About Writing “i Can”

This week marks the 5^th year of “i Can” - five years already?! When I review the long list of blogs that have been published, only a small number have content that’s dated – most of the blogs are as applicable as when they were first written. New readers of this blog might want to review the older articles.

My biggest challenge with the blogs is “What am I going to write about this week?” I still have a long list of topics to write about, particularly now that 7.2 is available … but there’s also the time factor that comes into play. This blog is an extra piece of work I do each week and is not really part of my regular job. Some weeks it’s not a problem to spend a few hours writing, but some weeks I can hardly find a few minutes to spare. Some weeks a guest author is immensely appreciated! Often the topics I pick are simply based upon how much time I have to write. I try hard to write something each week; occasionally I miss a week, but not too often.

This week, I’m going to diverge from the usual technical topics to share a little about my writing (and speaking) background. My English skills were rather poor in high school – both written and verbal. I attribute it to growing up in a meager, rural environment. I’m old enough (although I don’t like to admit it!) that there were no computers at the time. My high school writing projects were always done in long hand (I didn’t even have a typewriter until I went to college); I didn’t know how to think through my sentences prior to writing them down and rewriting was tedious. C’s were a typical grade on written papers. Although my English skills were poor, I was a wiz at math and went to college for a degree in Mathematics and picked up a degree in Computer Science as well.

Then two things happened – I got a job at IBM where I was surrounded by really smart people all the time, and I had access to computers. Being around really smart people helped my English skills improve dramatically – although some people were so smart I couldn’t understand what they were talking about! Although my English skills improved, my speaking and writing style remained somewhat basic – but this has been to my advantage as I’ve often been told that my style makes me easy to understand. Using a computer for writing is a huge benefit – I can easily cut/paste/copy/edit/rewrite – and rewrite I do! I rarely write a sentence correctly the first time.

The experience of going from poor language skills to writing a blog and public speaking has been unexpected, but very exciting. When I was 17, if someone would have told me that I would write often and be comfortable speaking in front of an audience, I would never have believed it. You can overcome handicaps and even let them work to your advantage.

 

Automate Extra IPL for PTF Install

This week's blog was written by Ellie Streifel.  Ellie works in the IBM i development lab on the Software Service team and has extensive knowledge on the IBM i PTF process.  Ellie worked on the Technology Refresh support as well as the function she describes in this blog article. Ellie will be at COMMON in Minneapolis (along with co-worker Dennis Martin) presenting the session, “What is an IBM i Technology Refresh – and Why do I Care?” 

Do you get annoyed when it takes two IPLs to install a PTF package? If so, we’ve got a great, new function for you in IBM i 7.1. When you’re installing PTFs, there are two conditions where we prompt you to perform an IPL to apply some of the PTFs, require you to restart the PTF install after the first IPL, and then make you perform yet another IPL to apply the delayed PTFs:

1.    When installing a cumulative PTF package that contains special handling pre-apply PTFs.

2.    When installing a technology refresh PTF at the same time as a technology refresh requisite PTF. This can occur when installing the HIPER PTF group, the technology refresh PTF group, or a cumulative PTF package.

We can’t eliminate the extra IPL, but this new function can automate it for you. If an extra IPL is required, we’ll save off of your PTF install parameters and use them during the next IPL. Instead of seeing “Confirm IPL for Technology Refresh or Special Handling PTFs” panel, you’ll see a new message CPF362E: “IPL required to complete PTF install processing”.  Actually, if you select Automatic IPL=Y on the “Install Options for PTFs” panel, you won’t see any messages or panels, we’ll just power down. On the next normal IPL, we’ll do your second “GO PTF” during the “PTF Processing” IPL step in the SCPF job, and then automatically do a second IPL of the partition. So when the system IPLs the second time up to sign-on, your PTFs are all activated and ready to go.

Your total PTF install time will be shorter since we won’t start any of the system jobs during the first IPL when we restart the partition. However, you’ll have a somewhat longer IPL time since we’re doing the work you previously did interactively – the second GO PTF to set all PTFs for delayed apply. If you’re wondering why the IPL is taking so long and what it’s doing, you can always bring up the console. The “Operating System IPL in Progress” panel is shown in the following PDF link with the “PTF Processing” IPL step active (Download ICan 3.15.11 Figure1).  Previously, we only displayed “Applying PTFs” for the Activity in this step.  But now you will also see “Loading PTFs” or “Setting IPL Action for PTFs” if the previous PTF install was incomplete. When all PTFs have been set for delayed apply, you’ll see “IPL requested by PTF processing” status message at the bottom of the screen and then the partition will be restarted again to apply the delayed LIC PTFs.  The next time we reach the “PTF Processing” IPL step, we’ll display the usual “Applying PTFs” and the IPL will continue.

