IPhone = Lotus Notes

I my have been drawn to this phone because this wonderful user interface is so similar to the "concentration game" tiles we have been using with Lotus Notes for DECADES.

Photo taken with an LG Vu!

Free the iPhone

I've had an iPhone for less than a week.  Sure it is very cool in many respects, but there is a big butt! Actually, there are a number of big butts, things about which an astute user might be upset.

There are the missing things, like Bluetooth for something other than a stupid earpiece. How about files and such. And MMS - we really need multimedia messaging - it will save the world and get us out of this recession.

And the dumb things that aren't there - like a clipboard. But of course there are good things. The UI, of course. And it works well as a phone. And many other things we expect a phone to do, it does well - play music, calculator, take pictures (this is really not that good), SMS texting, etc., you know, phone things. It is a great phone for those.

Then there are the crazy apps. The vast majority are crappy things - toys for wasting time. I am not a gamer, so I have not evailuated those capabilities (not do I care to). The minority of apps are somewhat useful, or gee-whiz information that is amazing to have so conveniently in your pocket.

I like it, and it can stay. 

The Big Issue

There is something outside of my drivel that is a topic of contention - the freedom for an application developer to create something for the iPhone platform. It seems that Apple is trying very hard to stifle this. If you tried to create a new Mail client, for instance, forget it, Apple won't let you distribute it.

This is wrong. It's un-American. Remember? Freedom? We used to value it. We cannot let corporations or governments dictate our actions like this. We don't have to take this without a fight. Think about it.

Being locked to iTunes is simply silly. Tethering users to a moronic user interface, designed to sell them more stuff is insulting. So it should be obvious that I will be avoiding Apple's proprietary setup. Having a closed system so that something works reliably is OK, but having it so you can control consumer behavior is unacceptable. 

The "Jailbreaking" community seems to have a lot of junk out there too, just like the Apple apps store. I think the only way for Apple to make this ethically right is to reconcile with Jailbreakers and mainstream the process of freeing the platform. From what I've heard, this is another point of view I have taken where I am on the losing side.

Launching Directly into Lotus Notes Applications

Launching Lotus Notes directly into an application is dangerous to workstation stability. To qualify this statement, launches with versions up to 6.5.x were always unstable. I am an ex-Notes developer and a little behind. I am just getting into 8.5.1, but I am not going to retest this behavior until 8.5.1 is completely rolled out (and the need arises).

There are a number of ways to do launches directly - .lnk files, shortcuts into a document, the Notes://ServerName/Directory/DatabaseName.nsf format embedded in HTML. All of these work. Sometimes. For a while. If everything works out OK. But they will consistently fail and cause Notes to crash. 

It would be great for a Notes guru, who somehow still cared about version 6.5, etc., to come along and tell me I am wrong. I welcome that. If anybody has had good experiences with Notes launches, let me know.

A little history: we use the Lotus Notes email platform because of it's ability to handle many terabytes of mail. It has aways been the most scalable and secure mail product. I have worked with Notes as an application platform since version 3 (1993), and it has always been one of my favorites. We put a moratorium on new Notes apps several years back. I was fortunate to have been assigned to creating our SharePoint environment, starting in 2005. 

Along the way, there have been several attempts at links like this, and they have always failed. Also keep in mind that we work in a fairly well controlled environment - standardized desktop and server setups, etc., and it still always fails. I am not anxious to try this again with Notes 8x, but I guess that will be necessary at some point.

Easy Way How to Find SharePoint Subsite Size

Revision: All the following was fine and dandy for SP 2007, and maybe if you don't have access to Powershell. If you do, just do this:

$used = (Get-SPSiteAdministration -Identity ).DiskUsed

$used

_______________________________

I was looking for a GOOD way to find out the size of subsites. It seems a lot of people are struggling with this. You could try SharePoint Designer. That's fun. When you ask it site properties, it will give you a different answer depending on what document libraries or lists you touched. Obviously that is not going to be reliable.

I'll cut to the chase (although I was trying to be as wordy as possible). This isn't a GOOD way, but it is a very simple way: 

• open the site in Windows Explorer
• navigate to the root of the site or subsite in question
• right click, properties

That may be a little resource intensive - it takes a while to open. I think it may have to open a lot more than it appears just to get you that number, but there it is in the properties window. Piece of cake.

