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.

 

Upcoming Travels and Products

Today marks the start of a two-week road trip that will take us to visit the great folks at WMCPA for their annual conference, and then directly to Fort Worth for the 11th (Wow - can it really be that many?) RPG & DB2 Summit. These kind of road trips are exhausting - but also highly rewarding in that we get to meet one-on-one with so many fellow iFanatics.

Summit will no doubt be exhausting. This will be the first one we have run without Skip Marchesani who has decided to retire (again). Skip will be there to help us out this time but there's nothing like a team member moving on to teach you just how much work they did. Thanks, Skip - we'll miss you.

There are two things though that we are particularly looking forward to in Fort Worth. First is the chance to catch up with our long-time friend Bob Tipton who is delivering our keynote presentation. If you haven't had a chance to read Bob's new book "Jump!: Get Unstuck" you need to grab a copy. In fact if you come to the Summit we'll even give you one! 

The second highlight is that the folks at CNX have chosen the Summit to announce the latest version of their Valence web tools. They gave us a sneak peak at the new Valence Nitro application builder that they will be featuring in the new announce. All we can say is WOW. This is a really interesting tool and you owe it to your shop to take a look at it once it is formally announced. We were so excited though that we asked the guys at CNX if they could give us a link to a "sneak peak" Web page to give our readers a brief preview. They have done just that and you can find out more right here. Page down and look for the section on Valence Nitro. We will be giving it a test drive as soon as we can sit still for 5 minutes. 

We can't say anything more at the moment, but last week we were given a brief open kimono on another new tool from a major vendor in the IBM i application development arena. We'll be getting more information toward the end of this month and hopefully they will allow us to share some details with you then. If the preliminary information is anything to go by then it too will be a game changer just as Nitro promises to be.

Seems to us that we have left the doldrums of the IBM i application development field and that some really exciting tooling is beginning to emerge. Perhaps it was spurred in part by the interest shown by users in the Open Access tools, or maybe the easy availability of high quality Open Source products like SugarCRM or osTicket - the latest to catch our eye. Whatever the reason the future is looking brighter than it has for a long time. Many excellent tools, more realistic price levels - there's some real excitement out there.

 

 

Bienvenue à Paris (or Welcome to Paris)

That's not Paris as in Jon. It is, as you may have guessed from the title, Paris as in France. That is where this week's missive is coming from. We are here on the first leg of a two-city trip to meet European members of the IBM i community. Our first event starts tomorrow (Wednesday), when we begin a two-day version of the RPG & DB2 Summit here in Paris, organized with a lot of help from our friends at Arcad Software. That’s nice for us because it means we can focus on speaking and leave the organizational aspects to someone else.

Following the Paris Summit, we head for Stockholm, Sweden, where we’ll be providing RPG, DB2 and PHP content for a three-day Data3 event. For those of you unfamiliar with Data3, think of it as Sweden's version of COMMON. Not sure how many we’re expecting in Paris, but the latest news from the folks at Data3 was that more than 130 were expected in Stockholm. That's good to hear. It promises to be an interesting week.

While we're over here this time, we're going to be taking some notes on differences and commonalities between the European IBM i community and the North American one. We'll let you know if anything pops up during those discussions.

As we write this, we're about to head out of our hotel and check out the journey to the Summit venue, which is some distance away. We're doing this now because the Summit starts at 8:30 a.m. and we don't do mornings, so our goal this evening is to determine just how disgustingly early we have to leave the hotel to make it to the Summit on time.

Before we go though a quick shout-out to our lunch companion Michelle Cummings. Michelle and Jon have known each other for some years when Michelle worked on the RPG compiler team. She's been living in Paris for the last two years since her husband's company transferred him here. She decided it would be fun to live here for a while. From what she told us over lunch, and the pictures we've seen on her Facebook page that have recounted her time in Europe, she has most certainly enjoyed herself and had some unforgettable experiences along the way. Her most recent adventure was running in the Medoc Marathon (Le Marathon Du Medoc). A most unusual event in many, many, ways. Looking at Michelle's
photo, you might be tempted to think that running the race in costume was the unusual part. But you'd be forgetting that we are talking about France and where would any French event be without wine? The entire marathon takes place in Bordeaux wine country and wanders though the grounds of chateaus and vineyards as well as the local villages. As Michelle tells it, there was a wine or cheese station every 2 kilometers or so (about 1.2 miles) where all the runners stopped and imbibed for a while before setting off for the next station. Needless to say a few didn't make the distance, but one can't help feeling that they still had a much better time than the average marathoner! This site is in French - but you don't need to understand French to enjoy the photos of some of the crazy costumes folks wear. Check them out here.

