IBM Systems Magazine Blogs

With this post, I am starting a series on the extraordinary relationship between hardware and the software that runs upon it. I’m a software engineer. That is how I understand and experience the world of computing. I love programming languages and, even more, I love middleware, the great multiplier of programmer productivity. But what software engineer doesn’t have a healthy respect for the hardware? Respect is one thing, but understanding it is another.

On the road again. Nothing surprising about that because I travel internationally two or more times a month. What is unusual is that this year about half of my trips are security related (the other main topic is performance although I prefer the term resource optimization).

The IBM i development teams have been delivering new open source software at a mind-numbing rate. In fact, it’s hard to keep up! Since our move to RPMs in May, hundreds of new packages have been delivered that help with application development, system administration and many things in between. In fact, I was in the middle of writing a short blog post about a tool called “Midnight Commander” when Steve Will published a discussion about some of our business results.

What happens when you generate a spooled file from a prestart job? Where does the output go and is there an easy way to find it?

We mentioned in our second article on DATA-INTO that " ... we look forward to seeing what third parties and open-source groups can do with it." Well soon after that piece was published we received good news and bad news. The good news was that Scott Klement had added a DATA-INTO JSON parser to his port of YAJL. That’s also the bad news: Now Jon has to come up with a new project as that was number one on his to-do list!

Usually, people wait to write an annual retrospective until December, and it’s only October.  But I have some good reasons to write this now, and the first of them is that there are multiple definitions of a “year,” and by one of those definitions, we already have reason to celebrate a year of success for IBM i.

After 28 years of working with IBM Db2 for z, and almost 11 years writing the DB2utor blog for IBM Systems Magazine, I’m saying goodbye.

This week's blog post is about my recent experience with a Nutanix Cluster.