Pavlov Scope

Lotusphere 2006 (Day 1).

Good stuff out of the way first – Jason Alexander was our celebrity guest How cool is that? To redundantly answer my rhetorical question: VERY cool. He was a hoot, as always, and was even cool enough to come out after the opening session and shake hands/take pictures/tolerate all the geeks that surrounded him. Here is my friend Pooja Jain with Mr. Alexander (that was me behind the camera ;-)
He is extremely laid back and giving, especially for a celebrity of his caliber. “Architect” of the future, indeed. If that acting gig doesn’t work out for him, he has a lucrative future in corporate events ;-)

Now, to the less important, geek stuff:

Lotusphere 2006 Slides and Presentations – Get them @ Lotusphere 2006 Online

You need a Lotusphere ID / password (upside down on your badge) to log into this site. Also, to get the slides, you need to go to the “Agenda” header link, then go to the “By Title, By Speaker,” etc. Maybe they should have the Acrobat icon on the home page linked to the By Title section of the slides/presentations area, but hey… what fun would that be…

ND7 should give us same performance with less CPU, so more scale on the same platform. iSeries already heavily optimized, so not as dramatic of a gain. Windows and Linux show biggest improvements (400% increase on SUSE w/2.6 kernel)

Domino Domain Monitoring

• Correlates issues across domains
  
• Rolls up data across servers
  
• Better reporting
  
• Suggests possible solutions
  
• Assign/manage admin tasks responsibities
  
• Autonomic computing

Client Management/Policy
Run as admin ability for SmartUpgrade is forthcoming (ugh.. come on guys.. we don’t give local admin to just anyone). One thing I wish developers and admins alike would do is utilze a test user-level (non-admin) ID when creating and testing new features and capabilities. One day, I hope that computers aren’t running wide open as the general assumption is right now.

DB2 integration
Not a replacement of NSF - OK, then how does it work (gateway)?
Choose specific apps for DB2 enablement (not everyone gets a DB2 mail file right now ;-)
DB2 access views – expose Domino data to other DB2 apps.
DB2 Query views – SQL based queries as views accessed via Notes 7 client
Running on Windows and AIX currently (the two main codestream parents).

Web services integration
SOA – Services oriented architecture is a new paradigm of delivering information to users and configuring IT to perform work. Lotus is positioning several of its products around this idea.
Provides access to Domino apps via web services
SOAP 1.1 over HTTP
WSDL1.1

“Activity” presentation and integration looks really nice. If Lotus can pull it off, it will dramatically change the way (for the better) that people work. Now, if I could only get my users to stop using the Workspace page (people love those infernal squares for some reason).

Chris Miller rocks – If you are an admin, DO NOT MISS his sessions. Look at his blog. He is doing BP402 (Advanced LDAP) and Security SMTP (Hands on session HND104 - will repeat).
Keep up and you’ll learn a lot, but it is somewhat like encountering a knowledge hit-and-run, so you WILL have to download the slides to commit most of it to memory. So, do that and love it.

DB2 (ID105) – ... Very interested, since I saw the first demo of it in 2004, in the integration of DB2 SQL with Notes/Domino. Mmmm, that’s some good query… bye bye FTIs (not really, due to binary objects), hello smoking-fast tables (finally, real RDB for Notes).
A Domino server is “designated” as a DB2 “access” server. Needs DB2 UDB Enterprise Server (ESE).

Immediate Question – How does failover work? If “a” server is designated, what if it is down, how do you get to the data then?
How do you backup the data (data dir)? Which files are critical?
Another issue, but hard to avoid: DB2 OS password might change per security password policies. OS id has elevated access (more than likely) to the database. If the password doesn’t change, then it has a higher potential hacking window (exempt from password expiration). This is not unlike the server IDs (which, incidentally, is where this is stored) in most environments, so it is just something to be aware of and perhaps restrict externally via other means (network-side, DB2 side, etc.). The developers thought of this already and exposed some APIs to set/change the password information in the server.id for use in automating this pw change.

DB2 Access is “not a real server,” just a dll or library used to talk between Domino and DB2 server.

