A Portal to a Portal: January 2009

Friday, 30 January 2009

Two new portlets from the Portal Solutions Catalog ......

IBM Lotus Web Content Management Rendering Portlet

The IBM Lotus Web Content Management Rendering Portlet provided with this package is a solution which updates and improves how the rendering of Web content is performed in IBM WebSphere Portal. While the existing Web Content Viewer portlet (referred to in the WebSphere Portal documentation as a "rendering portlet") has evolved throughout several versions to implement sophisticated Web content rendering functions, it is still based on the deprecated IBM Portlet API. By contrast, the new JSR 286 Web Content Viewer has been entirely redeveloped based on the Java™ Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). In addition to the benefits afforded by JSR 286, the JSR 286 Web Content Viewer in this package also enables other features for Web content management, such as a new Web content portal page type and support for the standard search seedlist 1.0 format.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/portal/portal/details?catalog.label=1WP1001S6

WebSphere Portal Extension for WebDAV Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning

WebDAV for WebSphere Portal allows WebDAV clients to connect to a portal server. You can use these clients to access the portal page topology as if it were a folder structure and directly read and edit page titles, description, metadata, and static page content, rather than to use the portal administration portlets. This access point allows you to work with portal pages and directly edit content on a live portal server, for example by using HTML design tools.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/portal/portal/details?catalog.label=1WP1001SR

IBM Lotus Foundations Start technical workshop - 25/26 March 2009 @ IBM Hursley Park

More from our friends at the IBM Innovation Centre in Hursley: -

IBM Lotus Foundations Start is a complete software appliance that provides the essential software you need to focus on running the business, not managing computer systems. It allows a small business to use e-mail; create, share and centrally manage documents; and ensure information is backed up and protected. If you need to know how to install, configure and use the new Lotus Foundations Start, this workshop is for you.

This workshop is offered in three formats—traditional classroom, virtual, and self-paced. All are no charge and cover the same content. The classroom and virtual formats have a live instructor who delivers the material. The classroom format is done in a traditional classroom setting with lab machines. The virtual format uses Web conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP) to deliver the presentations, and provides remote access to machines to run the labs.

This is a technical class and does not include a product introduction.

https://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/isv/spc/events/description.jsp?event=99A944C0B1E0138F8525749F005C9B64

Lotus TechJam III - The first of a series in 2009

Following on from our successes in May and September, we will be running another series of Lotus TechJam events in the next few months.

For those who have not attended before, the concept of a TechJam is an event "run by techies, for techies, with technical content". We try and avoid "Death by PowerPoint" and aim for

This time we're going on the road, and escaping from the comfort zone of Lotus Park ( Staines ) and from the M25, so will be exploring the highways and byways of the UK: -

24th February    IBM Warwick
26th February    IBM Edinburgh
3rd March          IBM Hursley Park

covering all or some of the following topics: -

Lotus Notes and Domino – An Update
XPages - Building Collaborative Web Applications in Lotus Domino and Beyond
Collaboration in Context - Lotus Mashups and Lotus Sametime Together
Lotus Quickr – Team Collaboration
Lotus Sametime – For Microsoft Sharepoint Customers !!
Portal Accelerators – From Collaboration to Mashups
Collaboration and Content – Quickr and Filenet Working Together
Lotus Connections – Social Networking – The Next Generation
Lotus Protector – Email and Security - In A Box
Lotus Foundations – The Appliance of Collaboration
LotusLive – End-to-end Communication and Collaboration – As A Service

( precise agenda will vary from location to location )

For more details, and a more proper invitation, please see here.

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Switching between chat sessions using Lotus Sametime 8.0

Following on from my "discovery" about tab switching in Firefox, I just discovered that the same trick works for Lotus Sametime e.g. that I can switch between open chat sessions ( I have them "tabbed" down the left-hand side ) using the [Ctrl] [Tab] key sequence.

Woo, keyboards rock - bring back my IBM Enhanced 5250 keyboard with 24 function keys :-)

Thursday, 22 January 2009

Useful Portal URLs

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

"Managing Portal 6.1 Environments" Redbook release

"...The following document (wiki) discusses best practices for building and managing your WebSphere Portal v. 6.1 Environment. High level information is provided about how to
set up a Portal v. 6.1 Environment, including a development, staging and production environment. Within the context of each of these environments, we cover topics related
to how to move changes through the system and successfully manage releases of a Portal 6.1 site..."

It's available on the WebSphere Portal wiki here.

Congratulations to Fernanda Gomes, Carrie Hu, Corinne Letilley, Ivan Portilla, Matthew Stokes and Rahul Vyas for what looks to be a really useful and complete document.

