the corner office

True to form, this month's Wine upgrade broke Notes again. Thankfully the problem had been found by others and it wasn't too hard to fix.

This post has the details - you have to specify WINEDLLOVERRIDES="usp10=n". An easier alternative to setting the WINEDDLOVERRIDES environment variable is to use the winecfg utility which sets the preference in ./wine/user.reg.. Be careful to set it to 'native' only, I originally chose 'native, builtin', and that still crashed.

The upgrade also updated my Wine installation to 0.9.5. At first, it caused Lotus Notes to crash with the following error (if launched from a terminal):

colin@mirkwood ~ $ wine "c:\lotus\notes6\nlnotes.exe"
wine: Call from 0x55a1e7c0 to unimplemented function usp10.dll.ScriptCacheGetHeight, aborting
ERROR (0): NetUserEnum failed: err=5 - (131) Negative seek
Host Name       : mirkwood
User Name       : colin
Date            : Sat Jan 28 19:17:04 2006
Windows Dir     : c:\windows
Arguments       : "C:\lotus\notes6\nsd.exe" -dumpandkill -termstatus 1
OSVersion       : Windows 98 4.10 (Build 67766446), PlatID=1,  A  (1 Processor)

The usp10.dll file is the culprit. I found this Howto which advised deleting the file /usr/lib/wine/usp10.dll.so (on my AMD64 machine that's actually /usr/lib32/wine). I did that, and it works fine again. I notice that the 'missing cursor' from my last install has been fixed, as well.

Aside: it seems that I can't copy & paste text from Firefox into Notes (a text field, obviously) - it gives me an error message "Only text can be pasted into this type of field." Pasting from the URL bar works, and pasting from other apps like the console and gedit works, so what I do is paste into a gedit text document and then c&p into Notes from there. Bit of a schlep for blogging, but not the end of the world.

I did my monthly emerge world yesterday, and in doing so upgraded Wine to version 20050111. Not such a good idea - it ended up breaking my Notes client. For some reason, the Replicator page wouldn't open, and hung the client, which is a bit of a showstopper. I masked the package, and moved back to Wine 20041019-r3, and all is dandy again.

The nice thing about Gentoo's portage is that you don't have to muck about with the system tools too often. If you're lucky, everthing just works. The downside is not being able to remember the damned commands and file locations when you need to. Time to build me a cheat sheet.

These days I'm able to live almost exclusively in Linux, and it's made a lot easier by the fact that Notes 6.5.1 works well with Wine (try saying that last bit a few times over). I haven't done much Notes development recently (you know, it's just hard, man), but I've been working on a small app for Ronwen. Designed, written and sloppily tested, all in Linux. I'm well impressed.

As Julian pointed out months ago, there are still some issues with Java. One of these is that you can't open up the Java debugger - you get an obscure "Unable to create a suitable default GraphicsConfiguration" error as soon as the client tries to do any Java graphics-related stuff, and subsequent attempts to open the debugger throw a NullPointerException back at you. There is a workaround though - and if you get to see the error message I mentioned, you've already got it. Basically, don't launch Notes from a shortcut button or menu, use the command line. If you do this, (typically something along the lines of wine "c:\lotus\notes\nlnotes.exe"), all Java output will go to stdout - in this case, your terminal. It ain't ideal, but it does the job. That might be obvious to most, but I must admit to having a Doh! moment, staring at the error message and muttering about not being able to see Java output, before realising that I was looking at exactly that!

Yesterday was the last day of the month and I'd timed my ADSL bandwidth quota perfectly. With one day to go and the cap about to be blown, I went apeshit and hauled down a heap of stuff. Including these puppies:

colin@colin notes.arks $ ls -hl
total 2.4G
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 191M Jul 29 16:13 c57wyna.exe
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 484M Jul 29 18:12 c57wzna.exe
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 646M Jul 29 18:10 c57x2na.tar
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 131M Nov  3 21:10 c59gwna.exe
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 369M Nov  3 21:11 c59gxna.exe
-rwxr--r--  1 colin root 600M Nov  3 23:11 c59h0na.tar
colin@colin notes.arks $

Those would be the Notes/Domino 6.5.3 and 7.0 Beta 2 installers. Lots of people gripe about IBM download sites. It's actually quite easy to get hold of Notes/Domino trials and betas, the only problem is that once you've downloaded them, you're buggered if you can remember what each file refers to! If you haul down a lot of Notes/Domino stuff, things can very soon get out of hand.

