructure and development topics. Participants will receive a hands-on experience of the WebSphere Portal product as well
as the integration capabilities found in the WebSphere Product Family. This offering also shows how WebSphere Portal can be used to
implement a responsive and easy-to-use portal that has rich function delivered from the secure and scalable infrastructure of WebSphere
Application Server.

Objective

The objective of this session is to demonstrate how IBM WebSphere Portal allows you to customize your work environment to the needs of your
business and present content and applications in a consistent fashion. Portal gives you the ability to easily provide a highly personalized user
experience based upon the end user’s previous interactions with your portal, their personal preferences, as well as attributes from their user
profile or any other source.

[PDF] Agenda is here

20 November IBM Mashup Center - A Proof of Technology

Muddled by mashups ?
Worried by widgets ?
Feeling curious aboutfeeds ?
Puzzled by portlets ?

IBM has the answer for you – please book yourself onto this 1-day workshop at Hursley Park, near Winchester in Hampshire, which aims to answer all of your questions about the recent advances in mashup technology.
IBM Mashup Center is an exciting new offering from IBM, designed to provide both business users and IT with the key capabilities needed to quickly and easily create, share, customize, and secureEnterprise Mashups.
With this lightweight enterprise mashup environment, organisations can unlock and transform enterprise, Web, personal, and departmental information into consumable or "mashable" assets, including information feeds and widgets.
These assets can then be dynamically assembled, at-the-glass, into new applications thataddress daily business challenges, allowing organisations can reduce their application backlog and improve productivity by empowering line of business, self-service application development.

Via a series of presentations and hands-on labs, our team will take you through the product portfolio, which includes: -

Lotus Mashups delivers the browser-based assembly tooling and widget creation environment
InfoSphere MashupHub provides the data connectors and feed generation + transformation capabilities
Lotus Widget Factory a powerful widget creation environment that enables developers of all skill levels to rapidly generate widgets without coding

The workshop will also focus on the integration points between mashups ( tactical, departmental )and portals ( strategic, enterprise ), and demonstrate how mashups and widgets can be delivered via a secure role-based, personalised portal environment, using WebSphere Portal.

Interested ?

If so, please let me know.

Sunday 19 October 2008

WebSphere Portlet Factory and SAP Together

Just starting to play around with the "free" implementation of Mini SAP
that came with my copy of "ABAP Objects - An Introduction to Programming
SAP Applications" that I bought a couple of years ago.

I installed it without too much difficulty, and was able to get
WebSphere Portlet Factory to connect using the supplied jCO.jar classes.
I can retrieve a list of BAPI objects, but haven't got a clue what to do
with them, or what data to use for my input queries.

Am also trying to work out if Mini SAP also offers a SAP Business
Workplace ( SAP BW ) implementation as well.

More fun to come .... watch this space.

Thursday 16 October 2008

Updating the iPod Touch

Back in September, I blogged about the error messages that I was seeing when I tried to update my iPod Touch to the most recent software level ( 2.1 ).

I was getting errors 1602, 1604 and 2002, despite plugging/unplugging, booting/rebooting, installing/reinstalling etc. I'd tried most everything, but nothing seemed to work.

Last night, I cracked it - following a blog post, I temporarily disabled my Symantec Anti-Virus ( File System Auto-Protect ) and Symantec Client Firewall. This allowed me to restore the iPod to the v1.x software stack. I tried the v2.1 update again this AM, and it failed - again, I disabled firewall and anti-virus, and ..... voilá it worked.

Not sure whether I did need to disable both or one of the Symantec services, but it worked, it worked, it worked.

PS In case it helps, I'm running iTunes 8.0.1.11 on Windows XP SP2

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Lotus Notes 8 - Performance or Perception ?

Thanks to Darren, I found a link to this on Dogear, and followed the guidance to increase my Notes 8 JVM heapside - it SEEMS to have improved the performance and responsiveness of the client, but is it just me ? Am I seeing what I wanted to see, or is it just perception ? Red pill or blue pill ?