Can move existing data from an NSF to a new DB2 tablespace/group. You want to lock a tablespace/group if the data stored in there has a lot of data / indexes. Mail file was used as an example to move into a specific group (I have several candidates ;-)
Class name is used as a comment/categorization field. Was put in there for backups, so that different tablespaces could be backed up on a different schedule than others (more frequently backups vs. less frequent).
New Replica process (between servers) creates new DBs (on DB2-enabled Domino servers) as DB2 datastores (instead of NSFs) by default. So, indexes and metadata are stored in the DB2 server (I think, this remains to be clarified) – raw data is stored elsewhere (kinda like MailMeter works).

Vendor concesion action: As usual, good stuff and loud. Lots of fun junk, good munchies.

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Lotusphere 2006. This is my seventh Lotusphere. I have arrived and checked in, Carribean Beach… hmmm. Not quite, but we’ll see.
Nevertheless, it is good to be back. ND7, DB2, workplace, etc. Geeking should be good this year, coming away with a lot.

If you are reading this and are at Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, drop a line.

Hope to see you around, but I’ll be updating this as the week goes on.

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I am very happy to see the growth of more innovative applications on the Internet, particular those that involve truly coming together and building knowledge that will bring us forward whether it is artistically, intellectually, politically, or productively. The advent of what is being called the read/write Internet is a great step toward collaborative cultures coming together. I love sites like Wikipedia (although it has its critics), based on the great Wiki technology, the Rosetta Project which is documenting human languages, and ibiblio (a content aggregator of free information) – these use community submission to build content. By developing these kinds of huge scale bodies-of-work, we approach the ideal that Vannevar Bush envisioned with his ideas of memex.

The Semantic Web is a term, coined by Tim Berners-Lee (W3C founder), to describe how information can be made more useful on the Web. Specifically – “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” – Tim Berners-Lee (from the article The Semantic Web, Scientific American-May 2001).

For several years Dr. Ted Nelson has been working in related areas while working toward Xanadu. He, Tim Berners-Lee, and a host of others have been working to realize the vision of Dr. Vannevar Bush (a brilliant researcher and scientist) who pioneered the idea of contextualizing and linking knowledge – making it much more accessible than traditional methods of presentation. In a July 1945 article published in the Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Bush wrote a paper describing this idea in a broad and philosophical sense entitled “As We May Think.”

Conspiracy theorists and UFO believers have even speculated that Dr. Bush’s efforts in this area came about through his contact with the aliens that allegedly crash-landed in the desert of Roswell ;-). I don’t buy into that explanation (the man was a brilliant visionary, before and after the Roswell incident), but there is no doubt that he brought this idea, as old as epistemology itself, new life in the 20th century.

These are truly big thinkers and they can be considered practical technicians in this modern-day epistemological effort to bring meaning
and newfound usefulness to the creation of knowledge brought about by the explosion of science in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In the days of our Founding Fathers, between Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, given enough time and intellect, one could know pretty much all there was to know at that point in modern history. But, just 100-150 years later, science has changed the world irreversibly not only with its advancements but in the amount of knowledge that has been created – to the point that it has grown to the level where no single person has the capacity to understand and know all that is knowable.

The current Web has the ability to catalog and make available the enormous amounts of information available today, but it is very bad at giving meaning to that information – or perhaps better stated, it was simply not designed to give content meaning. The Web was designed to make information available only. This is why search engines have become a major driver of research in information science – they allow users to sift through this massive information store more easily. But, it is still us, the users, who are giving context and meaning to the information we retrieve from the search engines. When we are returned a list of Google results, it is us that analyzes and categorizes the information presented. The search engine simply cross-references the words and phrases we provide it as input.

The Semantic Web effort would evolve the existing tagging mechanisms used on the Web today. Using technologies like XML, data would be given predefined meaning and context so that it tells the user what it is about upfront. This has the potential to transform the information available into knowledge – relevant, empirical, and continuously adapting to new contexts and developments.

This tool would also unify the language used to describe information on the Web. Take Yahoo! for example – The categorization used by Yahoo! to give context (using the directory model) to other websites form what Jerry Yang calls its “ontology” (or, its unified specification to represent information), as described in the May 1996 issue of Wired. Others have seen this categorization as the reverse: As a mechanism to describe documents individually to create a kind of pseudo-semantic web.

The Yahoo method requires the use of human-based interpretation, analysis, and manually categorization. Albeit sophisticated, this is still an effort that will be inherently flawed and difficult to maintain over time. The promise of the Semantic Web is that it will bring context to the information presented inherent to the document itself. This will modify the way that the document is created from the beginning to automatically have definition built-into the document so that it can be automatically correlated and given better relevance in the larger Web system.

