Choosing the right spam solution

While I was on vacation Ed Brill blogged the question "Have we hit the "who cares" point with spam?" Ed's premise was that since your e-mail address is out there, and the whole point of having e-mail is to be reachable, was trying to obfuscate e-mail addresses even worth the effort?

The discussion turned into one of spam filtering techniques and what solutions can or "should" be used. In that message thread I found the following comments by Mike Lazar particularly inflammatory:

Full disclosure -- My company is a strategic partner with Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, i.e., the former FrontBridge. I don't know why any organization, regardless of size, wouldn't use one of the 3 big services for anti-spam/anti-virus. Whether it's MEHS, Postini, or MessageLabs, they are all superior to anything you can do with native tools or an appliance.
...
Frankly, the cost is also negligible, espeically when compared to buying an appliance, maintaining it, etc.
...
It comes down to a service vs. DIY approach, and honestly, a service is the better/proper fit for the vast, vast, majority of organizations out there.

I respect Mike's knowledge, and am aware that he has worked with Domino in the past. I have nothing against him, and I do think Mike is entitled to his opinion. I also think it is wrong. :)

First, there isn't anything any of the "big 3" offers that you can't get with another solution. There is absolutely no basis in fact for that statement. Going through the Postini and MessageLabs feature lists, there isn't anything listed that I don't have currently.

Second, the costs are not negligible. The best price I was ever quoted from Postini was $1.50 per mailbox per month. The Barracuda we're using costs us about $0.40 per mailbox per month, which is the annual support contract and the 1 hour a week we spend on maintenance. (If we had more mailboxes it would actually decrease since there is no per-user mailbox charge.)

Third, I find it offensive that anyone would be arrogant enough to tell every company using Domino's built-in spam filtering, an appliance, or DIY spam filter that they are totally wrong-minded. Chris Linfoot works for a large manufacturer, relies on Domino's built-in spam filtering, and has had tremendous success. Companies like IBM, Coca-Cola, FedEx, and Nintendo all use appliances. To Mike's way of thinking they all made the wrong choice.

The message I'm trying to get across is before you choose a spam solution be sure to investigate what makes the most sense for your organization. There are several ways to tackle this problem and only you can determine what is right for your company. For me, outsourcing is the least desirable option.

Notes and Domino 7.0.2 part numbers

I've been having problems for the past couple of months with Passport Advantage not showing me the correct entries. Sometimes I have to go the All Downloads section, other times I have to search by part number. I'm sure there's a decoder ring somewhere, but I wanted to make it easier on everyone else and just give you the part numbers and the file descriptions in case you need them.

• C96RIEN - Notes and Domino 7.0.2 Release Notes
• C940BML - Notes 7.0.2 Quick Start Guide -Multilingual
• C94QIEN - Notes Client 7.0.2 - English
• C94QAEN - Notes, Administrator and Designer 7.0.2 - English
• C94QBEN - Domino 7.0.2 - Win32 - English
• C94QEEN - Domino 7.0.2 - Intel Linux - English
• C84T5NA - Install Shield Tuner
• C940CML - Server 7.0.2 Quick Start Guide - Multilingual
  

5 things you never wanted to know about me

From Ed to Nathan to Mary Beth... that's how we ended up here. So here goes.

1. I complain a lot.
You already know that. Umm... this is gonna leave a mark. Can I send my therapists' bill to Mary Beth since she put me up to this?

1. I attended two universities but graduated from neither: DeVry Institute of Technology, then transferred to Southern Polytechnic State University (it was called Southern College of Technology when I attended).

2. I've been to five foreign capitals, but not Washington, DC: Panama City, Panama; Vatican City; Rome, Italy; London, England; Lisbon, Portugal (twice). My partner says I can count six foreign capitals, but I don't consider Grand Cayman to be an independent nation.

3. I have crossed the Atlantic three times by boat: October 1997 Wind Star, November 2003 Wind Surf and October 2005 Galaxy. I'll be crossing it again in November 2007 on the Regatta. Incidentally, my partner's birthday is October 27th, and he decided when he was 35 that it would be a good idea to do something special for his birthday (he climbed Ayers Rock). That's why I travel in October and early November every year.