Almost made us think that we'd like to try a marathon like that ourselves some day, but then common sense prevailed and we decided that there just has to be a less painful way of sampling the joys of the French countryside!  

Before we close, a quick reminder that the Watson “Jeopardy!” TV show (#IBMWatson) is being rebroadcast this week for those who missed it the first time--or just want to see it again. And yes he will still be giving those of us who live in Toronto a good laugh by placing our airport in the U.S. Check your local listings for show times.

Jon and Susan's Air Travel Tips

This week, we're sharing tips of a completely different kind. Instead of programming tips, we thought we'd share some ideas about something else we do on a regular basis--travel, specifically air travel. Those of you who also travel regularly probably know many of these things, but for those of you who aren't road warriors, you may find these ideas helpful someday.

With today's economic situation, flights are booked much more fully than in the past. This not only makes for less comfortable flights, but when a cancellation occurs, it can often be days before all of the passengers on the cancelled flight can get where they need to go.

First of all, when you travel by air, it's a good idea to join the airline's frequent flyer program before you book the flight and to make that your number is recorded on your reservation. Even if you don't fly frequently enough to ever get a free flight out of it, being a member of the club gives you just that little bit of extra status over non-members and you never know when that may come in handy!

If you're at the gate/airport when your flight is cancelled, immediately pick up your cell phone and call your airline's 800 number to rebook. Don't waste time commiserating with your fellow passengers or complaining about the situation to the airline staff. There are likely to be at most a handful of available seats on the next available flight and you want to get one. You may want to line up with the dozens of others from the flight just in case you have trouble getting through, but chances are you'll have your new flight booked via telephone long before your fellow passengers who waited patiently (or otherwise) in line at the gate.

We mentioned not complaining to the gate agents. Always be especially nice to the agents; they usually have quite a bit of discretion on changing your seat allocation and even upgrading to first class. As the public face of the airline, they take a lot of flack from the traveling public when things go wrong. If a fellow passenger is giving the agent a hard time, you can earn yourself some brownie points by reminding them that the current problem is not the gate agent's fault and perhaps they should give them a break and let them do their job. It's not uncommon in these circumstances for the agent to express his/her gratitude by giving you a better seat assignment, or even giving you a "non-existent" seat. Let's face it--they didn't create the bad weather, cause the plane to break down, "lose" the crew, etc., so do yourself a favor and be nice to them.

If your flight is cancelled due to weather or some other factor beyond the airline's control, don't look for anything in the way of compensation, including hotel nights or meals. If it was cancelled due to equipment failure or unavailable crew, for example, and you are delayed for a significant period of time, they should be offering you meal vouchers and a hotel voucher if the delay extends into the next day.

Unfortunately, our experience is that getting your hands on the voucher may well prove more time-consuming than it's worth. Sometimes you're just better off biting the bullet and booking your own hotel, especially if the delay is weather-related because the local hotels will fill up quickly. Before we got smart, we would sometimes wait for an hour or more to get a voucher for a hotel a 30-minute drive from the airport, only to find that our new flight would leave at 6:30 a.m. and it was now midnight!

Remember too that you will probably not be able to get your hands on your checked luggage if you have to go to a hotel. So always, always have in your carry-on luggage whatever you need to last at least 24-36 hours. Toiletries and a change of clothes will go a long way and having any medicines with you is a really good idea.

One last thing before we close. Flights are very often oversold these days (i.e., the airline has sold more tickets for the flight than there are seats) and when this happens they need to "persuade" some people to switch to another flight. The gate agent will announce: "We're looking for X passengers with flexible travel plans. ..." The usual initial offer is for a $200 travel voucher. Unless you really want the money don't accept the first offer. Wait until it gets to $300 or more. We recently were on a flight where the offer crept up to $500, plus meal vouchers, plus a guaranteed seat on the next flight. Sometimes they will even up the ante and offer a first-class seat on the next flight. Recently a young lady on one of our flights got $600 and a meal voucher. The original flight had only cost her $400. One approach that sometimes works is to go to the desk when they make the original offer and tell them what your "price" is. In other words tell them that if the voucher is for $400 (or whatever) you're prepared to take the offer but not at $200. It avoids getting trampled in the rush when the offer does get up to a reasonable level!

