Las Vegas

Me and Mike after our ATV drive down the North Rim

Mike enjoying his Star Trek experience

One of my more dramatic visual aids

Mike singing with pal Tony Bennett

Liberace and me, doing a show together

The two Mikes

Me helping out Shirley and Frank

John Wayne practicing his swagger

Siegfried and Roy: the ultimate Vegas show

The Secret Garden: for cat people, well worth the ten bucks

In June 2003, I embarked on an adventure: speaking at the Advisor DevCon in Las Vegas. Now, public speaking is not normally my thing, but I do enjoy sharing what I've learned with others (albeit in written form), so I decided to brave it. I'd never spoken at a conference before, and I was, er, a tiny bit nervous. It's pretty clear I am not one of those talented souls destined for a brilliant career as a speaker. But at least I tried it.

To Boldly Go...

My husband Mike and I arrived Saturday morning at our hotel: the JW Marriott Resort, a few miles from the famous "strip." As we pulled up the palm-tree-lined drive, we were awed by the sight of this place. I couldn't help wondering if we'd made some sort of mistake. But nope, this was really where we were staying. The Las Vegas Marriott is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in.

That evening, Advisor speakers converged for dinner and a show: The Star Trek Experience at the Hilton. I must admit I've never been much of a Trekkie, but that didn't matter -- they do a pretty good job of making it entertaining for non-Trekkies as well. The last part of the show is a ride that simulates a careening flight through space (and over the streets of Vegas). It was perfect: not scary-scary, but just scary enough to be amusing.

Did Someone Say "Scary"?

Sunday I gave a two-hour XML Jumpstart session. It went mostly okay, with a few glitches. I didn't quite cover all my material, and got confused during the live demo, but hey -- you try standing onstage in front of a hundred people in a fancy hotel ballroom for two hours! Believe me, I have a renewed respect for folks like Rocky Oliver, Bob Balaban and Karen Hobert who do this sort of thing all the time and make it look easy. It's not! First of all, standing on a raised platform and speaking over a mike while showing slides looks perfectly unremarkable when someone else is doing it. But when you're doing it yourself, it's totally surreal. I felt like the Wizard of Oz up there. On the other hand, the attendees who sat through my very first conference-speaker experience also went home with some good materials--over a dozen working examples for Domino and WebSphere, along with a document that describes what they do and how to install them--so despite my stumbles, I still feel good about it overall.

And, hey. I didn't fall off the stage. That alone is something for which to be grateful. Nor did I lose control of any bodily functions. I didn't swear, have a giggle fit, or leave the microphone on during a "bio" break. And of course the Advisor folks were on hand all the time in case anything went really wrong. In particular, Jeff Gilliam and managing editors Liz Olsen and Ellie MacIsaac made sure I had everything I needed -- and were infinitely patient with my nervous dithering.

Las Vegas: The World's Most Bizarre City

During our stay, Mike and I checked out every wonderfully cheesy, tacky Vegas tourist trap we could squeeze in--and we barely scraped the tip of the iceberg. I'm definitely up for a return trip one of these days. Among the many things that are cool about Las Vegas is the fact that most people are either there on vacation having a good time, or they're trying to get your money. Either way, they tend to be extra nice. Just about everyone I met during my weeklong stay was incredibly pleasant and friendly.

There seems to have been some sort of local ordinance passed in Las Vegas requiring that all Caucasian women have blonde hair. Compliance is achieved with--how can I put this?--varying degrees of success. In Vegas you also see a lot of women my size and larger strutting around as if they were supermodels in tight white capris and high heels. Either they're more confident out west, or their vision is blurred by too many free drinks in the casino. The experience has inspired me to give Weight Watchers one more try.

After nightfall, Las Vegas is magically transformed from seedy to breathtaking. At Treasure Island, Mike and I caught the free pirate show that takes place every 90 minutes. They've got these two giant three-masted ships and they stage a battle between pirates and English sailors, complete with flames, smoke, and cannonfire. At the end, the English ship actually sinks. After the applause, it rises back up out of the water.