There are a few things to keep in mind if you want to take advantage of this new function:

1.    You must have PTF SI42445 (PTF management code) temporarily applied before you perform your PTF install. Note: if you have HIPER PTF group SF99709 installed with level 26 or higher, you have PTF SI42445 applied.
2.    If an IPL is required for a technology refresh PTF, the new function only supports installing from a virtual optical device or *SERVICE (PTFs downloaded electronically to save files).  If you’re installing from a physical optical device, you’ll still need to perform the extra IPL and second GO PTF manually. If you received your PTFs on physical DVDs, just create yourself an image catalog from the DVDs and use the new support.
3.    If you’re doing your PTF install and you’re not yet ready to IPL the partition, remember, we’ll use the same PTF install parameters the next time you IPL. That includes the image catalog and virtual optical device you were using … so don’t delete the image catalog until PTFs are active.
4.    If you’re installing PTFs from a shared virtual optical device or a network optical device, we’ll access the remote device from the SCPF job on the next IPL without bringing up TCP/IP. Make sure the server partition and remote optical device are available when you IPL the client partition.  Also, PTF SI42302 must be temporarily applied to the server partition that contains the image catalog with the PTFs you are installing. PTF SI42302 contains the required image catalog and optical code to support the new “Automatic-IPL” function.
5.    Since this new support was delivered via a PTF, the new messages seen from GO PTF and the “Operating System IPL in Progress” panel are English only. They will not be translated until the next IBM i release.

When a new Technology Refresh is announced, a corresponding Licensed Internal Code Resave is also released. If you want to avoid, rather than automate, the extra required IPL, install the corresponding LIC Resave. The latest LIC Resave for 7.1 has the latest technology refresh PTF already permanently applied.  For more information on Technology Refresh, see the IBM i Technology Refresh website.

Rethinking Twitter

I set up a Twitter account last year, just prior to the 2010 Spring COMMON Conference and occasionally tweeted about what was going on during the conference. Through the rest of 2010 I'd rarely tweet about something - I just didn't get Twitter! It seemed silly to me to “text message” to the Internet what I was doing. Plus, others would tweet about these events and I just never felt that I was contributing new information.

But recently, much to my surprise, I discovered some tweets that were very informative.

It all started just before the holidays, when I finally downloaded and installed TweetDeck. It had been suggested to me that perhaps if I tried an application for using Twitter that I might find more value in it. Up until that time, I had been using the Web interface. Having an application to work with Twitter made sense, and the tweets from the people I followed would automatically show up. Pretty cool. But still, I continued to feel like I didn't have something of value to contribute by tweeting. And most of the tweets I read were trivial “I'm doing this today.” Bah, humbug!

Then along comes Watson. People I followed on Twitter were tweeting about Watson. And through those tweets and links to news articles, I learned a lot about the project. In fact, Twitter was THE vehicle for how I found out about many of the articles that had been written.

And it hit me – I had found some real value to Twitter! Had I not seen those tweets about Watson, I wouldn't have read those very interesting articles!

But I was still having trouble trying to figure out how could I use Twitter to contribute to the community. I can't tweet about the details of my day-to-day job. Going to speaking engagements is nice, but is it really contributing information to just tell you “I'm at the xxx User Group Conference”?

Then I work up last Sunday morning with an idea. While I'm not working with the latest and greatest technology all the time, I do know a lot about IBM i and have a very good understanding of our documentation. And, for the same reason I started to write this blog, I figured out how I can now use Twitter to contribute something. I'm going to try to tweet on a regular basis – but it won't necessarily be about the latest stuff. Rather, I'll share links to helpful documentation, PTF cover letters, support knowledge base articles – really, all the same things I do with this blog, but I'll do it in Twitter micro-blogging style.

My Twitter ID is @DawnMayiCan and we'll see how rethinking Twitter goes.

 

New Years Wishes

It's hard to believe that I've been writing these blog articles for well over a year already! My objective has been to write about IBM i's latest enhancements and hidden features in these blog articles and I have a long list of topics yet to cover.