We'll offer further tips on rental cars, hotels, etc., in future blogs. In the meantime if you have a travel tip to share please use the Comments section below to let us know.

Fairy Tales for Adults

There are so many titles we could use to describe this week's blog but we'll settle for "Fairly Tales for Adults" (or "Stories of the joys of modern travel").

Open Access

Before we begin the tale, a quick follow-up on last week's blog. Marc O. Vadeboncoeur posted an excellent response to our request for people to let us know how they got on with the trial download of RPG Open Access that we mentioned. Marc's step-by-step instructions give you all you need to know to get the thing up and running. Thanks, Marc.

Unintended Consequences

We talked a few weeks ago about "Unintended Consequences." Well this past weekend we encountered yet another example. Remember last winter when there were any number of occasions when people were stranded in planes stuck out on the runway either waiting for a gate or permission from Air Traffic Control (ATC) to take off? Well one of the effects was that pressure was bought to bear on the airlines to limit the length of time that passengers could be held captive in this manner. We believe that there were even some fines levied by the FAA against some of the worst offenders. Well - to cut a long story short - we just got caught in the backwash of that action. 

Because Chicago O'Hare was suffering from bad weather conditions, we were stuck at the end of the runway for a prolonged period of time. Several false starts before the pilot proudly announced that we had finally received a solid "wheels up" time and would be taking off in 10 minutes. The brief period of celebration was cut short however when 5 minutes later he was forced to announce that despite arguing with ground control to allow us to continue, he had been ordered back to the gate as we had now exceeded our 2.5 hours of "on the plane" time. Back to the gate we went - everybody got off and then, after about 30 minutes, we all got back on again. All went well until O'Hare put us on another 50 minute ground hold! We did eventually make it to Chicago - but of course missed our connection. Next was 30 minutes trying to get rebooked for flights the next day, and over an hour trying to figure out where our checked luggage was and whether we could just get it, so we could rent a car and drive overnight to where we needed to be. Answer: No. 

Net result? $250 on a hotel room for the "night" (5 hours hardly counts as a night) - an 8:30am flight to the "wrong" city (no flights available for 24 hours to where we actually wanted to go) followed by a drive to another city where (you guessed it) our luggage had been sent - followed by a 60 minute drive to the customer location. Ah the joys of travel. And all because some idiot thought that we'd rather stretch our legs than take off. 

Our good buddy Charlie, the (only) American Eagle flight attendant stuck with us on this flight American 4003 on Sunday August 7th if you are reading this at AA, deserves a promotion for the way he handled the whole scenario. He turned a crowd of angry, frustrated business travellers into a cheering, joking, supportive mob with his sense of humor and common-sense approach to the whole situation. The cockpit crew were also great at making the best of a bad situation. The pilot announced just before landing - 6 hours after were were originally scheduled to arrive in Chicago - "We'll be touching down shortly in Milwaukee since Chicago is fogged in  . . .  Just kidding! We're at O'Hare!" 

Sadly our "good fortune" ended with our flight crew. The hotel (an expensive and well-known chain whose name starts with "E" and ends with a word that sounds like the the English word for candy) was unable to supply hot water the next morning. A lack of heat that extended to the breakfast - but that's another story. Everyone has mechanical problems from time to time - we expect it when traveling. What we don't expect is that nobody on the staff seemed to give a ... Needless to say, we won't be making a return visit any time soon. Jon gave up washing in cold water when he ended his scouting career some 45-odd years ago - not the sort of thing one wants to reminisce about. 

The one-way car rental to get us from the city where we finally landed to the city where we could retrieve our luggage and then get to where we wanted to be was another $175 for about 8 hours. Then we had to go back to the local airport to trade it in for a similar car to secure a "local" rental rate. It was either that or pay more than $100 extra per day for the rest of the week. 

