Author Archives: raybilyk

A Little Humor

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I received this from a friend here at work. It made my day, so I thought that I would share. [WARNING: This contains geeky text, but is ‘not’ a geek joke! Read it down to the punch line…]

*A COWBOY NAMED BUD*

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?” Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photo Shop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.” “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?” “You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud. “Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep…” “…Now give me back my dog.”

Sametime – Disabling Lotus Notes user’s ability to save chat transcripts (aka the Power of Social Business)

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I was tasked by our Information Security team to disable the ability to manually save chat transcriptions for Lotus Notes 8.5 users that are using the integrated Sametime chat. The vast majority of our clients have Lotus Notes Standard software installed, but are using the Lotus Notes Basic client. (Many of the clients do not have enough memory to run in Standard mode.) We do have some users that are running Lotus Notes Standard.

After some research (and a call to IBM Support), I was able to get an answer for the Basic client users. All that needs to be done is to add a NOTES.INI parameter to client workstations:

IM_ALLOW_SAVE_CHAT=0

This parameter has been there since Notes 7.0.4, and can be manually added, or added to a Desktop settings document, then pushed out using a policy.

This worked great for the Notes Basic clients, but had no affect for the Standard clients. When I asked IBM Support, I was given two settings to add to the plugin_customization.ini (again via a policy), but this didn’t work. This called for a more ‘social’ way of getting the answer.

I placed a post out there on Twitter:
Can someone at #LS11 ask around & find out how to prevent Notes Standard client users from getting option to save chat transcripts? Thanks!

A few short minutes later, the answer came in the form of this response by Gabriella Davis (also known as @gabturtle on Twitter):
@RayBilyk you can disable that via a policy.. it’s a ST policy option

So all you have to do is log into Sametime via a web browser, and select ‘Administer the server’ from the Administrator tools section. Next, select ‘Policies’ on the left, then select the Sametime Default Policy. Next, scroll down to the Instant Messaging section, and DESELECT the option ‘Allow to save chat transcripts’, and for good measure, SELECT the option to override all policies:

To be honest, I don’t know when it takes affect, but I made the change just before our server weekly maintenance reboots, so the next morning, it took affect. Not only am I not able to save the chat transcripts, but I don’t even see those options now…

Thanks Gabriella for once again proving that friends are there for you… no matter where they’re at in the world…

Where has my day gone?

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I was hoping to get an hour or two of rest today… no such luck! Between my work pager going off (I didn’t ‘think’ I was on call), and a problem with my DVD drive (Thanks, iTunes for the latest update! Can we NOT screw up a person’s registry?), my day is pretty much shot… Tonight, I’m on call (a colleague needed to rest and concentrate on another issue), and I’m going to watch Kiara play basketball tonight. GO LADY PIRATES!