4. When I met my partner (at age 23) I didn't drink and I didn't cook. While I haven't devolved into alcoholism, I do enjoy adult beverages (Jack Daniels is my favorite -- incidentally, did you know they use Notes? [not for their website, though]) and I make a mean dirty martini. I also love to cook, but hate to use recipes. I go off what I learn from FoodTV (mostly Alton Brown, because he's a food nerd) and my own taste memory. My most recent favorite concoction: brined pork tenderloin with an amaretto, Grand Marnier and juniper berry reduction.

5. I love to do home improvement projects. I have refinished cabinets and hardwood floors, ripped out wallpaper and stripped popcorn off ceilings. My most recent endeavor involved applying venetian plaster to our 30-foot long hall, and ending in a rusty red accent wall. This was in addition to the cable light system and venetian plaster on the ceiling I did last year. (Pictures coming soon.) Yes, I did venetian plaster on the ceiling. My chiropractor loved me.

I guess I need to tag someone now, but I honestly have no clue who reads my blog to know if they'll get the memo. Oh well, here goes... the idea seems to be to tag 3 - 5 people, so how about Chris Whisonant (crap, already taken), Rocky Oliver (shaking fist at Chris), Ben Langhinrichs, Alan Lepofsky, and... Paul Robichaux. Here's hoping at least one of them read my blog, or I'm going to look even sillier.

SNTT - Integrating a Barracuda Spam Firewall with Domino LDAP

Spam is a never ending battle. A few years ago I purchased a Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall 300 to help reduce my headaches and the load on my Domino servers. It is hands down the best $1900 I have spent and I have been nothing but thrilled with it. On the average day we reject over 85% of all inbound SMTP traffic with virtually no false positives.


As you can see, the number of "bad recipients" is significant. Here's what happens during the delivery process:

• Barracuda checks its own rules and filters to see if the message is spam
• If it's not spam, it tries to deliver to Domino and waits for an OK response.
• Domino checks the recipient to make sure it's valid (I have this setting enabled). If it is, the Barracuda takes the response and updates the log to show the message was delivered.
  
• If the recipient isn't valid, the Barracuda shows the document as not delivered and flags it as a bad recipient. Meanwhile, Domino generates its own delivery failure report, which it delivers to the sender. The Barracuda doesn't cache these bad recipients, it just passes them through.
  

On an average day this isn't a problem. However in mid-December we started getting about 500 e-mails an hour for randomly generated e-mail addresses. Domino handled the load fine, but it was generating about 400MB of log entries a day and causing our mail.boxes to backlog with delivery failure reports.

I had to stop this. Luckily the Barracuda has the option to do LDAP lookups to verify recipients exist before it even tries to deliver the messages. Getting the Barracuda to resolve all the possible incoming e-mail addresses my users have proved to be more challenging than I expected.

Step One: Enabling LDAP in Domino
Let me start by saying I am a mediocre Domino administrator. I find Domino Administrator overwhelming and difficult to use, and I honestly don't understand what a lot of it means. I usually leave it alone until something breaks, then I hit the Internet and methodically try solutions until something fixes my problem. Also, my knowledge of LDAP begins and ends with defining the acronym. I have a vague idea of what it does and why it's important, but it's never been anything I thought I would have a use for. Even with that crippling deficiency, enabling LDAP really isn't so bad.

The biggest trouble I had was finding the right Configuration document. The Domino Administrator help says to go to your default configuration document, but doesn't tell you which one that is. Since I only have LDAP running on my mail server I thought that's where I would go to enable it. Wrong-o. Here's the first thing that went wonky on me. When I open the Configurations view, this is what I get.


Notice the scrollbar on the right side of the view. If I scroll up ....


*Poof* I have more Configuration documents! Okay, maybe it's not magic (I can suspend my disbelief for a moment) and maybe some of you already knew about this. I don't understand why it's behaving like this, and I only discovered this when I accidentally hit the scroll wheel on my mouse and the other documents appeared, so color me clueless. The "default" Configuration document is the one listed as "* - [All Servers]". Once you find the Configuration document, click the Edit button and go to the LDAP tab.


