Chris Maxcer had a good read of an interview with the new COMMON President Wane Madden (see link at bottom). It amazes me that the initiatives they are moving forward with will cause excellent speakers like Scott Klement to possibly not present his sessions - I am hoping they bend the rules. Please make sure to voice your opinion at the bottom of the article so people know where you stand.
http://systeminetwork.com/article/will-commons-next-big-challenge-be-its-last
I want to say that I am not trying to nail anyone specifically as I value many of the people that work for/with COMMON, but COMMON doesn’t seem to be taking a path that encourages the right kind of growth by making speakers pay to speak. For the record I am in full support of users groups. I also support COMMON’s efforts to educate but I am more and more convinced that the conference just isn’t being run effectively and/or efficiently. Obviously I only have an outside-looking-in view of the conference. Dare I ask the question: Maybe it would be best for COMMON to die entirely so something else can be birthed? Like Jon Paris mentioned in the article, maybe COMMON needs to be completely re-invented?
On a final note I must say I do enjoy the gathering and networking I get at COMMON as that is THEE place to congregate it seems. I see most of my long-time friends there and for that I really appreciate the legacy COMMON has created.
Thoughts?
So I have been developing in C#.NET the past couple weeks in preperation for a new software release from Krengel Technology Inc named “DB2 Web Service Enabler” (ping me if you want in on being a beta customer). Being that I am on a Linux desktop I naturally wanted to develop my C#.NET code using MonoDevelop. All was fine and well until I went to debug (read step through) my first sample application. Turns out
my version of MonoDevelop doesn’t come with a debugger. Or does it? Because I can see the debugger option in the menu. I go to the add-ins area and notice that the debugger isn’t specified like some forum posts say it should be. Hmmm… so I read up some more on http://monodevelop.com and it sounds like I *should* have a debugger in my version (v2.0) but nope, it isn’t there.
So I proceeded to use SharpDevelop which I have used before but it only runs on Windows. After doing some more digging I learn that MonoDevelop actually has it’s roots in SharpDevelop way back in the day but then there was a fork and separation of ways and now we have two products - interesting. Well anyways. I just needed to rant about my MonoDevelop woes for a bit. It’s things like this that make a commercial product like Visual Studio worth it’s cost if it keeps me productive and billable.
Are others doing .NET development on Linux? I have also wanted to try and develop a C#.NET application that runs in PASE on the IBM i but I haven’t gotten around to see if Mono can run in PASE. 
This would be cool because it would eliminate one of my distastes for the .NET framework which is that it only runs on Windows. I would be curious to know how stable Mono is on Linux. Can a company use it for production purposes? If they were already a Linux shop what would cause them to want to use .NET vs. Perl or PHP or Java?
I am running the Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicago marathon. I can’t hardly believe it. I have been training for about 2 months now and have 1 month to go. After many years of pursuing things for my own benefit, I am finding that leaves a guy empty and I am now finding that life is more fulfilling by being a servant to others (who would have guessed!).
It all comes down to this: I am running to feed kids that are literally starving to death. I have four of my own kids with the 5th on the way. If I really stop and think about the reality of my kids dieing for lack of food it shakes the very foundation of my heart - I have to do something. That’s where World Vision comes in…
World Vision works to tackle the root causes of poverty by working with children, families, and their communities to provide things like clean water, health care, nutritious food, education, and economic opportunities.
You can support my efforts through Team World Vision by making a one-time tax-deductible donation through the following URL: http://firstgiving.com/aaronbartell
To make the whole process more entertaining and eventful I am going to be incrementally shaving a portion of my body when different fund-raising levels have been met. My end goal is to raise $10,000 and the following list is what I will shave at different levels. Note that each shaving experience will be video recorded and published on my YouTube page.
- $1,000 Shave legs
- $2,000 Shave armpits
- $4,000 Hot wax the small patch of hair in the middle of my chest (oh don’t even pretend it doesn’t exist - it’s there)
- $7,000 Shave my eye brows (the wife says “no” to this one, but I say yes. She is actively hiding all razors in our house.)
- $10,000 Give a hair buzzer to my 4 year old, Ethan, and let him do WHATEVER he wants to my hair a week before the race. I have a feeling it will be some sort of a mohawk as that is what he has always wanted. Hmmm… a curly hair mohawk - should be interesting! I will sport the hair for the day of the race so everyone there can partake in the splendor :-)
…for my wife to be prego with our fifth (5th) child. Yes, you heard that right, number 5 - we can conceive with the best of them. We finally found out what is going on and it turns out we know some Catholics and that is enough to make the wife a “fertile mertil”. Of course we have to stop at five because that is all we have room for in our mini-van. You know, it is quite important to follow General Motors limit-your-family-size-based-on-our-vehicle-size plan.
My wife and I were on the baby-a-year plan but we are failing miserably as we have been married for almost 10yrs (time flies - mamma wowie!) Needless to day that after this child is born (or during the pregnancy) the wife is wanting me to join the “V-Club” (vasectomy for the technically inclined). No telling what a doctor will screw up when he gets to your innards and starts severing things, tieing them off, and then codderizing them [shudder]. I figure I could do it for a lot less than $1000 if I have a good sterile nail clippers and two bottles of Advil.
Well, I digress. For those that want to donate to “The Bartell Family Diaper Fund” you can go to my PayPal donation site. Please be generous in your giving as I would like to send my kids to Harvard so they can support me when I retire.
Till the next baby this is Aaron Bartell signing off….
