Happy Endings

We're writing this on the plane flying from Stockholm to Heathrow en-route to a brief stopover at home before we head to Minneapolis for the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit.

Our friends at Data3 did a wonderful job and the event was very successful with more than 100 of the faithful gathered together to hear about the "latest and greatest" in all things IBM i. The location was beautiful too - just outside the downtown core right alongside the channel into the main harbor. In fact one of the sights at the hotel is to watch the daily arrival and departure of the large and very modern ferries, which the locals affectionately refer to as the "booze cruise." Two or three of these leave Stockholm each day and make the overnight run to Finland or sometimes, apparently, simply into the nautical equivalent of no-man's land. Why? Because Sweden has very high taxes on liquor and apparently these cruises take long enough for you to qualify for a substantial duty-free allowance. As our friends Trevor Perry and Alison Butterill noted, this accounts for the people getting off what appears to be a cruise liner carrying only tiny overnight bags--and very large bags of duty-free items!

But telling you how lucky we were to have been teaching in such a gorgeous location was not intended to be the point of this blog. Instead we wanted to pass on a story related to us by our hosts of one Swedish company's successful approach to the problem of finding new RPG blood. Like many of our customers, the company faced an aging RPG population. While some of their work is outsourced, the organization felt the need to have a strong in-house core to the development team. The solution was to hire recent computer studies graduates and have them trained in RPG. Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that this is an approach we have long advocated, and we have been involved in several such programs. It was encouraging, therefore, to see others successfully using this approach. The training consisted of a three-week classroom period, followed by four weeks of practical hands-on experience and then an additional week in the classroom. Needless to say, crucial to this effort to persuade these new hires that RPG did not mean "Role Playing Game" was the use of modern tools like RDP--no green-screen chains for these newcomers!

If you can read Swedish you can find the details in Data3's excellent magazine. We tried Google translate but it just isn't good enough to publish in that form. So, we hope to work with our friends at Data3 to produce an English version, which with luck we can share with you in next month's IBM i EXTRA eNewsletter.

It is nice to hear a story with a happy ending! But Jon will probably never persuade Susan that herring  is a real delicacy worth exploring.

Reliving Great Times

Allow us to reminisce a bit today. We spent the weekend at one of our favorite places in the world--La Hulpe Belgium, just outside Brussels. We came to La Hulpe frequently when we worked for IBM because there was a major European IBM Education Center there. Susan spent time in La Hulpe in 1987/1988 leading up to the announcement of the AS/400. And both of us spent time there for many an ITSO Forum event over the years.

In addition to classrooms and labs space, there were bedrooms there as well. Many IBMers, especially those traveling from the U.S., tried every trick in the book to avoid staying at the La Hulpe center, opting whenever possible to stay at a "proper" hotel in Brussels. But we always loved La Hulpe and definitely preferred staying there. Yes, the bedrooms were tiny, the beds even more so and the furnishings very basic--spartan, in fact.

But the place is surrounded by the Belgian national forest and next door to a beautiful chateau whose grounds are open to the public. The IBM center had bicycles you could borrow and ride over to the chateau or into the village of La Hulpe. There were some great little restaurants in the villages around La Hulpe. And if you were busy trying to get your lab working for the class you were teaching the following week, there was a restaurant at IBM with pretty decent food. Perhaps strangest of all, at least to IBMers from the U.S., there was a bar--La Cave. It was only open in the evenings but it was a great place to enjoy the wide variety of Belgian beers and relax with kindred spirits (i.e., fellow AS/400-iSeries geeks).

Sadly, IBM moved out of the La Hulpe education center long ago and the place seemed to stand empty for years--a terrible waste. When we heard a year or so ago that it had been turned into a luxury hotel and convention center, we knew that we'd have to get back there someday.

