tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310798012012-02-16T11:46:33.550-08:00Mainframe News. Weekly.Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.comBlogger761100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-27807219754234413532007-10-15T11:29:00.000-07:002007-10-15T11:48:11.536-07:00

Hi Folks, This week I want to point you to The Mainframe Update, a new newsletter that Xephon launched last week at www.mainframeupdate.com. This newsletter is designed to bring you information from all over the web. News items, announcements, tips, tools and tidbits from the web that you may have missed. Additionally, Trevor Eddolls, has a like-titled, but independent new blog over at

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-44771722447257268832007-10-08T00:50:00.000-07:002007-10-08T01:02:06.387-07:00

In October 1985 the very first CICS Update was put together. Since the summer that year, articles had been coming in to the Xephon office. Created on an Apple II using the Zardax word processing program, the first issue of CICS Update was printed out and sent to the printers at the beginning of November. Early in December, issue 1 arrived on the desks of subscribers. The Updates were born. I

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-27990512581613333812007-09-30T07:38:00.000-07:002007-09-30T07:40:05.261-07:00

The Titans, in Greek mythology, were originally twelve powerful gods. They were later overthrown by Zeus and the Olympian gods. I'm not talking about them. Nor am I talking about the fictional characters created by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson in their Legends of Dune novels. Today I want to talk about an interesting announcement from NEON Enterprise Software (www.neonesoft.com) called

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-51187503670252571872007-09-24T00:45:00.000-07:002007-09-24T00:54:12.677-07:00

How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn and a 1941 film directed by John Ford. It was written and filmed in the days when green was just a colour and not an aspirational life style. I blogged about IBM’s green data centre plans a few months ago, but I wanted to revisit this whole issue. There does seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what’s green and what isn’t, and it

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-15477470203753405862007-09-17T01:40:00.000-07:002007-09-17T01:45:02.237-07:00

It had to happen – I was bound to be sent a DOCX file. This is the new file type associated with Microsoft Office 2007. It’s all to do with the Office Open XML format Microsoft is keen on, and, of course, my copy of Office 2000 can’t open it. To be fair, Microsoft does have download that allows Office 2000 to open DOCX files, but it comes with health warnings and caveats, so I haven’t tried it.

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-37294475421748552022007-09-10T00:45:00.000-07:002007-09-10T00:54:34.681-07:00

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was blogging about social networks on the Internet and how I thought that Facebook was being colonized by older people not just students and other youngsters. And now I find that Facebook is being treated by some companies as the most evil thing since the last virus or worm infection! What’s happened is that Facebook has caught on, and a large number of

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-76320889569947494262007-09-03T01:52:00.000-07:002007-09-03T02:02:38.617-07:00

I can still remember those distant days of the 1990s when everyone you spoke to “knew” that mainframes were doomed to extinction, and dates were confidently predicted when the last one would be turned off. These sit alongside, in terms of accuracy, predictions about how many computers a country would need in the future – I think two was the best guess, just one fewer than in my office at the

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-66372513798447880812007-08-27T04:50:00.000-07:002007-08-27T05:06:01.935-07:00

I am just back from China and suffering from the usual affects of jet lag – so just a short blog (you’ll be pleased to hear). I thought I’d pass on lots of Chinese wisdom, but you’ve probably heard them all before. Anyway, as I think they say, the longest blog begins with a single word! So, I was thinking about my IP address now that I’m back – I was wondering what it was. So I downloaded a

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-55987276403276743282007-08-10T06:15:00.000-07:002007-09-17T01:40:11.522-07:00

Someone was telling me that some top IT people who write blogs regularly and have a presence on Facebook and Myspace, etc are now so busy with these Web-based interactions that they don’t have time to do their real jobs properly. So, they employ people to live their Web life for them while they get on with their proper work! This is to confirm that I am really writing this blog and I don’t

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-17679570101723851762007-08-06T00:23:00.000-07:002007-08-06T00:38:33.133-07:00