Post Script: http://www.codeplex.com/SPUsedSpaceInfo is a console app to get a CSV listing of sites and their size. Beware that the setup is pretty heavy handed - a Dotnet 3.5 SP1 installation starts right up if you aren't there already. 

Time Zones and Site Templates in SharePoint

This little problem had blog entry written all over it. We use a site template created in the SharePoint user interface (not Visual Studio) in several farms. Maybe we should stop that practice as it is starting to slow us down, but that's how it is currently deployed. 

Besides being a pain because the template needs to be re-saved in each site collection in order for our stuff to work right, we also have to do it to set the regional settings because:

• When you save a site template in the SharePoint GUI, it saves the regional settings in the template.
  

Use this to your advantage!

See also my blog entry about how simple and straight forward time zone issues are in SharePoint: http://bobklass.blogspot.com/2008/06/regional-settings-are-simple.html.

Robert Gordon and Chris Spedding at the Beachland

I have been going around saying that there weren't enough shows going on in Cleveland this winter, but maybe all I had to do was open my eyes. I nearly missed a great one this Saturday at the Beachland. Robert Gordon and Chris Spedding are so important to Rockabilly and yet I almost missed it.

Once I realized I was going to go to this I started getting psyched by playing the only two things I had of Roberts - the first Link Wray thing (on vinyl, of course) and a King Biscuit of the two of them from the late seventies. By showtime I was ready.

With no opener, the "7:30 doors/8:30 show" didn't start until after 9:30. I got there 8ish (it was a nasty weather evening, as they all have been - snow and ice and cold) and got a seat right by the mixing desk. Schoolboy was there with his Zoom H2 just sitting on the table in the little acoustically transparent black bag that comes with the Zoom. That worked out just fine for the whole evening.

This rockabilly revival with a brit twist (Chris) worked beautifully. Robert did a set, Chris did a nice set in the middle (doing fine vocals, tasty guitar, etc.) and then Robert did another set. The band was just Robert and Chris with a bass plus drums rhythm section (electric bass only, and I was a little disappointed in that). The band was well rehearsed - they do a great show.

The Beachland crowd was a lively one. Mixed ages in the 25-60 range - I would say average in the 40's, though. After the show I met with Robert and Chris. They were very gracious, but Chris seemed pretty tired. 

Schoolboy's recording is outstanding - easily the best Beachland recording I have heard. The Zoom did well. At 24 bit 96 kHz, the show took up around 3.7 GB. That high resolution gives it a smooth sound and the great mic capsules in the Zoom perform well. Nice!

Indians Depth Chart - I Hope This Is Better Than It Looks

I got a little depressed today as I was reading about the trade for Mark DeRosa. That seems to have been a good trade - he must either be expensive or not have a lot of time left on his contract, because they gave up very little for a good player.

This is the depressing part - the depth chart: http://cleveland.indians.mlb.com/team/depth_chart/index.jsp?c_id=cle. It doesn't feel like a championship team. It doesn't feel like a contender. I hope that changes. I have followed Indians baseball as a fan since I was a kid. It's always fun, even if they aren't very good, but right now there doesn't seem like there is enough there to make it fun.

The pitching depth is very questionable. Almost every position is questionable. Centerfield and catcher are pretty well covered. Hopefully I will gain confidence in these guys as they show up in their new spring training site. 

Cannot Move Web Parts on Page

This simple little issue has cropped up at least twice in our environment. Most recently it happened because we started using a new alternate access mapping. Previously we encountered it when migrating from IE 6 to IE 7.

The Javascript needed for editing pages (and other stuff, no doubt) cannot run without adequate browser security. Check that the site is included in Trusted Sites or the Intranet Zone and that your policies (for the zone for the specific browser version) enable scripting. 

Migrating Content Databases from RTM to SP1

We did a migration, copying a content database from an RTM farm with a SQL 2000 back end in North America to an SP1 farm (no infrastructure update) with a SQL 2005 back end in Europe (and another in Asia) in order to give a starting point for replication (using a certain major replication software).

It was easy. We restored a backup of to the new database server. It's now a SQL 2005 database. If you try to simply attach this database to the SP1 farm in the Central Admin GUI, when you browse to it you will get an error with a useless link to a Microsoft site (that's what we got). 