Even with our lack of sleep and shower and hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket expense, we weren't the only ones inconvenienced. We had been scheduled to begin teaching a class at 8:30 Monday morning. We arrived at the client's location at 2:30 PM - decidedly crumpled and wearing jeans and sneakers since our business clothes were crumpled in the luggage we picked up on the way to their location. Thankfully, our students were sympathetic to our situation and we're working out how to make up the missed teaching time. 

All in all, we've had better weeks! The remainder of the trip has already been significantly better than the inauspicious beginning, thankfully! 

Those of you who don't travel frequently for business - don't envy those who do. Sometimes things go relatively smoothly and seeing new places can be interesting. Sometimes, things go wrong and you wonder why you ever decided this was a good way to make a living! 

The Rodney Dangerfield of Computer Systems

This week, we're doing three of our favorite things. First, we are in Montreal, which is a city that we both love. It is also home to one of our favorite restaurants - Les 3 Brasseurs -- check out the website and you'll quickly understand why Jon loves it so much. Second, we are teaching RDP's Remote Systems Explorer -- one of our favorite topics. And third, we got to travel here by train -- which as we've said before has become our favorite mode of transportation. What more could we ask?

But let's talk about the Rodney Dangerfield of computer systems. Yes, we mean our beloved IBM i.

Today marks IBM's 100th birthday and there's been a lot of publicity about it over the course of this year -- including, of course, Watson's spectacular "Jeopardy!" win. IBM has been putting out a lot of material including videos of the history of the company and lists of its top achievements etc.

All good stuff -- until you realize that the System/38 (the IBM i's ancestor), a truly revolutionary computer architecture, is inexplicably not even on the list. It gets a small mention in at least one of the movies, but that seems to be about it. The IBM PC gets a lot of attention -- as indeed it should -- but it was hardly revolutionary. The IBM PC's story was a classic demonstration that it took the power of an IBM to bring standardization to an industry that was descending into incompatible chaos.

Not surprisingly the mainframe also gets a lot of attention -- but again, it was hardly revolutionary in the way that the System/38 was. It was more of an evolution of the systems that preceded it. Even the notion that the System/360's VM heralded a revolutionary change in operating systems would be hotly disputed by those who worked on the ICL George operating systems at the time.

Surely a solid argument can be made that the S/38 hardware and software architecture was not only revolutionary, but that the hardware abstraction concepts that it embodied (and which we still enjoy today) were the forerunner of the whole army of hardware independent virtual machines that we see now in the form of Java and .NET among others. 

Rodney would understand how we're feeling today.

 

Musing on Comments, Updates and Travel

Some days, ideas for this blog seem to flow like water ... and then there are the days like today.

What to talk about? Well, for openers a quick thank you to Mihael Schmidt and Aaron Bartell for pointing out some of the tools we missed in our recent review of the world of RPG-oriented Open Source software which appeared in last month's EXTRA. If you don't subscribe to EXTRA (and you should!) you can find the original article here  and Mihael and Aaron's comments here. Thanks, guys. We won't elaborate on why these particular gems were omitted from the original list as we've already done our groveling in the comments section mentioned above. 

One comment we haven't yet responded to, until now, was from IBM's Nadir Amra. Nadir pointed out that our comments on IBM's offering, in the area of consuming Web services in RPG, was somewhat disparaging. And, more to the point, that we had apparently missed out on some recent updates that meant that RPG stubs are now generated to make the interface simpler. Guilty as charged. We had completely missed that change, Nadir, and thanks for pointing it out to us. Since the C compiler is still needed though we are however going withhold judgement on the utility of the revised version until we've had time to give it a test drive. We'll report back here, or in EXTRA, when we have had a chance to do that.

The fact that we were completely unaware of this particular update though does highlight an issue that we've encountered a number of times recently -- unknown IBM i enhancements. Maybe the details of this upgrade were published somewhere but we were completely unaware of them -- and we'd known for a while that some changes were in the offing. Yet we still missed them when they happened. If you know of a reliable source for information on these kinds of "between releases" updates please let us know -- 'cos we obviously aren't catching them all.