Last week I was talking about AIX 6, which IBM is making available as an open beta – which means anyone can test it out so long as they report their findings to IBM. This week I want to talk about Viper 2, the latest version of DB2 9, which is also available as a download for beta testers. You can register for the Viper 2 open beta program at www.ibm.com/db2/xml. The commercial version is slated

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-24460253040860293952007-07-30T00:41:00.000-07:002007-07-30T00:43:12.781-07:00

IBM has announced that it is making available an open beta of AIX Version 6.1 – an upgrade to the currently available version of AIX. Now, the questions that immediately spring to mind are: is this a good thing? and why is IBM doing it? Before I try to answer my own questions – or at least share my thoughts about those questions – let’s have a look at what AIX 6.1 has to offer. The big news is

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-6628382428999000282007-07-23T01:52:00.000-07:002007-07-23T01:55:14.147-07:00

Without wishing to get all mushy about it, this is my blog’s birthday! It’s one-year old today. This is blog 52 and blog 1 was published on the 19th July 2006. I’ve tried to comment on mainframe-related events that have caught my eye, and at times I have blogged about other computer-related things. I discussed stand-alone IP phones, problems with my new Vista laptop, wireless networks. I also

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-43936997813417917062007-07-16T00:50:00.000-07:002007-07-16T00:55:07.331-07:00

Today (Monday 16 July 2007) is my youngest daughter’s 21st birthday – so happy birthday to Jennifer. I started to think how things were different 21 years ago from how they are today – and hence I stole the title from Bob Dylan’s third album (released 1964) for the title of this blog. 21 years ago I’d just started working for Xephon (which I still do). I had a small laptop at home that I used

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-87897821360813829082007-07-09T00:39:00.000-07:002007-07-09T00:47:02.244-07:00

You’re an IBM mainframe user, where can you go for help with your mainframe problems? (If you were thinking of more personal problems, you’re reading the wrong blog!!) Well, my obvious answer would be Xephon’s Update publications (see www.xephonusa.com) or, perhaps, a search on Google (www.google.com), but IBM has recently introduced Destination z (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/destinationz/

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-33231788858875061662007-07-02T02:15:00.000-07:002007-07-02T02:17:47.018-07:00

A while ago I mentioned in this blog about IBM’s ECLipz project – their unannounced and mainly rumoured plan to create a single chip for System i, System p, and System z (hence the last three letters of the acronym). The big leap forward in this plan (according to rumour mills on the Web and elsewhere) was the much-touted Power6 chip, which IBM finally unveiled at the end of May. Before we look

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-41118969380978434822007-06-27T08:39:00.000-07:002007-06-27T09:18:43.965-07:00

Today, our friends at z/Journal launched a Mainframe Job board dedicated to helping mainframe professionals locate new career opportunities quickly and effectively. Additionally, if you have jobs that you need to fill, the site also offers low cost opportunities for you to promote those positions. For more details, visit the job board. -colin

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-73192710039668590672007-06-25T00:56:00.000-07:002007-06-25T00:57:44.270-07:00

It looks like IBM has a plan. A number of recent events seem to indicate that IBM has decided how it wants things to look this time next year, and has started to set about making it happen. What am I talking about? Well I have in mind the recent acquisition of Watchfire, a Web application security company, and the “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative. Watchfire has a product called AppScan, which

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-54453537467366730882007-06-18T00:25:00.000-07:002007-06-18T00:29:37.194-07:00

IBM’s SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) conference, IMPACT 2007, attracted nearly 4,000 attendees to Orlando, Florida. IBM used the occasion to make some software and services announcements. IBM introduced a new mainframe version of WebSphere Process Server, which, they claim, automates people and information-centric business processes, and also consolidates mission-critical elements of a

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-43448140248355987802007-06-11T02:12:00.000-07:002007-06-11T03:26:54.235-07:00