But I thought I'd like to take a step back and solicit input from my readers on what you would like to see. What would make this blog better? Do you like the focus on enhancements that IBM has made to i? The sometimes hard-to-find information on function added with PTFs? Do you have specific topics you'd like to see more information on?

Lately I have written about some topics that aren't new enhancements – such as the library locking level system value, history log changes, and the improved scalability of subsystems to support many devices. Were articles like this helpful to you? Should I continue to write about existing features as well as recent enhancements?

Your input and feedback will be appreciated. Posting your input as comments to this article would be a great way to have a discussion regarding future topics. But also feel free to send your feedback to me at [email protected].

It's interesting that I personally have discovered these articles to be a valuable reference for my own use, and that was rather unexpected! I don't always remember the details and generally look up information when I need it. I have found myself going back to the blogs over and over again. And it's wonderful when I get a question that I can answer simply be providing the link to information I had written.

I'd also like to take this time to thank my colleagues at IBM who have written articles for me. In general, my goal is to personally write more than half of the articles. But I don't have the breadth of knowledge to cover everything and thus rely on others for topics outside my personal areas of expertise.

This will be the last blog update of 2010. I'm looking forward to celebrating 1-1-11 (isn't that a great date!) and a wonderful 2011. Now if it would just stop snowing here!

 

 

 

COMMON Europe Power of i Tour

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to be part of the COMMON Europe Power of i Roadshow. I attended and presented at events in Nyborg Denmark, Vienna, Lisbon, Brussels and Luxembourg. My coworker, Tim Rowe, has been doing presentations in other cities within Europe as part of this COMMON Europe event.

COMMON Europe is a bit different than COMMON as we know it here in the U.S. In the U.S, we have a major spring conference and a smaller fall conference; COMMON also supports other educational opportunities such as Webcasts.

While there’s a general COMMON Europe organization and an annual conference (called the CEC - COMMON Europe Conference), each country is also responsible for education to its COMMON members. As such, you’ll note on the COMMON Europe home page that there are links to the various countries and their COMMON organizations and events.

COMMON Europe, like COMMON U.S., also has an advisory council that meets with IBM on an ongoing basis. A key component of both of these advisory councils is working with IBM on future plans and requirements for Power Systems and IBM i.

I'd like to share the highlights and interesting points of this trip; most of this information is actually not technical, so enjoy the break from my usual technical writings.

Nyborg, Denmark. Nyborg is a small community west of Copenhagen. It was in beautiful fall color when I arrived – which was nice since the fall colors had already past in Rochester. The meeting was very well attended and was an all-day event. I think the highlight of the day was the last hour when Richard Moller Nielsen talked about coaching the 1992 Danish football team to the European Championship. I couldn't understand what was said, but it was very clear from the audience that his talk was very entertaining.

Vienna, Austria. The event in Vienna was very small with just two of us each giving one presentation. However, COMMON in Austria has been active in having ongoing events each month, so they don't always get a large attendance for each event. My highlight in Vienna was getting a little bit lost the next morning! I was out wandering some of the side streets looking for a nice, quiet place for a small breakfast, when I realized I didn't know where I was …. and I didn't have a map along! I did some careful backtracking and found my way to familiar territory, but it left me with little time to enjoy the leisurely breakfast I had hoped. Lesson learned: ALWAYS bring a map.

Lisbon, Portugal. My time in Lisbon ended up being not at all as planned! It turned out that there were two events scheduled for the same day; one in Lisbon with IBM i customers, and one in Tomar with Power Systems business partners. At the last minute, they decided to combine the two events into one. Of course, that was the right thing to do, but it also meant that I was reworking my presentations to be more general at the very last minute! What was wonderful about the event in Tomar was the team-building session that started the day; rather than all-day meetings, the first 90 minutes was spent in small groups of about six on sort of a scavenger hunt, looking for specific things around the town or some information about IBM. While 90 minutes wasn't enough time to complete the activity, it was a very good way to get acquainted with some of the other people attending the meeting. Perhaps we should think about activities like this more often. One other point about the event in Portugal is that COMMON Europe does not have a presence in Portugal at this time; there’s an attempt being made to change this, however.

Brussels, Belgium. The event in Brussels was my busiest with three presentations. It was sort of “Dawn May Day.” The audience was again rather small, but very attentive with excellent questions and discussions outside of the presentation time. While in Brussels, I was taken to probably the best restaurant I’ve ever visited – La Maison du Cygne. It was amazing! I also discovered I really like Belgium chocolate. I’ve never been much of a chocolate lover, but even the free little chocolates they had at the IBM Forum location were wonderful!

Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Luxembourg turned out to be an easy day! Giving the same presentations for the third time makes things easier, of course. What I found interesting about the audience for this event though was it was entirely men – not one single woman. During a couple other events, we had some brief conversations about the difficulty in getting European women interested in technology, but all the other events did have one or two women in the audience. It's a good thing I’m not bothered by being in the minority!

Overall, this was a fantastic trip and I'm honored to have had to opportunity to participate in these events. Everyone was very hospitable and friendly, and I would like to thank those who took the time to show me sights and share information about their wonderful cities.

 

 

 

i Can … Attend COMMON Europe

Last week, I was fortunate to attend the COMMON Europe conference. Steve Will, Jenny Dervin and I were there from Rochester. We all gave several presentations at the conference, and afterward we attended the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) face-to-face meeting. 

The conference was held in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I found to be a nice little community with an amazing amount of traffic! The conference was split between two hotels that were separated by a busy street. I don't think anyone suffered any injuries crossing the road, but patience was required. For those of us who don't routinely have roundabouts in our traffic patterns, we had to pay a little extra attention because we didn't know for sure which direction the cars would be going. I found the “Look Right” and “Look Left” words painted on the road at pedestrian crossing points to be very helpful!

The conference was quite a bit like the Annual COMMON Conference we have here in the U.S. There were several tracks of presentations running in parallel that attendees could choose from. Aside from being a much smaller event, the main difference from COMMON in the U.S. is that the sessions were only 60 minutes long, rather than 75. 15 minutes shorter doesn't sound like a big difference, but presentations prepared with 75 minutes in mind end up being a bit long for 60-minute sessions. There was also an expo and evening events. The Monday evening event was a group dinner at Warwick Castle, which was very entertaining with excellent food and a lot of fun; the magician was a big hit.

The CEAC meeting was a mix of educational information from IBM back to the group, as well as ongoing discussion about requirements and future directions. The requirements process is very important to both IBM and our customers as it definitely influences our investment decisions. Since we've just released 7.1, you can imagine that we’re relatively early in the development of our next release, when it's much easier to react to new requirements.

Steve, Jenny and I traveled together during the trip and did have a little free time while in Stratford-upon-Avon to do some sightseeing. We also took an extra day at the end of the trip to do “London in a day.” None of us had been to London before, so we spent the entire day walking and seeing the major sights – Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London Eye, Tower Bridge.... Needless to say, our feet hurt by the end!

The trip there and back was uneventful, which is a good thing. On the flight home, I chatted with the young man sitting next to me; he was traveling from Ireland to Estes Park, Colorado, where he’s planning to spend the summer working as a lifeguard. Working as a lifeguard for the summer is something a lot of young people do, but not many travel quite so far for that summer job!

 

 

i Can … Use POWER7 Features with IBM i 6.1.1

The announcement of the IBM POWER7 systems is really exciting! This announcement is primarily a hardware announcement though. You and i covers this announcement from an IBM i perspective. Although the announcement is about IBM's new POWER7 servers, there’s IBM i support for these new systems in the 6.1.1 release.

I'll review a few of the key features that POWER7 provides that are supported in the IBM i 6.1.1 release.

4 SMT Threads per Core

POWER7 supports Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) with four hardware threads, which provides more capacity per core. Power hardware has had SMT support for many years. Initially, it was two hardware threads of execution on a processor core. With POWER7, the number of hardware threads has been increased to four.

In addition, with POWER7 we’ve also added the capability to support “dynamic switching.” Dynamic switching allows the hardware to allocate resources to optimize the processing capability. So while the core may be configured to use four threads, if the work to be done only takes one thread, the other three threads can free up resources, giving that single thread greater performance.

You control the SMT behavior with Processor multitasking (QPRCMLTTSK) system value. The default for this system value is “system controlled,” which means the operating system determines the optimal setting; for POWER7 systems, this is dynamic switching with four hardware threads. You can explicitly turn off SMT support and always run the cores in a single-threaded mode by setting QPRCMLTTSK to *OFF. In general, the default setting will be the best for most applications; in fact, IBM doesn’t recommend the use of single-threaded mode on POWER7 since the system automatically switches each core to single-threaded mode if there’s just one task executing on the core. The article “Simultaneous Multi-Threading on POWER7 Processors” has a lot more information for those of you interested in the details.

