TuxGuitar

TuxGuitar is a programme to transcribe music for the guitar.
There are versions for Linux, Mac and Windows available for download - and I think it's worth investigating as according to the website it does the following...

With TuxGuitar, you will be able to compose music using the following features

• 
  Tablature editor
  
• 
  Score Viewer
  
• 
  Multitrack display
  
• 
  Autoscroll while playing
  
• 
  Note duration management
  
• 
  Various effects (bend, slide, vibrato, hammer-on/pull-off)
  
• 
  Support for triplets (5,6,7,9,10,11,12)
  
• 
  Repeat open and close
  
• 
  Time signature management
  
• 
  Tempo management
  
• 
  Imports and exports gp3,gp4 and gp5 files
  

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Getting to the websphere Admin console

I set-up a Domino 8 and Sametime 8 server, then I installed Quickr 8 (portal) on the same box.
After securing the Quickr to the Domino ldap - I needed to get access to the Websphere console to export the SSO keys in order to import them to Domino and get SSO working.

The deafault url for the Websphere admin from Portal or Quickr is http://hostname:10027/admin
Ever since this port changed from Portal 5, I have to think about it every time.

One day i will remember it.

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RSS Reader - Newzie

Quickr and Connections have an untold number of rss feeds enabled to allow people to access content from other apps. Due to the large number of feeds i was following I needed a decent rss feedreader.

Newzie is the latest one I've tried an it seems to be quite good.
It's quite pretty to look at - I may be a bit shallow there.

Flock

I've been trying out the firefox based Flock browser - In short...it's very good.

It hooks up to several social networking sites, which is a major use as there can be so many of them. One thing I'd like to see added is support for the Google OpenSocial type networks network.

There's an opportunity for someone to create an extension to Lotus Connections as well

Blogged with Flock

Lotus Notes 8 - importing RSS feeds from OPML

If you use RSS feeds to follow various news sites you will probably end up using an RSS feedreader of some description. If you are an expert in your field then it's good to be able to share your RSS feeds with colleagues so they can learn fro the same sources.

The OPML file format is used to transfer RSS feeds between readers.
Lotus Notes 8 has an RSS feedreader, however there is no obvious method to load an OMPL file.

When you load the Notes 8 RSS feedreader for the first time there is a button to "subscribe to preset feeds". This actually does load an OPML file called "presetfeeds.opml". This file is held in the C:\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\extras directory .

Just rename your new OPML file to presetfeeds.opml, place it in the C:\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\extras directory, (after you've backed up the original of course), and click the "subscribe to preset feeds" button. All your new feeds should appear.

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Musicmesh

Musicmesh is a pretty good site that allows you to search for an artist and navigate around to different similar artists. When you select a CD cover the track listing is displayed to one side and if you click on a track the relevant video plays from YouTube.

KeyJNote

I've been feeling envious of a few colleagues with apple macbooks lately. They are simply stunning to see and use. My old windows laptop seems like a poor unfit cousin by comparison. Seeing Keynote running on the Mac is an experience.

Well.... there is something called KeyJnote.

Keynote displays your presentation once it has been saved as a pdf.
They quality of the images and transitions onscreen is really pleasant to look at and blows away ppt and simpress.

The best part is being able to highlight a section and then zoom into it, and using TAB to find the slide you want, and of course the cool effects.

The downside --- it runs from the command line on windows...
"keyjnote.exe my.pdf".

Don't let that stop you - it's really worth the effort. Or of course - go buy a macbook.

Expanding the size of a VMWare disk

My friend Neil needed to expand the size of a VMWare disk from 10GB to 20GB.
Initially the idea was to rebuild the VM image, however there had to be a workaround.

We found it "here"

As the disk was the system disk we needed to follow the special instructions in the comments. "To do the system disk you will ned a second virtual machine. Mount the System disk on another virtual machine and a second disk, run diskpart on the disk and then shutdown the machine. No start up the original machine and voila you now have a larger system disk."

Bless those MCPs.

How to hide a factory

I watched a documentary a couple of years ago where they showed how the british army used a stage illusionist to hide artillery in plain sight in fields on the south coast of england during WWII.

The results were impressive.

This is better

How to hide an entire factory

Organisational Heirarchy in Portal server

I setup a portal server connected to Domino for ldap and did all the usual configuration.

I created a few test users in Domino and added their managers name into the Work section of their person doc. In the people finder portlet I searched for each user and viewed where the sat in the Organisational hierarchy. The portlet then drew the organisations tree structure as requested.