Let’s start with a caveat: I’m calling this a beginner’s guide not a complete guide – so, if you know of a product that I haven’t mentioned, sorry, I just ran out of space. Now the thing is, on a mainframe, we’ve got z/VM, which is really the grandfather of all these fashionable virtualization products. In fact, if I can use a science fiction metaphor, VM is a bit like Dr Who, every few years it

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-82619179771845506762007-06-04T01:04:00.000-07:002007-06-04T01:37:53.820-07:00

The April/May 2007 issue of z/Journal (http://zjournal.tcipubs.com/issues/zJ.Apr-May07.pdf) has an interesting article by Philip H Smith III entitled, “The state of IBM mainframe emulation”. Emulation is a way of letting hardware run software that shouldn’t be able to run on that hardware! It’s an extra layer of code between the operating system and the hardware. The operating system sends an

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-52729174254351944852007-05-28T02:19:00.000-07:002007-05-28T02:22:37.036-07:00

OK, I’ve stolen the title from Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film – or from the title of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel. And this blog has nothing to do with racism, but it is to do with colours – the colours you see on your computer screen. I have recently been using a little device called a Huey (from Pantone/GretagMacbeth – http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=79&ca=2), which is a

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-11490935307328670852007-05-21T00:44:00.000-07:002007-05-21T01:23:07.549-07:00

Let’s make it clear, this isn’t a personal rant – although I am finding the lack of Vista drivers for devices that happily attached to my XP laptop a bit frustrating – it’s a look at recent news stories and their significance. Firstly then, there’s Adobe, who have announced that Vista-compatible drivers for Postscript-enabled printers will be available in July. Hang on, didn’t Vista appear in

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-82743191456628915082007-05-14T01:13:00.000-07:002007-05-14T01:16:09.000-07:00

I must have been messing around at the back of the class recently, because I have only just heard of aglets – a portmanteau word created from agent and applet – that run with distributed DB2 databases. A mobile agent is an exceptionally clever piece of software that can migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. Once it arrives on a new machine, the agent then

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-50725553166158502322007-05-07T02:44:00.000-07:002007-05-07T02:47:12.334-07:00

You might very well think this is a strange title for a blog – after all, they seem like two completely different things. It’s like saying apples versus mountain bikes! However, think about it a little deeper. Both of them are trends in computing and both would take IT departments in totally different directions. At some stage, managers are going to have sit down and decide which route they are

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-20552218484844450152007-04-30T03:45:00.000-07:002007-04-30T04:06:30.076-07:00

I mentioned in last week’s blog that I’d been to Mainz in Germany with IBM. The focus of the meeting was on SMB customers rather than mainframe users, although I would guess plenty of mainframe sites have a host of other boxes around the place. One thing that surprised me was the number of horror stories they could quote of sites that had a number of x86 servers around the company, but weren’t

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-36189431793099139392007-04-23T01:07:00.000-07:002007-04-23T01:38:37.185-07:00

I was recently with IBM in Mainz discussing data centre challenges for the 21st century. Interestingly, one of the issues under discussion was about having a green data centre. Now, environmental friendliness is very much on every politician’s agenda, with everyone trying to outdo the opposing candidate on how green they are – in terms of recycling waste, cutting energy use, and creating fewer

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-64017737705799384952007-04-13T09:04:00.000-07:002007-04-13T09:10:49.095-07:00

IBM has been excitedly telling everyone recently about the latest release of CICS. But the real question is whether sites should be looking to upgrade from 3.1 to 3.2. Is there really any point? IBM reckons that the upgrade rates to CICS 3.1 were the fastest that it had ever experienced and there was probably a good reason for that – SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture was available for the

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-34093929652829264352007-04-09T01:18:00.000-07:002007-04-09T01:19:50.561-07:00

Last week I blogged about a session at a legacy application modernization session I attended. This week I’d like to tell you about another presentation I saw later that same day. This second one was by Gary Barnett, Research Director at Ovum Consulting. His approach was less one of telling us what to do, but rather raising our consciousness to stop us making the same mistakes that other people

