Will this help bring the mainframe back?

Posted on November 9, 2011 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

Word on a mainframe–who would have thought? Hey, we already have Linux available–bring it on.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IBM-Brings-Windows-to-the-Mainframe-298629/?kc=EWKNLEAU11082011STR2

Cobol Ready Trace lives

Posted on August 8, 2011 - Filed Under Business, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

In the age of Expediter, et al, it may seem old fashioned to want to use this old tool, but it’s still an unmatched gem. For those of you who don’t remember Ready Trace, it’s an old verb that was obsoleted by Cobol II. It lists every paragraph that a program executes. Expiditer, for all it’s great capabilities, cannot do this. Nor any other tool that I know of.
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The logic table

Posted on May 13, 2010 - Filed Under Business, Contracting, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

I’m big on documentation. And I’m a programmer, believe it or not. I’m a flowchartin’ fool, and I love to add logic tables to my work. What’s a logic table? I’m not sure why it’s not more common than it is, because it sure beats a lot of the excuse for documentation I’ve seen. And it’s so readable that you can even show it to the users and after a little guidance, they’re able to figure it out. It’s a great tool, and is very under utilized.

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A new direction on the job hunt

Posted on February 6, 2010 - Filed Under Contracting, Mainframe | 1 Comment

Okay, I’ve moved through the first two iterations of my job hunt–ramping up my profiles on Google and LinkedIn, and refining my resume so I have multiple versions. That looked promising for a while.

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This flowcharting tool will surprise you

Posted on January 12, 2010 - Filed Under Business, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

In the mainframe world, flowcharting is one of those things you hate to do, but is so necessary to give a user friendly view of a system. And I’ve tried them all–Word, Visio, PowerPoint, Dabbleboard, etc. They mostly achieve their aim–to put together a flow chart, but they all make it way too difficult to modify the chart after initial creation.

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Cobol shortcut using sort

Posted on December 21, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | 2 Comments

One of the more common tasks for a Cobol program is to take some action on matching records from two flat files. This is fairly straightforward, but it’s still a pain, because you have to be meticulous about testing a situation like what happens when one file hits EOF before the other one.

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The search for answers in a new shop

Posted on December 6, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

It never ceases to amaze me–you start a new job (or contract, in my case), and things go fine until you need some specialized piece of knowledge. Like in my case, this week, how to do a new copy for CICS? Not only does IBM change the process every now and then, but sometimes shops have their own custom way of doing it.

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Job hunting in 2009–it’s a whole new world

Posted on August 3, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

Ah, the good old days. When you could find a job in a day or two. Sometimes within hours. 2009, on the other hand, sucks big time.

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Great hotkey program–Autohotkey

Posted on August 3, 2009 - Filed Under Business, Family, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

I found this through PC Mag about a year ago, and have been using it ever since. Autohotkey is free, and does several great things, which I illustrate here:

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Frequency count with SAS

Posted on April 30, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

This is a trick I picked up at work today. I wanted to see how many times a particular transaction executed within one second for all today’s transactions. (more…)