aaronbartell

So far this year I have been a busy bee.  One of the two big announcements I have is that Mantatech has an Audio/Video seminar I did titled “WDSC Tidbits Of Goodies”.  I will share the other big (bigger) announcement hopefully before August 1st.  The seminar contains a large collection of the little and big things I love about WDSC - the things that I have found to make me more productive over my past 5 or so years of using the tool.

The audio/video seminar approach is something new Mantatech is trying out and I think it is a great idea.  The basic idea is that you purchase a seminar for $96 and can then access it for an alloted time to view as many times as you want.  The other cool thing about this approach is that it can be easily updated by the author should more (or different) information come about.  In my case I hope to double the length of the seminar sometime next year once I have the next round of tidbits done.

To access the seminar first go to Mantatech.com(click here) and then select “Seminars By Instructors” on the left nav area.  Then on the next page select “Aaron Bartell”.

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At COMMON Nashville ProfoundLogic Software introduced their iData product.  David Russo (lead developer of the product) handed me a copy of it and told me to check it out.  iData is basically a really nice looking browser based physical file editor; at least that is what I use it for though it has more capabilities.

I installed it on my AS400 (very easy install btw) and have been using it the past months since COMMON and thought I would drop a plug for it here being I feel it is most definitely worth checking out.  The thing I like most about it is that I don’t need to install anything on all the programmers PC’s and instead it is all on the server and delivered via the browser.  Below is a screen shot of the application running on my Ubuntu (Linux) desktop.

The other very cool aspect of it is that they have a free version.  Basically after the trial expires you can still use the tool, you just don’t have the most advanced features or some of the features that make the tool slightly quicker to use (i.e. grid editing of table data).

You can check it out at the following URL: http://profoundlogic.com/prodidata.rpgsp

Till next time, this is Aaron Bartell telling you to keep your eyes set on your true love (RPG) and away from other programming langauges that muddy the waters :-)

UPDATE: After I had initially posted this blog entry I thought of other ways people try to gain access to data on the AS400 from their PC’s. One is to use QuantumDB from Eclipse which is a free plugin you can add to WDSC.  Then I remembered that WDSC has a built in browser that allows you to display web pages.  I put two and two together and got three - bring up iData in WDSC! ;-)  Check out the screen capture to the right to see how it looks.  Note that iData allows you to actually update your data vs. QuantumDB’s method is read-only.

Just one more use for iData!

I oft find myself needing to take a peek at what a value is with different character sets (i.e. UTF-8, ASCII, EBCDIC) and have found Tachyon Software has some excellent tables up for reference.  It is one of those things that took me awhile to find, and being I have found it to be useful over the years I thought I would post it for others to checkout and use.

Here is the main index: http://www.tachyonsoft.com/cpindex.htm

Here is the page I find myself on most often: iso88591

Happy code paging!

For those of you who are under 30 and are on the IBM i platform, you should make sure to check out the happenings at http://yips.isociety.org.  It is time for us to rise from the ashes and take control of the AS400 platform!  Ok, so that was a little cheesy, but I couldn’t resist.

What is so interesting about this group is that we are all youngin’s that have found the truth and value with the IBM i - something that doesn’t happen a lot these days IMO.  The other incredibly cool thing is that it is getting full support from IBM!

Right now it is mostly a bulletin board, but there are some committed posters and lively/helpful conversation so far.  Join on in!

I have been using Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS and running an instance of WindowsXP within Ubuntu using VirtualBox.  To see a picture of what that looks like check out the following screen capture.

The reason I need WinXP still is because that is the only place WDSC and Outlook run reliably (two of the most important software packages I use throughout the day).

Everything was going great with my use of WDSC in the VirtualBox WinXP image until I started working with members that had a couple thousand lines of code.  It seems the bigger the source member the longer it takes to save it back up to the server after changes are made.  My guess was that the issue had to do with the fact that VirtualBox gave me an awkward IP address requiring a NAT traversal to communicate with the IBM i (note I am not well versed in networking so forgive my inability to reference things appropriately :-).  So I set out to configure my VirtualBox WinXP image to obtain it’s IP via DHCP from my LinkSys router (like all the other computers on my network including my IBM i).

I found the VirtualBox user manual to be very useful and had the exact remedy to my ailment.  Section 6.7.1.1 of the user manual describes how to setup a VirtualBox “machine” to use DHCP to obtain it’s IP address.  The process was relatively painless and I just wanted to let others know about this in case you had a similar issue with slowness (note I was also having an issue with getting disconnected intermittently which I never had before on my local network).

Happy Monday!