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-57389086050000662112007-04-02T03:05:00.000-07:002007-04-02T03:09:37.156-07:00

Last Monday I was lucky enough to attend a one-day seminar near Heathrow in London organized by Arcati. It had a number of speakers, and gave a very interesting positioning of where many companies are today and where they’d like to be – and the all important guidelines describing how to get there. It highlighted two very important points – that getting there is going to take time and effort; and

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-89510991296982600762007-03-23T09:26:00.000-07:002007-03-23T09:28:49.997-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I described the pain of setting up a Vista machine – and to be honest most of that pain was simply because we are so familiar with XP machines and anything Vista did differently came as an unpleasant surprise. This blog brings you right up-to-date with events. Readers may be interested to know that I am now working on my Vista machine each day and this blog was written using

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-53636315347563323362007-03-19T01:30:00.000-07:002007-03-19T01:41:18.517-07:00

Finally (ie as of 16 March 2007) mainframers can get their hands on DB2 9.1 and start to use the promised XML facilities that it has to offer. IBM has been talking about Viper – the codename for DB2 9 – on Windows, Unix, and Linux servers for a while now (July 2006), but now it is available on mainframes (although, of course, the Windows, Unix, and Linux version would run in a mainframe Linux

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-52555591767308112102007-03-12T01:36:00.000-07:002007-03-12T02:01:31.162-07:00

I blogged the other week about whether I really did want a new Vista laptop, and if I did whether I needed Microsoft products running on it. Well, I visited another PC superstore and they had about two Mac laptops and absolutely none at all with Linux pre-installed. In the end I was swayed by the hardware and took the software that came with it. So yes, I was turned to the dark side and now have

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-80537769975352217122007-03-05T01:06:00.000-08:002007-03-12T01:41:16.725-07:00

Back in September I was talking about the 2006 version of the Arcati Yearbook – saying what a great source of information it was for mainframers. Well, the good news is that the 2007 version is now available for download. It’s free and you can get it from www.arcati.com/newyearbook07. It’s a 2763KB download, and the PDF file describes itself as “the independent annual guide for users of IBM

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-83941207808530450152007-02-26T07:24:00.000-08:002007-03-01T15:30:12.758-08:00

What does user interface facade mean, and is it a good thing? Like all good philosophy essays, let’s start with some definitions so that we know what we’re talking about. A user interface is simply what a user sees when they are trying to make use of a piece of technology. The interfaces are usually completely inflexible. A user interface facade is very similar to a user interface in that it

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-63539519394244611192007-02-16T05:07:00.000-08:002007-02-16T05:12:03.823-08:00

I’m just buying a new laptop – I need it for work. I want one with a letter box-shaped screen and I think I’d like that screen to be 17 inches rather than 15.4 (or any other size). I definitely don’t want a sub-notebook. I don’t want to record TV programs (because I don’t want a TV card), but I do want to burn DVDs and have lots of windows open at the same time. Doesn’t seem too difficult a

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-62605475957229130922007-02-12T14:17:00.000-08:002007-02-16T05:17:03.627-08:00

I blogged about virtualization a couple of weeks ago (see Virtualization – it’s really clever, 22 January), well a couple of days ago (6 February 2007) IBM came out with an interesting announcement about virtualization. IBM said that with z/VM Version 5.3 they were able to set all sorts of new records for the number of virtualized machines. For those of you who tuned in late, virtualization

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1170665562144996242007-02-05T00:50:00.000-08:002007-02-05T00:52:42.953-08:00

Last week I was considering issues that CIOs and others might be concerned with for 2007. I talked about having to do more with less (less space, money, and fewer people), High Availability, licensing issues, and Open Source software. This week I will extend that list with some more things worth thinking about. SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) has definitely been the acronym of choice for

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1170059977259476072007-01-29T00:37:00.000-08:002007-01-29T01:03:42.356-08:00

