Management Email WTF
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@Someone You Know said:
Bonus: if you have either or both of the other two client applications (Domino Designer and Domino Administrator) open at the same time, they all run in the same process and, seemingly, in the same thread. A freeze or crash in one of the applications will freeze or crash the others as well. All for one and one for all.
I also found that if it crashes, Notes fails to release some window and/or file handle(s). Trying to re-launch Notes after a crash is an automatic fail. The only solution is a complete reboot of the machine. I did hear a rumor somewhere though of a utility which will wipe Notes' ass after a crash so you don't have to reboot.
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@Smitty said:
@Someone You Know said:
Bonus: if you have either or both of the other two client applications (Domino Designer and Domino Administrator) open at the same time, they all run in the same process and, seemingly, in the same thread. A freeze or crash in one of the applications will freeze or crash the others as well. All for one and one for all.
I also found that if it crashes, Notes fails to release some window and/or file handle(s). Trying to re-launch Notes after a crash is an automatic fail. The only solution is a complete reboot of the machine. I did hear a rumor somewhere though of a utility which will wipe Notes' ass after a crash so you don't have to reboot.
If I remember correctly from my days as a desk monkey at IBM Global Services, you had to delete Bookmarks.nsf and cache.ndk. A couple Notes processes still exist, so you then had to run a small utility called ZapNotes.
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@Nexzus said:
@Smitty said:
I found killing the processes to be sufficient enough.I also found that if it crashes, Notes fails to release some window and/or file handle(s). Trying to re-launch Notes after a crash is an automatic fail. The only solution is a complete reboot of the machine. I did hear a rumor somewhere though of a utility which will wipe Notes' ass after a crash so you don't have to reboot.
If I remember correctly from my days as a desk monkey at IBM Global Services, you had to delete Bookmarks.nsf and cache.ndk. A couple Notes processes still exist, so you then had to run a small utility called ZapNotes.
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@Nexzus said:
If I remember correctly from my days as a desk monkey at IBM Global Services
Ah, the good ol' IBM Global Service Desk. We switched to CSC for our help desk a few months back. I miss the days when a password reset only took 10 minutes. Now I get to listen to somebody with a barely-intelligible accent ask me for a blood sample before they'll help me do anything.
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I was about to shut down Notes for the day when I received an email from management. The title? "Documentation of procedure for reviewing procedure documentation and bulletins". Not sure if it really belongs in this thread but the WTFery demanded I say something.
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@Lingerance said:
@Nexzus said:
@Smitty said:
I found killing the processes to be sufficient enough.I also found that if it crashes, Notes fails to release some window and/or file handle(s). Trying to re-launch Notes after a crash is an automatic fail. The only solution is a complete reboot of the machine. I did hear a rumor somewhere though of a utility which will wipe Notes' ass after a crash so you don't have to reboot.
If I remember correctly from my days as a desk monkey at IBM Global Services, you had to delete Bookmarks.nsf and cache.ndk. A couple Notes processes still exist, so you then had to run a small utility called ZapNotes.Unfortunately that doesn't always work, especially with the Eclipse-based clients. Which is especially funny if you remember the marketing hype that preceded Notes 8, most of which claimed that all of these usability issues and crash problems, including the inability to restart it after a crash, would be solved in the Eclipse version of 8.
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@Someone You Know said:
Unfortunately that doesn't always work, especially with the Eclipse-based clients. Which is especially funny if you remember the marketing hype that preceded Notes 8, most of which claimed that all of these usability issues and crash problems, including the inability to restart it after a crash, would be solved in the Eclipse version of 8.
They made the same claim when version 6 came out, and then again when version 6.5 came out. In my entire time working with Notes, the only actual improvement they made (in version 6.5 IIRC) was that they *finally* fixed it to work with Windows NT's multi-user features. Before 6.5, you couldn't have more than one Notes user per computer, regardless of how many Windows users were on the computer. That was in, again IIRC, 2004... so it only took IBM a solid decade to figure out how NT permissions work.