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Mashups and Portals Together

Am making some progress - I've now got my Mashups server and my Portal server wired up to the same Domino LDAP server, offering me single sign-on via LTPA. I can add a widget to the Widget Portlet and display "Hello World!" from the widget onto a portal page. Not bad after over a week of hacking ......

More to come, including a document ........

Sunday 5 October 2008

CWWIM0515E The 'CN=wpsadmin,O=ibm' entity is not in the scope of the 'defined' realm

Have been getting this dratted error message all day, since I migrated my WebSphere Application Server 6.1.0.13 server ( running Lotus Mashups 1.0 ) to a Domino LDAP server.

I think I've done everything right, but I'm still getting: -





each time I try and log in to Mashups.

There is a corresponding message in SystemOut.log: -

CWWIM0515E The 'CN=wpsadmin,O=ibm' entity is not in the scope of the 'defined' realm.

The WAS 6.1 Information Centre refers to the message here but merely states: -

Explanation

The operation cannot be performed because the specified entity is not in the scope of the realm.

Programmer Response

Ensure that the unique name of the entity is specified correctly. If a realm name is specified in the Context object of the input object, ensure that the name is spelled correctly.

Am still digging into it - applying fixpacks and fixes like a mad thing ..........

A suitable JVM could not be found

Whilst trying to apply a WAS 6.1 fixpack, I kept seeing this error: -





despite trying various options, including: -

update.exe -is:javahome "c:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\java\jre"

and: -

update.exe -is:javahome "c:\WebSphere\AppServer\java\jre"

In the end, I created a log file using the command: -

update.exe -is:javahome "c:\WebSphere\AppServer\java\jre" -is:log c:\foobar.txt

This log file showed a series of messages: -

...
Searching for Sun Java 1.4.X for Windows using path hints
Check path hint Relative C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java
Verifying JVM at C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java\bin\java.exe
for JVM: Sun Java 1.4.X for Windows
C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java\bin\java.exe does not exist
Check path hint Relative C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java\jre
Verifying JVM at C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java\jre\bin\java.exe
for JVM: Sun Java 1.4.X for Windows
C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\.\java\jre\bin\java.exe does not exist
Check path hint Relative C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\..\java
Verifying JVM at C:\Lotus\Mashups\AppServer\updateinstaller\..\java\bin\java.exe
for JVM: Sun Java 1.4.X for Windows
...

which suggested, to me, that the fixpack installation requires JVM 1.4.X whereas I'm using JVM 1.5.0.

On further reflection, I realised that I was trying to use a WAS 6.0 Update Installer to update my WAS 6.1 instance.

Can you say "Doh" ? I bet you can ....

In the meantime, I'm downloading the correct Update Installer from here.

Thursday 2 October 2008

IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta - NEW AND UPDATED

Yes, you heard it right - IBM has released a NEW and UPDATED beta for WebSphere Portal 6.1; namely 6.1.0.1, with the following features: -
  • WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 7.0 (toleration level support as the underlying Application server)
  • IBM DB2 9.5
  • Oracle 11g R1 11.1.0.6
  • Windows Active Directory 2008 (excludes Application mode),
  • Firefox 3 browser
  • Apple Safari 3 browser
  • Opera 9.5 browser (on Vista OS)
  • Windows IIS 7
  • Apache HTTP Server 2.2 (for use with WAS 7 environments only)
The beta is available as a VMware image, which is rather nice :-)

There is also a new "drop" of the Rational Application Developer V7.5 beta as well.

Please see this page for details.

****UPDATED 5 OCTOBER 2008****

Having following the link for the RAD 7.5 beta here, it's now clear that RAD 7.5 was GA as of September 30, so I guess I'll have to go and download it from the normal PPA site

****UPDATED 5 OCTOBER 2008****

Visual Studio Code - Wow 🙀

Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...