Now, should I live on the edge and see if the Notes/Domino 7.0 Betas install on Gentoo?

Weeell... I made it through the Domino server installer. That's promising...

I've noticed a couple of Domino blogs I follow are being hammered by comment spam. In a way, it feels like watching an approaching hurricane. Assuming that the blogs are being sniffed out by spiders, then it's only a matter of time before the spiders follow a blogroll or comment link to my site.

I don't automagically convert URLs in my comments to links (part laziness, part policy), so I'm less valuable to spammers, but a spider's probably not bright enough to figure that out.

Some anti-spam solutions have been discussed, but I don't have the time to implement them, now. I expect that Blogsphere will have some spam protection soon enough (I think Dominoblog already has), and I'm just hoping that the spammer pigdogs remain ignorant of me a while longer, at least until I have enough time to research and implement a decent anti-spam mechanism.

(Let's hope those aren't famous last words...)

Visit a website. About running Domino. On Linux. On an Xbox. Just to prove the point, the site itself is running Domino. On Linux. On an Xbox.

Lawd.

(via Bill Buchan)

I've been using my Notes client in WINE for over a week now, and it's going great, except for two small niggles:

• Tab key moves you forward from field to field as expected, but SHIFT-TAB doesn't work, so you can't skip backwards through fields.
  
  
• You can't copy text from the field values pane in the Fields tab in the Document Properties dialog. I always use that tab as a shortcut to getting to field values inside a Notes document, for some reason with WINE, if you right-click and 'Copy' a selected chunk of text, it doesn't place the selected text in the clip board. In fact, the clip board isn't changed at all.
  

WINE reimplements Win32 APIs, so you can get an odd perspective on just what a Windows application (like Notes) is using and doing, by seeing how it interacts with WINE. I presume the SHIFT-TAB is interfering with another key binding, but why can you copy to the "clip board" from one place, but not from elsewhere? Makes me wonder what deep voodoo is going on in a Notes property box? Weird.

This post courtesy of a 6.5.1 Notes client, Gentoo 2004.2, KDE 3.3 and wine-20040408.

Minimal tweaking required. I did an emerge wine, copied over the two dlls specified at vowe.net over here, and I was on my way. I had to sort out permissions since all the files were read-only on account of being copied from my NTFS partition, which is mounted read-only. That was the only hitch.

The fonts are screwed, but that shouldn't be hard to fix with some RTFMing. I have no idea how solid the client is going to be; I haven't put it through its paces, by any stretch. It seems good enough for my blog editing and replication though, and until such time as I have to re-enter the realms of gainful employment, it's one less reason to have to boot into Windows.

Just for search engines (and me if I ever run into this again) -

Running a Java Notes app from the command line, gave me the error:

java.lang.Exception: Notes initialization failure - err 421
        at lotus.domino.NotesThread.NnotesInitThread(Native Method)
        at lotus.domino.NotesThread.sinitThread(NotesThread.java:184)

Problem was related to my notes.ini not being in the normal place (ie. Notes program directory). I dropped a notes.ini into place and happy happy. I tried putting notes.ini elsewhere accessible by my PATH environment variable, and it didn't seem to work - so the native methods called by the Java API seem to look in the same directory, end of story.

Bit of a pain, that, especially if you juggle clients and have differently-named and stored ini files for your different clients. I know the C++ API allows you to specify the location of the notes.ini variable to use. It would be nice if the Java API allowed one to do the same thing.

(also: link to the sole other post about it on the ND6 forum.)