Wake up at home at 4am. No power. My inbuilt alarm clock woke me up expecting the “real” alarm clock to be going off. Nope. Power outage in the entire estate.

Can’t find torch.

Laptop and iPhone used (torch app) to try to get ready. End up looking and feeling like a proverbial bag of shit when the taxi turns up to take me to Airport. Go outdoors. It’s snowing. SNOWING. Christ almighty can we just have some half decent weather please. It’s April. Get to Belfast City Airport.

Can’t check in.

Machine will not let me check in. It tells me to go to desk. Nobody at desk. Queue, wait, get annoyed. Look in mirror and realise I look like I dressed in the dark. Lady from BMI arrives arrives.

Her: “Sir you are supposed to check in using the machines or online”
Me: “It told me on the machine to approach the desk”
Her: “You should be able to check in just fine on the machine”
Me: “I couldn’t – the machine wouldn’t let me”
Her: “Ok, I have checked you in sir. But please keep in mind next time you are to use the machine”
Me: “Are you not liste… Ok. Thank you”

Get through security. Waiting for flight. Tired, grotty and downright narky. It’s only 6am.

Marie Scott’s post on platform time settings on domino reminded me of Bill and I’s first Worst Practice session at Lotusphere.  This video recalls a true story of what screwing with platform time settings can do to domino, and therefore you.

Michael Kinder asked me this question, and I am trying to get a definative answer.  If you happen to know, can you please comment?

Basically, you setup Lotus traveler and all is well, and your boss has his iPhone and mail etc.  Again, all is well.  But, is the data traveling between the traveler server and iPhone (i.e. Activesync protocol/traffic) encrypted by default?

Well, the migration has been plodding along, and as I have been asked by a few people, here are some of my thoughts so far.  The negatives:

• Migrating data is a bitch.
  Moving off any system to another system is not easy, and if you are planning to use it for the same exercise (i.e. blogging) there is little reward for the investment.  Same goes for migrating email systems folks.  I am doing it to try something new, and to take advantage of some of the positives.
• URL’s
  refs in WordPress are case sensitive.  I have a “dload” directory where all the items I make available for download reside.  I ftp’s that directory to my wordpress site, but the URL links do not all work, until I change the casing to be correct.  Domino (on windows) spoiled me that way.
• SPAM
  Already have had a lot of spam on my site. Askismet has helped a great deal to block them, but a few have got through. Kudos to blogsphere there.
• .nsf
  There is something great for an admin person to have control.  You can never have more control then having everything in your .nsf file.  I just need to let go of having that need to control the data. Dreamhost already do backups for you, and you can manually ftp/backup if you need to. But, local replication is the killer feature of Lotus Notes. Never forget that.

And now some positives.

• Something new
  It’s nice to work with something new as a hobby.  It makes me want to blog more, and more relevant things.  What do they say about a change…
• Themes
  If you are design “challenged”, themes in wordpress are for you.  It makes changing looks of your site a breeze.  I am using the Carrington theme here, more or less unmodified.  There are things about it I want to change, and will get there as I start to play, but if I wanted to modify everything in one swoop, it’s easy enough.
• Plugins
  There are stacks of plugins for WordPress.  If there is a new funky feature out on the web, there is a plugin.  Typically they are free too.  I don’t have to wait for new features to be made available in blogsphere or the domino blog template anymore.
  A nice example is the recommendation on installing the wptouch plugin. Now my site looks like this on a mobile device.

pmooney.net on mobile device

That’s it so far.  I may not continue on WordPress forever, but so far it is a very interesting experiment.

The 10.6.3 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes that:

• improve the reliability and compatibility of QuickTime X
• address compatibility issues with OpenGL-based applications
• address an issue that causes background message colors to display incorrectly in Mail
• resolve an issue that prevented files with the # or & characters in their names from opening in Rosetta applications
• resolve an issue that prevented files from copying to Windows file servers
• improve performance of Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2 when running in 64-bit mode
• improve sleep and wake reliability when using Bonjour wake on demand
• address a color issue in iMovie with HD content
• improve printing reliability
• resolve issues with recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server
• improve the reliability of 3rd party USB input devices
• fix glowing, stuck, or dark pixels when viewing video from the iMac (Late 2009) built-in iSight camera

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4014.
For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

At Lotusphere, Matt White was getting my attention. Not just because of his immense brain, witty humour and ability to get Allister Rennie to get him drinks before the OGS, but because he walked around with a bulge in his pocket. He wasn’t that pleased to see me.

Ok.. enough ‘fnar ‘fnar references.

Matt had a MiFi. This is a 3g Dongle, but without the dongle bit. Basically its a 3g Dongle that you put a sim into, but it is also a mini wifi router. So, insert your sim, turn it on and it connects to the internet. Then you connect to it as a wifi source and bingo, you connect to the internet! Unlike dongles there is no wire and you can connect multiple objects to it.

Had.to.have.one.

So, about 2 weeks ago I bought a MiFi on ebay. You could walk into a store and buy a locked one, but then you are tied to the carrier. On ebay, they are unlocked for about £60.

I got an
“UNLOCKED 3G HUAWEI E5830 Mifi USB Mobile Modem Router”

HUAWEI E5830 Mifi

It came with a 3G uk SIM card, and I added some credit to it. Then after traveling to Ireland I bought a 3G Irish sim card, and added some credit to it.

Connect to your MiFi and complete some very basic configuration work, then you can switch sim as you need (think about this people who travel) and all your devices can connect to this router and connect to the internet.

Speaking purely for myself this will come with me everywhere from now on and save me a fortune.

Just cocking about with the free wordpress iPhone application.

One of my more popular pages on the site is the List of products that support Domino 8.5.1 . If you want me to add anything to this list, just email me.

As you can see, my site is now running on WordPress, using the Carrington theme. It’s not finished yet, and I hoped to finish it a while ago, but work/life got in the way.  All the posts and the resources are still available, and the site will change a lot over the coming months.

Please let me know what you think.  This is just an experiment to learn something new.  I will setup a link to the domino blog aswell in the near future.  Who knows, I may switch back if this does not work out.   Domino proved to be a very useful, stable platform for me for blogging for 7 years (count ‘em).

You will see test posts in the near future, as I blog from my iPhone, blackberry, mail etc.  One nice thing about WordPress is the massive amount of plugins.  I hope to try a few of them out.

Let me know what you think.