Monthly Archives: July 2014

ConnectED 2015 – Smaller and shorter but more technical

Posted on by Posted in Connect, ConnectED, IBM/Lotus, Lotusphere, Technology 8 Comments

Connected

If you read the official IBM announcment for ConnectED 2015 posted by Mat Newman, you will notice a few interesting details.

First of all, the event is shorter than previous years. It starts on Sunday and ends on Wednesday instead of Thursday. On Sunday IBM has scheduled the Leadership Alliance meeting, which previously been held in the late fall in Boston. This is of course much more cost efficient for business partners, esxpecially international ones, who only have to pay one airfare and one hotel cost. But it also means that business partners who are invited to LA have to choose between presenting at the Sunday JumpStart sessions and attend the Leadership Appliance meetings. In the past, Sunday has also been the day for the Business Partner Day, hopefully IBM is not putting that on the same day as well.

Second, the conference will be held only at Walt Disney World Swan, not at both Swan and Dolphin as in previous years. This indicates a somewhat smaller conference. The Swan ballrooms combined can seat about 2700 people, with the other meeting rooms seating an additional almost 1000. So a qualified guess is that the number of participants will be limited to around 3000 or just above, assuming the keynote/OGS will still take place in the Dolphin. However this is not that much less than Lotusphere/Connect in the last few years. The labs and the sessions we all come to love (“Ask the Developers”, “Ask the Product Managers”, “Gurupaloza”) will be back, and I would be very surprised if there will not be a product showcase of some kind. There are also more interactive elements planned, like roundtables.

Third: ConnectED will be more of a technical conference, similar to the developer conferences IBM had back in the 1990’s. It will be bigger than a LUG (Lotus User Group) conference, but have a much more technical agenda than Lotusphere and Connect in the last few years. In my mind, this is a good thing. Perhaps less catering to press/analysts, “suits” (CEO/CFO type managers), project managers and similar non-technical crowds and more to the hard-core developers and admins who actually use the products.

Personally I think this is a good move by IBM. Separate out the non-technical attendees and focus on the technical side, instead of mixing technical and strategic sessions in a big messy conference. I am excited about ConnectED 2015, even if I am suspecting it will be the last conference in Orlando. Some years ago (2006? 2007?) IBM announced that they had renewed the contract for the conference (back then still called Lotusphere) until 2015.

With so many other IBM conferences merging together and taking place in Las Vegas, I would not be surprised if Lotusphere/ConnectED will suffer the same fate in 2016. I hope not, as Dolphin/Swan is a more intimate setting, where people can meet and socialize in the evening (as well as a day or two before the conference). With IBM pretty much taking over “Swolpin” (Swan and Dolphin) during that last week of January, there are very few non-conference people around. That would not be the case in Las Vegas.

No matter what, I will try to again be able to go to Orlando this coming January and see all my friends and learn more about Notes, Domino, Connections and the other products in the ICS stack.  Hope to see you there!

Recover lost SSL keyring password

Posted on by Posted in Administration, IBM/Lotus 3 Comments

About two years ago, our Network (as well as Domino) administrator left the company after 10 years. The other day our SSL certificate for one of our websites expired, and we wanted to use a newer wildcard certificate instead of a server specific certificate.
The problem was that we did not have the password for the keyring file (keyfile.kyr) used on the server, either the admin did not document it (which does not sound like him) or the document with the password was lost/we could not find it.

So what to do? We thought about creating a new keyfile and start over, but these days the certificate authorities (like Verisign, Thawte and Go Daddy) use 4096 bit SHA2 certificates as root certificate, which IBM Domino does not support (and don’t plan to support). The recommended solution is to use the IBM HTTP server as a proxy in front of the Domino HTTP server, since that one supports SSH2. So we could not go this way right away (we probably will do it eventually, though), as we just need the SSL certificate up and running on the server right away.

Our administrator came up with a way to get the password for the keyfile, assuming that you have the corresponding .sth file (which we fortunately had). The instructions are below, in case anyone need them in the future.

To recover a Lotus Domino keyring password you need a Lotus Domino server where you have admin access to and the *.sth file which fits the *.kyr file. If you have both you can perform the following steps:
Bring down the HTTP task via:

tell http quit

Open the domino console and enter:

set config DEBUG_SSL_ALL=3
set config SSL_TRACE_KEYFILEREAD=1

If you now bring back your http task via:

load http

you should see a line similar to:

ReadKeyfile> Recovering password from stash file
ReadKeyfile> Password is xxxxxxxxxxx

You now have the password. You can now simply restart the server to remove the temporary notes.ini settings.

IBM Connect becomes IBM ConnectED in 2015

Posted on by Posted in Connect, IBM/Lotus, Lotusphere, Technology 5 Comments

IBM has announced the new name for the yearly conference in Orlando, the one most of us know (and still call) Lotusphere. For the last two years it was named Connect, and for 2015 IBM again changes the name, this time to ConnectED. The conference will be more technical than the last few years, according to IBM:

In 2015, IBM Connect will transform into an even more in-depth technical event,
“IBM ConnectED” that provides the deep “nuts and bolts” technical experience that is so important to our long-standing technical community.

Specifically designed for technologists of all levels, including CIOs, IT managers and practitioners, this new event will offer deep-dive technical sessions, demos, labs and roundtables, access to IBM technical experts, and more.

The IBM ConnectED 2015 website.

The IBM ConnectED 2015 website.

I also want to share what John Head wrote about his thoughts from the IBM Digital Experience conference.