To make it work, with the database not attached, we ran:

Stsadm.exe -o addcontentdb -url -databasename

If you want to check the database version, you can run:

SELECT * FROM Versions

There is a nice table of the database versions here http://blogs.msdn.com/shaden/archive/2008/01/10/migrated-to-sp1-checking-your-database-schema-version.aspx. You are looking for 12.0.0.4518 for RTM, 12.0.0.6219 for SP1. You can see the rest of the database versions in the post linked above.

Where's my Easy button? I hope this is really as good as it looks.

Live Recording with the Zoom H2

See also Part 2

For the casual (low budget) recorder (previously know as "tapers"), if you wanted top quality and the ability to record concerts lasting many hours, the iRiver H120 was a great way to go. I like to think I was on the forefront of the iRiver-for-tapers movement, and helped promote using these great devices for recording concerts. You see them a lot these days.

For the uninitiated, the iRiver was a brickish iPod-like device with a little hard drive and great DSP stuff. It even had digital ins and outs. The Rockbox project adopted it and created some great software for it. I started using mine for shows in January 2006. I later bought an H320 too and Dale has been using that one. 

I hate to come out and publicize it. It may impact the resale value of the iRivers. But here goes: the Zoom H2 can be had for about the same money as good second-hand iRivers (iRivers in questionable condition are fairly cheap, though). The H2 can do a lot more. Most significantly, the H2 has built in mics that aren't bad and it is 24 bit.

I have done only one concert with the H2, so if you were expecting the definitive guide to recording with this device, come back in a few months. What I have found so far, though, is that the thing sounds good. The mic capsules inside the H2 are pretty good (there are four of them, read about it here).  The electronics do a good job of capturing that decent sound and digitizing it,  and the user interface beats Rockbox.

The H2 has two cool mounting options - a regular camera tripod thread, or a mic-holder/mic stand adapter (which I used with a regular boom. It has a volume control range that worked well for a very loud live venue. Functionally, it gets high marks for out-in-the-open taping. For less overt recording, it may have it's drawbacks, but the H120 with Rockbox also leaves much to be desired for clandestine taping.

As for the show I chose as my first with the H2 (I didn't really choose it, the H2 I ordered arrived two days before the show, so I took it), to be kind, it was memorable. It was the third or fourth time I went to the Jigsaw Saloon and Stage's Thanksgiving eve show. The place is always packed, and that always makes it fun. The sound in there is always WAY too loud. The bass bins on their main stacks are way too big for the venue - a lot like the Beachland Ballroom used to be. 

Since I didn't have my 16GB memory card that I'd ordered (I only had a 2GB card) I could only get 59 minutes at 96 kHz 24 bit, so I decided I would only record the Lords of the Highway. It turns out they got stuck all the way at the end of the bill, so I had to listen to the other 5 or 6 bands they put on first. I didn't like any of them, except for Uncle Scratch (always fun) and the Whiskey Daredevils. I had seen them before, but not with their new guitar player, Gary Popcorn (Siperko?). That guy could really play and it made the entire evening worthwhile. I just wish that I had recorded their set. I stopped him (Gary) and told him how much I enjoyed his playing at least three times.

The Lords got on stage about 1:30 and started playing about 1:32 after the crappiest two minute sound check I ever heard. It was their first Cleveland show with new bassist, Jimbo, so of course all of us fans (those who were left) were enthusiastic. Overall, though, it was too short. Insultingly, the sound guys shut off the PA in the middle of a song at 2 AM. Need I say more?

New Look for BobKlass.Info

I am a copycat. Scott recently added new theming and functionality to mylifeinaminute.com and it prompted me to look at some alternatives. After two or three minutes of shallow thought, a new theme was selected.

It looks and works better for me on my new studio monitor in 1920x1200 (yes, it's the month long Black Friday celebration when new gear finds its' way into my setup).

Prophylactic Reboots of SharePoint Servers

Up front, I will admit that I've always been a fan of prophylactic reboots of servers. Any servers. In the NT4 world, weekly. In the Solaris world, monthly. And in the Windows Server 2003 world, monthly. But things are not always equal, and SharePoint is a huge wild card.

WSS/MOSS 2007 causes IIS some heavy duty pain. Put it up, leave it up, and eventually, it will die. We've all seen it, and I'll bet those of you who are lucky enough to run SP1 or other patched up  systems have seen it too. Hopefully we will get all patched up soon too, but I don't expect that to make things perfect.

