I am excited about a recent article I wrote that was published in IBMSystemsMag.com because it is part of the bigger picture of getting NEW people involved with our beloved OS and also allows the existing IBM i customer to test out new features.  You can find the “Test Drive IBM i For Free” article here:

http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/virtual_loaner_program/33432p1.aspx

The best part about it all is that YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE AN ISV OR BIG IBM CUSTOMER TO USE THIS SERVICE.  All you need is a PartnerWorld Id which can be obtained at no cost using a simple signup process!  I tested this concept out by signing up with my personal email address (i.e. no affiliation with Krengel Tech – my employer who *is* an IBM ISV) and all went just fine.

Pretty cool, eh?  :-)

SPREAD THE WORD!!

This video says it all: http://screencast.com/t/YmZjNjg0Mz

Moment of frustration coming here…

IS ANYONE ELSE SICK OF IBM PUSSY FOOTING AROUND WITH OUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION TOOLING!?!?!?

Normally when an error like that occurs I would be able to do a DSPJOBLOG and at least get a clue as to where to look next.  I checked the *ADMIN jobs in WRKACTJOB and that shows nothing.  I guess to that point, I usually don’t have ANY issues like this when I am configuring stuff on the command line side.  Note that I get the same message when I try to create a printer from iNav.

I feel like the next generation of system administration tooling on IBM i is going backwards in stability, and that isn’t good for bringing in new business.

IBM, I am trying to run a #@!$%$ business here and am not a sandbox for your developers to try things out on!

Who would love to have IBM go back to non-virtual machine (i.e. JVM) admin tooling? Maybe IBM is doing a bad job on purpose so a vendor can have a chance to develop something better.  Probably best if I just end my day at this point….

I was excited to see System i Developer recently announce a new effort for e-Learning.  Not that I don’t think networking with other people is valuable – it is VERY valuable – but sometimes it isn’t a reality to travel out of the office for 2 to 4 days.  I have been hoping somebody would come a long with something like this where you can basically get training multiple times a year on a number of topics for a crazy reasonable price.

You can learn more about it at the following link:

http://www.systemideveloper.com/announce2010_elearning.html

This has my wheels a turnin’ for other ways education could be delivered more efficiently.  For example, what if we had a sort of shopping basket that allowed you to pick from a list of available sessions and dates/times, and after you entered your credit card info and clicked submit you would get an email 1hr later with a GoToMeeting invite for an event that was JUST for your group (big or small).  That training session would be informal in nature as the presenter would go through their material but your personnel would be able to ask question as they went through it – thus providing a more solid learning experience (i.e. the “holes” would be filled in and you would be ready to jump in immediately after the session was done).

The reason I bring this up is because I do this a fair amount for a variety of “sessions” as it relates to WDSC/RDi, RPG-XML Suite, RPGUI and any other things my customers want me to meet with them on.  Even better, if the presentation was concerning RDi, you could do it right on the customer’s desktop so everything that was accomplished was available to them after the session.

What do you think about ala carte education?

It is that time of year again for the SystemiNetwork.com RPG and Beyond Web Conference.  Thanks to Sue from Penton for inviting me to present with the big hitters.  This conference is a nice change of pace for me because I don’t have to travel and can instead present right from my home office.  Heck, for all the attendees know I might be giving the presentation in the nude – you will NEVER know :-)  Now try and wash that imagery from your mind.

I am quite excited about RPG and Beyond because I am actively in the process of creating a BRAND NEW presentation that shows how to develop your first Google Android application (i.e. cell phone operating system for those not on the DL (down low) ) and have it talk directly to RPG on the IBMi – zero Java middleware involved (i.e. no Websphere App Server, just your friendly native Apache server plus RPGUI plus DB2 plus IBMi).  As has always been my mantra:

There is very little you can’t do with RPG

Check out the list of sessions at the following link.  If your budget is tight this year then this is the conference for you because it is currently available for ONLY $249.  Most spend that much on cable TV in three months and you can learn new tools/concepts that will further your career – no brainer in my mind.

List of sessions

And if you are looking for some music to listen to while you peruse the session listing you can check out one of my favs from years ago.  The artist is Pedro The Lion and the album is “Whole EP”.  It documents a storyline of him going through drug addiction and coming through it to find hope and peace on the other side.  You have to listen to the whole album from start to finish to get the whole effect.

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/album/Whole+EP/2256655

Stay tuned for some new sessions from me involving Google Android development as it relates to RPGUI+DB2+IBMi.

Hope everyone had a great July 4th and raised a cup to our independence.  I had the pleasure of spending time with my family “at the farm” (grandma and grandpa’s house just south of Good Thunder, MN).  I have MANY fond memories of spending time on the farm and the endless adventures that ensued.   I still remember helping my grandpa feed the cows silage in the wee early  morning hours and how I would stand in the trailer and hop over the tines that would pull the silage to the rear of the trailer where these humongus things with teeth on them would grind up the silage and push it out onto the cattle feed trough.  Oh, the dangers, but oh what great fun! :-)

One of the married couples that often come to the 4th of July celebration is Paul and Annette Godtland. Some of you might remember Paul as being “the face of the V6R1 upgrade” (http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/enewsletterexclusive/18803p1.aspx).  Paul’s mom is my grandma’s sister.  Paul has to be one of the nicest guys out there – always gentle, kind and humble.

