Rational Developer for Power Systems 8.5 & Beyond

You don't have to have been following this blog for long to know that we are both big fans of RSE, which is currently packaged in Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP). Many of you are probably RSE users as well and you may have noticed that Rational came out with a new version, RDP 8.5, back in June. If so, you may have wondered why you haven't seen us blog about it.

Well, we installed 8.5 and while there was at least one really major new feature we liked, we also encountered a few idiosyncrasies that gave us some problems. In particular if a connection dropped while we had source files open, it took forever to get the workbench back in action as you had to respond to a seemingly endless series of connection-related dialogs. None of them offering the option to work off-line, etc. Admittedly we are perhaps unusual in that we often travel to a client site, connect to their system, and then go back to our hotel with the sources still open, knowing that we will be back on site next day. Once we open up the laptop again it can take 10 to 15 minutes to regain control. There were other issues, but to be honest, neither of us can remember exactly what those were. We're also not sure whether they were new features that we just needed to learn how to utilize properly or whether they were bugs. We also saw several reports on the WDSC-L list on Midrange.com and other places of other people who were having trouble with 8.5.

Bottom line, we are both so addicted to using RDP for our development that we decided to postpone digging into it for a while. Fortunately, we had also kept our old installation of RDP 8.0.3 so it was an option for us to keep on working with that version.

The good news is that a fix pack for RDP 8.5 has recently become available. So maybe it's time that we give 8.5.1 a try and see if it works better for us than our earlier attempts at 8.5.

Another reason for postponing the use of the new release is that we didn't have a really burning requirement for the only significant new feature that we heard about in the community--a dynamically updated Outline View. It's a nice feature, to be sure, but since we don't work as much with very large programs, occasionally refreshing our Outline Views isn't exactly a huge burden.

And we also had real difficulty finding a good list of any other enhancements in 8.5 that would cause us to want to dive in right away. We have now found such a list on developerWorks and thought we'd share with you, just in case some of you are also postponing the upgrade. So here it is--courtesy of Dave Dykstal--a nicely detailed list of new features, complete with link to a video of the RPG Outline View enhancements by Edmund Reinhardt.

But wait, that's not all! (sounds a bit like a late night infomercial, doesn't it?). The 8.5.1 fix pack includes several new features, not just bug fixes. You can read all about the 8.5.1 fixes and enhancements here. Spoiler alert: any IBM i COBOL programmers out there may want to pay particular attention to the Outline View in 8.5.1, according to this list. They have waited a long time for a usable Outline View, and it looks like their patience has been rewarded.

Maybe in a future blog post, we'll report on our findings of all the cool new things we've experienced in 8.5.1. As soon as we're both able to get the fix pack installed, that is. Jon's update to 8.5.1 worked flawlessly, but Susan seems to have hit a (hopefully temporary) snag.

In the meantime, any of you who have used 8.5 or 8.5.1, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

The Why and How of Moving From SEU to RSE

We published the first couple of installments of our newly updated "RSE Quick Start Guide" in the IBM i EXTRA newsletter over the last month or so. There we promised to update you when the rest of the guide was available for download. 

It is now available from the System i Developer downloads page. So if you have been looking to get started with RSE yourself, take a look. And for you RSE veterans out there who have been looking for a way to chip away at the excuses from your SEU-laden colleagues, maybe the guide can help.

We wrote the Guide to be very task-oriented, but there is a very small piece near the beginning that discusses why one should consider moving from SEU to RSE. The hardest part about writing that section was deciding which things to highlight from the dozens of reasons that make RSE the obvious choice for us. We were helped by the fact that Susan recently developed a conference session called "My Favorite Things about RSE." She had a lot of difficulty coming up with that list, but at least it was a starting point for paring down the list to 7 favorites for the guide.

Maybe some of you RSE users out there can help us out with future efforts in this area. What are those "killer features" of RSE that make you wonder how you ever managed to write code using only SEU/PDM?

To get the discussion started, here are the 7 features we listed in the Quick Start Guide.

1.  More lines of code on the screen (typically 2 to 3 times what SEU shows)
2.  Filtered source code - by change date, to remove comments, show control flow, etc.
3.  Unlimited levels of Undo & Redo - even after a save and compile
4.  Tab keys work without prompting (and can be customized)
5.  Multiple source members open for edit at once
6.  An Outline view cross referencing all fields (internal and external), subroutines, etc. 
7.  Compile error feedback without closing the source and without spooled file listings

Please let us know via the comments if these features would make your own list of top reasons to code using RSE and which killer features we managed to leave off the list.