At Caesar's Palace, there's another free show that's worth catching -- it's an Animatronic dramatization of the story of Atlantis. While you can tell that the robots are robots, their movements are still remarkably lifelike. Later, we watched the fake volcano erupt outside the Mirage, which it does every fifteen minutes. At the Bellagio, we watched the musical fountain display, which I heard is choreographed differently each day. It's amazing the lengths these hotels will go to in order to get your attention. It works, obviously, since I was able to remember the names of the hotels.

From Snore to Roar

Monday we visited the Hoover Dam. Boy, is that ever NOT the most exciting thing to see in Vegas. Nuff said. Upon returning from the "dam tour", I attended Bob Balaban's session on Domino and WebSphere installation and configuration. Okay, so it wasn't the most exciting show in town, but it was certainly more interesting than the 1950's diorama of Lake Mead.

Mike and I went to see Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage on Tuesday night. All I can say is: Wow. Our seats were in the very front row, right next to the stage -- just a few feet away from the tigers and lions. About ten minutes into the show, Roy slid dramatically across the floor, practically threw himself into my lap, and gave me a big "Mwah"! Startled the living heck out of me -- it was great! Later, as the show ended, I got to shake Siegfried's hand. And finally, to top off a perfect evening, on the way out of the casino I decided to play one of the slot machines, and immediately won $158.

Work? Huh? What's That?

Tuesday I gave an hour-long session on Domino's LDAP service and JNDI. This one went more smoothly than the XML session. I was a bit surprised when I asked for a show of hands from Domino developers and another one from WebSphere developers. I'd expected a mix of about 50/50, but it turned out to be more like 90/10. My talk was very Java-centric, so I was a bit wary of boring the audience with information they might not think was relevant to them. On the other hand, you don't meet too many Domino developers who are interested only in Domino. After all, one of the nice things about Domino is precisely the fact that it has so many hooks to the outside world.

At Advisor DevCon's "Lunch With the Speaker", attendees get a chance to chat with the speakers in a setting that's more relaxed than speaker/audience mode. My speaker lunch was on Wednesday; that's also the day I got to attend sessions on Advanced Domino/J2EE Integration, WebSphere Portal Troubleshooting, and JMS. In the afternoon the speakers assembled as a panel for one last massive Q and A session. Most of the questions had to do with IBM's and Lotus's future direction.

Cats, Cacti and Cash

After the conference ended, we wrapped up our trip with a visit to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and a prop plane trip through the Grand Canyon, which also included a very dusty and bumpy ATV ride over twenty miles of scorching desert. This is the kind of experience that many people, including my husband, apparently think is great fun, and are willing to pay extra for. (I imagine we could also have eaten dirt and slept on beds of cacti for an additional fee.)

In the city, we visited a club called Madame Tussaud's where we had an opportunity to rub elbows with many celebrities. We also played the slot machines, of course, and altogether, won over $300 between us. Of course, we put almost that much in the machines to begin with, but hey, we came out a little bit ahead. I understand from the locals that the technical term for what we experienced is "Beginner's Luck."

Now I'm home, and I keep looking at my cats and thinking of Siegfried and Roy's cats. This has definitely been a memorable week. Viva Las Vegas!

One of the perks of being a speaker is that I also got to attend sessions myself. I can honestly say every session I attended was very good--and I'm picky about such things. Here are the ones I went to:

• WAS and Domino: How to Install and Configure Right by Bob Balaban
• How to Integrate Microsoft Office with Notes and Domino by Rocky Oliver
• Advanced Domino+J2EE Integration Programming Techniques by Bob Balaban
• The most useful session for me was Top 10 Things Developers Need to Know About WebSphere Portal Troubleshooting by Sunil Hiranniah and Doug Philips
• How to Use Java Messaging Service Publish and Subscribe by Ron Bower