Tuesday, 20 January 2009

More on Notes and Citrix

Following on from my earlier post about Notes and Citrix, there is a new paper on the developerWorks site entitled IBM Lotus Notes 8.0.2 on Citrix XenApp 4.5: A scalability analysis that may be of further interest

I may be able to post more tomorrow ( Wednesday ) once I've attended Brian Gallagher's session ( joint IBM/Citrix ), ID108, here at Lotusphere 2009.

What do bears and hedgehogs have in common with my Thinkpad running Ubuntu ?

They can all hibernate !

I'd not tried hibernation since moving to Linux and, having had so many
problems with suspend/resume ( now sorted since New Year ), I assumed it
wouldn't work.

Oh, me of little faith.

I needed to switch batteries as I was running on empty - ordinarily, I'd
just shut down but, being brave, I hit the Hibernate button.

After 1-2 minutes of disk activity, the Thinkpad appeared to shut down
with all the LEDs being blacked out.

Having switched batteries, I hit the power button, entered my normal
power/disk passwords and saw the Ubuntu splash screen, again as per usual.

After another 1-2 minutes of disk activity, I was presented with the
lock screen, asking for a password, rather than the post-boot
user/password prompt.

Having entered my password, my desktop restored to where I'd left it,
with Notes, Skype, Twitux etc. all running, and the Lotusphere network
reconnected.

Not something I'd use every day ( I rarely did when using Windows ) but
much "cheaper" than a shutdown when power is low ...

Monday, 19 January 2009

Lotusphere 2009

Whilst I find the time and the AC power to create a post summarising my takeaways from the Lotusphere 2009 Opening General Session, please feel free to follow my live tweets from this AM's session, as well as reading the thoughts of the http://lotusphereblog.com/.

Lotus Notes 8 and Citrix

Whilst I'm here at Lotusphere in Orlando, I intend to attend some of the joint Citrix / Notes sessions that are running, as we have a number of customers interested in using this combination to help manage the costs and complexity of a large Notes rollout.

Whilst preparing to depart on Saturday morning, I found this on Ed's blog, which refers to the Lotusphere sessions, but also links to a 40 page PDF relating to Notes 8.0.2 and Citrix XenApp.

Will post more when I know more ...

Friday, 16 January 2009

Global Businesses Choosing Lotus Software; More Than Half of Fortune Global 100 Now Using Lotus Notes/Domino

A nice filip in the news before we depart for Lotusphere 2009

"...

In advance of its annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida next
week, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the number of global Lotus
Notes licenses has reached 145 million, up five million, including
purchases by many industry leaders exchanging Microsoft licenses for
Lotus collaboration software.

Over the past 15 months ending in the third quarter of 2008, more than
12,000 new organizations bought their first Notes/Domino licenses, and
more than half of the Fortune global 100 now use Lotus Notes and Domino.
This includes more than 80 percent of the largest banks, consumer
product, electronics, insurance, pharmaceutical and telecommunications
companies -- as well as more than 50 percent of America's largest 100
companies..."

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0466226.htm

Monday, 12 January 2009

Making sweet music with Lotus Symphony - isn't it nice when stuff just works ...

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Thursday, 8 January 2009

Dilbert and IBM

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

Switching page tabs using Firefox on Ubuntu

Having more or less switched away from Windows to Ubuntu, I was looking for a way to switch between open page tabs on Firefox 3.0.5, having got used to this feature on Windows in the past.

Thanks to this, I've "discovered" that I can use [Ctrl] + [Tab] to cycle through open tabs from left to right, or [Ctrl] + [PgUp] to move left or [Ctrl] + [PgDn] to move right.

Sweet !

"I'm a Mapple person ... we're all Mapple people"

The Family Simpson enjoy the Mapple experience ...

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

I want this ... just for the cute kitten

Ubuntu Kung Fu Tips, Tricks, Hints, and Hacks by Keir Thomas

Monday, 5 January 2009

Curses on social networking :-)

Six months ago, I was a complete n00b when it came to social networking - I'd really only set up this blog back in early 2007 as a way of documenting things that I might someday wish to refer back to - and I frequently do look back.

As an example, I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu earlier today, and referred back to this post to remember how to fix the borked keyboard when running Windows VMware images.

Fast forward to October or November when I joined Facebook after months of gentle encouragement from friends and colleagues including Ray. Then I discovered the completely addictive waste of time that is Twitter, and my "life" went out the window.

Well, today, I'm ashamed to announce that I've found another complete waste of time - Last.FM - and am happily listening to music and artists that I'd almost wiped from my short and longer term memory.

