Al Macintyre: 400 on Radio Dial

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:55:05 GMT

Earthweb on weblog software for IT managers. [Scripting News]

This article reviews what we webloggers already know, and shares some ideas worth further exploration. It also introduces me to the wicki, group editing of a shared document. I am a bit nervous about this concept ... I am accustomed to shared programs in which it is clearly tracked which programmer made which changes for which reasons, where we have good consistent programming discipline standards.

Currently I send e-mail to selected co-worker users every few days. I select recipients based on nature of content situation. Perhaps some of this sort of thing belongs on a weblog, with comments, and IT department subscribing to the comments, which might say YES this is a high priority to resolve, or NO there is some nuance you were not aware of. However, rather than comments, I am more comfortable with the Manila group discussion format, that makes it easy for people to comment on other people comments, aside from the original author of a thread.

I have identified a problem with some garbage in one of our files. It is not doing dirt to the integrity of our corporate data base, but could contribute to invalid results for people doing queries over the data in that file. Here is specificity of the problem, as I interpret it. I seek permission to delete these records.
We did have some costs that were negative and I fixed them. I believe it is valid to have a negative quantity transaction, or temporarily negative on-hand due to transactions posted out of sequence. I do not believe it is valid for the value of something to be negatively priced.
The ERP has provisions to delete items, customers, vendors, etc. when we no longer need them. I have discovered that unfortunately, history on those deletions do not go away, so that when we re-issue an item, customer, vendor, etc. for a new entity, it comes attached to history on the unrelated prior usage. I am now inventorying contents of history files using control numbers that are no longer in our system, for the purpose of working towards purging these orphans. (Orphans are child records with no parents, where widows are parent records with no children.) I trust my co-workers concur with my efforts.
Some Help Desk Challenge we were working on has come to the point that some new or revised software is ready for testing. Here is how to conduct such a test. Here is how to evaluate and report the results of the tests.
Common questions to Help Desk => FAQ on how to accomplish standard activities that newcomers may need to know, especially if they come to us from a different Computer Operating System environment which probably did things other than what we are accustomed to.

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 04:15:57 GMT

IBM's Autonomic Computing Products. I.B.M. Releases Self-Fixing Computer Software. Autonomic computing is a major component of IBMs On Demand Computing initiative, the part that keeps systemic costs down. Their first releases are functions in their DB and App Server products. Look for similar advances to flow down the stack to support Grid Computing.

``All the IT staff does is define these business rules and the systems will then perform to those rules and make sure all the right things happen,'' said Miles Barel, IBM's director of autonomic computing. In addition to setting itself up and running, autonomic computing includes enabling systems to run in the most efficient manner and stay running, fixing itself when something goes wrong.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Sat, 09 Nov 2002 09:39:40 GMT

I just started a directory of documentation sources for BPCS which is an ERP from SSA GT.

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 00:23:11 GMT

developer.* [Blogfish] Thanks for the link to Daniel Read's great collection of essays for Professional Programming Quality, Book Reviews, and project to codify programming standards.

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 17:52:56 GMT

A thread recently came up on BPCS_L asking where newbies should go for help, which reminded me to look up Don's url on finding 400 user groups world wide. http://www.eserverusergroup.org/

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 19:42:55 GMT

Today I attended a meeting of my local 400 user group with a meeting presentation on using Ethical Hacking to test a company's computer networks. Here's my write-up on what I got out of that meeting.

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 05:22:09 GMT

White House To Unveil New Plan for U.S. Computer Security [SecurityFocus] [dws.]

There's been a lot of press about the role Microsoft's responsibilities should play in the White House big picture as opposed to the role it really is playing. Wasn't there a former Microsoft Security Expert who got hired to become a White House Security Expert? I have to be careful with my big mouth here, since I consider some other places much more appropriate sources of talent for our Government.

Top Story in this week's http://www.eweek.com/ is what should be a copy of the President's Plan for Cyber Security and the notion that they now will seek public support for the plan, and also possibly get second opinions from other people in the know, before the President signs it.

Top Story in this week's e week Security pages is a progress report on how various industries are doing moving towards better computer security, such as mass transit, power plants, communications, etc. followed by a survey of computer security professionals.

The results imply that almost half of the nation's infrastructure has done nothing different about computer security since 9/11/2001, and that this constitutes criminal negligence. Now I think that some enterprises were probably doing proper security before 9/11/2001 and did not need to do anything other than a review. One person was quoted as saying that proper security requires incremental gains in Security each year. I think it is better to get your security as good as you can get it, and keep it that way, except when the security risks are so bad that installing patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix ... means that you can get nothing else done with your time, so what you should be doing is learning a different Operating System that does not need that behavior, assuming that other Operating System is not going to be declared illegal by pending legislation.

For my past Weblog posts on computer security topics see

Sep 16 on Y2K of copying;
Aug 29 on diagnosing hoax and computer security myths vs. serious downage;
and Aug 15 on how Computer Security does not have to be rocket science.

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 21:23:31 GMT

Comment on Al's Radio Doc Sources using Quick Topics. Eventually, Al wants to look into pros & cons of several different commenting systems for Radio, but we have to start some place.

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 08:13:24 GMT

I have just started a category called 400 on Radio Dial which will be for stuff related to my interests in that part of the IBM world which has nothing to do with the PC world, other than issues related to connecting PCs to IBM midrange networks and OS, like Linux, Unix, or OS/400. This category will not show up on various lists until stuff I post there gets upstreamed ... you will then be able to find it via my directory of stories and categories.

Midrange-l is a technical discussion group for people who work with IBM's midrange computer system, which used to be known as AS/400 but has been rebranded iSeries eServer.

Midrange-l discussion group now has its archives such that we can subscribe to them through our Radio News Aggregation, but where Radio Subscription Channels are identified by rss.xml at end of the Channel's url, here you have to select
http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/maillist.rdf to join up.

Posts to the Radio News Aggregation then show up in the format of the title of the post with in parentheses the name of the person who made the post to the discussion group. Clcking on the link then takes you to the actual post, looking exactly the same way as it does when you go to the archives of the group, and you can link from post to post within thread, just like being at the archives.

This link announces the service and gives instructions for subscribing.

*** ADMIN: RDF / RSS files now available (David Gibbs) [midrange-l mailing list]

This service is also available for the RPG400-L list.

For random visitors to Al's Weblog who may be unfamiliar with RPG, it is an extremely popular business language used on mid sized IBM computers. I guess common languages for software written in the IBM world include: COBOL JAVA RPG SQL

RPG is an acronym meaning Report Program Generator. At one time I knew what most all languages acronyms stood for, except perhaps ENGLISH. " :-}"

Important context, when discussing this technology, is that UserLand wrote and deployed the first RSS-based news aggregator, in the spring of 1999