 

P.S. If any of you emailed us in the last week or so and didn't get a response, please try again. Our email server recently made some changes to our account and apparently some number of emails just disappeared somehow.

Lawson Software Users Flock to RSE (or at Least They Should!)

It's conference season again! For us, that means travel season--even more so than our normal travel schedule. Most of the conferences we attend are hosted by local user groups. We were in Wisconsin in March for one of our favorite events--the annual WMCPA conference, followed by our own RPG & DB2 Summit, which involved quite a lot of interaction with the MMSA user group in Dallas. One interesting aspect of both conferences was the increased number of younger developers in attendance. WMCPA always has a few because their president, Jim Buck, usually brings a group of his students along to assist and participate. But we were very pleasantly surprised to see the number of younger folks at Summit--we're used to Aaron Bartell being the youngster!

The following week (now) we're at the NEUGC event--a unique event where multiple local user groups in the area pool their resources to put on a successful and fun conference each year. Once again there seem to be a few younger folks around, but the really good news is that overall attendance is up. We should all applaud that. Next week, we head to Fort Wayne, Ind., for an all-day session focusing on RSE hosted by the local user group there. Then the day after returning from Fort Wayne, we head to Sweden for a developer conference there. The following week our own local user group, TUG, holds its annual TUG TEC event, which is followed by the grandaddy of user group conferences, COMMON in Anaheim. We'll be speaking at COMMON this year for the first time in a while; it will be nice to see some old friends again.

So what does all this have to do with Lawson? Today at one of Susan's RSE sessions at NEUGC, she had the pleasure of making one person really happy over the idea of using RSE to edit source code. In fact she was positively ecstatic. Many SEU users are happy when seeing the productivity features of RSE than leave SEU in the dust. But ecstatic? That is the reaction you get when you're a programmer who can't even use SEU to edit her RPG source code!

What would programmers be using instead? How about EDTF (Edit File)? Never heard of it? It's the green-screen editor for IFS stream files. You can get to it from WRKLNK. Imagine: no PDM or even SEU. Just WRKLNK and EDTF to edit your source code. Next to EDTF, even PDM and SEU look like the greatest programmer productivity tools ever invented. If you've not had the pleasure of using EDTF, perhaps you can remember eons ago using a truly rudimentary editor called EDLIN. EDTF is a tad more advanced that EDLIN but not a lot.

Why has this person been editing RPG source with as primitive a tool as that? Because her source code is stored in the IFS and it was the only editor that she knew of that could edit IFS stream files.

She's not alone. More and more shops are finding themselves in the position of having to edit source code in the IFS because Lawson's recent releases started storing and shipping all of their source in IFS files rather than source members in regular source physical files. Who knows why they would decide to make that rather strange decision? Perhaps someone out there among our readers can enlighten us. Perhaps even stranger is the fact that Lawson doesn't seem to have told their users that RSE is the way to go for editing the code.

Regardless of the reason, the effect has been a dramatic drop in programmer productivity among those RPGers who must make changes to the Lawson code because EDTF is the only obvious way to do it--at least if you're limiting yourself to green-screen tools.

Now the person in Susan's NEUGC session today has learned that RSE (packaged in RDP/RDi/WDSC) has no problem whatsoever working with source stored in IFS stream files, and hence her unbounded joy. RSE can seamlessly handle IFS files for editing, compiling, etc., in exactly the same way it works with source members for the rest of the IBM i community.

This individual wasn't the first Lawson programmer who couldn't wait to get her hands on RSE. One of our recent private classes was to an entire group of Lawson programmers who were equally ecstatic over the prospect of leaving EDTF in the dust.

Now, if we could only get the rest of the SEU users still out there to a have similar revelatory moments about how much more productive they could be ...

Calling All RSE/RDP Users--Vote Now!

Back in December we blogged about the RSE wish list. But lately, we've discovered that it seems not many of you followed up on our suggestion, so we're taking another shot at it.

IBM developerWorks has a place for submitting and voting for your favorite requests for enhancement (RFEs) for RSE (and/or other Rational products). Many of the requests we have heard most often from RSE users are already on the list. If some of your favorites are already there, add your votes to help direct IBM's development efforts to the features that the most users want/need.

