Build a Tool

Over the past few months I’ve become quite a tool builder. The project I’m currently on involves a lot of really repetitive code changes and analysis … basically I’ve been externalizing as much of the text in the product as I can (to message files). There are a LOT of display files to be analyzed…

5250 for iPhone

The folks at Mochasoft have come out with a new 5250 client for mobile devices … this one for the iPhone. There are two versions in the Apple iTunes Store … a free ‘Lite’ version and the full version for $29.99. For what it does, the $29.99 cost is not unreasonable … although I haven’t…

Context Is Key

Ha! I’ll bet you thought this blog was dead. Well, in the words of Miracle Max, only mostly dead. I’m in the process of reading a new programming book (well, not new to some … new to me). I’ll probably post a review in a week or so (yeah, right). Anyways, it got me to…

Al Barsa

This morning, on my way back from COMMON, I received email from a friend informing me that Al Barsa had passed away last night. This news hit me very hard … Al has been a pillar of the AS/400 (yes, I use that name deliberately) community for many years and a friend. His passion and…

“I” is not a System “I” anymore

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…

Distinguished Service Award

Today I was honored by the COMMON organization with it’s highest award … the Distinguished Service Award. Although I did have a slight inkling that something was in the works … due to a flub by Anne Lucas in the mailing list … I really wasn’t prepared for it. I was presented with the award…

LUG Services

For those of you involved in IBM 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 … A simple announcement list to broadcast meeting information & other important bits to your membership. This type…

Technician, fix thyself

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 ……

V6R1

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]

Found and Lost

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…