The unexpected crashes of IIS seemed to do the most damage to the indexing process. The indexer itself can take a hit and stop functioning (you probably will see a lot of junk in the event logs) or the web front ends it is trying to use might unexpectedly crash. We got slightly toasted (not quite burned) by this several times.

Since we started rebooting the farm Saturday night (before Sunday's full crawl), things have been better (I would hate to say perfect, but it has been perfect).

I know that server folks don't like prophylactic reboots. They really would rather address the problem, but since some of what ails SharePoint servers are real bugs, memory leaks, etc., this kind of thinking has to give way to good, old fashioned, weekly reboots.

Halloween Psychobilly Party to Remember

Some of my friends call psychobilly "halloween rock." This seems especially appropriate when that season rolls around. Last Friday's show was a special kind of party because it marked the last Lords of the Highway show with Sugar on bass. 

Lords fans are like a family (a family that likes to party!) We turned out in big numbers since this was a special occasion. Crazy people, some in crazy costumes. 

The Music

The Slackjawed Yokels, Horror of 59 and Lords of the Highway were on the bill. The Yokels reunion sounded great and was a blast. I've seen Horror of 59 a couple times before. Since Sugar will be in the band from here on out, I will give them more attention. The Lords gave one of best performances (out of how many have I seen?? - It feels like maybe 50?? but probably less).

The Recording

Bob and Dale Boots had the recording rigs going pretty well (Keith the taper was there with his too). We got a feed off the soundboard to one iRiver and another room microphone up high on a mic stand to another iRiver. We haven't combined them yet, but it should make a great surround mix.

The Photos

I almost didn't bring a camera. I wish I could capture a night like this on video, but the Beachland Tavern is just too darn dark. I grabbed my old Cannon and had it in my back pocket most of the night. That's what you see above. I have Dale's pics on a different computer and maybe I'll post those too. He got some good shots.

The Beer

If the Beachland didn't make a killing that night somebody robbed them. It was flowing. I must criticize the bad Great Lakes on tap (I think it was Dortmunder, but it tasted like soap). I got it early in the evening (early was around 10:30 and my complaint was not answered with a free one as it should have been). I switched to other stuff, and had plenty! It was a good time for all.

I Wish I Took This Advice ...

... then, as the man says, you couldn't blame me for any of the mess!

Do what you like today. I voted absentee a few weeks back. At least I could tune out most of the garbage that flies through the air during election time.

This Is No Way to Promote Tourism

How about extreme nasty tours. The weather is Cleveland is turning sour. It should stay that way for a while. Tourists are now few and far between. But it's not so bad that one can't enjoy a brisk walk by the sea shore!

Beats me where the audio went on this, but just think shwwwwwwwwew ...

and a little rock and roll at the end.

I Verse Uverse, We All Verse

Ma Ma Ma Belle! I'm not sure what the AT+T breakup was really all about in the first place, since so much of it came back together. Once upon a time there really was very little competition in the U.S. in most of what was then the telephone business, but look what it is now. AT+T has a few competitors, but it has huge market share in so many of today's (much broader) communications markets.

They now have all of my personal communications. And long before even cell phones, in the early days of home Internet service, I was wishing for a single provider to sell it all to me. Somehow I now wake up in the middle of the night and it has happened (it could be because I missed one of my Lyrica pills, though, because my skin also feels like it's peeling off).

My TV, home phone, cell phone, and Internet are all from the same provider. AT+T Uverse was the latest addition to this pile, with television and Internet services. So, what's it like? It certainly is impressive to look at the router config screen and see that 25 megabits of IP are coming into my house.  I haven't had the service long enough to say much about reliability. 

There definitely are limits to what it can do. I am supposed to have 6 mbit down and 1 mbit up of Internet. This seems to be rock solid, unlike the cable TV provider, which felt inconsistent. Cable was supposed to be faster on the down side, but it seemed to be spotty. On the TV side, yesterday we were recording two HD programs and watching one regular program in one room. When I tried to tune to an HD channel in another room, it said it could not (sorry, Dave). I can live with that (I watched a different, recorded HD program).