About 700 people here, and 85% of the sessions are technical. (…) The best conference keynote I have seen in years. I hope that IBM reviews the feedback for the session and applies it to future ones. I know, the Connect OGS’s have had to speak to the press and analysts that are there – and there is no press or analysts here. But what a stark difference. And in the best of ways.

I hope IBM take a good look at the ConnectED Opening General Session and make some changes, now when the conference will cater more to the technical crowd. And if the ConnectED planners read this, please have the party at the new Harry Potter Diagon Alley park this year. :-)

 

 

Code snippet – DateClass

Posted on by Posted in Lotusscript, Notes/Domino Leave a comment

Here is a small Lotusscript class I wrote some years ago. I use it in a number of other classes where I need to use date functionality of different kind. For example, I have a class that communicates with a FoxPro database, using a COM object. Some of the methods in that class uses XML while other just pass a few arguments to the COM object. The COM object expects the date values to be in ISO 8601 format (yyyy-mm-dd). In addition, sometimes the date comes from a field in a Notes document where they usually are stored in US format (mm/dd/yyyy), sometimes it is the current date.

So I decided to create a this class to just make the code cleaner and to avoid having to do the same conversions over and over again. This class can of course be extended with more functionality if you like.

I simply put the class in a script library called “Class.Date” and then use that script library in my other classes or agents.

Class DateClass 
  Private dt As NotesDateTime	
  Public ErrorMsg As String

  Public Sub New(value As Variant)
    Dim datestring As String
    ' *** Check what data type was passed and take actions.
    ' *** If value is blank or Nothing, use today's date.
    Select Case Typename(value)		
      Case "EMPTY" : datestring = Format$(Today(),"Short Date")
      Case "STRING" : 
        If Fulltrim(value) = "" Then
          datestring = Format$(Today(),"Short Date")
        Else
          datestring = value
        End If
      Case "DATE" : datestring = Cstr(value)
    End Select
    ' *** Also check that the value is a valid date
    If Isdate(datestring) = False Then
      ErrorMsg = "Class.Date:New() - '" & datestring & "' received is not a valid date."
      Set dt = Nothing
      Exit Sub
    End If
    ErrorMsg = ""
    Set dt = New NotesDateTime(datestring)	
  End Sub
	
  Public Function DateOnly As String
    ' *** Return date-part only, in format selected by the system
    DateOnly = dt.DateOnly		
  End Function

  Public Function DateOnlyISO As String
    ' *** Return date-part only, in ISO 8601 (big endian) standard format
    DateOnlyISO = Format$(dt.dateOnly,"yyyy-mm-dd")
  End Function
	
  Public Function DateOnlyUS As String
    ' *** Return date-part only, in US (middle-endian) format
    DateOnlyUS = Format$(dt.dateOnly,"mm/dd/yyyy")
  End Function

End Class

And this is how I use the class, this is the first few lines of a function in another script library:

Public Function GetPolicyData(Byval policynumber As String, Byval lossdate As Variant) As Integer
  Dim DoL As DateClass
  Dim result As Integer
  Set DoL = New DateClass(lossdate)
  If DoL Is Nothing Then
   '*** Display message, including error message from DateTime class
    MsgBox = |Failed to initialize New DateTimeClass with LossDate "| & _
    lossdate & |". | & DoL.ErrorMsg  
    Exit Function
  End If
  '*** Call COM object with policy number and date of loss in ISO 8601 format
  result = object.GetPolicyData(policynumber, DOL.DateOnlyISO())
  ...

There you have it. Easy, isn’t it?

I am back.

Posted on by Posted in Generic, Life, Personal 9 Comments

On June 11 I had some major surgery at Medical City in Dallas. It was a planned surgery to remove part of my intestines to prevent future outbreaks of diverticulitis. I been having about 2-3 outbreaks a year for the last 12 years or so. Normally they perform surgery after just 2 severe cases. I was not looking forward to the surgery and recovery, knowing that I would not be able to work for at least 3-4 weeks, and after that just half days for a little while. But the benefits of the surgery outweighted the negative sides.

Scar 10 days after surgery. YOu can also wee where the drainage tubes were located.

My scar 10 days after surgery. You can also see where the drainage tubes were located.

I was a bit nervous before surgery, but everything went well. Í am now the owner of a scar about 14 inches long across my abdomen, and lacking about a foot of my colon as well as a tennis ball sized clump of scar tissue from years of infections. If anyone is interested, the procedure is called sigmoid colon resection.

I had to stay at the hospital for a week (I was released in the evening on June 17) and then stayed 3 days at a local hotel to avoid having to go up the stairs at home. On June 20 I was finally home. I started working half-time last week, but after two days at the office, I was in severe pain/discomfort and had to rest for a day before I started working from home instead. Thankfully I have a great boss who let me do that.

For the first 5 days after surgery I was not allowed any solid food, then I went to a low fiber diet.  Two weeks after surgery all dietary restrictions were lifted and I could eat anything I wanted.

For obvious reasons I have not been blogging during this time, I have mainly been resting. But now I hope to be able to do some blogging again. I have already returned to the developerWorks forums and StackOverflow.

If you, or anyone you know, is suffering from diverticulitus, look into this surgery. I have already been able to eat things I had to exclude from my diet for years, like sesame seeds, chopped garlic and raspberries. Despite still not being fully back to normal, and having some pain every day from the healing process, I would highly recommend this surgery.

If you live in the DFW area, I can highly recommend Medical City. Great facility with wonderful staff. I also want to recommend dr Robert Cloud, my surgeon. He was great at explaining the procedure in detail and answered all my questions. His office was also very quick to respond to email.