As we write this, we're in sunny Livonia, MI. Or at least it was sunny when we arrived -- it's dark right now. We're here for the annual MITEC conference and are looking forward to meeting the faithful at tomorrow's gathering of the clans. Our System i Developer colleague Paul Tuohy is here as well so we'll get the chance to catch up on the latest news from his time at COMMON Europe in Milan a couple of weeks ago. If you're at the conference please come up and say "Hi" -- we always enjoy meeting our readers in person. This is always a great event and it makes a nice change to be able to drive to a conference for once. For us, it's a four-and-a-half-hour drive -- longer than we'd normally take but no longer than flying. Wel,l the actual flight is only 30-40 minutes, but when you factor in the drive to/from the airport and all the extra time you have to spend in security screening, etc., it actually turns out to be as fast to drive. 

On that subject, we don't know how many of you regularly cross the Canada/U.S. border as we do (or for that matter the U.S./Mexico border) but it always strikes us as strange that you get a much more intensive "grilling" when flying cross border -- with limited luggage -- than you do when driving across with a whole car load of stuff. Guess they have their reasons -- but it does seem odd.

Until next week, go forth and do good things.

Education, Relaxation and Remembrance

Being at home and dealing with the grit and grime of the household renovations was too much of a strain ... so this week we're on the road again, this time at the annual NEUGC conference in Framingham, Mass. This year the theme is "i Can Do Anything," a sentiment we wholeheartedly endorse.

We started our part of the conference with a half day hands-on RDP seminar. As is often the case when using hotel facilities, the labs didn't go completely smoothly. There never seems to be any end to the imaginative road blocks that the average hotel, in cahoots with their ISP, can throw in your path. It didn't cause us or our students too much grief, but did serve to remind us that no matter how many times you run labs, Mr. Murphy will always find some way to thwart your best efforts. Our thanks to the NEUGC technical team who certainly did all that they could to get things back on track. Luckily, we don't have any more labs among our sessions this week so at least those problems are behind us. However, Jon has a number of live demos in one of his presentations so Mr. Murphy may yet raise his head again!

SQL and DB2 Education

Those of you who have written to us in the past bemoaning the lack of advanced education focused specifically on SQL and DB2 will be pleased to hear that our System i Developer consortium is sponsoring the first DB2 Directions event which will be held right here in the Boston area from June the 20th to 23rd at the IBM Innovations Centre in Waltham, Mass. The formal announcement will be made in the next few days, but we thought we'd give you a heads up. We'll give you the Web links, etc., next week after the announcement is made. Our own IBM Systems Magazine is among the sponsors for this new event and we hope to meet some of you there, this time as fellow attendees; we'll be there to learn, not to teach.

R & R

When we leave Framingham we'll be headed for New Hampshire for a couple of days R & R with some friends before we head back home to the insanity of the "construction zone." They have a beautiful hot tub on the back deck, a stress reliever supreme that we could certainly use right now, but we'll just have to be patient.

RIP Marcus

We were saddened to hear last week of the death of our friend Marcus Dee. Marcus, for those who were not lucky enough to know him, was the CEO and inspirational leader of looksoftware. He was one of those rare people that immediately makes you feel that you really want to get them know them better; a more genuine "bloke" would be hard to find. Sadly, the distance between Australia and North America prevented us from getting to know him as well as we would have liked, but we always enjoyed his company on those occasions when we did have the chance to get together. Those of you who would like to know more about Marcus can check out the tribute site his friends and colleagues have set up.

New Adventures

After three weeks on the road we're finally home for a while--well for a week, anyway. While it was nice to get home, we could have lived without the thin layer of dust that covers everything as a result of our ongoing household renovations. The contractor has tried his best to keep the dust levels down, but it's a losing battle. We'll just have to settle for a slightly gritty feel to everything for a while!

We called this blog entry "New Adventures" in part because of the household renovations, but also because of the two new computer additions to our household. We said a long time ago when first discussing the iPad, that we intended to wait until version 2 became available before buying one ourselves. As you all know by now, version 2 has arrived and as might be expected, the real challenge became actually obtaining one. Since we weren't in any mad rush (there being no immediate business imperative to do so) we decided to just try our luck in various stores as and when we came upon them.