What this does is maps fields on the Person document to the standard LDAP schema. I honestly have no clue what 99% of this stuff means or why it's relevant. I also don't know when/where/how/why all that stuff got put in there, but I just left it. I do know from extensive trial and error that at a minimum you need the cn, FullName, mail and shortname LDAP attributes. The only one I had to add was the FullName. The rest of the LDAP configuration is as follows.


We already had anonymous LDAP enabled for some network scanners to be able to e-mail files to users. While setting that up I learned that if you don't limit the number of LDAP entries that can be returned it takes a while for LDAP to run through the entire directory. I only have 200 users and I was getting timeout errors. I set the maximum entries to 15 and the errors went away. I didn't do any analysis, I just tried it and it worked. Your mileage may vary. Once you have these settings to your liking, click Save and Close.

If you didn't have LDAP already loaded, load it from the server console (load ldap). If it was already running, issue the command tell ldap reloadschema.

Step Two: Configuring the Barracuda
LDAP configuration is done from the Domains tab.



The important bits:

• LDAP Server - your server's IP address
• LDAP Port - 389 is the default
• Exchange Accelerator/LDAP Verification - Set to Yes
• Unify Email Aliases - Set to Yes, unless you have a reason not to. Everything I read on the Barracuda support forums said this should always be Yes, so I enabled it. Pittsburgh is still intact and mail is flowing, so I guess it didn't hurt anything.
  
• Bind DN - Only required if you don't allow anonymous LDAP. If that's the case I'll assume you know what to put here.
  
• Bind Password - Password for the above account.
• LDAP Filter - This is the most important part and requires more discussion. See below.
• Everything else - leave it at the default

The LDAP filter tells your Barracuda what LDAP fields to search and what constitutes a match. For example, if you used nothing but (|(mail=${recipient_email})), it would only look for an exact match on the incoming e-mail address. That is to say, if the InternetAddress field on the Person document does not contain the recipient e-mail address, this would not be a match and would be a "bad recipient".

And that's a bad, bad thing because... we have lots of people with e-mail aliases in the FullName field (which is labeled User name on the Person record). Mostly this is when someone gets married, wants their primary e-mail address to be their married name, but still needs to get e-mail with their previous address. The easy way to accommodate this is to change the primary internet address and copy the old one to the FullName field as an alias.

A "mail=" search won't match these aliases. Okay, so you might think you could match the incoming name against the ShortName field since you rename people using the standard AdminP process. Unfortunately the automatic rename process does not update the ShortName field. It could be part of your process to update it manually, but I haven't been doing that and didn't want to try to figure out which ones needed updating.

As you consider all the implications you might think you need to do a search against the FullName attribute. However, aliases entered in the FullName field are listed under the cn attribute. I don't understand why, but that's the way it works.

Taking all this into consideration, the LDAP filter on my production Barracuda is:

(|(mail=${recipient_email})(cn=${recipient_email})(shortname=${recipient_local_part}))

This searches for the internet address, any e-mail aliases, and the shortname as a final last-ditch attempt to get the message delivered. LDAP queries are always OR'ed, so if anything matches it will return a True, the message will be delivered, and life is good. But if none of those match, the Barracuda will take care of sending the delivery failure report. The Barracuda does not cache invalid LDAP recipients, but at least Domino isn't having to do the double duty of doing both the lookup and generating a NDR.

That's all there is to it. As simple as the filter is, it took me many hours of tinkering before I finally found the right combination that worked for me. I strongly recommend you do some tests using the Test LDAP feature in the Barracuda to make sure you are getting everything you expect.

SnTT , show-n-tell thursday

Efficiency gone wrong

Ben Langhinrinchs posted recently about his efforts at conservation. I'm a huge proponent of being as green as I can be. I have been using compact fluorescent bulbs, we replaced all the windows in our house and installed ridge vents, and we installed a high efficiency dishwasher and gas dryer.