If I was in charge of a data centre at the moment, what issues would I be concerned about for 2007? That’s the sort of question CIOs and others must have been asking themselves recently. I’ve been kicking around that question recently and below are some of my thoughts. I’d love to hear your thinking on this topic. The perennial problem of how to do more with less must be at the top of everyone’s

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1169454300168376822007-01-22T00:22:00.000-08:002007-01-22T00:26:47.060-08:00

I’ve recently been taking a look at virtualization and The IBM Virtualization Engine platform, and I’ve got to say that I am very impressed with the concept behind it. I’d really like to hear from people who have implemented it to see how successful they have found it to be. Virtualization started life in the late 1960s with the original implementation of VM/CMS. The problem that VM/CMS solved

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1168850581857260932007-01-15T00:41:00.000-08:002007-01-15T00:58:28.946-08:00

It must have been about six years ago last time I looked at “speakwrite” software, and at that time it was a bit useless! A speakwrite machine, you’ll remember from George Orwell’s novel 1984, was a device allowing the user to speak into a “mouthpiece” (microphone) and his spoken words would be written onto the page. Such a device would be really useful for us bloggers – we could record a podcast

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1168246048052707292007-01-08T00:46:00.000-08:002007-01-08T00:48:48.176-08:00

In an earlier blog (16 October 2006) I looked at Netgear’s wall-plugged wireless range extender kit and mentioned that there were other similar products available. One of those “others” is the Solwise HomePlug, which I’ve recently had a look at. The problem that both these products try to overcome is the one where a wireless network doesn’t reach as far as a computer that wants to use it. It can

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1166431628575548672006-12-18T00:42:00.000-08:002006-12-18T00:50:18.723-08:00

In last week’s blog I passed on two CICS tips that I had been sent. This week I’d like to look at a DB2 performance tip. This one applies to DB2 V8, it is to do with columns, TEXT, and STMT, and was sent in by Bernard Zver, a regular contributor to the DB2 Update (http://www.xephonusa.com/) journal. If you are in NFM (NEWFUN = YES), the text of your DBRMs, which is stored in column TEXT of the

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1165826525462431172006-12-11T00:40:00.000-08:002006-12-11T00:44:12.000-08:00

CICS has been around for a long time and has seen an enormous number of changes over the years. And that’s the reason it is still in constant use at so many Fortune 500 companies. It’s re-invented itself and kept up with computing trends, but never lost its overall reliability. Optimizing its performance has been on the mind of CICS systems programmers since day 1. In this blog, I’d like to pass

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1165223154211583492006-12-04T01:01:00.000-08:002006-12-04T01:20:14.926-08:00

I have been using widgets on my laptop for ages now. Widgets were originally created for the Mac as small mini-applications that just sat on your desktop until you needed them. They could also be fun to use. A company called Konfabulator created a JavaScript run-time engine so the widgets would also run on Windows. Yahoo bought Konfabulator some time ago. If you don’t have it already, go to

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1164618023315806062006-11-27T00:59:00.000-08:002006-11-27T01:16:04.963-08:00

I have been a Skype user for a long time – but, too be honest, I only had three names in my address book. However, just recently, I have been using Skype more and more. And I have been comparing it with the latest version of MSN. So let’s start with MSN (or Windows Live Messenger as Version 8.1 beta calls itself). It allows you to type in conversations with your friends, and you can start a

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1163768047318141152006-11-17T04:49:00.000-08:002006-11-20T02:04:26.340-08:00

I was at the UK Oracle User Group conference last week. Now you might think that Oracle doesn’t have a lot to do with mainframes – but think about IBM and Oracle’s recently-announced strategic initiative to collaborate on the sales and marketing of a series of enterprise business solutions with Oracle applications and technology for Linux on System z. And, don't forget, PeopleSoft and Siebel

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1163407589919220742006-11-13T00:42:00.000-08:002006-11-13T08:46:33.610-08:00

I have seen the future and it works – so said Lincoln Steffens back in 1921 after a visit to Russia in 1919. But that’s exactly the way I felt after seeing a demo of William Data Systems’ new product called Ferret (www.willdata.com/v2/products/ferret.htm). I’ll get to exactly what Ferret does in a moment, but what I saw that I believe to be the future of computing was the amazingly fast AJAX