(Of course, the installer still defaulted to "one user per computer" for some ridiculous reason... you had to click a checkbox during to make it install right, one of those "don't break" checkboxes. So half the time I'd forget and have to reinstall anyway.)
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@Smitty said:
Ah, the good ol' IBM Global Service Desk. We switched to CSC for our help desk a few months back. I miss the days when a password reset only took 10 minutes. Now I get to listen to somebody with a barely-intelligible accent ask me for a blood sample before they'll help me do anything.
I worked out of the Burnaby, BC location. Among others, we supported Circuit City, Panasonic, Sony America and The Gap. We had some decent folks on those teams, but anyone with any real talent just used it as a springboard to something better. Some wanted to move within IBM (we were actually contracted by Kelly Services), others couldn't wait to put in their 4-6 months and get the hell out of there. I lasted 5 months. You're probably serviced by the Brazil or Manilla desks, sounds like.
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@Someone You Know said:
The biggest WTF of Notes in general, which persists in the latest version, is that the Notes client's UI is not updated while the it is waiting for a response over the network (or waiting for anything else). This means that if (for example) your mail server is not responding, the entire application will be completely frozen and unresponsive until the request times out. Notes at least presents the appearance of an application running entirely in a single thread.
A very Notes-savvy former Notes admin i know once assured me that Notes, at least as of 7.5, is fully multi-threaded; there are many threads involved in processing all aspects of the Notes client. Unfortunately, it apparently has a single mutex which is utilized by the entire application. If *anything* needs to be locked, *everything* which might possibly need to be locked is locked. As a result, if you are really quick, you can switch to and from a stale view, such that your client would be locked looking at a mailbox index, rather than locked looking at the message that says the view needs to be updated and you can change to another view while it's doing that1. Note that I have not actually verified that claim - I always forget about it until the software boasts of its multi-threaded nature, and by then it's too late.
And, yes, as someone else has hinted, this one mutex is apparently shared by just about any domino client running on your desktop, although some use it more than others.
1 Just in case that was confusing, no, you can't actually switch to another view once this message appears. It's just that the message says you can.
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@tgape said:
@Someone You Know said:
The biggest WTF of Notes in general, which persists in the latest version, is that the Notes client's UI is not updated while the it is waiting for a response over the network (or waiting for anything else). This means that if (for example) your mail server is not responding, the entire application will be completely frozen and unresponsive until the request times out. Notes at least presents the appearance of an application running entirely in a single thread.
A very Notes-savvy former Notes admin i know once assured me that Notes, at least as of 7.5, is fully multi-threaded; there are many threads involved in processing all aspects of the Notes client. Unfortunately, it apparently has a single mutex which is utilized by the entire application. If *anything* needs to be locked, *everything* which might possibly need to be locked is locked. As a result, if you are really quick, you can switch to and from a stale view, such that your client would be locked looking at a mailbox index, rather than locked looking at the message that says the view needs to be updated and you can change to another view while it's doing that1. Note that I have not actually verified that claim - I always forget about it until the software boasts of its multi-threaded nature, and by then it's too late.
And, yes, as someone else has hinted, this one mutex is apparently shared by just about any domino client running on your desktop, although some use it more than others.
1 Just in case that was confusing, no, you can't actually switch to another view once this message appears. It's just that the message says you can.
Yeah, I figured it was something like that (hence "presents the appearance" in my original post) but I'm not sure which is worse: the thought that the application really does all run in a single thread, or the thought that it has a vastly multi-threaded model that's implemented so completely wrong that they might as well not have bothered.
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@Lingerance said:
...
07:30 I click the forward button
08:30 I am now in a screen that can forward the email
...
loved this bit
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@morbiuswilters said:
Garrison is the teacher who was gay, then a woman, then a lesbian, then a man again.
I must be further behind than I thought. I don't recall Garrison going back to being a man.
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Yeah, episode was "Eek, a Penis" I believe.
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@merely a lowly intern said:
Oh, you're right. I thought it was all a clusterfuck and forgot that he actually got his penis in the end.Yeah, episode was "Eek, a Penis" I believe.