Each document will define what it is, to some degree, so that we can better find, understand, and use the knowledge that would be inevitably created by such contextualization.

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I am not sure why the government keeps punching themselves in the face with this stuff, but do they really need to have access to millions of “random” searches on Google? The “company line” is that they are looking for evidence of pedestrian searches that return pornographic results (mistakenly) as a way of finding porn sites that aren’t offering strict entrance controls.

In light of all the bad press recently for our government’s operational ailments, it seems like strange timing to start worrying about protecting children from seeing pornography. I could be wrong, and maybe they are trying to nab some negligent people for real, but casting such a wide net for such a non-offense begs too many questions in my mind. After all, they are looking for evidence to bring BACK a law that was overturned a couple years ago.

Google’s core mission is the freedom of the world’s information (well, other than to make some huge money ;-) and to that end they have made more progress than anyone in history since the invention of moveable type. I agree with Lawrence Lessig’s core philosophy that the natural state of information is freedom (that is to say, without significant barriers), just as the natural state of humans is to be free, but it is commendable and somewhat comforting to see this organization (with access to so much information about us) push back against this kind of, in my opinion, government overreaching into all of our lives. Whether you are one of the good ones or one of the bad ones, I still believe that we do not deserve to be treated with almost despotic disregard. I don’t care if it is terrorism, kids looking at porn, or a meteor hurtling toward Earth – our government has shown us that it almost never “knows best,” especially at the higher levels of political office (regardless of what political flavor you may favor).

One solace that we might take from this report: Perhaps those concerned about Big Brother already having this information are misguided (after all, they are asking many search engines for their logs). Like many government projects (although not all…), it would seem that the collection of all data traversing the Internet is a task that not even the hyper-powerful American government can do.

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Caia’s release The Magic Dragon is another recent acquisition of mine that I can’t believe I missed when it was first released in April 2003. This downtempo album is made by Maiku Takahashi with Andy Cato (Andy is better known as one-half of Groove Armada). But, Caia is a lot less “commercial” sounding and more laid back than GA. This is an excellent, very solid throughout, release from the excellent Guidance label.

Maiku Takahashi and Andy show that they are a great combination with skills in both beat construction and atmospherics on The Magic Dragon. This trip-hop album is full of quality composition and, probably thanks to Andy’s experience, does not sound like a debut release in that it seems well formed and mature. The Rose Room starts out the album with a breakbeat tune to set the tone. Second track (Remembrance) is much more ambient without any heavy percussion, almost like a more uptempo Deep Forest track with a whimsical chanting carrying the song forward.

The third track (The Love Room) brings back some big breakbeat live-sounding drums, very phat, funk oriented basslines, and more atmospheric sampling that makes this a very fun driving song ;-) Fourth song brings it back down to lower key, with more eastern chants, rhythmic wave samples that match the back-and-forth eastern percussion sounds. La Telecabine lightens the mood with a much more “airy” feeling track that is like a soft house track with a very bright feeling in general, bringing to mind a crisp summer morning.

Mr. Gone (track 6) shifts gears once again with a loping bassline and guitar sample, more funky drumming, and a great 303 effect to add electronic flavor to the track that was missing (i.e. if Mr. Oizo did downtempo funk/hop, this is what it would sound like).

Whose Blues? drops you into the song as if you were walking into a room where it was playing (like you entered the middle of a song)... you are brought into the song as if you are walking toward it down a hallway. Its Miles-esque trumpet sounds over the top of a mellow, but funky breakbeat and moog line throw you into a Digable Planets sampledelic mood immediately – especially with its “Those were the days” vocal sample. Heavy Weather (8) has the same flavor as La Telecabine in that it is a more atmospheric track, but it is mixing together some of all the elements of this album as a whole: Heavily processed vocal samples, airy synth line, bongo percussion, etc. that when thrown together creates an interesting mix of organic electronic music. Heavy Weather changes gears nicely inside the song and in it I can sense the Groove Armada influence.

If you close your eyes during Jericho (track 10), you’ll swear you are hearing a new Nightmares on Wax track – awash in synths, echoing vocal samples, the mild melodic hook that introduces you into a funky, loping bassline should make any steadfast trip hop fan happy. This is track is full of smoky room ambience.