For example, we took a look at the top 20 voted RFEs for Rational Developer for Power Systems. Some of our favorites are in the top 20, such as an SQL prompter, the ability to re-indent /Free-form RPG code and--our personal pick--support of RDP running natively on Mac.

So there are some great RFEs out there. But the sad thing is the small number of votes that have been cast for the enhancements. Given how many RSE users we hear from who want some of these functions, there should be (at least) hundreds of votes out there for several of these RFEs. But when looking at the top 20 RFEs by number of votes, as of yesterday, we found fewer than 50 votes for even the most popular ones.

Susan taught two RSE sessions yesterday at the RPG & DB2 Summit in Fort Worth, Texas. Each had enough people present to double the votes for nearly all of the requests if every student present voted for them.

Just as Susan challenged all of her session attendees to go look at the submissions and vote for their favorites, we're now challenging all of you out there. You can put in your own suggestions as well. But make sure you check to see if something close to your own requirement is already out there so that you can simply add your own vote.

It's easy to add your opinion. Go to the website and create an IBM ID if you don't have one already. Under "Browse RFEs," look at the top 20 voted RFEs. Then choose Brand: Rational, Product family: Design & Development, Product: Developer for Power Systems. There are many other ways to browse and search for RFEs if you don't see your favorites in the top 20.

Don't just sit there, VOTE. Your favorite tool needs you.

RSE Wish List--Now With Clout!

Almost a year ago, we wrote about our own RSE feature wish list and many of you responded via the blog.

We recently attended a meeting of TUG, our own local user group, which was held at the IBM Rational Toronto lab. Not surprisingly, the topic was RDP. Actually, in a way it was a bit surprising that the focus was on "just" RDP rather than the more expensive packages/add-ons such as RTC. Kudos to the lab folks for resisting the urge to up-sell!

Out of all of the information covered in that session, the one item that piqued our interest most was the mention of a Web page where ordinary developers can enter and vote on requests for enhancements (RFEs). So we couldn't resist taking a look at the RFEs currently out there for RDP to see how our favorites were faring in the voting and what other requests had been made.

We'll hit a few highlights here, but we strongly encourage those of you who use RSE to visit the site and cast votes for your own favorites and/or even put your personal favorite new/changed feature request in for consideration. You'll need to create an IBM ID to do this if you don't have one already, but it doesn't require a customer number or serial number or anything like that, so you can set one up very easily.

We looked at the list of the top 20 vote getters for RDP. We're a tad disappointed at how few of our personal favorites were in the list. What we haven't yet done is figure out whether the rest of our favorites have even been requested. If not, we'll be entering some new requests of our own very soon!

Looking at the top 20 by votes, we're gratified to see that one of our favorites--the ability to indent/reformat existing /Free RPG code--is second in the list as of this writing, with 29 votes. We'd especially encourage everyone to vote for this one, even though it's near the top of the list already, don't assume it will stay there. This is one of the most requested features we hear from RSE users and lots of votes could help propel it to a status where IBM will more seriously consider adding it!

On the other hand, we're a bit concerned about the request at the very top of the list--constantly update the Outline View with changes made in the editor. We understand the value of such an enhancement. However, as a few people have pointed out in the comments on this one, there are concerns of the performance impact of such an enhancement. Even if the outline view were to only be updated from local editor changes, which is how the request is currently stated, it could still impact the performance of editing, perhaps dramatically especially for very large source members, given the way the Outline is currently populated. At the very least, if IBM decides to do this one we hope IBM follows the advice as stated in the comments, making it a feature than can be turned on and off, preferably in a very easy way (hint: not searching through hundreds of preferences pages to find the right one!).

We believe this Outline View request is a case of "be careful what you ask for" and encourage any of our readers who may decide to cast a vote for this feature to also add their voices in the comments section that this should be optional and also should only be done if it can be accomplished without noticeable editing performance degradation in medium to large source members.

We are delighted to see that another of our top wish list items is also in the top 10, although we would love to see it even higher than its current No. 7 (as of this writing.) That's the request for RDP to run natively on Mac. Yes! We love our Macs and we love our RDP. If we could run RDP as a native Mac application (without using the Windows virtual machine we currently use), we would be to very happy-- no, ecstatic--campers! We fear this may become a sort of chicken and egg situation. IBM i folks don't use Macs because tools such as RDP don't work natively on Macs. Consequently, they don't request Mac support because it doesn't impact them immediately. Please consider voting for this one, even if you don't use a Mac today. Wouldn't you like the opportunity consider using a more stable and reliable workstation platform--much like the more stable and reliable server platform we all know and love?