A few years ago our aging electric water heater was dying and we needed to replace it. I was shocked to learn that it was under the house. I'm not sure why, but that's where it is. Since we live in a hurricane zone we wanted to convert to gas, and to improve efficiency we wanted to bring the water heater inside. Bringing the water heater inside meant sacrificing much-needed closet space, and we would have to run a new gas line.

In looking around for an efficient solution we came across tankless water heaters and decided they matched our lifestyle and conservation goals the best. The idea is that since they don't maintain a tank of water they are more efficient. With a tankless gas hot water heater you have a few options as far as ignition. One is to use a pilot light, which burns gas constantly. If you want a sparked ignition you have three options: electricity, battery and hydro-generated.

Since the idea was that we wanted hot water even when the power was out, which could be days or weeks in a hurricane, electric was out. We also didn't want to be dealing with changing batteries, so we opted for the hydro-generated ignition. Here's what happens: water flows through a turbine, which spins and strikes a sparker. The sparker ignites the gas, which heats the water. It's efficient, requires no maintenance, and as long as you have water and gas, you have hot water.

Installation wasn't that big a deal. It has to be vented outside and we have an old chimney from the boiler that used to be the heating system, so we tapped into that. It's in our panty, beside the dryer, which was perfect. We installed the water heater on the wall directly behind the clothes dryer, vented it out the chimney and spliced into the dryer's gas line. It's a cramped space, but since we would never have to touch it, we didn't mind.

We bought the Bosch Aquastar 1600H with an automatic ignition, and it's awful. First, if it's windy, it simply won't light. Even with a damper on the vent and a cap on the chimney there's too much wind coming down the chimney. When it's not windy it can still sometimes take 10 - 15 minutes to get the striker to finally catch. If you've had the hot water on for a while, such as when washing clothes or someone else taking a shower, the water heater stays warm enough that it won't turn back on immediately. Since it's directly behind the dryer we have the same problem if the dryer has been on, too. Finally, because the ignition is hydro-generated it shuts off the hot water if the water flow is too low. You can't have just a trickle of hot water, it has to be pretty much full force and you have to add cold water to temper it.

A tankless hot water heater is a great idea, and I love the concept. This implementation totally sucks, though. I wish we had purchased the model with the battery ignition instead, and I've contacted someone about retrofitting ours or giving us a trade in for a battery ignited unit. We paid over $500 for the heater and for that kind of money we shouldn't have to deal with this frustration. After five years of this insanity, I've had enough.

Domino 7.02 upgrade - mosty good and a few glitches

Today I upgraded my mail server from 6.5.4 FP3 to 7.02. The install was relatively painless, but trying to track down all the information on getting Rooms and Resources set up was frustrating. I had read some posts about it on Notes.net and the blogosphere, but I couldn't find it all when I needed it and ended up spending an hour or so pulling it all together. My pain is your gain. Here's the down and dirty on what you need to do to go from 6.x to 7.x:

1. Upgrade to Domino 7.x
   
2. Load your Domino server
3. on the console tell rnrmgr quit
4. on the console tell sched quit
5. on the console load convert -d [your reservation database] * resrc7.ntf
   
6. Open your reservation database in Designer and enable all the disabled agents. Optionally sign the database with the server's ID if you don't want automatic notices to have your name on them.
7. Make sure you have an administration server set on your reservation database
8. on the console load sched. Let it finish processing.
9. on the console load rnrmgr

My only problem now is I'm getting errors like this:
12/30/2006 02:22:02 PM RnRMgr: Error processing reservation document (NoteID: NT0000988E) in database RSVP.nsf
12/30/2006 02:22:02 PM Error connecting to server MAIL/WMBIRD: The server is not responding. The server may be down or you may be experiencing network problems. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

The server this is running on is MAIL/WMBIRD, so I don't know how it could possibly not be responding. Also, the filename in the OS and in all the mail-in records is rsvp.nsf. I don't know where that all upper case thing is coming from. I haven't broken out NotesPeek to see which documents can't be processed, either.

Upcoming travel

The next several weeks are going to be a little insane...