When I typed out that title I felt a little like Mel Gibson in Braveheart - except I was wearing more than a loin cloth and there were no barbaric tools about to be used on my body. Ok, now back to my non-threatening job of being a software developer :-)
I received an email from Larry Bolhuis last night announcing he is going out on his own (sol
e proprietor). The name of his company is Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC and he will be focusing on system design, implementation, migrations, system administration, networking, networking security and connectivity. I had the chance to spend the better part of a week with Larry a year or so ago and was quite impressed with his knowledge of the IBM i.
You can reach him at the following URL: http://www.frankeni.com After reading his home page I also noticed he holds a “teechnical” certification of some sort. I gotta buy him a web page spell checker next I guess ;-)
Here’s to wishing you a prosperous business pursuit! [Aaron raises first cup of early morning coffee]
I thought this was an interesting site because it seems to have come from a somewhat non-technical community that learned how to use technology to their benefit - very cool! The description of the Zotero tools is as follows: “ZoteroFirefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use itself.” 
What’s very interesting to me is that it was built strictly for FireFox as a plugin. Hmmmm…. this seems to be a turning point in the browser wars if you ask me. Which brings up an interesting point. What do each of us do for research? How do we remember what we have accomplished in a piece of code or our collective thoughts about a technology? I must say that I don’t document my research that much, though I do keep track of the different pieces of code I develop so I guess that is kind of along the lines of documentation (it stays with me forever and usually has it’s trigger points).
How do you document your thoughts and research?
If you are a web developer using RPG to “talk to the browser” then you should check out Profound Logic’s new site, www.profoundlogic.tv, where they are doing some docu-torials of sorts. Cool idea for sure, and it is a medium that I enjoy being educated with. Good job Profound Logic!
I just learned of this “Enterprise Modernization Sanbox” thanks to Kent Miligan sending me a note last week. Basically it is a way to try out some of IBM’s latest modernization tools without needing to set them up on your own personal machine. You will need an IBM id to log in with (register for free - I already had one).
The high-level important thing to note here is that IBM is making efforts to bridge the gap for people to try things out much more easily. In the RDi tutorial they even give you access to an IBM i to do the tutorial on!
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/emsandbox/systemi.html
Very cool! I was able to connect to this service and try out the latest version of RDi (v7.5) in less than 30 minutes. They also give you the ability to try out EGL and HATS (not sure if that is the current name).
Couple of thoughts:
- It only gives you four (4) hours worth of access and then it expires. I would change this to 8hrs to allow for interruptions in a programmers day.
- On the page it tells you to print out a script but when you get to an area of interest none of the things that I believe are supposed to be printed out are ever referenced as a script. In short I think this thing suffers from some usability issues.
- Once I got into the RDi tutorial everything went much better - good job on that tutorial.
- I saw EGL as an option and I was hoping there was also an option for Zend/PHP
- It would be interesting if there was a short tutorial on getting people up to speed on the latest versions of RPG.
I am liking this and am going to dig in some more as I personally have a business need to look into Team Concert for i. Why Team Concert for i? Well, if I am counting my chickens right then I can have a reasonably price source management solution that is slanted at IBM i.
Given how much work I do with XML files in the IFS on the IBM i there is often the need to quickly create a stream file. Over the years I have become more and more comfortable with using QShell as a means to accomplish many tasks and in this case I found a solution that works great for creating files by using the touch command. You can find the documentation for the command here.
If you found yourself to lazy to click on that link then I have copied the touch command description here for your lazy butt to read :-) “The touch utility sets the modification and access times of files to the current time of day. If the file doesn’t exist, it is created with default permissions.”
Usually when I am entering QShell commands I do so from the shell prompt by first typing STRQSH on the command line to start a QShell session. But if I only want to run a single command I can do so by simply typing it in on the command line like the following:
QSH CMD(’touch -C 819 /home/myfile.xml’)
It is important to note that a capital letter “C” is being used in this case so we can set the CCSID to 819 (aka ISO88591, aka Latin).
There’s a Saturday morning update from your host, Aaron Bartell. I am basically typing this because I woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep and I am running 5 miles this morning to train for a half marathon taking place Aug 2nd in Chicago. More updates to come on the marathon front as I will be asking for donations for a good cause, and to solicit donations I am going to be doing certain acts to my body so your donations can double as entertainment :-) Stay tuned!
This past week I found myself doing communication traces because I had an RPG-XML Suite (www.rpg-xml.com) customer needing to communicate with a non-traditional web service. By “non-traditional” I mean they remote web service doesn’t use HTTP and instead uses raw sockets, and they also require start/end hex character codes at the beginning and end of the XML stream.
We ran into issues with knowing whether the response was being sent back from the server to the IBM i (the IBM i was acting as the client). I found myself searching through the various trace utilities on IBM’s Infocenter and tried out nearly all of them without success. I posted to midrange.com and Michael Ryan and Vern Hamberg had pitty on me and helped out. With their help I was able to come up with the follow sequence to get a solid comm trace placed into a spool file:
1) STRCMNTRC CFGOBJ(ETHLIN01) CFGTYPE(*LIN) USRDTA(*MAX) CMNTRCOPTS(*RMTIPADR) RMTIPADR(’216.114.242.89′)
2) GETURI URI(’216.114.242.89′) <–this is an RPG-XML Suite command–>
3) ENDCMNTRC CFGOBJ(ETHLIN01) CFGTYPE(*LIN)
4) PRTCMNTRC CFGOBJ(ETHLIN01) CFGTYPE(*LIN) CODE(*ASCII) FMTTCP(*YES)
5) DLTCMNTRC CFGOBJ(ETHLIN01) CFGTYPE(*LIN)
After running PRTCMNTRC you can do a WRKSPLF to see the generated output. The issue I had was that I didn’t specify USRDTA(*MAX) which meant I didn’t see the entire request, and then I also needed to specify CODE(*ASCII) so the trace data was legible with the human eye.