While working on our Sox projects I was emailing spreadsheets around. To help track progress I "traffic lighted" certain cells: Green for no problem, yellow when I was waiting for someone, and red when I had to do something myself. I was using Excel 2007, but those receiving my spreadsheets were using Excel 2003. Every time I saved the file, Excel 2007 would wand me about a minor loss of fidelity but I paid little attention. That was until one user complained that there were no green cells on the spreadsheet – only yellow.
Now I must admit to being color deficient (or partially color blind). So when I chose green for the cells, it was a bit of a yellowish green. And when Excell saved my spreadsheet in 2003 format, it changed these green cells to bright yellow! My guess is that the 2007 version of the program uses 24 bit color (like a photo), whereas the 2003 version uses only 8 bit color (like a gif file). And when the 24 bit color was downgraded to 8 bit, the yellow green was changed to bright yellow – totally altering the meaning!
So beware when using Office 2007 and 2003 products in a mixed environment. Things can bite you if you are not careful.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
In a recent Network World article IT Managers are warned against buying consumer class laptops. The logic implied is that higher prices mean better quality systems. Unfortunately my experience shows that paying more money by no means guarantees that you will get better systems.
In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.
Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).
With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.
Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.
Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).
With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.
Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Sox (Sarbanes Oxley)
Today marks the end of a Sarbanes Oxley (Sox) project which has been consuming much of my time for months. My responsibility was getting the IT part of the company Sox compliant, and I'm pleased to say that after tying up a few loose ends the auditors gave us 100%. Considering that six months ago there was nothing in place, this leaves me feeling satisfied.
If there ever was something that cries out for tools like Lotus Notes or even SharePoint it is Sox. However, because of previous history and the consultants we were using, we ended up using the classic word doc, spreadsheet and email approach with a lot of cutting and pasting. This approach is very popular in many companies, but in reality is a very manual method. You often find it used for project management as well.
Spreadsheets track progress and summarize document content, and a significant part of the work consists of keeping them up to date. The core of Sox is developing policies and procedures (summarized in those spreadsheets), and then providing evidence that you are following you procedures. Fortunately most of these policies and procedures are well understood, but customizing them for a company involves emailing copies back and forth. Some of the documentation references other parts, and manually keeping this in sync is difficult to say the least. As I have said before it is impossible to keep any non trivial collection of documents in sync manually. And Sox certainly qualifies as a non trivial document collection. Is it any wonder that mail stores grow so fast with this approach? What really puzzles me is why some companies use such manual and inefficient methods to manage a particular process.
Now consider doing this using a workflow enabled tool like Notes or SharePoint. All the emailing of documents back and forth is no longer required. Audit trails show changes to documentation. And different views of those documents provided automatically updated summaries that replace the spreadsheets. Once you have such a system or tool in place my gut feel is that you will cut the work load by about 50%.
Which leaves the question – why is the "cut & paste" method so popular amongst IT professionals? We talk so much about collaboration, but we don’t practice it. Maybe we need read a book like Flawed Advice and the Management Trap and then take a good hard look in the mirror.
If there ever was something that cries out for tools like Lotus Notes or even SharePoint it is Sox. However, because of previous history and the consultants we were using, we ended up using the classic word doc, spreadsheet and email approach with a lot of cutting and pasting. This approach is very popular in many companies, but in reality is a very manual method. You often find it used for project management as well.
Spreadsheets track progress and summarize document content, and a significant part of the work consists of keeping them up to date. The core of Sox is developing policies and procedures (summarized in those spreadsheets), and then providing evidence that you are following you procedures. Fortunately most of these policies and procedures are well understood, but customizing them for a company involves emailing copies back and forth. Some of the documentation references other parts, and manually keeping this in sync is difficult to say the least. As I have said before it is impossible to keep any non trivial collection of documents in sync manually. And Sox certainly qualifies as a non trivial document collection. Is it any wonder that mail stores grow so fast with this approach? What really puzzles me is why some companies use such manual and inefficient methods to manage a particular process.
Now consider doing this using a workflow enabled tool like Notes or SharePoint. All the emailing of documents back and forth is no longer required. Audit trails show changes to documentation. And different views of those documents provided automatically updated summaries that replace the spreadsheets. Once you have such a system or tool in place my gut feel is that you will cut the work load by about 50%.
Which leaves the question – why is the "cut & paste" method so popular amongst IT professionals? We talk so much about collaboration, but we don’t practice it. Maybe we need read a book like Flawed Advice and the Management Trap and then take a good hard look in the mirror.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Web Serendipity
Sometimes you can find gold nuggets in the rough. The nice thing about the web is that you can share these nuggets and everybody can benefit. Let me tell you about two that I have found recently. I enjoy travel and photography, and the web is an ideal way to make armchair visits around the globe. Unfortunately most web sites describing places are worse than useless: pictures scarcely larger than postage stamps, often lots of adds, and little useful information.
Enter Flickr and Wikipedia.