• January 6 - 13, 2007 - Lake Tahoe ski trip (link to our timeshare resort). This will be my 9th year going to Tahoe and my partner's 12th, and a friend from San Francisco will be joining us for the third year. If there's anyone out there in the Sacramento or Bay Area and you want to join us, let me know. We have a spare sleep sofa. :-)
  
• January 20 - 26, 2007 - Lotusphere. My second! I still need to figure out what sessions to attend.
  
• February 4 - 11, 2007 - WinterPRIDE in Whistler, BC (ski trip) We went to this event in 1999 when it was called Altitude. Some friends from Atlanta will be joining us
  

Between all this I'll be upgrading our servers to Domino 7.02 and migrating more servers off the iSeries and onto Red Hat. I still need to publish more documentation about that process...

Later in the year I already have the following planned...

• June 3rd - Wedding in the Eastern Shore.
• July 13th - Wedding in Toronto
• October 20th - Wedding in Boston
• November 13 - 24 - transatlantic cruise - Barcelona to Miami on the Oceania Regatta

With all this travel I'll end up taking a couple of weeks off without pay. I gotta live while I'm still alive, right?

Blue Rinsed application template

A really long time ago I created a standard application template for all my applications. After R6 was released I decided to "Blue Rinse" it and make it look more like the regular mail template. It was a little tedious but it has allowed me to provide my applications with a consistent look and feel. Hopefully someone else can benefit from my effort, too.


A few things to know:

• ENFORCE CONSISTENT ACL IS CHECKED!!
  
• The star icon is an image resource with the alias DBIcon.
• The name beside the icon is an action button with a computed label of @DBTitle. You can find it on the ($notes-Top) form.
  
• There is a view for comments, and an agent for adding comments. Nearly every application I create needs this feature so I just built it into my template. To get rid of it you'll need to delete the (Add Comments) agent, the Comments view and the Comment form.
• There are a few shared actions.
• Everything on the form template is sized so it will print nicely. This means a left margin of 0.85" and a maximum table width of 6.8".
  

There's probably something I left out so let me know if you have any other questions. Download the template here.

[EDIT - 12/29: Added the General script library and reuploaded.]

Michael Sampson on Sharepoint Portal 2007

Michael Sampson recently wrote an article for Messaging News Magazine in which he does a high-level review of his favorite features from Sharepoint Portal 2007. In his final analysis he states the following:

Collaborative capabilities in SharePoint are positioned as merely one of six major functionality areas, the others being portal, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business processes and forms, and business intelligence. This is an extensive product that addresses an extensive list of business needs.

Wow. Where else have we ever seen a product do so much? I mean, one platform that handles all that? All kidding aside, welcome to the party, Michael. :-) Customers have been doing all that for nearly two decades with Lotus Notes and Domino. In fact, there isn't anything particularly revelatory in what Sharepoint Portal 2007 delivers. Michael's favorite features are as follows:

• Blogs and Wikis - As far as I know this has always been part of Notes in the form of discussion databases, it just didn't have a supercool buzzword attached.
• Shared Notebooks - The concept is that you can store information in a central repository and you choose who can view it. Again, it's a discussion database.
• Knowledge Network for Collaboration Auto-Discovery - For those of you still awake after reading that, the idea is some sort of server-based spider searches your e-mail to find out what you're an expert in, then lets you choose whether you want to tell the rest of your organization. I think Lotus had something called Raven or KMStation that was similar, but it died because nobody cared. I guess in a large organization this might be useful for those times when the person who handles Responsibility X could be in another country. For the other 97% of companies I just don't see it being relevant.
• Engine for Human Workflows - Basically a set of six or eight document-centric workflow choices, such as fill out your TPS report then select the "Forward to PHB" option. There isn't really much to say, other than it's nice this is easily accessible to end users. Doing it in Notes is still several orders of magnitude simpler for a developer. Notes doesn't have a built-in way to extend this to end users, though, and that is a shame.
  