Energy Management Features

Energy management features were introduced with the POWER6 systems. The IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager plug-in measures, monitors and manages the power components built into IBM systems.

While the energy management features in POWER7 are functionally similar as POWER6, both IBM i and the underlying hardware have been enhanced to allow for increased energy efficiency and more intelligent power savings. Release 6.1.1 of IBM i is now more tightly coupled to EnergyScale functions built-in to PowerVM, the system hardware and the POWER processor itself. For more information on POWER7 and energy management, see the EneryScale Whitepaper. 

What About That Processor Frequency?

Historically, the one thing about the ever-increasing performance of processors has been that the processor frequency always improves. However, POWER7's design improves performance per core as well as a massive improvement in capacity per chip with a processor core frequency roughly 30 percent less than that of POWER6. We've all gotten so used to frequency being the performance touchstone in processors that all the other intriguing things that make a processor fast tend to get overlooked. And some of them—like processor cache, memory bandwidth, and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)—matter. POWER7 has a number of advantages over POWER6, including a much faster L2 cache, a large on-chip L3 cache and twice the memory bandwidth. And POWER7, like POWER5, uses “out of order” execution.

Check out the article “Of Gigahertz and CPWs – P7” for a discussion of what else is going on in these modern processors and what it means to the execution of your programs.

POWER7 has eight cores on a single chip. That's a tremendous amount of processing capacity on a single chip. See “What's This Multi-Core Computing Really?” for some great information on multi-core computing.

“Of POWER7 and NUMA” discusses POWER7's memory access design in much more detail.

A Few Additional Notes

A good page to bookmark is the IBM i Performance Management Web site. This site has a lot of great information on performance. The papers I've referenced in this article can be found under the “Resources” tab on that page.

It's possible some of the links in my blog today may not be live immediately because the information is so new. Please check back again later in the week.

I'd like to thank Mark Funk on the IBM i Systems Performance team, Chris Francois and Darcy Koch from the IBM i LIC Development team, and Michael Hollinger on the IBM Power Firmware Development team for their assistance in providing content and reviewing this blog article.

 

 

Navigating IBM i's Documentation Web

I thought it’d be good to start by reviewing the IBM i documentation and online resources available. Most of the technical topics that I'll be sharing via this blog are already documented in some manner – the issue is knowing where to find the documentation and then finding the time to read all it all!

IBM i Information Center

This is the formal documentation repository for each release. The Information Center has a tremendous amount of documentation but built-in search capabilities do leave a little to be desired. The English version of the Information Center is updated periodically; national language translated versions are not.

IBM Systems Hardware Information Center

This is where the hardware information is documented. Depending upon where you navigate to, you may end up taking links that lead you back to the IBM i Information Center.

IBM i Web presence 

This is the IBM Web site for IBM i marketing information. It's mostly overview information that reviews the key features and benefits. These Web pages generally link to the IBM i Information Center for technical documentation. There’s an amazing amount of information within the IBM i Web presence - but once again, finding it is the challenge! However, the Web pages do have a method to the madness. Each major topic area follows the same standards for organization, high-level content and layout.

I've solicited favorite links from my peers in the lab to build the following list:

• Performance Management Web page
• iDoctor for IBM i
• Systems Management 
• IBM i Access
• Security
• Availability
• TCP/IP
• HTTP Server
• BRMS
• IBM Integrated Web Application Server
• Integrated Web Services for i
• DB2 for i main page
• DB2 Web Query
• DB2 Web Query community page
• Virtualization with IBM i, PowerVM and Power Systems
• IBM i on a Power Blade Read-me First
• IBM i on POWER Blades Supported Environments
• IBM i integration with BladeCenter and System x

Redbooks 

Redbooks, Redpapers and Technotes are great technical resources. They’re generally focused on a specific topic and cover conceptual as well as task-oriented documentation. That is, Redbooks not only tell you how to do something, but also describe why you want to do something. Redbooks are produced only for a small set of topics that IBM i supports. Within the Redbooks Web site, you’ll find a specific section for "System i" Redbooks; note that "System i" is really a legacy name since the Redbooks included in this section include Redbooks for IBM i software topics as well.

