Tip of the Week

9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless

Link to Article in CIO

“How Not to Be Clueless

“My CIO is clueless.” These are words you don’t want to hear if you want to earn the respect of your application development professionals. So how do you avoid being a clueless CIO? Steer clear of these behaviors:”

Offtopic - Go topless to meetings!

While I am sure the headline grabbed you, it’s really true. I worked with a “moron” a few jobs back that would insist on playing with his Blackberry at every meeting and when he was not getting everyone full attention he would play ring tones that he had downloaded. Problem was he did really poor work, was never really up to speed on anything and then blammed evryone around his for having attention deficit. The artilce I have linked to lays it all out very well. I am leaving my toys at my desk from now on. Oh and I still really despise that person for doing that all the time. What a jerk!

LINK —> When it’s hard to stay focused, try going ‘topless’ to meetings

COMMON - First Timers Kit

So this is your first time going to COMMON and your thinking to yourself it’s going to be scary, or maybe you just don’t know where to go or when to arrive.

Sunday - You need to make sure you are in Nashville early on Sunday. All the fun starts Sunday afternoon. If you are going to do a session on Sunday then you need to be there on Saturday, but at the least be at the hotel Sunday @ 12 PM. That way you can walk around and get to know the joint. The Expo floor opens @ 1 PM and you really want to spend as much time in there getting all the free crap they bring, and learning about their products. I will explain the Expo later too.

Make sure you have your week layed out as to what you want to do and what you want to attend and kind of make mental notes as to where those rooms are. It will help you later during the week. You will of course be able to find a map and I will explain what to do with that later.

Continued »

IT Jungle - Explains how to get up PHP Web on System i

The System i is good for every part of any company. So why not set up PHP & Web on your System i too?

There are going ot be sessions on this very topic this year at COMMON. Basically over this past year LAMP is now available for System i, so should we call i iAMP?

LINK : IT Jungle - Setting Up A PHP/Web Environment On System i: Where Do I Start?

So does this mean we can now run Drupal on System i?

System i - Tip of the Week

It’s not so much a tip as it is a little insight that might over time be a tip.

The System i world is being change and right before your eyes. Without any of you out there knowing it. The System i and the System p are getting closer and closer to each other, the lines are blurring and while you were sleeping IBM let Sun in the door and now is thinking about pushing the Solaris OS out on Intel blades and such, the same blade systems we all want for out Power6 CPUs and our i5/OS. What is a decent System i guy to do?

I think the writing on the wall is very clear and I have been a big subscriber to this practice for a long time, if you have made your life’s work the System i as an Admin then you have done yourself a huge disservice. While I will agree any day that the System i is by far the superior platform for most large workloads, it would behoove you to learn a little UNIX, nay a good bit of UNIX or Linux. It’s one way to survive and not seem like your stuck just running the System i.

Back in 2001,2002, & 2003 I jumped into Linux & UNIX with both feet. I was living in Atlanta and started attending after hours classes at Kennesaw State University to get a UNIX/Linux Administrator Certification from KSU. It was a good bit of hard work but in the end I had a very good understanding of UNIX and was able to administer a UNIX server much like a System i. I know had a firm knowledge of dozens of platforms all using the same central theme, UNIX.

This bit of knowledge has made me a better Admin over the years and propelled my career a bit, well I should say a lot. Companies don’t look at me as a one trick pony like some System i Admins. Not that being a really great System i Admin is a negative, but just think what you can do with a little bit of very detailed Windows knowledge and a firm grasp of UNIX. You can in fact work pretty much anywhere and contribute to most any project in any company.

OJT is also a very important part of the equation. While getting the certificate was one thing, putting it all to good use is a whole new blog post. So find a new direction, and new OS and spend a little time getting to know UNIX or Linux. Solaris is now free for the taking along with FreeBSD, any Linux and many other enterprise classed OSes. Might I recommend a little Ubuntu.

Laern a little UNIX and come to COMMON where I will be preseting Linux on System i tracked classes. I look forward to see you all there and will keep posting more about the System i and Linux over the next few months leading up to COMMON.

Tip of the Week - WRKACTJOB

Hurry and find out what is killing the system!

We all have heard that from time to time. Some user is running an SQL that looks at over 300 million records and it pretty much kills the system. On top of that the System i will let it run because it can handle it and not crash. That is the upside, the down side to this problem in large System i shops is that all the Admins run back to their desks and what do they do?

WRKACTJOB

So not only do you have a Query taking up 105% of the CPU, now you have 5 other Admins all hitting it with one on the commands with the most overhead. Work with Active Jobs is in fact a very nice and telling screen but you as the Admin can wreck the system just as fast if enough of you type that command at the same time. If you know all your ODBC jobs run in a separate subsystem (we will cover that later) then just use WRKSSBS SBS(name of subsystem) instead. You can also just use WRKSYSACT and see who is beating the stuffing out of the CPU and if my memory serves it a command only one person can use at a time.

So be careful in times of crisis with the WRKACTJOB command. It can just make matter worse. Every shop I have ever been in has this problem. The CPU is trashing and all the Admin do a little more damage so it just takes more time to recover.

I got an email from Chris Whisonant saying that this is true on older systems but with never version of the OS and Hardware it has gone away. To that I say, thanks Chris. It used to be a rule of thumb but I guess IBM got wise to the problem and kind of fixed it. I would still only test the hardiness of the system after hours.

Fun things to do with WRKACTJOB