I never used any previous release of Sharepoint Portal and only installed the 2007 version to see what all the hooplah was about. Coming from Notes and Domino I wasn't particularly impressed. The features aren't new, and to get the full functionality everyone needs to use Office 2007. That is an extremely heavy requirement in every conceivable way: massive hardware requirements, massive server requirements and massive user retraining. Michael sums it up well:

If your business or organization has the financial wherewithal to embrace Microsoft's Office 2007 system, plus the people to manage and maintain the resultant infrastructure, SharePoint is good move.

That excludes me.

Picked up from Peter de Haas, the article is available from Messaging News Magazine.

Install Shield Tuner on Passport Advantage

There's something seriously strange going on with the Passport Advantage site. None of the Notes or Domino 7.0.2 stuff shows up in my preferred list and I have to go to the "all" view to find it. I was just downloading the 7.0.2 files and noticed there is now a downloadable Install Shield Tuner package, which I have never seen before. According to the PA website this was posted on August 25, 2005 but it only shows up under the Domino 7.0.2 section. I don't know if it rolls up to the most recent list but I do know for a fact I never saw it for 7.0 or 7.0.1. You can't find it by searching, either. I tried by name (Install Shield Tuner) and part number (C84T5NA). By name gives no results, by part number returns everything in the catalog that I have access to.

Anyway, for those of you who do use the Install Shield Tuner, there is now a downloadable version. Or maybe it's over a year old and I somehow missed it.

Template upgrade finished

It took a little tinkering but I finally got this the way I like it. The most frustrating part was the default sidebar was HUGE. We're talking nearly 1/3rd of the screen. Fixing it meant wading through the seemingly endless layers of divs wrapped in divs wrapped in more divs. Anyway, I figured it out and it's more appropriate now. You'll also notice the annoying wasted space at the sides is gone. Someone finally got the memo that people want to actually use their full screen real estate.

You'll also notice the About Me section is a little different. I put my e-mail address on my Blogger profile. Hopefully that won't get abused too much, if it does I'll obfuscate it a bit. The big reason I did this template upgrade in the first place was for the comment RSS feed. That's mostly for my own benefit because now it's on my Netvibes page. I hope you like the new layout and find the comment feed useful. Let me know f there's anything else you would like me to move around or add.

Domino's place at the table

The discussion over on Ed's blog is about why people believe rumors that Notes is dead. I posted a lengthy comment there, but I had some more thoughts on the subject that were more contentious and I didn't want to take over Ed's blog with my ramblings.

It isn't Notes that is threatened. It's Domino. Look at the recent announcements:

• Sametime RTC Gateway
• Lotus Component Designer
• Activity Explorer
• Workplace Forms
• Domino Toolkit for Websphere Studio
• Domino and Extended Product Portlets
• Lotus Expeditor

It's all about Websphere. Where are the Domino innovations? IBM's lack of focus on Domino, while claiming it is a focus on Domino, is creating FUD. There is a roadmap for Domino and there has been a commitment to new releases for the next decade or so. The question is what lies along that road?

I'm not suggesting that Websphere is replacing Domino. When I look at everything laid out in front of me and I start connecting the dots, Domino's role and even it's usefulness isn't clear. End users don't care about the difference between Notes and Domino, and you need to look no further than the above examples to understand why people are willing to believe the rumor that Notes is dead. Strictly speaking, though, it's Domino that is more likely on a path toward extinction.

Template upgrade

Blogspot has some new templates available so I'm going to be changing mine around this weekend. The big thing I'm trying to hack in is a comment feed. I also plan to tie up a lot of loose ends this weekend and provide some follow-up I promised a while back. I just wanted to give everyone a head's up in case things go wonky. :)

Why I love Netvibes (subtitle: Okay, so I'm a little slow.)

Over the past year or so I've accumulated quite a list of blogs that I like to keep up with. The problem has been trying to keep up with all the updates since everyone publishes new content on their own schedule. This is the problem RSS and Atom are supposed to address.

RSS and Atom are both relatively simple protocols, but there is a huge number of clients that can be used. The issue I had is I wanted something that was Internet-based so I could use it from wherever I happened to be. I didn't want to have to install software or use a special browser add-in that essentially tied me down to one computer.