Seriously, life is good, but I can see my (ahem) work-day increasing as I find more things to do that require a network connection.

Now, did someone say that there is an iPod / iPhone application for Last.FM ???

Friday, 2 January 2009

Using Skype on Ubuntu

A few days ago, I struggled to use Skype on Linux to have a conversation with a friend in New Zealand. Before you ask, it wasn't the beer but the audio inputs and outputs on my Thinkpad T60p (2007-AE7).

Today, I re-installed Skype 2.0.0.72 on a clean installation of Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid", and took the time out to document the key points, including how to set up the audio so that I can actually make a call.

Hope this helps.

*UPDATE* And here is the actual document *UPDATE*

Thursday, 1 January 2009

Happy New Year, and it's looking good so far .... suspend and resume ARE working on the T60p, really :-)

Following on from previous posts here and here and here, I was still struggling to get suspend and resume to work reliably on the Thinkpad T60p with Intrepid.

Given that this used to work when I first installed Intrepid in early November, I'm assuming that a recent update has broken something e.g. a new kernel or an updated fglrx driver.

I experimented with various drivers including the supported open-source fglrx driver that comes with Intrepid, the radeon / radeonhd drivers, as well as the most recent fglrx driver from the ATI site here.

Sadly nothing seemed to work and I was becoming resigned to having to shut down and boot up each time I went from home to Starbucks to the office to home to Starbucks ....

Symptom-wise, I could suspend without problems, but would find that the display remained dark on resume. Whilst the PC seemed to be working e.g. [CapsLk] light could be toggled on/off, hard disk appeared to spin when I hit various keys etc. I couldn't get the display to return, and ended up using the power button - which is a less than ideal way of shutting down.

After lots of trial and lots of error ( and lots of Google ), I worked out that: -

(a) the problem related to virtual terminals
(b) that the combination of compiz and fglrx was definitely the root cause ( apart from the aforementioned updates )

I went down a few blind alleys, including playing with /etc/default/acpi-support, removing the chvt command from the resume scripts and using vbetool to toggle the display on.

Happily, after a couple of days of seriously hard work ( thank goodness for coffee ), I managed to find the solution or, to be more honest and accurate, I managed to find the solution that Dave Abrahams had posted here.

Before I post the solution, let me outline my environment: -

Hardware 2007-AE7 IBM Thinkpad T60p OS Ubuntu Linux 8.10 ( Intrepid Ibex ) Kernel 2.6.27-9-generic Graphics ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200 OpenGL 2.1.8087 FireGL Release Driver fglrx 8.54.3 [Oct 10 2008] xorg-driver-fglrx ( 8.543-0ubuntu4 ) Compiz compiz-core 0.7.8-0ubuntu4.1 Fusion compiz-fusion-plugins-main 0.7.8-0ubuntu2.2 Suspend Mode pm-suspend
If it helps, here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well as the listing produced by the sudo lspci -vv command here.

I've validated this solution on three separate Ubuntu environments, including my production build from November 2008, as well as two clean builds over the past two days.

As far as I can understand, the problem is that, during the suspend process, compiz fails to shut down normally and "locks" the virtual terminal on which X runs ( typically this is VT7 ). This does appear to be a BUG #197209 in Ubuntu that, I assume, has been recently introduced in a kernel or module update.

The "solution" or, to more precise, circumvention is use a script ( 00compiz-fglrx ) to kill compiz during the suspend process, and restart it on resume.

A second script ( 50compiz-fglrx-noclear ) is used to stop the Change Foreground Virtual Terminal ( chvt ) command from running until compiz is killed ( to be more specific, it "blacklists" the default /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00clear script from running on resume, thus preventing the chvt command from being run ).

Dave wrote these two scripts: -

/etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

and: -

/etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

These can be downloaded to, say, your home directory and then deployed as follows: -

sudo cp ~/00compiz-fglrx /etc/pm/sleep.d chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx sudo cp ~/50compiz-fglrx-noclear /etc/pm/config.d chmod +x /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

Once deployed, check the file locations, execution bits and permissions as follows: -

ls -al /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

should return: -

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6746 2009-01-01 17:53 /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

and: -

ls -al /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

should return: -

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 182 2009-01-01 17:52 /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

Once you've rebooted, you should be able to suspend and resume without problems.

If needed, you can enable logging on the /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx script by setting a value to the parameter LOG_FILE_NAME e.g. LOG_FILE_NAME='~/suspend.log'.

This newly-created logfile, along with /var/log/pm-suspend.log should help determine the cause of the problem.

Happy Holidays 8-)

A Portal to a Portal