The last song is named exactly right for its location on the album: Afterwards @ The Bar gives you the feeling that they are “rolling the credits,” wrapping up the preceding tracks as if you are reflecting on what you just listened to while hanging out in a loungey, after-hours bar – winding down. Hustle-and-bustle sounds give the impression of a crowd of people around you, tinkling high notes sound like martini glasses clinking, and the piano man is tickling the ivories in broken melodies to pass the time, finishing off that “Play it again, Sam” feeling (yes, I know that is a misquote, but hell – if Woody Allen can name a movie after the incorrect version of the quote, I’ll use it here).

Something that shouldn’t be overlooked with this release is the extremely cool cover art; it is a joy to study while listening. Created by Rob Coke @ TwelveTen design, it has a three-dimensional feel by using alternating textures and finishes. Just very well done and the lost art of cover art is not “lost” on Rob. The cover of this disc makes me wish that vinyl was still the norm because I’d like to see it big enough to frame.

The Magic Dragon has a familiar mix of live instrumentation with electronic arrangements and any fan of trip hop should give this release a shot. I can’t wait for more from this duo.

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Hi again all;

As of today, yet another WMF vulnerability, complete with exploit code, has been discovered. In case any of you don’t read assembly programming code, thankfully, this one is less severe ;-)

The WMF vulnerability disclosed today subjects WMF-related programs (things like Internet Explorer, built-in image viewers, etc.) to crash. This is known as a Denial of Service (or, DoS) – meaning that when the exploit is accomplished it Denies you (crashes or prevents you from using) the Service (where, in this case, the service is Internet Explorer and related imaging programs).

This is clearly not a red alert since the code doesn’t appear to be able to infiltrate your computer, but it is important to stay vigilant as always. Follow this link for Microsoft’s official response to this vulnerability so far.

I’ll update when a patch has been released or if any more develops take place.

P.S. New (additional) Windows updates are due out tomorrow (Tues., 2005/Jan/10), which are unrelated to this and the previously WMF flaw.

FYI;

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Hi all;

FYI and finally

UPDATE (19:50 EST): I have deployed the patch on a small set of test machines that had both unregistered the DLL and applied the v1.3 version of the workaround from Ilfak. The XP SP2 machine deployed and restarted without any problems. However, both Windows 2000 Pro machines hung on shutdown… not sure of the cause yet (whether it is directly related to the update or something else). But, when those Win2K machines were booted back up, they both had the updated GDI32.DLL file (time/date 2005/Dec/30 @ 11:15am EST and 233,744 bytes in size). Will be looking into the problem further with additional test machines and report back here…
The update works fine, but if you need to deploy this into a large environment, I would recommend doing a sampling of the Win2K machines first to prevent widespread TechSupport calls (just in case).

FYI - the XP GDI32.DLL appears to have been fixed a couple days prior (2005/Dec/28 @ 21:54 EST and it is 280,064 bytes in size).

UPDATE (20:45 EST): I tested another Windows 2000 Pro machine, which did NOT have the Ilfak v1.3 patch applied (no patch, and the DLL was still registered) and the update went without any glitch.. no hang, no reboot problems, and the GDI32.DLL is updated as expected.

Hi again all;

Steve Gibson’s (great security researcher and asset to the IT Security community) GRC site has reported that the fix for this problem has been leaked from Microsoft. He has tested it and it appears to work as expected, and thankfully, doesn’t appear to cause any problems with the previous, unofficial, Ilfak fix. So, you will not need to uninstall the Ilfak fix to update from Microsoft next Tuesday when the fix is deployed via Windows Update.

 But, I recommend to uninstall the Ilfak fix after you have verified that the Microsoft fix is stable (in other words, after you reboot post-update, make sure you can properly use your computer for a couple days, then uninstall the Ilfak fix). Once you have uninstalled the Ilfak fix, reboot, and test your computer using the Ilfak "checking" utility (mentioned in previous posts here) to verify that the computer is no longer vulnerable.

 Then, stay tuned for the inevitable next 0day software problem which I’ll do my best to keep you updated here.

Whoops! Ilfak’s site was slashdotted today by the inundation of impatient types (read:people like me) that would prefer to have their computers protected now instead of next week when Microsoft releases the official patch.

As stated in Update 4, you can download the checker and patches from this site (see links in Update4).

Skippy has written a very nice, clean tool for doing a simple and quick backup of your WordPress DB. It is called WP-DBBackup (and why can’t all software be named so clearly?).

Recommended for those busy-on-the-go typeswho don’t have time to futz with direct DB shtuff (oh wait, that’s everyone).