Paul’s wife, Annette, is also a technical personality that has programmed for 20+ years and has recently entered retirement.  As with anybody that has programming and great ideas built into their very fiber, well, she couldn’t be slowed by retirement.  Instead retirement seems to have afforded her more “mind bandwidth” to think about where there are needs in today’s technology space.  In particular she has a heart to show people how to get up and running with creating, deploying, distributing, selling and marketing your first product (i.e. software) on the Internet.  Over the years she has collected thoughts on this subject and has now put them into tangible book form to help others out there.  The book is titled “This Little Program Went to Market”. Annette’s website is www.GodtlandSoftware.com.

Annette gave me my own personalized/signed copy of the book at the July 4th get together and I have since been paging through it to see how her experiences have matched mine (i.e. I was part of taking RPG-XML Suite from zero to a sellable product) and to learn how I could have approached things differently.

The book is geared towards Java development on Windows but could benefit other platform scenarios, and if you are new to this space then it is well worth the investment to get a leg up on getting your program to market.  You can pick it up at Amazon for around $35 right now.

Who out there is currently working on a new software product for IBMi that they would love to market?  You don’t have to spill the beans concerning what your yet-to-be-release product does, but it is always fun to know that others are out there.

AaronBartell.com

This post is based on a question I asked in a long running thread on LinkedIn surrounding this article.

Question for the group: How much should an IT team plan for portability of an application and DB? I bring this up based on a comment in one of the PDFs which is

“A portability issue often overlooked is the portability of SQL programming skills. Many enterprises and application development organizations have switched to programming with SQL for this very reason — it is easier to find a programmer with SQL skills than a programmer with RPG skills.”

The perceived benefits would be that you would be shielded from vendors (i.e. IBM and the i) dying off.

The cost would be the additional time it takes to become “portable”.

Obviously there are varied levels of adopting portability, and each adopted portability minded approach would have to be cost justified. For example, introducing embedded SQL into a single RPG program to “test the waters” is a very small cost to portability (especially since it probably saved time over doing native I/O if a dynamic SELECT/WHERE/ORDER BY was involved).

A much more expensive adoption of portability would be switching server-side languages to Java because of the significant retraining involved. The cost of portability can sometimes end up being the entire demise of an application (i.e. it takes so long to transition to Java/.NET that an IT dept is no longer able to meet the business needs in a timely and cost effective fashion).

To repeat the question: How much should an IT team plan for portability of an application and DB?

AaronBartell.com

Over on LinkedIn.com Nathan Andelin just got done posting the following which I thought was worth repeating.  These days we suffer from technology diarrhea and it is refreshing to see somebody making use of RPG on a Power system to provide awesome performance with very little technology overhead.

Can I turn the original question around and ask What’s Right with i? And can I share a positive response? We recently posted a quick-paced promotional video on our Web site:

http://www.relational-data.com/promo/promo.php

We’ve deployed about 170 new applications under our Web portal during the past 18 months which offer a very positive view of the platform, and its prospects for the future.

Many things are right with IBM i, but if I had to pick the one most significant to me, it would be its native workload management. Some of our customers are running thousands of jobs, supporting thousands of users, with everyone getting exceptional, reliable performance, WITHOUT distributing workloads across server farms. Customers run hundreds of applications concurrently and reliably, on just one server.

As the video illustrates, we’re improving the end-user experience, while moving more workloads to a centralized server, as opposed to distributing workloads to desktops, or application server farms.

We’re getting a lot of positive feedback from people, who appreciate the idea of everyone (students, parents, teachers, administrators, in our case), having a single point of entry, and a single runtime environment for so many applications.

-Nathan.

The guys at ExtJS <cough> Sencha have done it again.  They are pushing the technology envelope and have produced the first HTML5 framework for mobile devices.  Why is this important?  Well, if you haven’t been following the news, a few weeks (months?) ago Steve Jobs (figure head of Apple) publicly spoke out against Adobe Flash/Flex and declared they would not be allowed to run on the iPhone or iPad because they sucked too much CPU and were inefficient in other areas.  I actually couldn’t agree with him more based on my usage of Flex/Flash on the desktop…

Anyways, with HTML5 now being supported by THEE most popular Javascript client company on the internet, well, we should see some good/cool things happening.  I am still quite new the the whole HTML5 changes but I imagine this will keep developers from having to learn each and every device’s languages (i.e. on Droid it is Java, on iPad it is Objective C, etc) and instead, for apps that don’t need deep claws into the mobile OS, you can just deliver text (i.e. HTML5) from your server language (i.e. RPG).

I think the next part of this year will be quite exciting.  Look for an RPGUI+HTML5 article later this year.

Thoughts?

AaronBartell.com

Just learned of a new blog based on a posting on the YiPs forum.  You can check out Steve Pitcher at the following URL:

http://endjobabn.blogspot.com/