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1162814171347564112006-11-06T03:50:00.000-08:002006-11-06T03:58:05.696-08:00

With so much virtualization going on, it is very important that systems programmers have the right tools to configure, administer, and monitor both physical and virtual resources in the heterogeneous environments they now find themselves in. That’s why IBM has just introduced a new tool for them to do just that. Virtualization Manager is a Web-based browser dashboard that can view and manage

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1162201194481685602006-10-30T01:36:00.000-08:002006-10-30T02:26:59.476-08:00

I’ve mentioned both CICS and AJAX before in these blogs, and it seems to be a marriage made in heaven to bring them together. On the one hand you have all the advantages of transaction processing on the mainframe – speed, reliability, security, etc – and on the other you have the fastest way of allowing users to work from a browser. AJAX, for those of you just returned from the planet Tharg,

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1161589664631401962006-10-23T00:45:00.000-07:002006-10-24T09:43:35.233-07:00

Just recently, people have been talking a lot about Project ECLipz, and, I have to admit, I wasn’t really sure what they were talking about. Yet, it appears that this IBM project has been in existence since 2001 or thereabouts. And the reason behind the recent gossip about it has been the POWER 6 announcements earlier this year. Basically, it seems, IBM has a goal to converge all its non-Intel

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1161097145849110492006-10-17T07:50:00.000-07:002006-10-17T07:59:06.263-07:00

There is an article on cnet.com on the subject of USB (Universal Serial Bus) and the slow transition to UWB or "ultrawideband. Maybe the most valuable part, aside from shedding the litany of cables surrounding nearly everything I own, is this: UWB technology can deliver data rates at up to 480 megabits per second at around 3 meters, with speeds dropping off as the range grows to a limit of

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1160986073211295392006-10-16T01:07:00.000-07:002006-10-24T09:48:38.793-07:00

We’ve been working away on our laptops in a wireless environment for about three years. Everyone can access the wireless router and get on to the Internet, and everyone can share files. Because of our Macintosh heritage we still talk about “Transfer” files rather than “SharedDocs” in “My Network Places” – but that’s just us! Obviously, all the new laptops come with wireless technology – either

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1160383987728766102006-10-09T01:25:00.000-07:002006-10-24T10:00:45.146-07:00

It used to be the case that whenever someone sent me a file from a PC it would be in a format that I didn’t have and I would have to run it through some other application before I could use it. Paint Shop Pro was brilliant because you could use it to convert so many picture file types from one to another. I have a piece of music software, dBpowerAMP, that can convert mp3 files to wav (or most

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1159779014560329522006-10-02T01:45:00.000-07:002006-10-24T09:59:11.766-07:00

Last week I wrote about the excellent Arcati Yearbook 2006 at www.arcati.com/yearbook.html, but that isn’t the only source of mainframe information on the Web. There are numerous Web sites created by mainframe enthusiasts out there, many of which are well worth a look. This is a topic that I intend to return to in future blogs. Http://www.mximvs.com/ is home to Rob Scott’s OS/390 and MVS

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1159304913412547782006-09-26T14:08:00.000-07:002006-09-26T14:20:48.623-07:00

Here's a new website (Krugle.com, pronounced Kroo-gull, as their site helpfully informs) focused on helping coders find what else? Code! Basically, you type in a search string, select a programming language and then let the engine go to work. Using Java? No problem. Using Pascal? No problem! It may not be all mainframes all the time here at Mainframe Weekly, but I defy you to not find

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1159177880068640072006-09-25T02:47:00.000-07:002006-10-09T09:38:23.280-07:00

So where do you get information about mainframes from? Well, obviously, there’s IBM, and there’s third-party vendors of hardware and software like CA, BMC, and lots of others. But where do you go if you want unbiased information? Well you could join a user group, but you’d have to wait for the next meeting. Or you could search on Google – or another search engine – but you never really know how