AS/400 Online Library 

I don't use this site a lot, but I really like it when I need it! Given that a lot of the software on i has been there for a long time, some of the "legacy" functions haven’t been documented in the IBM i Information Center. The Information Center does contain links to the older books that are still applicable, but you have to know how to find those links! This online library Web site is how I find the older documentation more easily.

Support for IBM i Web site

The link I have provided is the System i support link - not the Power Systems support link. The Power Systems support page doesn't have all the popular links that the System i support page has - and I think those popular links are pretty good. In addition, through this Web interface you can "Search Support," which includes more documents when going through the System i support page. Searching through the support site has the really nice feature of searching through multiple repositories - Redbooks, Software Knowledge Base, Hardware and Software Information Centers, educational information, PTFs and APARs, and more. While on the topic of the support Web site, I want to specifically discuss the Software Knowledge Base.

Software Knowledge Base

The software knowledge base is a collection of articles written by IBM support representatives to describe or document common situations, scenarios or problems seen by the support center representatives. Some of the articles are available to everyone for free, and some are only available if you have software support. But these articles can provide some really helpful information. Perhaps in future blogs, I'll point out a few that I find particularly helpful.

Within the IBM i Support site, I want to highlight a couple Web pages.

• IBM Disk Sanitizer is a cool new function to securely erase IBM i disks units that I'm sure will make a future blog.
• Future software upgrade planning information is the Web site where IBM makes our future planning statements so you can be aware of potential future changes and plan for them.

No wonder we have a hard time knowing all that's available! Just trying to summarize the main Web information turned out to be surprising difficult; but what's really amazing is that I've just scratched the surface in this brief review of IBM i online information. Each and every one of these links is just the starting point for a wealth of information, not to mention the fact that I've only identified a subset of the topics that we document on the Web. This just confirms why it’s so hard to know about all the capabilities of i and why we need this blog!

Next week's blog will be on to the technical topics. Stay tuned. 

Why i Can

IBM i, being an integrated operating environment, has tremendous capabilities. A few of us in the development lab in Rochester have wanted to find a more direct way to share all of the great things done to improve and enhance IBM i. We document the enhancements in the IBM i Information Center, but outside of our marketing information, it's hard to find a nice summary of "What's new in IBM i 6.1" (or whatever release you’re interested in.) You have to scour the IBM i Information Center for the "What's New" topics scattered throughout the documentation, or look through the information and see what has been identified as being changed. And even then, not everything may be there. Many enhancements have been delivered via PTFs for current releases and the documentation is generally in the PTF cover letter --and I suspect most of you don’t read all the PTF cover letters! Plus there are no change flags on command documentation, so you have to manually compare to figure what, if anything, has changed. The documentation provided by IBM also tends to be very task oriented -- it tells you how to do something, but it may not tell you why you care. In fact, the same concern was raised in the blog by Susan Gantner and Jon Paris a while back, and it pointed out to us that there was a need for a more interactive, direct method of spreading the word about the capabilities of IBM i.

The intent of this new blog is to share the “hidden gems” within IBM i. The name “i Can” is to convey the fact that IBM i can do even more than most realize. The updates to this blog will generally be information about the latest features in the most current releases of 5.4 and 6.1. I hope to also provide some insight into why you may actually be interested in something you didn't realize you should know about.

As I’ve been planning what I'll be writing about, I discovered something -- there are a lot of enhancements and features that even the leading experts within the development lab weren’t aware of. If we within the development lab have a hard time knowing the full capabilities of our beloved operating system, how much more challenging it must be for those of you who are users of it!

And who am I? I've been working on the IBM i and its predecessors my whole career, all of which has been at IBM in Rochester. I’ve generally been part of the team that works on the “little things” that provide good value for our customers and rarely been part of major announcements within a release. Thus, sharing information about the hidden gems has always been something I thought we could do better, and now the opportunity to do just that is here. I have technical leadership responsibilities on IBM i in what I call the “core” technologies - work management, messaging, output and print management, security, networking, performance and diagnostic tools, install/upgrade, etc... -- most of the things that we've had on i forever; those things that are central to the integrated value of what i provides.

I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to share information via this blog. But this blog won't be written by me alone; we'll have developers from the lab share their expertise through this blog as well. In my (very biased) personal opinion, the i development lab in Rochester is second to none. I find it amazing what that team can accomplish! We just need to do a better job of getting the word out about everything that i can do. If there are topics that you want to hear more about, please let me know! And please provide your input and feedback via blog comments.