While reading an article on the BBC website about Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, I was fascinated by the stone carvings. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC web site were too small. Now, one thing I have noticed is how useful Flickr and Wikipedia are when you want to see travel pictures of a place. Look up Rosslyn Chapel on Flickr and you will see lots of pictures taken by several people. Many of these are full resolution 2000 pixels across or larger. So if you want to look around at almost any place on the globe, just enter that name in Flickr. Most of the time you will find somebody has posted some pictures about that place, and those pictures will often give you a far better idea about the place that any tourist or commercial web site can do.
Recently an opportunity to visit the east shore in Maryland came up, and a friend suggested St Michael's as a destination. Googled web sites on St Michael's had little of interest. Then I tried St Michaels in Wikipedia - what a difference. One of the really great things about Wikipedia is that most of the pictures include links to full size images.
I don't think that using Flickr and Wikipedia as travel resources was something that could have been foreseen. But these are good examples of quite unexpected serendipitous benefits that sometimes surface.
Enter Flickr and Wikipedia.
While reading an article on the BBC website about Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, I was fascinated by the stone carvings. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC web site were too small. Now, one thing I have noticed is how useful Flickr and Wikipedia are when you want to see travel pictures of a place. Look up Rosslyn Chapel on Flickr and you will see lots of pictures taken by several people. Many of these are full resolution 2000 pixels across or larger. So if you want to look around at almost any place on the globe, just enter that name in Flickr. Most of the time you will find somebody has posted some pictures about that place, and those pictures will often give you a far better idea about the place that any tourist or commercial web site can do.
Recently an opportunity to visit the east shore in Maryland came up, and a friend suggested St Michael's as a destination. Googled web sites on St Michael's had little of interest. Then I tried St Michaels in Wikipedia - what a difference. One of the really great things about Wikipedia is that most of the pictures include links to full size images.
I don't think that using Flickr and Wikipedia as travel resources was something that could have been foreseen. But these are good examples of quite unexpected serendipitous benefits that sometimes surface.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Windows Server Llimitations
We have run into an interesting scaling problem with Domino on Windows Server 2003. We have 6 Domino mail servers with about 850 users on each, about 5000 users in total. These systems are configured as 3 Windows servers, each supporting two Domino partitions. With a corporate policy of unlimited mail file size this means about 6 TB of data total, or about 2 TB per Windows server. Due to the high volume of open mail files, Windows can't quite cope, and occasionally corrupts mail files. When you see the message "Insufficient system resources..." in the Domino log, you know database corruption is not far away! The problem is caused by the way Notes uses the Windows Page pool to cache files (See IBM technote 1093511 and Microsoft document Q312362), Of course you can disable OS caching altogether, but, as IBM says, this will seriously impact server performance.
Initially we were alerted to the problem last December when massive data corruption occurred on all mail servers in the space of a week or so. That first occurrence was shortly after we completed our server consolidation project, putting two Domino partitions on one Windows server. After this cache problem happens, Domino finds some mail files with thousands of corrupt documents. It then removes those documents (i.e. deletes them without leaving a deletion stub). Missing documents are replaced from the clustered mail server in the next scheduled replication, and life continues.
Since this is a known limitation on Windows, server operations teams patched the Windows NetApp drivers. They also tweaked the servers to increase the size of the Page pool cache. That certainly reduced the problem, but in the first 3 months of this year we had another 3 minor occurrences, seemingly at random. There certainly seems little correlation between server load and the problem happening. In fact, it is possible to go for quite a while and not noticing the problem. Unless it happens to the CEO's mail file, which it did on Monday.
We are tackling the problem on a number of fronts. Short term we are adding a new (clustered) server, and moving about 100 user off each Domino server to this new server. That will reduce the number of open files on each Windows box by about 200. In Q3 we are upgrading to Domino 7.0.2, and we will upgrade Windows to the 64 bit version at the same time, which increases the size of the page pool cache.
I am also curious to see how well Linux fares under a real production load, so long term we are setting up a production mail server on Red Hat Linux. Fortunately Domino supports application level clustering, which means we can leave the current pairs of clustered Windows servers in place, and bring up a Linux server as a 3rd member of the cluster. We will then migrate users over to it slowly (can you tell I am risk adverse?!!). Finally we will restrict access to the current main production server, and run Domino on Linux with a full production load. This is a long term project, and I doubt we will get it complete this year. But it promises to be very interesting comparison to watch.
Initially we were alerted to the problem last December when massive data corruption occurred on all mail servers in the space of a week or so. That first occurrence was shortly after we completed our server consolidation project, putting two Domino partitions on one Windows server. After this cache problem happens, Domino finds some mail files with thousands of corrupt documents. It then removes those documents (i.e. deletes them without leaving a deletion stub). Missing documents are replaced from the clustered mail server in the next scheduled replication, and life continues.
Since this is a known limitation on Windows, server operations teams patched the Windows NetApp drivers. They also tweaked the servers to increase the size of the Page pool cache. That certainly reduced the problem, but in the first 3 months of this year we had another 3 minor occurrences, seemingly at random. There certainly seems little correlation between server load and the problem happening. In fact, it is possible to go for quite a while and not noticing the problem. Unless it happens to the CEO's mail file, which it did on Monday.
