Andy Yiu’s Blog

The latest news reports indicate that there are power outages occurring around the Galveston and Houston area now.  Some the outages are occurring in the Sugarland and River Oaks area which is relatively close to where we are right now.  I don’t know how much longer we will have power around here but Centerpoint Energy has made a statement indicating that it might take several weeks to restore power to the area which could paralize the Texas economy for weeks.  The rain around here has been on and off throughout the day but the winds are definitely picking up. 

I have been listening to the KHOU News reports and I am quite amazed with some of the advice given to citizens in shelters.  Some of citizens sheltering in the San Luis resort in Galveston have been asked to write their social security numbers on their arms for identification purposes.  There are also some people out there that don’t realize how dangerous flying debis can be.  Some video played on the webcasts show people out in the beach trying to take photos.  Wind gusts in this area have peaked at around 50 MPH now and they are expected to get stronger overnight.

It looks like the winds are starting to pick up around here.  This is really the calm before the storm hits.  Most of the roads outside are pretty clear and it looks like there are a couple of 24-hour pharmacies still open.  Katz’s for those who know of it is still open and it looks like the Chinatown area is still pretty active with people heading into shops to get last minute supplies.  There are some pretty funny “hurricane party” commercials playing on the radio.  They state that they are offering “Hurricanes” at a discounted price.  Good luck to anyone who is crazy enough to drive through hurricane force winds to a club to party when the real hurricane is on the other side of the wall.  Personally, no thanks.

Fifty miles away in Galveston, the story is quite a bit different. There are reports that the storm surge has flooded part of the island already and fortunately most citizens heeded the evacuation order and have left to public evacuation centers outside of the Galveston and Houston city limits.  Many of the roads are now covered with several feet of water and so helicopters are being used to ferry rescuers in and out.

The eye of the storm is expected to pass around the Houston metropolitan area between 1-3am on Saturday but weather conditions will start to deteriorate long before that.  My family is fortunate enough to not be in the evacuation zone and city officials have asked us to stay put.  Thank you to everyone who has sent emails and SMS messages asking if we need a place to stay.  Right now we’re bundled down, but if things change I’ll be calling someone while on the road.

It looks like the rush for supplies finally began and I also assume that the hurricane parties have also commenced. As I was picking up last minute supplies, many owners were boarding up windows and closing for the day. At a store I was at earlier, pretty much all fresh fruits were gone, canned goods were sold out and bottled water was in short supply. Some shopping carts I saw were full of beer opposed to water, the reasons for which I don’t know and probably will never understand. Across Houston many gas stations were closed since they ran out of gas and those that had gas had 30+ cars waiting. Fortunately we have the supplies that we need and all we can do now is bunker down and hope for the best.

From the latest weather predictions, it looks like Hurricane Ike is starting to change course to a more northern direction.  Hopefully for us in Houston, this won’t mean much but there are already concerns about the storm surge in some areas of Harris County.  The Mayor of Houston has already stated that the city will be closed tomorrow and many companies have already shutdown businesses for today to allow their employees to prepare.  For the most part, things in Houston are calm and there’s the normal line of people at the fuel pumps waiting to gas up their cars and people picking up last minute supplies from the grocery stores.  All we can do right now is watch the storm and hope that nothing major will occur.

Anyone who is interested in following the storm, take a look at the KHOU site.  They have a pretty good path overlay with the major Texas cities listed.

http://www.khou.com/stormtracker/

Anyone who is connect to the AOL Gateway via SIP should be aware of this notice.  This is the same notice posted on the Lotus Support Blog.

The AIM Messaging Service will have planned maintenance.

Maintenance Window:
Confirmed Maintenance Start time: 09-11-2008 10:00 ET
Projected Maintenance End time: 09-11-2008 10:30 ET

Maintenance Description:
The certificate for HPE is due to expire and will be replaced.

Impact to Sametime Gateway customers:
End-user impact should be minimal if at all. Intermittent awareness/connectivity issues may arise during the maintenance window. However, full service will be restored immediately following the maintenance window.

With fuel costs increasing, many of the airlines are looking for ways to make an extra buck or to lighten the load of the plane.  Over the last year, we have seen that airlines have started charging fees for luggage.  The main question I have for the airline industry is “Is it helping at all?”  With the TSA regulations on liquids, gels and other carry on items, many people do not have any choice but to check their bags in.  All of the carry on baggage which would have gone into the cargo bay of the plane is now stuck in the cabin with the rest of the passengers.  The Houston Chronicle composed a very good article about a futuristic airline, and I have to say they do an excellent job in outlining the potential problems.  I have heard about stories where people are willing to fly across the US and back again on the same day to save their frequent flier status.  At the rate the airline industry is going, I would be tempted to do the same thing if I was in the same case. 

Houston Chronicle article: Fees galore when flying in the future

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5933335.html

If anyone hasn’t seen the announcements already, Google has finally come out with its own web browser titled Google Chrome.  It has a lot of rich features which were not available in some of the other browsers.  Remember the times when a web site managed to bring a browser to its knees and you had to kill off all of the browser sessions?  Google has fixed this by starting each tab of a browser as a separate process.  It is also built upon open source technologies (typical for Google) such as WebKit with some structure from the Mozilla foundation.  

Take a look and take it for a spin.  The download was really simple and quick.  There’s only a PC version out there for now but I’m sure that they have a Linux and Mac version in the works.

http://www.google.com/chrome

This should be an interesting call to attend.  Since Sametime is quite heavily dependent on the Web Server, it is important to understand how things work on the Web Server.

You are invited to participate in an IBM Open Microphone call with IBM Development & Support Engineers to discuss Domino Web Server Security Configuration (version 6, 7 & 8). There is no charge for participating. The topic and dial information for this call is:

Configuring Security in Domino HTTP Servers

Date: August 14, 2008

Time: 10:00 am eastern US time (2 pm GMT, 3 pm UK)

Phone Conference Info:

Toll free US: 888-437-9276

Toll call US: 719-325-2306

International Dial-in Info: Click here =>http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21315685

Confirmation Code: 7543402

The IBM Open Mic calls are intended to provide you the opportunity to interact directly with the IBM Lab developing IBM software products, in this case the

Domino Web Server Team, to have product questions answered. For details about the Open Mic calls, please see the Lotus Support Open Mic technical exchange page (http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg27011126).

There have been a couple customers who have reported that users are reporting inconsistent behavior among clients. Some of these incidents have been traced back to the Sametime policy database. As a best practice it is a good idea to repicate the stpolicy.nsf to all Sametime servers.

I recently read an article assigned by MBA professor outlining how an organization in the Northeast was brought to its knees due to an experimental P2P program running on the network.  In that specific circumstance the program was designed to move streamline the data transfer from one node to another node.  Originally the program started out moving small bits of data and over time routers became overloaded as terabytes of data were transferred.  This article highlighted the importance of test environments.

Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to talk with different people and ask them if the customers they have worked with have up-to-date testing environments.  After polling various people it appears that a majority of companies do not have test environments which realistically mimic their production environment.  I would like to stress the value a testing environment.  By taking the time to build out and maintain a test environment that mimics the production environment, system administrators can save themselves a lot of time and headaches. All changes can be tested before implemeting the change in the production environment. With server virtualization packages, test environments do not have to be running all the time and hence physical machines can be multipurposed to serve as testing platforms for other applications.  So… with this I urge all companies to consider implemeting test environments.