Well, I had my first experience with Microsoft Silverlight this evening while writing a YiPs (Young i Professionals) article for COMMON Connect.  I was looking for fodder to use as an example of Microsoft’s excellent marketing for young people and wanted to reference some of the video game ads I had seen in SDTimes (www.sdtimes.com).  The ad in SDTimes points to http://www.defyallchallenges.com which *requires* Microsoft Silverlight to work!  Now this wouldn’t be so bad except for I am running Ubuntu (Linux) and use FireFox as my browser.  I don’t know if nobody told Microsoft it is losing browser and desktop share (to mostly Macs, but Linux is catching up), but they need to realize they aren’t the cats meow anymore.

Silverlight is actually a great name for it, because it definitely falls short of gold :-)   Adobe’s Flex/Flash team probably throws a party for every day Microsoft chooses to only recognize their operating system as a suitable runtime platform.  Well anyways, time to get back to writing that article…

A couple of years ago I switched over to using TN5250j for my 5250 terminal emulation because I wanted a free tool, but also learned to love the tabbed emulators (think  FireFox or IE7).  About 9 months ago I had problems when installing it on new machine because it wouldn’t let me map the Enter key to actually *be* the enter key (sorry for all you who think that should be the field exit and the Right Control key should be enter - you have been misled by history :-)

Anyways, I stated my grievances to the right person, Pete Helgren (who is active on the project), and he recompiled it to a newer JDK for me.  As it turns out the keymapping portion only worked on a particular JDK version!  So thanks Pete for getting me a version compiled to a newer JDK.  If anybody else has had a similar problem or would like to try TN5250j out for the first time, please download Pete’s version here (click me).

Did I mention TN5250j runs great on Ubuntu (which I am working on being my preferred operating system over my traditional Windows XP)?  Here is a screen shot of it running on my Ubuntu 8.04 system.

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Well, I am finding that SaaS (Software as a Service) is looking more appealing all the time.  I already use a fair amount of this via sites like www.salesforce.com, www.autotask.com, and krengeltech.backupmybusiness.com.

Right now I use BackUpMyBusiness to sync a folder on my HD to a remote server, but I have found their pricing to be worth a look at other alternatives.  This led me to JungleDisk and Amazon’s S3 service which gives you unlimited bandwidth and storage for a fairly small price (i.e. $.15 cents per GB per month).

So how does Ubuntu and VirtualBox come into play with this posting?  Well, Amazon’s S3 service has a 5GB max file size limit and my VirtualBox image file (i.e. WindowsXP1.vdi) for Windows XP is currently 12GB in size.  To get over this limitation I did some googling and found the Linux split command which allows you to split (of course) a file into smaller chunks that can be re-assembled at a later date.  To split up my .vdi file I did the following:

user@ubuntu: split -b 1000000000 WindowsXP1.vdi

This created multiple 1GB files in the same directory named xaa, xab, xac, xad, through xan (no extensions).  Now I can upload these through JungleDisk to Amazon’s S3 service.

Also, when I was splitting my .vdi file I notice it was causing some very choppy performance for the rest of my workstation, so I set out to see if Linux has job priority type handling like IBM i (aka OS/400).  I found the “nice” command and set the split to run at the lowest priority of 19 with the following:

user@ubuntu: nice -n 19 split -b 1000000000 WindowsXP1.vdi

This seemed to help performance a little, but not as much as I had hoped.  It seems Linux has way more of these types of utilities readily available over Windows, and they are free and tested over time.  These are the tidbits that can make a programmer geek like myself more productive on a Linux desktop environment because I can more easily tweak my environment to do what I need.  Anyways, hope you enjoyed this post.

I was reading a recent article about the AS/400 turning 20, and while the article was good and all I noticed something equally important: the guy in the picture(click here) putting together one of the first AS/400’s isn’t wearing a hairnet!  Now, we all know hairnets at McDonalds are VERY important to getting a quality hamburger without somebody elses “stuff” in it.  Basically hairnets keep the stuff out that we don’t want in our burger.

You see now, I don’t want to make a stretch, but one could say it was at this point that a little EGL mite crawled from that guys head into the very first AS/400 computer and has been in gestation all these years only to just recently come out and declare it is the best thing since single level storage (sorry, no sliced bread in southern MN - it is all soaking wet).

So let this be a lesson to us all.  I am right now wearing a hair net as I write some RPG code for a customer to insure I do not let some inappropriate technology slip out of my follicles and cause business growing pains to abound.  Stay tuned for more important notes on this topic.

A user on midrange.com forums posted the following link which I thought was quite entertaining to read: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Made me feel like Bill Gates is more of a true technology person that I had made him out to be.  The poor guy has to give all those opening session type presentations where the software doesn’t work half the time and what’s worse is he didn’t even create the software so he hasn’t much say in how well it works unless he finds it’s uselessness!

Bill, I feel for ya and don’t blame you one bit for leaving Microsoft’s fulltime employment.