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As I sit in my office with a slight fever I am pondering what type of year I want to make 2009. Below is a small list of goals that I would like to achieve during this year.

1. Get Married!! 08.09.09 Ohh yeahh!!! Love you baby.
2. Manage my time better.
3. Update this website using my (undeveloped) lifestream module.
4. Network more. This includes getting involved online and at local groups.
5. Do more consulting work
6. Live a more active/healthier lifestyle
7. Continue to build Bella’s Sparkle w/ my family.
8. Develop my TeePals.com golf site AND play more golf!!

Well that should keep me busy for the year! Lets hope 2009 is a productive and enjoyable year!

God bless.

Merry Christmas to all!!!! This site will change this coming year……

I don’t normally post IBM stuff to this blog but figured why not. Today I wanted to find out given a physical (or logical) file what programs use this file. There are tools that will accomplish this for you such as Hawkeye but we currently don’t have them in our shop. The DSPPGMREF command was my answer. This command lets you input a program name and it will output all files it uses on the system. You can direct the output of this command to an outfile and simply run some SQL over it to find where your given file is used. For example the following command will create a large file containing all the file references from all programs on the system:

DSPPGMREF PGM(*ALL/*ALL) OUTPUT(*OUTFILE) OBJTYPE(*ALL)
OUTFILE(lib/DSPPGMREF)

Then querying the outfile for the program will give you a nice result set.

Well another year has gone buy and I will be walking with my family in memory of my father for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night walk. I am trying to raise $250 in donations for the walk. This year I am excited to announce that my newly formed company.. Bella’s Sparkle will be sponsoring the event.

Any help would be greatly appreciated… you can donate right over the web here.

Thank you.

So I have been using Twitter for a while now. I am much better at keeping a micro blogging service updated then I am a full blown blog. It interests me because I can post the web while I am actually doing the activity I describe in my post. For example, I was in Disney just under a year ago. While watching the fireworks in Epcot I was twitting how gorgeous they where right when it was happening. There is something rather gratifying about that. Twitter as a technology gets alot of “haters” for the fact that it is always going down. I must admit, I am not loyal to the brand OR the technology, I am loyal to the large community of PEOPLE that comprise it! The people are what makes twitter and because of it I will continue to use it. Although, the technology does seem to be getting better after that large investment from Mr. Bezos, and rightfully so!

I am not yet syndicating my twitter content on this domain yet but I plan to do so in the near future. If you are not yet following me, check me out. I will do the same for you!

http://twitter.com/direct

Well, I am off to see the Dark Knight, finally. Check my twitts for how I felt!

Open source technology excites me. The idea of groups of people from around the globe focused on building a solution open to everybody is extremely attractive. I have been following Drupal for a little over a year but did not spend the time to really dive in until about a month ago.

What is Drupal? Drupal is a modular content management system. Basically right out of the box you get a functional web site that has configurable modules for blogging, forums, user management, etc. Unlike development frameworks such as Rails, CakePHP, OR Symphony you actually have a working application with RICH functionality in minutes, not just some CRUD. This means Drupal’s user base can extent to non-programmers and programmers alike.

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A conundrum that enters my mind from time to time is the fact that it seems consumer technology in its current state is much further ahead then many of the solutions deployed in enterprises today. Why is this? I wish I had the answer but like you I have my ideas.

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I have been wanting to do this for a while! Check this out.

This will make tracking modifications to our System I software ALOT easier without having to invest heavily in a system we don’t really need.

Open Source to the rescue!

Late last year I participated in IBM master the mainframe contest for the second time. IBM partners with a college (Marist) and enabled students to logon to a z-series machine and perform certain tasks. The contest was split into 3 parts. The first part was really easy, providing us with the basic foundation of navigating the zOS menus. I successfully completed part 2 which required more intense problems to solve such as debugging JCL, troubleshooting the SYSPLEX cluster, and researching the network configuration. It was a great experience of which I earned an honorable mention on IBM’s master the mainframe webite!!

Unfortunately last year was the final year I can participate but I am glad I was given the opportunity to experience this interesting high end platform.

Big news today! Sun is acquiring MySQL! Hopefully this will mean good things for the open source database system we all know and love! The blogosphere is exploding right now with posts from users and developers of the system. Personally this kind of caught me by surprise. I had been following IBM and MySQL’s announcement last year but did not see Sun getting in on any of this action.

John Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, has a good post on his blog explaining the acquisition.

Good luck to all the talented people over at MySQL during this change!