Later a colleague imported a lot of test users when he installed the ActiveInsight applcation. I could search for these users and view the results as before, however they did not appear in the organisation hierarchy. You could not see who managed which employee.

I tried reloading ldap and restarting the portal server to no effect.

I also a few person docs to clear out and reload the manager field details. This worked - the users appeared as direct reports of their manager.

However it turned out that after investigation and a lot of experimentation that i just needed to make an edit of each users person doc, not even to change anything - just to touch the doc. I found a quick way to do this was to slect all users and run the agent "Upgrade to More Secure Internet Password".

Now I can see the entire company hierarchy in people finder.

I could easily have wasted a lot of time on this.

Cool train stunt - engineering

It's amazing what kids can do these days
==> Trains

Facebook

I never saw the point in facebook.
However I signed up to check it out - just to keep someone quiet.

Pretty dull.

Then someone contacted me... and I contacted someone else...
and it really started.

it's fun

Lotus Quickr Templates

The Snapps team have completed and published the new templates for Lotus Quickr services for Domino.

You can register for, and download these superb open source apps from http://QuickrTemplates.com

Well done Rob, Viktor and team

3D Mailbox... joke ?

I really hope this is a joke
http://www.3dmailbox.com
The thought is disturbing - then there's the video.



Well, maybe it's better than outlook

Notes 8 composite apps - the easy way

One of the main features of Notes 8 is the composite applications. This allows mutliple apps, not all Notes apps, to be combined together as a mashup and delivered as a single application to the Notes desktop.

If you'd like to setup a good demo - have a look in the sandbox.
Sandbox - composite app

The app is based upon sales lead management. There is no development required to get this up and running. Just follow the included instructions.

When placing some of the files in the Notes data directory the instruction is to place the files in the root data directory - I chose to place the files in a subdirectory such as notes\data\compapp

A nice demo.

The BBC have an article discussing how there is an issue with older Word documents becoming harder to read as older versions of Windows and Office are made obsolete.
Here's the accompanying movie.



Lovely - so the solution appears to be that the BBC demonstrate how cool Vista looks as opposed to older versions and then proceeds to demonstrate the need to use MS Virtual PC in conjunction with an ever increasing selection of Virtual PC images just to read a text document. Have they heard of Heath Robinson?

Of course - if you really want to be able to read some important documents after a decade or two - you could choose ODF, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Lotus Notes 8, Neo Office, etc....who mentioned license fee?

Need some email?

Ok, so there used to be discussions about Exchange vs Domino for email.
Anyone educated in the debate understood that Domino gave secure distributed applications and also did email as a very good aside.

So.. if you just need email..not applications.. try Zimbra

Here's a good writeup

upgrading Ubuntu from 6.10 to 7.04

I've been using Ubuntu 6.10 for a while and thought it was about time to upgrade to 7.04.

I opened the terminal and typed.... gksu "update-manage -c". This brought up the update manager dialog box with the button to upgrdae to the nextr version of Ubuntu. I clicked the button and the upgrdae promptly failed. In the terminal window there was a message regarding "GnuPG exited non-zero, with code 131072".

This basically means that Ubuntu is trying to ensure that the downloads it wants to grab are really the right ones - it does this by checking the PGP keys against a signature - and cannot find any PGP setup on the local machine.

The fix is to run "pgp" in the terminal. Once PGP states "Go ahead and type your message" press Ctrl-C to break out and re-run the update manager with - gksu "update-manage -c".

Click the button and all should be well (as long as you've made a backup of course)

Navigating around Notes8

I found a couple of useful shortcuts when using the Notes 8 client (beta 3).

Try Ctrl + F7 - this opens a quick navigation menu of the open Notes panels.

and...

Try Ctrl + F8 - which opens a quick navigation menu of the open Notes tabs.

Cheers

Safari Browser on windows

So Apple released their Safari browser on the Windows platform. After a little testing it appears to be really fast. Really fast.

i like it a lot, the question is as i move more and more towards Linux desktop - will it appear there?
At first look Internet Explorer is such as poor relation to this browser.

Firefox is still top in my opinion as it works for me on Windows and Linux - however If Safari does appear on Linux I'll be faced with a new choice. Maybe Firefox needs to go on a diet.

Choice is good.

How NOT to use Powerpoint

Presenting is an art, some people are good at it, some are not, everyone could do with a little improvement.

I've believed for a long time that you should be able to describe your topic verbally, or with pen and paper, before anyone lets you loose with a multimedia presentation.

Lately, when provided with a presentation to deliver,(using either Notes 8 or OpenOffice), I have taken to removing slides with too much content or without a simple graphic. Really keep it simple.