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1158572659696402682006-09-18T02:38:00.000-07:002006-10-09T09:38:56.236-07:00

The recently announced DB2 9 – don’t call it Version 9 or you won’t sound like you know what you’re talking about – has some excellent new features and I’d like to highlight some of them in this blog. DB2 9 is meant to improve on Version 8 in areas such as performance, scalability, and security – although you would expect any vendor to promise their new software does these three things. The big

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1158247562242277342006-09-14T08:20:00.000-07:002006-09-14T08:33:36.603-07:00

Thanks to James Governor over at http://mainframe.typepad.com/blog/ for mentioning us today. It's a small, small world...

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1157971203714335452006-09-11T03:34:00.000-07:002006-09-11T08:50:35.046-07:00

For the past three blogs I’ve been talking about AJAX and Web 2.0 and that whole end user experience, but at heart I’m a true mainframer. I remember the days of water cooling and machine rooms with false floors and miles of cabling hidden beneath it. So, this week, I’d like to try to tie up the two ends – as it were. I’d like to talk about an interesting product I came across from a company

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1158079081316666972006-09-08T09:37:00.000-07:002006-09-12T11:37:46.736-07:00

While perusing the web as I am wont to do from time to time, I came across an archived posting on James Governor's MonkChips blog where he posed the question, "Where are all the mainframe bloggers?". And as with last weeks posting, a simple, "42" will not suffice. Mr. Governor then proceeds to provide links to relevant mainframe blogs that he has unearthed on the web-- mainframeweekly.com

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1157363773380809442006-09-04T02:50:00.000-07:002006-09-04T14:20:26.636-07:00

When Douglas Adams had his characters in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ask the ultimate question about life, the universe and everything, they got the answer 42! In my last two blogs I’ve been talking about AJAX and Web 2.0 and the exciting stuff that’s happening out there. But recently Google seems to have come up with the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe not

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1156956090744669982006-08-30T09:07:00.000-07:002006-08-30T10:04:21.153-07:00

As an addendum to Trevor's post on Monday regarding "Web 2.0" (it feels like less of a buzzword if I use quotes), I found an interesting project aggregating "Web 2.0 sites" (www.web2list.com). The considerable breadth associated with "Web 2.0" development is on full disply in this listing-- a veritable sea of gradient hues and shiny reflections, it seems that "Web 2.0" is here to stay... or

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1156757306496661042006-08-28T02:22:00.000-07:002006-08-28T08:19:43.356-07:00

Back in the 1990s, when everyone started predicting the exact date when the last mainframe would be turned off and IBM wasn’t having a particularly great time, IBM tried to counter the bad news by having lots of initiatives – rather like governments do. Governments want you to think that you can’t get rid of them because they are just launching radical reforms to education and health (and

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1156872669540477022006-08-25T10:19:00.000-07:002006-08-29T10:32:08.846-07:00

We have found Richard Keane’s article, A screen viewing utility, published in CICS Update, extremely useful for our Help Desk facility. A modification was described in a later edition of CICS Update, to enable this utility to be CICS 4.1 compatible and to PEEK by user-id rather than by terminal-id. We have now added a further change to allow the automatic screen update every two seconds. We

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1156153627713152092006-08-21T02:44:00.000-07:002006-08-21T11:35:24.986-07:00

Every time there’s a great leap forward in computing, you kind of think that you would have thought of that (given enough time, etc etc). For example, when we were all working on mainframes with terminals attached and those guys struggling away in garages built small personal computers for the first time – I remember thinking it was brilliant idea and I’m sure I would have come up with the idea.

