midrange.com - In My Humble Opinion

Well, I haven't been blogging from COMMON yet ... but I just got out of the IBM Town Hall meeting a few minutes ago.

It was announced that the "System i" and "System p" were merging into a single, unified, platform called "Power".  The OS, originally named OS/400, then I5/OS, is now going to be called "IBM i".

New hardware was announced that would be common between "i", "aix", and "linux" ... all the same price, regardless of the OS that runs on it.

New marketing campaigns that will mention "i" set to be run.  Starting with a full page ad in the local paper.  I think they run a full page ad in the local paper at every conference.  Let's hope they live up to the promise and keep the marketing going.

They also mentioned more academic initiative stuff.

More later.

For those of you involved in System i oriented Local User Groups (LUGs), midrange.com offers some free services that you might like to take advantage of ...

Mailing lists

You can request two types of mailing lists ...

1. A simple announcement list to broadcast meeting information & other important bits to your membership. This type of list is being used with great success by The Omni User and the Washington Area Midrange users group (WAM). These lists are usually named '<lug name>-announce@midrange.com'.
2. Private discussion mailing lists for small organizing groups in your LUG ... your BOD, annual tech conference organizing committee, etc. These lists are usually named '<lug name>-<committee name>-discuss@midrange.com'.

To utilize this service, contact me and I can get it setup. Once the list(s) is setup, I'll provide you with a URL for the list administrative interface and a password. You then import your membership email roster into the list and you're ready to go.

As with all midrange.com hosted mailing lists, no subscriber lists will ever be sold or distributed to a third party for any reason.

I can host up to two lists for each LUG for free. If you need more than two lists, let me know and we can discuss it.

Banner Ads

The banner ad serving offer falls into two categories ...

1. Regular meetings ... targeted at your specific geographic region.
2. Special events ... annual tech conferences, once a year events, etc. Targeted at entire US.

For the regular meeting banner ad's, you just need to provide me with 468x60 banner ad that advertises your user group, a target url, and the geographic region you cover.

For the special events, you can provide me with one or two banner ad's (one 468x60 and one 300x250) that advertise the event, the target URL, and the effective dates. I will set the banner up to run for the entire US. An example can be found at http://omniuser.org/images/omni07bannerWide1.gif and http://omniuser.org/images/omni07bannerSquare.gif (these were both run for the OmniUser 2007 technical conference).

If you would like to utilize either of these services for your LUG, feel free to contact me at 'support@midrange.com'.

Similar to the old saying "Physician, heal thyself" ... I certianly should live by those words.

Today I was chasing down a problem on one of our systems at work ... a program that works fine on V5R2 wasn't working on V5R3.

I was 99% sure the problem was in an i5/os server program ... and even found a APAR that described the problem almost to the tee.  Unfortunately, the PTF identified in the APAR didn't help.

So I called IBM and opened a PMR ... I got transfered to Colleen in the languages group, who looked at the job log and source fragment I sent, and sent me a reply indicating that the following link might be useful: http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/200505/msg00900.html.

DOH!  Maybe I should have done a bit more research myself before opening up the PMR.

I made the adjustments identified in the MIDRANGE-L posting and, lo and behold, the program worked perfect.

Well, it appears that IBM is getting ready to give us a taste of what V6R1 is going to include.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/os/i5os/v6r1preview.html

Not a lot of details ... I think the redpaper mistake earlier reported is probably more telling than the 'Preview' information.

[tags]ibm, system i, iseries, i5/os[/tags]

Looks like IBM had a but of a flub on the 'Redpaper' site ... a redpaper showed up on my planet.midrange.com RSS feed with the title 'i5/OS Program Conversion: Getting ready for i5/OS V6R1'. The abstract was quite interesting ...

Abstract: IBM® plans to deliver i5/OS® V6R1 in 2008. With this new release, IBM will require conversion of all programs created underprevious releases that use the i5/OS Machine Interface (MI). This conversion upgrades and refreshes programs to take advantage of the latest system enhancements, including enhanced system integrity, improved performance, and a range of new operating system and processor capabilities. In order for a program to be converted, its creation data (sometimes referred to as  observability) must be available. Programs created for V5R1 or later have their creation data automatically saved during program creation. Clients and ISVs with programs created for OS/400® V4R5 and earlier need to ensure that the creation data is available for the conversion process.

Sadly, the redpaper is no longer available. I suspect it was prematurely released.

Needless to say, the information contained in the redpaper was pretty darn interesting ...  especially for  those ISV's that support multiple releases at once.

[tags]ibm, redpaper, redpiece, System i, iseries, i5/os[/tags]

Our friend Aaron Bartell produced a ... um ... interesting (yeah, that's the right word) video while taking a break from writing an article for System i Network magazine.

What do you think?

The other day I was wandering around the internet and found a blog post that had a short interview with Toni Taylor, who is the IBM liaison to iSociety, that I thought was pretty good.

Since midrange.com is one of the founding members of iSociety, and as a sort of experiment, I'm going to make this post an open discussion of iSociety. If you have questions or comments about iSociety, feel free to post them here.

[tags]iSociety, ibm, common[/tags]

For those of you who have been paying attention, midrange.com was nominated for a System i Innovation Award in the Community Support category.

While we didn't win the award (Trevor Perry of angustheitchap.com won), it was quite an honor to be a finalist. It certainly shows that people have noticed, and appreciate, the work that I've been doing.

The award ceremony was quite enjoyable ... the food and entertainment was quite good, and we met a number of new people. It also goes to show that us System i folks can clean up pretty well.

After the Innovation Award ceremony, I was informed that I had also been nominated for another award ... and it would be presented at the iSocial (formerly known as CUDS) on Wednesday ... sadly, I was unable to stay to receive the Gibraltar award (for outstanding service to the System i community).

I really would have liked to been able to stay to receive the award ... I even had a a speech prepared ... but there was work to be done.

All in all, I did enjoy the time I spent at COMMON. As is usually the case, I wasn't able to do half the things I wanted to. But I met a lot of people and had a good time.

[tags]ibm, common, iSociety, conferences, awards[/tags]

Hah, I'll bet you thought this blog was dead ... didn't you?

It's not ... at least mostly not dead.

Here's a hint that might save your bacon sometime in the future.

It may seem obvious to some people ... but Service Programs are probably the BEST enhancement to System i that IBM ever implemented.

I'm in the process of completely revamping some code where I am completely replacing the guts of a bunch of routines. These routines are invoked from ALL OVER the application.

Because the routines are embedded in a service program, I don't have to TOUCH the core application logic. I don't even have to recompile it. As long as the prototype of the service program doesn't change, the application will pick up the service program changes without a hitch.

Obviously you have to take care not to change the SIGNATURE of the service program ... but if you're just changing the logic and not the parameters or procedure names, you should be good.

The effort to build the service program might not seem worth it now ... but next year, when you have to rework the logic, you will be thankful you put in the extra work.

[tags]System i, iSeries, RPG, Service Programs[/tags]

Things are happening in the System i / iSeries / AS400 community.

• The COMMON conference is just around the corner ... and there promises to be some pretty big news announced there.
• Trevor Perry announced a new site: www.i4everyone.com as a place to showcase YOUR marketing ideas for System i. He is looking for images or videos which you have created to promote the System i platform.
• IT Jungle is reporting some more information on Project Prometheus (although still considered rumor)

Although I don't know ALL the details ... I do know some ... but I won't tip my hat (sorry, but I made a promise). I will say that yours truly is somewhat involved.

More later.

[tags]Series, System I, AS400, COMMON, IBM, Marketing[/tags]