We bought the whole bevy of channels - 341. There are maybe 10 more HD channels than we had with cable (48, I think). It comes with a DVR you can access from other sets (or even control over the Internet). It can record 4 programs at once, two HD. American HD is a lot of data - 1920x1080 - so that's pretty impressive. Although we usually are not technologically deprived, we didn't have a DVR before this. It a keeper, something we can't do without. Pausing live TV. Gotta have it.

As a quality freak (but really only an expert on the audio side), I was concerned about excessive compression on the HD cable channels. With cable, you could see lots of artifacts if you looked at where subtle gradations of color were supposed to be. Uverse was supposed to be better, using MP4 compression. I don't think it holds up very well under close scrutiny either, though. Color gradations seem less blotchy, but animation of things like background colors is jumpy. Only a picky person would notice, and I would need side by side installations to give a more accurate account. And that ain't going to happen.

So, I am happy, but I won't save any money (not much, anyway) and the difference in the amount of service we are getting is negligible.

"Route 66" on WRUW

Eclectic. To me, that's always a positive word. I suppose there may be some things eclectic that I would want to avoid, but I'm not sure what they would be.

The term is perfect for describing a radio show I have been enjoying the last few years. It is inexplicably called "Route 66." You can find this show on WRUW 91.1 FM in Cleveland or http://www.wruw.org/ every Wednesday from 9:00 A.M. to Noon.

Your DJ Carl's shows normally cover multiple genres, often within one set. It is always fresh and heartfelt programming. And eclectic. Not to the point of obscurity, but in range. You can get everything from jam bands to punk rock, classic rock, any form of jazz, world music, odd imports. Nothing is off limits (although I'm not sure I've ever heard him delve into any orchestra music).  All mixed up and presented with a curious thread. 

You can check out some older shows as well: http://www.wruw.org/guide/show.php?show_id=163

Carl - for that dip into orchestra music that I think you should feel challenged to make, rather than the usual 19th century longhairs, maybe some Moondog would work.

Happy Birthday John Lennon

John Winston Ono Lennon

9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980

---

... and an early happy 72nd birthday to Bill Wyman (October 24, 1936). This is a picture of me with Bill a few years back. It was at a book signing at the Rock Hall. I was standing with a few other people waiting for Bill and didn't realize that I was standing almost right next to Gary Brooker ("Whiter Shade of Pale").

Relative URL's In a SharePoint Masterpage

I've mentioned that I hate branding, right? It is kind of nice, though, when you get it right. I've had some recent little successes that have made me happy. Or it may be the Lyrica I've been on for the past month that keeps me happy (nice drug).

OK, so while you are out there messing with masterpages, you might want to add a static URL link that goes to the current site. Here's mine that worked so nicely:

NavigateUrl="$SPUrl:~Site/../Search.aspx"

Text="Metadata Search "

Target="_new"

runat="server" CssClass="ms-SPLinkButtonInActive" Font-Size="XX-Small"/>

               

"$SPUrl:~Site/../Search.aspx" goes to a page saved at the root of the subsite. Naturally, you could specify a path into the subsite as well.

There also was a significant amount of pain that went into the meticulous placement on the masterpage. I'm not sure if I am satisfied with the way I did that. We'll see when I roll it to the QA and production environments. It is pretty! Likewise, I'm still debating on the actual location of that file, etc., but in the mean time, you've got your relative URL.

Adding a "Fake" Item to the Views Dropdown

I recently built some demos using Bamboo Solution's fantastic "List Search Advanced" web part. I called it "Metadata Search" since that's what it really is - a search on any of the columns (but not documents in a library). We needed to have a search limited to individual lists but we couldn't use the out of the box Advanced Search web part because it needs a defined scope.  We have too many subsites (Microsoft recommends no more that 200 scopes, or something like that). We could have tried to roll our own, but Bamboo Solutions to the rescue! Highly recommended.

The primary use of the Bamboo search web part will be from a special search page that I will add to the site template. In looking for other ways to incorporate it, I came up with something interesting. I created a view called "search."  It didn't matter what was on the view because I hid it.

Then I edited the web part page and hid the view web part (in the Layout section). It is now a web part page which shows in the view drop down, and I can add web parts to it. I added the Bamboo Solutions search web part, but it could be anything. Instructions, maybe.

Do not remove the list view web part from the page. If you do, the page will no longer show in the drop down. You may then need to delete it with SharePoint Designer.

The users turned down my idea, but it's still a nifty (stupid) SharePoint trick that I'm sure I will use someday.