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1156185018171309642006-08-18T11:29:00.000-07:002006-08-22T12:38:08.983-07:00

A question often asked is, “What capabilities exist to ‘kill’ a task from a given CICS system via CICS Performance Manager?”. (Here we are using the term ‘kill’ to refer to the action provided by many performance management monitors.) CICS Performance Monitor bases its facilities on those of CICSPlex System Manager. CICSPlex SM itself is an EXEC CICS application, and therefore provides the

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1155549676275139942006-08-14T02:59:00.000-07:002006-08-14T03:04:27.790-07:00

Looking back over the evolution of mainframes, there have been a few “great leaps forward”, but the majority of improvements have come trickling through in a way that seems to go unnoticed – yet the way we’re working today is easier and quicker than last year and a million times better than ten years ago. And those of us who can remember how things were over twenty years ago – well … One such “

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1155314932727357942006-08-11T09:47:00.000-07:002006-08-11T09:57:31.936-07:00

A colleague recently made the following request, having just converted from ACF/2 to RACF. ACF/2 allowed a quick log-off and disconnect from CICS by typing the transaction LOGO (as in LOGOFF). While the same function can be performed by typing the transaction CESF LOGOFF, users still wanted to be able to use the shortened command. As an exercise in using some of the new features introduced in

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1155026970012990392006-08-08T01:36:00.000-07:002006-08-08T02:05:32.790-07:00

Because the August issue of Xephon’s CICS Update (http://www.xephonusa.com/) journal contains such interesting articles covering important technology areas for CICS users, I thought it was worth just drawing your attention to them. The first article is by Aseem Anand, a senior systems programmer with US-based Syntel, and it takes a detailed look at the always essential issue of CICS performance

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1155051113269091232006-08-07T08:22:00.000-07:002006-08-08T08:34:59.190-07:00

CICS is more than 30 years old, but it now supports applications written in C++ and Java, and it allows a single application image to be spread over several computer systems. To achieve such youthful longevity, CICS has undergone many transformations. IBM mainframe products get three levels of version number within a distinct named product. CICS is on its third distinct product name, and its

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1154966210413269952006-08-04T08:53:00.000-07:002006-08-07T09:04:08.106-07:00

Mainframes have become increasingly central to business resiliency and information lifecycle management strategies. A reliable, resilient platform, mainframes are a logical choice to serve as a core technology for operational continuity and disaster recovery. Tape storage has traditionally been the primary mainframe backup medium, but it no longer serves the purpose for which it was initially

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1154339418896862152006-07-31T02:47:00.000-07:002006-07-31T08:42:09.516-07:00

Although pre-announced months ago, and officially announced in June, IBM’s DB2 Version 9.0, code-named Viper, was globally released on the 28th July. So what’s all the excitement about? Well, there are improvements in security, ie much better control over which parts of the database are accessible to whom. There’s an updated set of developer tools. There are improvements in compression, ie

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1153765115484379082006-07-24T11:15:00.000-07:002006-07-29T07:37:53.006-07:00

This month (July) saw the announcement that Mainstar has been acquired by Rocket Software (http://www.rocketsoftware.com). We also had ASG (http://www.asg.com/) sealing its deal to acquire Diversified Software Systems and integrating their products into its OpsCentral solutions platform. What else? Well we heard that AttachmateWRQ had completed its takeover of NetIQ – and rather than calling the

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1153339565930130922006-07-19T13:04:00.000-07:002006-07-19T13:14:50.813-07:00

What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations. Now CICS is even better – it can act as a provider of Web services and it can act as a consumer of Web services.

Trevor Eddollshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04547567673817096551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1152809965127157152006-07-13T09:58:00.000-07:002006-07-19T13:37:55.136-07:00

We have more than 2,500 CICS programs in our production environment. Many of them are very old, without proper documentation, and their authors have left our company. That’s why we write REXX procedures to generate simplified schemas from PL/I, COBOL, or Assembler source. The CICSDOC REXX procedure scans specified PDS or PDSE datasets and analyses each member in the following way: • Recognizes

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31079801.post-1152807783751732452006-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:002006-07-19T13:38:27.470-07:00

A new blog curated by Mainframe industy veteran, Trevor Eddolls!

Colinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17169161306180859923noreply@blogger.com0