A request for SQL prompting is in the top 20--one of the requests that we forgot to put into our original wish list, but were grateful to our readers for pointing out the omission. We're a little surprised it's as far down the list as it is at the moment. If you use embedded SQL and RSE and think this would be helpful, by all means, cast your vote!

The list contains many more very useful features so we could go on and on commenting on other items among (and not among) the top 20 vote getters. But we'll save more comments for another day, another post.

Now, don't just sit there--go out and vote!

What We Are Thankful For

We live in Canada and consequently our Thanksgiving was in a few weeks ago. However, as in most years, we were working in the U.S. that day, so we tend to celebrate in November. So as we near the Thanksgiving celebration, our thoughts turn to things we are particularly thankful for.

We have many personal things we are thankful for. These include our health (including our wonderful Canadian healthcare system), our families (including four exceptional grandchildren), our home (which we sometimes wish we could spend more time in than we do), and many more things that we could go on for hours listing. We are truly blessed.

But in this post, we thought we'd concentrate on those things related to our work with IBM i that we're particularly thankful for.

First of all, we're grateful to still have work and a good income, despite the state of the economy. We know many who are not so fortunate. Many IBM i shops seem to have decided that an uncertain economy is a good time to exploit their investment in existing applications by moving them forward, enhancing their applications' value and the developers' productivity. That just happens to be our specialty, so it has worked out well for us.

We're grateful that the developers of our favorite programming language--RPG--have never even considered resting on their laurels. They could have simply cashed in on the maintenance revenue stream for applications running the businesses of thousands of companies worldwide. Instead, they have continually made the language more modern (/Free, data structure enhancements), more powerful (native XML processing, enhanced file handling), and especially recently, more easily expandable (via RPG Open Access or OA--more on OA in a moment)

We thank our lucky stars every day for RSE (the toolset currently packaged in RDP, earlier in RDi and WDSC). It's almost painful to recall our days of SEU development, with DSPFFD to get externally described field names and spooled compiler listings to find compile errors (shudder!).

And we're delighted that Rochester has given us a new friend to play with by embracing PHP on our favorite platform. If nothing else, PHP allows us to breathe a sigh of relief that we don't have to keep beating our heads against the Java brick wall. PHP gives us another option for a modern, browser-oriented language environment that lets us use OO to the extent we choose and offers an amazing wealth of open-source tools and applications. All with relatively simple integration to RPG applications and IBM i function. And best of all, it makes sense to those of us with RPG brains.

We said we'd come back to RPG OA. That's simply so that we can remind you that it was about a year ago that we made a plea for rational thought (pun intended) to prevail related to the Ts and Cs for OA. We have seen some progress. A trial version is available, at last. But we're still waiting for the true solution that we still hope will come--OA support to be included free-of-charge with either the OS or the RPG compiler. We have read rumors to the effect that we may not have much longer to wait for this. It would make a really nice present to find wrapped up under our Christmas tree!

Most of all, we're simply thankful to have had the opportunity to make a career working on the best platform on the planet for business applications.

Last, but by no means least, we're very thankful to all the readers of this blog. When the IBM Systems Magazine folks asked us to begin writing this some years ago, our first reaction was "but who would want to read what we have to say every week?"  Well, apparently, quite a few of you would. We're gratified and humbled at the number of you reading our weekly posts. Thank you all.

And a very happy Thanksgiving to all--whether in the USA or elsewhere--we all have a lot to be thankful for.

The RSE Wishing Well

Thanks to all of you who added your thoughts on the subject of our last EXTRA piece, An RSE Wish List. It sounds like we're not the only RSE fans with a wish list.

We were particularly gratified to see the comment from our friend George Voutsinas from the RD Power Development team, indicating that at least some of our (and your) wishes have made it into the list of requirements. Like all of our end users, we look forward to seeing all the requested changes implemented immediately <grin>!

BTW, for those who have yet to visit the RD Power Hub site George mentions, take a look. It's an important site and one that should be high on the “visit regularly” list of all RD Power users.