And so we did this past weekend. It didn't disappoint. The place is now called Dolce La Hulpe. The bedrooms are now beautifully furnished with king-size beds--a major improvement! La Cave still exists (with a different name) but is only open for special functions. The restaurant on site is very different but still nice. One of our favorite restaurants nearby seems to have closed recently, but we did get into Brussels to our favorite restaurant there. On Sunday we rented bicycles and rode to and around the Chateau and had lunch at the tavern there.

It was very much like old times in La Hulpe--minus staying up half the night trying to get new systems and software to do what we were hoping to teach people about.

We're glad we came back and hope to be back again in the future. We highly recommend it to anyone who wants to visit the Brussels area but may prefer more serene surroundings than what the city offers.

We wrote up our own "Jon and Susan's Guide to Visiting Brussels" for a family member who was coming here a few years ago and we've shared it with a few others planning trips here. We'll definitely be adding Dolce La Hulpe to the recommendations in that guide. We love Belgium. It's definitely a favorite spot in Europe.

If any of you have an interest in our Brussels guide, let us know in the comments. We can always post it on our website! 

Don't Just Sit There - Vote Now!

Don't worry - we're not going all political on you, tempting as that might be sometimes. However, there's more than one vote that warrants your attention over the next few days - and it is as important for those of us who live outside the USA as those of our readers who do.

So what are we talking about? COMMON Europe's Top Concerns voting is what. Even though the Europeans organize this effort, it is aimed at a worldwide audience. This is now the 7th year that COMMON Europe have organized this poll and the results to date have been interesting. The fact that some categories such as "Aggressive marketing of IBM i by IBM" get a high ranking should come as no surprise, although the fact that it ranked only in 6th place in 2011 might surprise some. What beat it out? Well "Satisfy internal customers" came in first, followed by "Keep the skills current for existing staff" and "Attract the younger generation to IBM i". We have to believe that the majority of the votes for "Keep the skills ..." came from the "existing staff" themselves because training budgets always seem to be the first thing to go when finances get tight so it seems unlikely that managers were voting this way. It was good to see "Attract the younger generation ..." be recognized as a major concern.

Why is this poll important? Well IBM talk a lot to large users, such as those represented by the LUG (Large User Group) and also spend a lot of time listening to ISVs. But it is much harder for them to get a feel for what matters to "ordinary" users. This survey helps to fill that gap and has the added advantage of being open to all IBM i users around the world. In fact, even IBMers get to vote!

On the Top Concerns web site (www.topconcerns.org), you can vote for this year's top concerns - and maybe even win an iPod for your trouble. There are only a few days left to get your votes in for this year. While you are there don't forget to check out the results of the previous year's polls. The categories and polling method have changed over the years but comparing the results from earlier years can be interesting.

So stop reading - and go vote now.

All done voting? Good - well done! Time for some words on education.

First - for our European/Scandinavian readers, we're headed your way and we'd love to see you. We're working with COMMON Luxembourg  on 9 Oct and COMMON Belgium on 11 Oct. Then we head to Stockholm for the annual Data3 conference 14 - 16 Oct. Lots of i developer topics will be covered. Check it out if you're in any of those areas and don't forget to say hi! Last year's Data3 event was fun and informative and also very successful, so we're hoping we'll see an even bigger audience there this year.

Second - we thought we'd pass on a recent recent discovery in the area of education resources. Coursera.org is a company that partners with top universities around the world to offer high-quality university level education free of charge. Yup - completely free.

One upcoming course that caught our eye is Rice University's Introduction to Python. It is aimed at non-programmers, so that even those of us who wrestle with OO should find it useful. The whole programming environment is browser based so there is no software to load. Our friend (and former RPG compiler writer) Hans Boldt has often proclaimed, in our blog comments and elsewhere, his love of the Python language so this is a good opportunity to check it out. Usage on IBM i seems to be growing if recent forum postings and pieces in the trade press are anything to go by. The IBM i home base for Python seems to be www.iseriespython.com. Check it out.