And then I stumbled across Netvibes. Here is a description from Wikipedia:

Netvibes is an Ajax-based start page similar to Google Personalized Homepage. It is organized into tabs, with each tab containing user-defined modules, such as RSS/Atom feeds, iCal calendars, Gmail messages, notes, Web search, the local weather forecast, Google Docs & Spreadsheets documents, bookmarks, del.icio.us, Meebo, and user-created modules.

Nathan Freeman recently commented that he found Netvibes overwhelming. I can understand why, the initial screen takes some time to figure out. But once you do, you realize you can tailor it to be exactly what you want, such as this:


And when you click an article, it gives you the full thing (depending on content and how the blog publishes it):


I never really got the buzz over RSS until I found Netvibes. Now I can't imagine keeping up with all the blogs I read without it. I know I'm a little late to the party, and my uptake on these things is a little slow. Many of you are probably either smiling or guffawing at the idea that I only recently embraced this. It's better late than never, right?

Upgrade to Office 2007 and Outlook takes over

Today I upgraded to MS Office 2007 Professional. Here is the Notes icon on my desktop before...



and after...



And now my Notes shortcut launches Outlook:


Edit: Here are the properties of the updated shortcut:


And here are the properties of the Notes shortcut in my Start menu:

Is it okay to share modified versions of Lotus templates?

I know OpenNTF has their Mail Experience, but I just wanted to make sure it was acceptable to share copies of modified templates. I have an application template I created based on the Notes 6 mail template and I also "Blue rinsed" many of the other templates to look like Notes 6. A lot of the templates are stuck in Notes 5, and some (like the Sametime Configuration database) are from some earlier version (4.5?). I was just wondering if it was okay to share my updated versions.

Any hope for iTunes on Windows XP 64?

I have intentionally avoided getting an iPod because...

iTunes is currently not supported in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (the 64-bit version of Windows XP). Features may or may not work correctly. One example is reading or writing to an optical drive (CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW). It’s also possible iTunes for Windows may not successfully install.

Recently I purchased a Sony Walkman because it is supported on XP64. (The Sony SonicStage software is horrible, by the way.) So wouldn't you know it, I won a 30GB iPod Video at my company's holiday party!

I debated just selling it on eBay and decided that was more hassle than the $175 - $200 I could get out of it. I considered regifting it but I don't know anyone I like that much. So I finally broke down and installed iTunes.

The installation went fine and after it finished it tried to load iTunes and this all that happened:


Okay, I'm a nerd, I can make this work. I excluded all the EXE's from Data Execution Protection and set them all to run in Windows 2000 compatibility mode. I fired up iTunes, and I get the same error. Multiple reboots, lots of Googling, numerous suggestions, and all this is as far as I can get.

Apple's lack of support for XP64 is frustrating, but it's not completely surprising. Supposedly Anapod Explorer works in XP64 so I'm going to give it a try. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Until I can get some software that works I have a really pretty but effectively useless $200 paperweight on my desk.

Why you care about the new Electronic Discovery rules

On Friday, December 1st, 2006, new rules concerning electronic discovery went into effect in the US. Technically these rules only apply to federal litigation, but since they were ruled on by the US Supreme Court they can be used as precedent in any case. In a nutshell, the regulations say that all electronic communications must be saved for a period of 7 years.

Basically this brings at least part of Sarbanes-Oxley down to all levels of business. It does provide a few "outs", though. For example, Rule 26(b)(2)(B) states:

The amendment to this rule will provide that a party need not provide discovery of electronically stored information from sources that the party identifies as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. The burden would be on the responding party to show that the information is not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. Even if that showing is made, the court may nonetheless order discovery if the requesting party shows good cause. The court may also specify conditions for the discovery.

That's nice, but trying to justify why it is unreasonable to store 500TB of e-mail data to someone whose knowledge of technology starts and stops with iPod ads on TV is going to be painful. And there is Rule 37(f), which I see being invoked a lot:

This amendment will provide that absent exceptional circumstances, a court may not impose sanctions on a party under the rules for failing to provide electronically stored information lost as a result of the routine, good faith operation of an electronic information system.