The video below is a classic, funny sketch that is well worth watching.

http://www.davidairey.com/how-not-to-use-powerpoint

Quickr online presentations

Although Quickr there is not a publicly available demonstration server for Quickr just yet... there are a few online demonstration movies or screencams available.

Luis Suarez has made one available online here , and offline here.

Additionally Rob Novak and his team are responsible for some amazing free (open source?) templates for Quickr which provide a load of really cool functionality. A couple of them are demonstrated online, namely the QPresent and QPhotos.

Further online demos of Lotus software are available here, including Notes 8, Quickr, ActiveInsight, Domain Monitoring, and DWA.

something for all the family

Off topic again

This UK history is quite similar to the universe scale - and is superb
uk history timeline

Whereas this site shows Paris as a Roman city.

Migrating notes apps to Linux desktop

Once I had setup Notes 8 on Linux using the new Open client - the next step was to copy across the multiple nsf that I had on my windows Notes client.

I simply copied them across using a usb disk drive.

Once they were safely on my Linux disk I ran "chmod 664 *.nsf" in a terminal to set the permissions correctly

Nicely done

Quickr

Working with Some of the new software - experimentation time.
For anyone with a Domino background, this is easy.

Very Cool

Sametime 7.5.1

The new version of Sametime has been released.
There are plenty of reasons to upgrade - most of which are listed here.

Linux server support is the main feature I've been waiting for, however point to point video should be fun to demo.

Funnily enough - one of the new features is out of the box support for Outlook.

Pretty good.

Domino 8 Linux issues - resolved

I had a couple of issues setting up the Domino 8 beta server on Linux.

Firstly – when installing the server, do not select to create the symbolic link – softlink if you are installing into the default locations.

Also I had the usual problem where xwindows could not display the setup program. The error was

“Please edit your shell's DISPLAY environment variable to
reflect an unlocked terminal that you would like to launch
the Domino Setup Program”
The fix was to su to root and run the command /usr/X11R6/bin/xhost this sets security to let the machine export the display on it's own screen
then as the “notes” user run...
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY

Once this is done cd to the /local/notesdata directory and run /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server to start the setup program.

searching IBM software support - the easy way

The IBM software support web is full of usefull info and technotes, most admin and developers refer to it regularly. However it's not the easiest site in the world to navigate.

For years I have been searching the site through google by specifying site:ibm.com in the search box. I wish i could remember where I picked this link up from - however....

In the google search box try entering the text below...

sametime site:ibm.com/support/docview.wss

alternatively just click this link

Red Hat SLED 10 on a t60p

The latest (beta of course) version of the IBM Open Client is based upon RHEL 5.
The intention is to get the OS instaled with Notes 8, VMware and the VPN client Lotus Mobile Connect (WECM).
Even though this is all still in beta I've decided it's likely my best option for my T60p.

That was a short lived idea, SLED 10 seems like a much better idea at this stage for this setup - rather than a manipulated build of the rhel 5 beta . Installed like a dream and already has Notes 8 and vmware up and running.

Universescale

This is way off topic... but so good

Universcale

Once it loads you can navigate the ruler along the bottom

Sametime 7.5.1 - Linux Server

Finally - my demo server systems are going to be 100% linux.
The clients are going to have click to start web conferences too on Linux and mac.

Good stuff

Notes 8 beta 2 on Ubuntu

Alan Bell, http://dominux.co.uk explained how to enable the installation of Notes 8 on Ubuntu.
Basically the installer requires bash rather than dash. To do this as Alan explained...
start a terminal session, and...

cd /bin
ls -l sh
this should show sh -> dash
sudo rm sh
sudo ln -s bash sh
ls -l sh
this should now show sh -> dash

Download the installer for Notes8 beta 2 for Linux from IBM and extract the archive by running...
tar -xvf notes8standard_linux_beta2_np.tar

Once this has been successfully completed you can run the Notes8beta installer by running ./setup.bin

From this point onwards the intsallation if basically the same as on the Windows platform.
After installation the client can be started by running ./notes from inside the clients directory.

I found that I had to exit the client and restart it to successfully get up and running.

Free Web Conferencing

www.yugma.com looks pretty good.
It's a free (no cost) web conferencing tool for 10 people and works on Mac as well as windows.

Apparently they also have a tool called LetsPowwow which is available on Linux

Sametime 7.5 works in conjunction with Cisco IP Telephones.
I got it to connect up with the Cisco Call Manager and Presence Server - although the cisco side of things did seem a little trick to myself - it seemed simple enough to one of their technical guys