We wish we could report that visits to the RD Power Hub, as well as its cousin, the RPG Café, are happy experiences. We want to love these sites, but we’re frustrated nearly every time we visit. The interface seems (to us, at least) non-intuitive and lousy performance doesn’t help. Are we alone in thinking IBM is in desperate need of some good website designers? Or perhaps the ones they have need to be “liberated” from whatever legal or bureaucratic constraints they currently live under?  Still, the developers who hang out on the forums and participate in the discussions there do offer a lot of helpful advice. Read on for some evidence of that later on in this post.

Thanks also to Thierry (who must have been collecting an RSE wish list for some time) for your thoughtful additions to the list. While we know it's not nearly as nice as the feature you asked for, we recently discovered one technique to find the definition of a field in the editor. If you select the field and then use Ctrl+Space, you can see the definition without needing to go over to the Outline view.

Scott's request (that was seconded by Aaron and Steve)  was for much better SQL support--how could we have forgotten to include that one in our own list? Yes, we definitely support enhancements to embedded SQL support in the editor, whether or not implemented exactly as suggested. For sure, embedded SQL is a definite weak spot in an otherwise great RPG editing tool.

Dibs also offered good ideas. We like the idea of being able to export a source member or list of them, perhaps for email purposes. We have taken advantage of the ability to copy and paste a source member to a local file for the purpose of e-mailing the code, but having something a bit more architected into RSE for that would be nice. And the ability export (or copy/paste) lists of items from the "Show in table..." view would also be great.

As to the support for a version of RD Power on Mac: we're convinced there's a growing desire for this among IBM i developers. Jon recently examined an alternative Eclipse-based RPG editing tool--Michael Schmidt's RPGNextGen. While its native Mac support is a big plus, it's missing so many RSE features that we've become addicted to that it doesn't seem like a good contender as an RSE alternative at the moment. On the other hand, it's free, so those of you still stuck hopelessly in SEU-land may want to consider it.

We've had a few reports recently of some very strange behavior when using the “C” and “A” line command method of copying source member lines. Thanks very much to Tammy (and others who participated in the conversation) for taking this issue up on--of all places--the RD Power Hub's discussion forum. As a result, we have two important pieces of information. First, the problem as reported has a work around. If you turn off "Column sensitive editing" in your preferences, it seems to clear it up. Second, the Rational development team has noted the problem and plans to have a fix in the next fix pack, whenever that may be. Since the availability of fix packs seems to be the most common recent subject of blog posts on the RD Power Hub site, check out the blog from time to time to find out when that may become available.

Thanks for your participation in the discussion. Keep the thoughts coming!

The DDS Designer Showdown

For our EXTRA article this week, we wrote about the new DDS Designer--the one integrated with RSE in its latest incarnation as part of RDP or RD Power or ….  

In that piece, we couldn't help drawing parallels between the new DDS Designer and the CODE Designer. We're extending that discussion here and inviting your participation.

Neither of us are big fans of SDA and we pretty much considered RLU hopeless. CODE Designer, while far from perfect, has been our DDS designer of choice for many years. When the integrated Screen Designer came out as a Technology Preview, we spent some time with it. But since it wasn't recommended for production work, we didn't teach it in any detail in our private RSE classes 

Now that the new designer is officially supported, we're beginning to teach it, and in doing so, running into the inevitable comparisons with what came before--for us and for many of our students who are/were CODE Designer users as well. Which do we like better? That's not an easy answer. There are some really nice new features in the new one, but at the same time, we miss some of CODE's features.

First of all, the new designer is space hungry; it seems to work best with a large monitor. Since we spend so much time working on a laptop screen, this gets frustrating. The new designer makes extensive use of an expanded Properties view, much like the properties notebook we used in CODE. We could make the properties view a fast view or detach it, which would feel more like opening the CODE properties dialog. The difference is CODE had many of the most-used properties integrated at the top of the design screen (i.e., name, data type, length, row/column, color, display attributes, etc.) so we didn't need to use the properties dialog as often. With the new designer, the properties view is the most obvious place to change these things, so after dropping a named field onto the design screen, we want to use properties to change the field's name, data type, etc. and we need to use multiple tabs on the properties view to get to things like display attributes and color. This isn’t a big deal if you have a large monitor available, but it’s an irritant compared to the ease of adding new fields with CODE.

On the other hand, one option for changing those things that’s quite feasible with the new designer is to click on the source tab and directly edit the DDS source. The changes are immediately reflected on the properties view and the outline view and, best of all, you can quickly flip back over to the design view to do additional work. The ease and speed with which we can flip back and forth between graphical design mode and raw DDS-edit mode is miles ahead of CODE. Yes, you could do it in CODE, but it was slow and painful, so we rarely did it.