In other words, you can overwrite backup tapes if you can prove your backup procedures maintain full copies of documents. The questions I still have are:

• What about revisions to documents? Do you need to maintain those?
• What about the autosaved revisions some applications like Word, Excel and Lotus Notes create? Do those point-in-time snapshots have to be maintained?
• What about personal computers used to conduct work-related business?
• Or what if someone uses their personal cell phone to text message a customer are we expected to capture that?
• What about using a personal digital camera to take pictures of a customer site? Are we supposed to confiscate the camera media so we can obtain a copy?
  
• What is the liability of the systems administrator responsible for a messaging solution? Can we be held accountable at any level?
  

A good write-up can be found at the website of O'Melveny & Meyers, LLP. I have no relationship with them at all, I found their site while Googling for information and it was actually readable. They also provide a link to the full text of the new rules.

A matter of perspective

I've been lurking and/or participating in the blogosphere for over a year. Most of the blogs I read are written by IBMers, their business partners, or consultants. Many of the discussions I have participated in show this point of view almost to exclusion.

What seems missing from most discussions is the voice of the end user and customer. The role of a BP or consultant is inherently different than someone on staff. The BP is brought in for a specific project or problem, and when they're done they move on. I don't mean that to sound cold or callous, but the reality is they aren't sitting at the same desk every day, working with the same group of coworkers. The outside vendor hopefully has an ongoing relationship with the customer, but it's still a different focus.

I'm also not saying that BP's aren't customers themselves or suggesting they don't have a place at the table. I'm not knocking the role BP's and consultants have, I value their input tremendously. They have seen more than I ever will and their expertise is truly amazing. They're usually the ones who have the opportunity to push tools in directions and ways staff developers such as myself never will. The insight they gain in that process is invaluable, and it is extremely rewarding when they freely share that experience, as many of them do.

So, to my point. I think the BP's and consultants are the minority, but in most conversations I participate in they have a majority voice. Their influence is disproportionate, and I try to balance the scales somewhat and bring the perspective of the end customer to the discussion. I don't want to sound like an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur. I definitely have my own agenda and ultimately I can only speak for myself. I am by no means claiming to be "the voice of the common man".

But I don't think my experiences or needs are so different from the majority of Notes and Domino customers out there. I keep hearing that the majority of Notes and Domino customers are small to medium businesses, so I feel that my perspective and concerns are representative of a lot of people, and I often don't feel like we are being heard.

In memoriam - Theodore (Ted) Wesley Pstrak - February 8, 1927 to December 2, 2006

At 5:15 AM my partner's mother, Helen, called to say that Ted had fallen out of bed, she didn't think he was breathing, and she needed help. At 5:35 AM we arrived at their house and wove our way through two fire trucks, two police cars, and two ambulances. Ted was taken to East Cooper Regional Medical Center shortly after we arrived and was pronounced dead at about 6:15 AM. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Ted's health had been declining for a few weeks. He recently spent 13 days in the hospital, returning home on Friday, November 24th. Ted is survived by his wife, Helen Tyriw Pstrak, five children, and eight grandchildren. Ted was a former Navy Captain, having served for 10 commands with that rank. He joined the Navy in 1944 and was in active duty during World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He retired as Commander of the Charleston Naval Base in 1977, having been awarded numerous citations including a Bronze Star. A frugal man who grew up during the Great Depression, Ted was generous to a fault. He contributed to numerous charities and took great joy in leading the congregation at Christ Our King in Mount Pleasant, SC, in hymns.

This has been an extremely surreal day. I helped my partner and his family plan the funeral of their patriarch this morning, then this evening attended a wedding for the daughter of my partner's boss, whom he has known for 23 years (since she was 3). It struck me during the service that I heard The Lord's Prayer twice today: at shortly after 6:00 AM and again at shortly after 6:00 PM. I'm not a Catholic or even a Christian, and I'm having a hard time understanding the dichotomy of how this one piece can be used in two vastly different circumstances.

Ted, wherever you are, know that you are loved and will be missed tremendously.