UKLUG was today, but NEOLUG was cooler!

From the "Our LUG is better than your LUG department"
Today was the day for the quarterly Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group, (NEOLUG) meeting at the IBM office in Cleveland and what an awesome day it was! I had the pleasure of being asked to be a part of the blogger round table discussion that included Phil Randolph, Gregg Eldred, Rob Wunderlich and some guy from the west coast named Bruce Elgort or something. Chris Blatnick, also a local blogger in all things Lotus, moderated the panel and did a fantastic job putting together a list of questions to grill us on. Really the drive of the discussion was to show those in attendance that blogging, twitter-ing and contributing to the Yellow Bubble can be both a fun and rewarding experience. The whole idea of this community having such a positive impact for everyone really came through I think. Chris videotaped the session so hopefully it will be up soon and I will post a link to it in this entry. Really was a great experience.
After a short break, Rob returned to the front to go over what is currently available in the marketplace both from Lotus and third party vendors for mobile access to PIM and applications in your environment. Rob also went on to show how easy it is to take your custom Domino applications that you already have in your environment and make them accessible on mobile devices. It's all about the interface. The one thing I most took away from the discussion was that the Palm OS is pretty much dead to most all the vendors. This is something that I am dealing with in my job since we still have a number of Palm TX's in use that work great on wi-fi but have trouble with out new application. I'm still holding out hope that a Traveler version for the Palm will show up, but I think we'll have a better chance at Shatner being the speaker for the OGS.
Now it was time for Bruce to take over and show us just how really cool the products from Elguji Software are. LinkJam and IdeaJam, both built to run on Domino, are great tools that can be used in your organization as a great primer to the idea of social computing and idea sharing. Easy to use, easy to set up and valuable in helping to drive your business forward. If you are not yet familiar with Elguji, take some time to check them out.
So after a busy day it was time for me to hit the trail south. Thanks for Bruce and Gayle for coming in to give the demo and for buying us pizza! And thanks to Rob for driving down from Detroit to present as well. Was a great meeting and I'm looking forward to the next meeting where Gregg has volunteered me to present. Ugh.

LDAP lunacy and other stuff

LDAP is a fantastic tool to use, especially when you are using it with an anti-spam solution to validate email addresses on inbound mail. It is a great solution until something goes wrong. In my case, my Domino Directory had gotten corrupted and that made for a fun afternoon.

It all started when my application server began to become unresponsive during the late morning hours. That also happens to be the server that I do the LDAP lookups against. So, I rebooted the server and didn't think much more about it until shortly after the restart and I checked to make sure that LDAP lookups were being completed properly. All of a sudden, any time an address was being requested, it would find the entry in the Domino Directory but return to the spam server that it was not a valid address which then caused all messages coming in at the time to be rejected. Not a good thing. So I killed LDAP lookups against Domino and started the process of trying to figure out what went wrong. I started by calling the spam vendor and they couldn't find anything wrong, which led me to call Domino support. After doing a bunch of different debugging, the tech found the problem. Something had gone missing from my anonymous LDAP lookup entry in the all servers configuration document.
So for giggles, I did a design refresh on my Domino Directory and noticed that several items were being added. I even saw LDAP flash by a couple of times on the lower bar. That led me to think that somehow my Domino Directory had gotten corrupt and I somehow lost my configuration for LDAP. After re-adding the objectClass attribute type, LDAP started working again. I always seem to get the weird ones.

Outside of that and complaining about paying $3.50 for a gallon of gas, not too much else happening in my world. This past Sunday we had a great time helping Shannon celebrate her 17th anniversary of her 21st birthday. The NEOLUG meeting takes place tomorrow at IBM in Cleveland. Denise and I are all set to fly off to Boston a week from Saturday so I can attend the jumpstart training at Admin2007. Which leads me to one complaint I have with this conference. A few days after finalizing all our plans for the trip, Clippings sends this email. It would have been nice to have gotten that a few days earlier then I could have gotten away with having another day in Boston. Harrumph!

Well, that's it for now. I'll only be attending the Sunday jumpstarts in Boston, so if you see a big guy wearing this tshirt that looks like this:
Say hi!