There are a few irritants in the new designer, such as the inability to key static text on the screen directly. You must first select an item from the palette and then change its contents. This isn't horrible, but seems unnecessarily cumbersome compared to what we did with CODE. Similarly, to lasso multiple items on the screen, you must first select the marquee tool from the palette. Why? This is particularly frustrating when you lassoed them to move them and you must manually switch back to the other tool from the palette to move the lassoed items. Not show-stoppers, by any means, but irritating to those of us who used CODE.

On the other hand (again), with the new designer (in its latest incarnation, not in some of the earlier technology preview versions) you may use the graphical designer to design a single record format. You’re not forced to put it into a group (CODE term) or a screen (new designer term). The concept of a group/screen is great for those occasions when you need it, but much of the time, working with record formats is all that’s necessary. You do seem to be required to create a screen if you want to use the preview faculty, for some reason, which is also where the indicator sets and sample values for screen and report fields can be used.

The use of the field table to drop database reference fields onto a screen is great. Yes, we could do a similar function in CODE, but this one seems a little simpler and makes good use of an existing RSE feature that shows off the integration of the tool set, as does the use of the outline view for navigation, which replaces the "DDS tree view" of the CODE designer.

Other niceties in the new designer include the sliders to adjust the screen-image size and the visibility of the grid lines on the design screen. One of our other favorite features we ran across by chance is the capability to peek at the source code for the selected item on a screen (including an entire record format) by hovering over the name of the item just above the design screen image. The source for the item pops up in a box over the design screen--a very cool feature.

Of course, "undo" is more useful than making and reverting to checkpoints in CODE.
But we find we do miss the capability to distribute a group of fields evenly across a screen.

We could go on with the comparisons, but perhaps we've said enough for one blog post. All in all, we like the new designer, even more than the CODE designer. The very notion that it’s truly integrated with RSE makes a difference and some of the new features are nice. We're hopeful the new one may, over time, re-learn a few of the tricks its ancestor had as time goes on.

We're anticipating comments along the lines of "why are we even devoting time and energy to a DDS screen designer when the world has moved on to browsers and other non-green-screen user interfaces?"  Our reaction to that is some have moved away from green screens at a slower pace than others and why shouldn't maintenance of those applications be as productive as it can be? Maybe they can use the time saved to work on modernization efforts!

If you’ve experienced both designers, help us continue the discussion via the comment section. If you haven't used the new designer yet, take a look at EXTRA when it comes out this week.

Penny ... Penny ... Penny

Fellow fans of the show “The Big Bang Theory” will no doubt recognize the line above. Well, we're here to tell you that last week that annoying catch phrase became a nightmare reality for us. But we're getting ahead of ourselves and perhaps need to set the context a little first.

Last week we traveled to the N.Y. area where we were speaking at two one-day education events organized by The Long Island User Group (LISUG) and North Eastern Systems Technology Users Group (NESTU). Both events were well attended and it was good to see that both of our RPG-, RSE and PHP-oriented sessions continue to be popular. We had a lot of fun, met a lot of great people and look forward to going back again - particularly since the restaurants we ate at were truly amazing. Not good enough to tempt us to move to the area (that would take a lot), but terrific food none the less.

Ignoring the usual delays in getting into La Guardia, the trip had gone very well, but that was about to change!

Our GPS had been behaving a little strangely and we suspected that our route (New Jersey to La Guardia via the Lincoln Tunnel) was less than optimum, but we had just downloaded the latest road works data and assumed it was routing us around a problem area. All went well until the GPS died in the tunnel, due to the fact that our rental car's power outlets not working. It was at a critical time of course because, as any of you who know the area will be aware, the minute you exit the tunnel you’re faced with a bewildering array of choices and we hadn't a clue which way we wanted. A good example of what happens when the technology you come to rely on lets you down. We chose to follow the signs for the interstate but we must have missed one, and by the time we got the GPS going again we were not only lost but in the heart of the New York fashion district with so many deliveries/road works etc. going on that traffic was at a crawl.

To cut a long story short, despite thinking that we'd be at the airport over two hours before our flight we ended up checking in only about 40 minutes before it was due to leave. Normally they wouldn't have accepted us for the flight but luckily it was a quiet period and they let us go anyway--thanks American! So, sweaty from the run through the terminal, etc., we boarded the plane and sat down sighing with relief. The relief was short lived--it would be the trip from hell.