We are tackling the problem on a number of fronts. Short term we are adding a new (clustered) server, and moving about 100 user off each Domino server to this new server. That will reduce the number of open files on each Windows box by about 200. In Q3 we are upgrading to Domino 7.0.2, and we will upgrade Windows to the 64 bit version at the same time, which increases the size of the page pool cache.
I am also curious to see how well Linux fares under a real production load, so long term we are setting up a production mail server on Red Hat Linux. Fortunately Domino supports application level clustering, which means we can leave the current pairs of clustered Windows servers in place, and bring up a Linux server as a 3rd member of the cluster. We will then migrate users over to it slowly (can you tell I am risk adverse?!!). Finally we will restrict access to the current main production server, and run Domino on Linux with a full production load. This is a long term project, and I doubt we will get it complete this year. But it promises to be very interesting comparison to watch.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
25 Hours Days?
Working with the teams responsible for the (US) change in Daylight Savings I came across this: a 25 hour day occurs once every year when changing from daylight saving time back to normal time. Time keeping systems that limit you to 24 hours per day are going to break if you work 25 hours on that day! Just thought you might want to know...
Monday, February 5, 2007
Lotusphere: Worst Practices "Pre" video
... and here is the promised video, posted on You Tube. (Editing it was MUCH more work that I expected, mainly because it was done on a slow laptop.)
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Some feedback on Lotusphere 2007
I am sitting on a plane returning from Lotusphere 2007. Thought about live blogging, but decided that it's better to pay attention during the presentations. Besides a laptop gets very heavy by the end of the day. For the first time in years, I can say that IBM finally "gets" Notes. What I mean is that Notes now finally has a decent roadmap for the future.
Because of my work, I was looking to see the plans for the future of Notes. I well remember the collective groan that went up at the opening session of Lotusphere a few years ago when Lotus introduced the "dual lane" approach. So I was very interested in where Notes is going. My real interest is "How effectively can I use this tool to solve business problems that other tools haven't been able to solve.
With that in mind, I attended a designer session. It was mildly interesting until last 15 minutes when Maureen Leyland arrived and demoded where the Designer client is going; based on Eclipse, the Designer now has an open architecture. Same for the Notes client, also based on Eclipse. Finally, I saw IBM with a decent, logical, plausible future for Notes.
With these new directions, I think Microsoft finally has a reason to look over their shoulder. When IBM and Microsoft battle it out, I score as a customer. Remember how long IE6 was Microsoft's browser? Years. Only when Firefox appeared and started taking market share did Microsoft start improving IE. I see the same thing happening with the Apple / Windows race. These races are ones that we, as customers, do not want any vendor to win! As long as these companies are competing we score.
Much to my surprise, I bumped in Gary Devendorf at the Dolphin on Wednesday. Gary used to be "Mr LotusScript" until IBM laid him off. A few months later he was working at Microsoft, helping them integrate their products with Notes. It was very interesting to hear his comments on the culture, and on how people relate at Microsoft, compared to IBM. Personally, I think IBM rather shot themselves in the foot letting someone like Gary go.
This year my favorite presentation was "Worst Practices" by Bill Bucan & Paul Mooney. When you put an Irishman and a Scot of doubtful sobriety on the stage together you will have an interesting banter. I hope to post a video on this soon...
Because of my work, I was looking to see the plans for the future of Notes. I well remember the collective groan that went up at the opening session of Lotusphere a few years ago when Lotus introduced the "dual lane" approach. So I was very interested in where Notes is going. My real interest is "How effectively can I use this tool to solve business problems that other tools haven't been able to solve.
With that in mind, I attended a designer session. It was mildly interesting until last 15 minutes when Maureen Leyland arrived and demoded where the Designer client is going; based on Eclipse, the Designer now has an open architecture. Same for the Notes client, also based on Eclipse. Finally, I saw IBM with a decent, logical, plausible future for Notes.
With these new directions, I think Microsoft finally has a reason to look over their shoulder. When IBM and Microsoft battle it out, I score as a customer. Remember how long IE6 was Microsoft's browser? Years. Only when Firefox appeared and started taking market share did Microsoft start improving IE. I see the same thing happening with the Apple / Windows race. These races are ones that we, as customers, do not want any vendor to win! As long as these companies are competing we score.
Much to my surprise, I bumped in Gary Devendorf at the Dolphin on Wednesday. Gary used to be "Mr LotusScript" until IBM laid him off. A few months later he was working at Microsoft, helping them integrate their products with Notes. It was very interesting to hear his comments on the culture, and on how people relate at Microsoft, compared to IBM. Personally, I think IBM rather shot themselves in the foot letting someone like Gary go.
This year my favorite presentation was "Worst Practices" by Bill Bucan & Paul Mooney. When you put an Irishman and a Scot of doubtful sobriety on the stage together you will have an interesting banter. I hope to post a video on this soon...
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