• Code examples. On the conference CD, DevCon attendees should have all my XML and JNDI/LDAP code examples, and a document that explains what they do and how to install them. If you have any questions about these examples, drop me a line. (Be sure to include "DevCon" in the subject so you don't get spam-filtered.) My speaker agreement allows me to distribute these materials outside the conference, but I'd like to wait a decent interval before putting them on my site. (How long is a decent interval, you ask? I haven't decided yet.)
• LDAP redbook. Here's a redbook that might be helpful with some of the Domino LDAP configuration issues people mentioned at DevCon.
• Directory assistance. During my LDAP session, I mentioned a glitch I'd encountered with Directory Assistance. The glitch is as follows. I set up Domino R6 with a Directory Assistance document pointing to an IBM SecureWay directory. Then I set up SSO between Domino and WebSphere. The users defined in the SecureWay directory can authenticate with my Domino apps, but not my WebSphere apps. WebSphere isn't chasing the referral from Domino to SecureWay, which is expected (or at least documented) behavior, but there's supposedly a workaround for this. According to several documents I've found, including this Notes.net article, if you set Inet_Authenticate_With_Secondary=1 in the Domino server's notes.ini, the Domino server should chase its own referral (so to speak) in a way that's transparent to WebSphere. I tried this, and it isn't working for me. Is this a Domino bug? A WebSphere bug? A Rose Kelleher bug? As of this writing, I'm still trying to find the answer to that question.
• LDAP dropdown list. Over lunch someone asked me how to create a dropdown list in a Domino form that would display a list of users returned by a search against an MSAD directory. At the time, I believe my answer was along the lines of, "Duuuhhhh?" Watch this space -- I'll try to have a better answer soon.
• Web services. After my XML session, someone observed that typically, web services examples return some trivial value, like an int. The LotusScript web service in my zip file returns a double, which is not much better. A while back, however, I wrote a goofy Perl/CGI web service that performs several operations returning different types of values, including complex types. I forgot, this one's not on the conference CD, but it is on my samples page.
• XML: Miscellaneous. Because my XML session was cut short, there were a couple of things I forgot to mention. For example, one of the nice things about XSLT is that it not only allows you to convert XML to other formats, like HTML, text, etc., but you can also convert XML to different flavors of HTML tailored to different browsers. I also never got to demo my servlet that uses Apache's FOP to transform Domino XML to PDF. A conversation I had at my DevCon lunch about Notes and Crystal Reports got me wondering: how hard would it be to develop a J2EE-based ad hoc reporting tool for Domino using FOP? Has this been done already? If not, somebody ought to do it--the consensus at our table was that it would definitely sell.

I was due for a new computer, and what better excuse than giving a demo at DevCon? My new Inspiron 8500 came with XP, but I needed Win2K. After installing it, it turned out the graphics adapter doesn't support Win2K: the highest resolution I could get on my snazzy 15-inch screen was 640x480. I searched the Dell site and the card manufacturer's site, and neither had a Win2K driver. Imagine my surprise: Dell had sold me a computer that couldn't support Windows 2000, one of the most widely used operating systems in the world. Naively, I called Dell's support number. I got transferred around to five different support reps, having to explain the whole situation from the very beginning to each person, usually at least twice each time. By the fifth person, my voice was literally hoarse, so as he was getting ready to transfer me again I asked to speak to Customer Service. "No problem, hold on just a sec...CLICK."

I should have given up at that point, but I doggedly called Customer Service. At this point I was starting to get a teensy bit irritated (as evidenced by the flames shooting from my nostrils). I told the customer service rep: I'm only going to explain this one more time. Get a pen and a piece of paper and write this down. When I'm finished explaining my problem, instead of sending me, the customer, on a wild goose chase through YOUR organization, YOU will contact whoever you need to contact in YOUR organization to find the answer. Then YOU will call ME back and tell me what I need to do to get my brand-new computer working with -- for God's sake, Windows. The rep very politely agreed to all my demands, and promised someone would contact me the next day. I gave him my home phone, my work phone, and my email address. Needless to say, I never got a call or a message.

So how did I get it working? Well, the first option I found was to download a driver from some guy's personal website. Great. I was going to be dependent for the operation of my computer on software obtained from a site devoted to Seven of Nine. No, thank you.

After more searching, I found a post in a user's group that explained how to hack the driver's INF file and trick it into supporting Win2K. The procedure was for the Inspiron 8200, so the filenames were different, but I finally managed to get it working. The XP driver has been working just fine with Win2K for weeks now: everything's sharp and clear at 1280x800.

It's a very nice computer, and the price was not bad. But I must say it amazes me that all Dell has to do to allow the Inspiron 8500 to support Windows 2000 is to provide one measly text file: the modified INF file for the driver. All this frustration could have been avoided so easily, and yet they couldn't be bothered to make even that trivial an effort to help their customers.