It began with delays due to traffic volume, and we had to wait in line for nearly an hour after we had left the gate. Then the pilot announced that another plane had spotted that the door over the ground communication link had not been closed and although it was not a safety hazard we had to go back to get it closed. At least air traffic control allowed us to jump the queue when we came back out! Now this would have been annoying enough, but not unexpected. What made it unbearable was the couple a few rows behind us, or to be more precise: the wife.

Never in his life does Jon recall feeling so tempted to get up and smack someone--hard! Susan was equally annoyed by the woman's behavior, but knowing that Jon has a slightly shorter fuse than herself was more concerned at what he might do. And this is where we come back to “The Big Bang Theory.” Remember how Sheldon knocks on his neighbor's door going (knock-knock-knock) Penny? (knock-knock-knock) Penny?  (knock-knock-knock) Penny?  Well, that’s exactly what this woman was like, only it was "Teddy," not Penny (we've changed the name to protect the innocent; he's suffered enough!). She did this over and over and over and ... that is when she wasn't berating him for not looking after the baby properly, for falling asleep, for not answering fast enough, and much of the time for failing to answer rhetorical questions. The rhetorical questions were asked over and over and over, and in the same monotonous style as the "Teddy ... Teddy ..." bit. It’s quite possible that the only reason Jon isn’t currently in jail for assault is that finally, after about 90 minutes,  both the lady in question and her long-suffering husband finally fell asleep. Of course this just meant that she nagged and moaned even more when she chanced to wake up before he did. There was a five-minute-plus period when she just asked the same question over and over and over. What vital task was involved? She wanted him to sign the customs card. He on the other hand was in the peaceful oblivion of sleep and figured it could wait until he was fully awake.

The truly sad thing about the whole affair was that most of her complaints concerned how poorly (in the wife's opinion) her husband took care of the baby. It apparently didn't occur to her that the mental damage caused to the child by hearing his father constantly attacked like this probably by far exceeded most anything that his supposed lack of attentiveness might have caused. Maybe we should have said something, we were certainly tempted, but while it might have made us feel better we doubt it would have had any effect. If we are being gracious we could choose to think that she was scared of flying, but it didn't feel that way.

This week we're traveling again, but we won't be trapped on a plane with nowhere to go. We're headed back to Montreal by train with a stop over in Ottawa to see Eddie Izzard to round out the trip. At least if we find ourselves near the passengers from hell once again we can go for a walk and even move to another seat.

Ah, the joys of travel!

RSE, Anyone?

Lately, we've heard from several sources that attendance at courses,and interest in books, conference sessions, etc., on Remote System  Explorer (RSE) may be waning a bit. Previously, we were thrilled to see what had been a growing trend to move away from editing code the old-fashioned SEU way to using RSE. So we're now wondering what may be behind this recent dip in RSE interest.

Could it be that most everyone has already made the switch and so RSE is now an "old hat" topic? It would be nice to think so, but sadly we're pretty certain this isn't the case.

Could it be because IBM Rational has introduced the chargeable RDi version of RSE? We suspect so and have seen some evidence of that. Many people have told us lately that they have to stick with SEU because RSE isn't free anymore and their companies won't pay. 

Just to clarify things on the fee vs. free scenario--if you still have the WDSC V7 install disks around the shop somewhere, you can still install RSE and it will work even if your host is running 6.1. And it's still supported by IBM until April 2010. By that time, you'll be so much more productive that your management will be happy to shell out for the price of RDi (we can dream, can't we?).

Of course, it's not like most of us have ever shied away from using IBM products long past their IBM support window (how many pre-V5R4 systems are still out there?). And it's also entirely possible the pricing Ts & Cs will change again, hopefully for the better. We've written a previous iDevelop blog entry about using WDSC as your "free trial" to RDi, even for an extended period of time.

The fact that companies won't pay the relatively low price of RDi to improve the productivity of their developers is a sad statement as well, but that's a story for another post.

Could it be that the economy is to blame here and there isn't really any more drop in interest for RSE than for any other topic? After all, RSE is still on the agenda of every private class we teach--either the basics for those shops that haven't made the switch yet or a more advanced hints and tips level for those who are beyond the basics. In these days of slashed education budgets and many just trying to hold on to their jobs, perhaps learning a new way of working has simply taken a back seat.

What do you think? Is it one of these reasons or something else entirely?