Our first attempt, at the Apple Store in the Florida mall adjacent to the hotel where the recent RPG and DB2 Summit conference was held, met with failure. Several of the attendees were able to get their hands on one, however--particularly some of our European visitors. They either enjoy mornings more than we do or had simply not fully adjusted to the time-change, because the system that Apple had put in place was that you lined up outside the store, often as early as 4:30 a.m. Then at 8 a.m. they started handing out tickets for the stock that had been delivered overnight. The lucky ticket recipients could then come back at 9 a.m., an hour before the store officially opened, and claim their prize. By the time Jon lined up, there were no tickets left, so we decided we could wait.

However, on our trip to Albuquerque, N.M, we struck lucky in the local Best Buy store on our last day and were able to get hold of one of the basic Wi-Fi models. To say we've been having fun with this little devil is to put it mildly. Angry Birds is probably the most addictive game we have ever played and as a result we probably haven't done as much real work with the iPad as we had intended. But there's always tomorrow. The new iPad cover is another terrific example of Apple's human-engineering smarts. Screen protector, stand, screen cleaner, and on/off controller all in one simple little package. Sheer genius.

We don't intend the iPad to be all fun and games; it's a great way to quickly check email, etc., while traveling when you don't want to lug a laptop around. And last night we purchased our first magazine designed for the iPad. That was quite a revelation and we expect to use it more for that kind of thing. Being able to link into video within the context of an article certainly adds a new dimension to the reading experience. Jon for one also intends to do some programming with the Apple developer kit to see if he can come up with the next great app. He doesn't really expect to be able to do so, but he needs a break from RPG and PHP every once in a while. Plus of course, since mobile apps are becoming the thing, we'll be using the iPad to test out a few ideas for Web-based mobile applications.

Why an iPad for that and not a smart phone? Well, the fact that we're based in Canada, while doing much of our work in the U.S., means that it has proven financially impractical for us to use a smart phone. For some reason the phone companies do not seem to think that anyone who travels cross-border would need an ongoing reasonably priced digital solution. Either that or they like scaring the lives out of people by presenting them with thousand dollar invoices for the "pleasure" of watching a movie on their mobile phone while waiting for a delayed flight at the Toronto airport. There have been quite a few of such horror stories here lately. Those who talk about borderless communications should try seeing it in action in a practical sense. We have come a long way in enabling communications around the world, but practical economical communications while traveling however still seem to be a long way off.

The other new techno addition to the house of course was the much anticipated arrival of Susan's Macbook Pro. Right now we're in the process of getting it set up, including installing a copy of Parallels so she can continue to use the few pieces of Windows software on which she has come to rely, such as Freelance, and of course RDP. Jon has all but given up using Freelance and has instead converted to Keynote, and undoubtedly Susan will do the same in time.

Getting rid of Windows will be tougher though. If only IBM would produce a version of RDP that runs on the Mac we could both give up on Windows-based software completely, and that would be a really happy day. Sadly, right now Rational is only supporting RDP on Windows and on a couple of versions of Linux that, as far as we can tell, hardly anyone in the IBM i community uses. Perhaps one day Rational too will see the light, there are certainly more IBMers using Macs by the day. Fellow blogger here, Dawn May, is a long-time Mac user. Another familiar face in the IBM i world, Greg Hintermeister, also recently announced on Facebook that he had long last been liberated from the combined demons of Windows and Lenovo. We hope he'll be as happy with that choice as Jon has been.

Strangely, Jon finds himself in the position of both hoping that Susan will embrace the Mac while at the same time harboring a secret desire that she will decide to return to the dark side so that he can get his hands on her gorgeous new MacBook Pro. The increased speed and screen resolution, among other things, of this latest version have left him drooling with envy. Happy as he is with his own new MacBook, it does appear that he bought it four months earlier than he should've.

What other new technology has entered our lives? The renovations of the house involve a complete rework of Jon's kitchen (yes that's not a mistake, Jon is the chef for the family). It's a long way from being finished yet, but he's already discovering the joys of self-closing drawers and cupboards. In fact, he finds the self-closing mechanisms so fascinating, that he has been known to go around opening cupboards and drawers just so that he can watch them close by themselves again. Phrases such as "Little things please little minds ..." spring to mind! Next on his agenda of course will be a search of the Internet to find out exactly how these little puppies work. But that will have to wait at the very least until this blog is completed and we finish our shopping for granite countertops and drawer and door handles, and ...

Until next week.