The year end is approaching fast … and now is the time to get those pesky charitable contributions sent in in order to be considered for 2009. The COMMON Education Foundation’s Al Barsa scholarship is a charity I consider well worth an investment … and I encourage you to send what you can. midrange.com has…
COMMON Board Elections
Time for a little politisizing here … well, not really. With the COMMON conference a few months away, the COMMON organization announced the candidates for the next board of directors election. Running for the three board positions available are …
Another PTF Oops
Thanks to Bryan Dietz, we found another “oopsie” in a PTF cover sheet … Warning, this contains language that some might find objectionable … but most will laugh.
COMMON won’t be the same
As I mentioned in a previous post, there are going to be a lot of major changes at the next COMMON conference … and some of those changes are having impact: Jon Paris & Susan Gantner are not going to be presenting. I know for a fact that Jon & Susan are extraordinarily popular and…
Linux Desktop for IBM i Users
Aaron Bartell, and a few others, came up with a pretty neat idea: A Linux desktop for IBM i developers (and/or users). Based on Ubuntu, the desktop environment would provide tools that an IBM i developer needs. 5250 Emulator IDE Mail Web Etc… A list has been created to coordinate the project … LinuxDesktop4i. Check…
Promoting the i
Trevor Perry’s recent blog post Asleep at the wheel asks How many of you have told someone outside this community about this amazing platform? Well, I for one, can say that I did just that … and continue to do so as often as I can.
Analyzing Commands with Java
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts … building tools can be a fun & rewarding part of the job. As part of a recent programming task, I had to do some analysis on commands to determine what parameters were supported in the SQL variant of the language compiler and what parameters were not supported. I…
Reality Check: Workstation Backups?
As IT professionals, we are (or should be) quite obsessed with backups. The question is … does our obsession go far enough? Yes, I’m sure our IBM i systems are all backed up quite securely … with tapes being rotated and taken off site. Probably even a solid HA solution to mirror your operational environment…
Mail delivery problems with Yahoo
For quite a while now Yahoo has been temporarily rejecting connections from my mail servers ‘due to user complaints’. I joined their Abuse Feedback Loop program so I would be informed of these user complaints. Unfortunately, the feedback loop isn’t working that well … as my server’s connections are still being deferred, but I’m not…
The How and The Why
As technologists we are often called upon to figure out HOW things work in a system.
The question I would pose is: Is understanding HOW things work sufficient?
My answer: No, you must also know WHY things work as well.