Mar 20th, 2007
Mark Cathcart has posted a nice article about the Unix System Services roll-out process. He provides a historical overview of the decisions involved in the revitalization of the mainframe back in the early 90’s.
Personally, I remember when we introduced USS at my company about 8 years ago. It was a hard but also a funny work. Lots of mainframe guys dealing with a subsystem under OS/390 that has a strange behaviour and terminology.
What the hell is a “sticky bit“?
Oh, I see, it’s an executable that resides on LPA or LNKLST.
Why this guys doesn’t speak more clear!
Can I manage the user access rights via TSS?
Yes but not. Do you know what are the file mode permissions bits?
Ehhhhhh?
I also remember when I personally had to deal with Rexx and USS. We needed to implement a change control system to manage the production environment changes. Executing OpenEdition (USS former name) services through the “Address Syscall” Rexx instruction under a TSO/ISPF environment on a OS/390 mainframe was very very funny (and painful!).
I remember specially when one of our sysprogs executed the “rm” instruction on the development root filesystem using the change control user, which was, logically, a superuser. Just imagine his face when he realized what he has done! After this destructive action, we created an “rm” alias to prevent these kind of incidents.
Snif, I miss these great moments.
Mar 18th, 2007
I’m now micro-blogging, or doing what James Governor calls A Declarative Living. Yes, a few weeks ago, I signed up on Twitter.
Why I’m doing this? Just check this post, or this one. They resume my interest in this new way of communication or social network. As you have noticed, this blog is dedicated to the software development life cycle, and I don’t usually post about myself or my personal interests. So twitter brings me the possibility to talk about what I’m doing or what I’m thinking on a more informal way, without blogging an elaborate post.
During these few weeks, I found twitter a quite good indeed. I discovered interesting things during my last trip to London, or I have met some twitter friends in real life.
So here we are. If you want to track my activity, check my twiterings. And feel free to add me as a friend.
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Mar 17th, 2007
DexX has published a nice article called Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars where compares the latest versions of the major IDEs in the Java development space: NetBeans, Eclipse/MyEclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA.
The article reviews the three major Java IDEs from the viewpoint of basic, common features, but if focuses more on their strengths in four common areas of development: Swing, JSP/Struts, JavaServer Faces, and J2EE/EJB 3.0.
In the last part of the article, the author warns about ignoring the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio (code named “Orcas“), because Microsoft is putting a massive amount of R&D effort in both libraries and development tools, although he believes none of the Java IDE vendors are getting too comfortable and resting on their laurels:
I am very glad to see that the mistaken old Java mentality of “release the APIs first and then wait for the development tools of varying quality to appear much later” is being aggressively replaced with “release the APIs and world-class development tools for them as soon as possible”.
