SoftLayer is known for hosting the cloud for customers. They can do a private cloud if need be. Apparently they already have a lot of customers.
SoftLayer Acquisition
SoftLayer is known for hosting the cloud for customers. They can do a private cloud if need be. Apparently they already have a lot of customers.
Rational Upgrade
My tried and true apps are getting upgraded to version 8.0.0.5. This includes Clearcase and ClearQuest. Rational Rose, which I only seldomly used, is still staying at version 7.0.0.4. Not sure if this is due to IBM not having an upgrade, or my customer not buying it.
All I know is that I need to make sure my work is ready for the big upgrade. At least my toolset is staying the same. Seems like the testers have to get ready for some new programs that replace the ones they use that are being phased out. Let's hope this goes smoothly.
I have requested to manually control the upgrade on each of my machines. I get the executable to do the install. Somebody else must be taking care of the back end. It is most favorable that I am going to be in between tasks during the upgrade. It would suck if a delivery crossed the update dates.
IBM PureSystems
PureSystems appears to be an umbrella over three subsystems:
- IBM PureFlex System
- IBM PureApplication System
- IBM PureData System
Next is PureApplication. This seems to be the most nebulous of all. They mention that it is some sort of platform or framework. It allows you to define patterns. Yeah. I suspect it might actually refer to the software side of the house. This is offered as a platform as a service.
Finally there is PureData. This is a platform. Yep. You guessed it. This targets your big data needs. This is done via cloud based data management. It is sold via a platform as a service.
I get the feeling that you are supposed to choose one of these three, depending on your needs. Wouldn't you need all three though? Of course the brochure directs you to talk to IBM sales. I guess that answers what this is all about. It is some sort of sales channel. Sales as a service anyone?
Suspicious Activity
Luckily I am the real owner. Google asked me a lot of questions. Of course I knew all the right answers. I created this account myself. I am not the hacker that has been trying to get into the account. I guess it is a good think that Google sandboxed my account. Otherwise some unscrupulous individuals may have been able to take over the darn thing. This still has me irked.
Now in other non-technical IBM news, Jim Cramer has recommended IBM as a buy. Now Kramer might seem a little over the top. I also don't buy based on his recommendations. However others do. Perhaps that may drive the stock price up. Seems it is already relatively high.
I also heard some buzz that Warren Buffet has been reading over IBM quarterly reports for over 10 years. Not sure if that means Buffet will eventually invest. Could also be some sort of rumor mill. But it is interesting nonetheless.
Battery Failure
My company procided me with a ThinkPad T-Series laptop. I have had this laptop for a few years now. Not sure whether the thing was new when I got it. Until last week, the thing has been working fine. The only occasional slowness was my only concern.This past week I noticed a strange error message as I moused over the battery in the Windows system tray. It stated that the battery had failed and needed to be replaced. I kept that thought in the back of my mind. Later I tried to move my laptop to another room. As soon as I unplugged the laptop, the thing went blank. Doh.
Later I tried booting up the system, and it would not start Windows. I kept getting a blue screen of death stating the mount volume was unmountable. Ouch. My desktop support guy said the battery was not under warrenty. Now I need to get a new battery purchased. Sounds like a good time to back my stuff up again.
Phase Change Memory
IBM has announced a breakthrough in their phase change memory (PCM). This is non volatile memory like flash. It keeps the data when the power is turned off. The big news is that this memory is 100 times faster than flash.
The worst case latency for the memory is 10 micro seconds. This statistic is 100 times the performance of flash memory. The PCM has had a capacity breakthrough as well. Previously only 1 bit per cell was reliable. IBM is now working with a configuraiton that works with 4 bits per cell. PCM memory size is going up soon.
IBM envisions this memory to be used all over the place. It can be in PCs for ultra fast startup. It can be used in the cloud. It can even be used in mobile phone applications.
Project Orion
IBM is making progress on their Project Orion. The goal is to product an IDE like Eclipse that runs on the web. They just put out a Beta release for around 5k developers.I think of Eclipse as being an IDE for Java. However Orion intends to work for any programming language. For example, they want Orion to be able to handle JavaScript development.
The beauty of being a web app is that it can download code in real time from the web. IBM plans to integrate other free tools into Orion. This could be things such as Git, Bugzilla, and/or Jira.
Watson Plays Jeopardy
IBM has developed a computer named Watson to compete on the game show Jeopardy. It is going to be pitted against two of the best human Jeopardy players ever.Watson has a lot of computer memory. It has a fixed store of data is has "learned". It then needs to use the clues from the Jeopardy game to use this memory to answer the questions.
Watson is composed of a bunch of IBM Power 750 servers. The thing actually understands the nuances of the English language.
There is talk about commercial applications of this technology. But first IBM will need to figure out how to run the Watson program on something less than a massive computer.
ClearQuest is a Dog
I finally got my ClearQuest client upgraded to version 7.1. This thing looks and feels a lot different than the earlier version I am used to. For starters, the thing takes forever to launch. I spend a lot of time looking at the splash screen. The screen states that the product was built with Eclipse, and uses Java. Maybe that is part of the slowness.When I do a query that results in many defects, the results are now paginated. Previously ClearQuest would put each of these defects in a single huge spreadsheet control for me to navigate. Now I need to guess which page the resullts will be on. If my guess is off, I need to click on the other results pages. Poorly done.
I cannot resize the preview pane for the defect I want to look at. What the heck? Somebody has determined the optimal layout of screen real estate for the query results and the preview. Great. The problem now is that I feel like I used to have much more room in the preview. At least I can double click a query result row and get a popup window will all the details.
From everything I have seen in the past week, I want my old version of the ClearQuest client back.
Rational Tool Upgrade Trouble
Our customer upgraded their Rational Tools Suite to version 7 this past weekend. As expected, the upgrade did not go smoothly. Here was the plan. The servers were going to be upgraded on the weekend. An upgrade icon was going to be pushed out to workstations to allow users to control when the client tools would be upgraded.A lot of people did not receive the icon for the upgrade. I got the icon on one of my machines. However when I clicked the icon, I got an error because I did not have enough room on my C: drive. It seems that I need at least 1G of free space on my C: drive. Now my machine is a virtual one with a measly 10G of space on C:. Most of that space is currently used. I am now spending a lot of time trying to hack away at drive space used.
I know I may be in the minority. New computers have massive C: drives. But come on. Is this some major code bloat in the latest version. It would be best if I could just install those tools I actually need. That is a small list. I require ClearQuest and Clearcase. It would also be nice if I could specify what options are installed for these two products. Microsoft does that all the time and gives me the options to not install pieces. Can we get that from IBM here?
Rational Upgrade
My customer decided to finally upgrade to the latest version of Clearcase and ClearQuest. The upgrade was timed to happen between releases of other critical software. The plan is that the system administrators are going to upgrade the servers over the weekend. They are also going to push out a client upgrade program over the weekend.People are supposed to keep their computers online over the weekend. Then on Monday, they are to launch the client program upgrade install. There is a story out that the last time we upgraded, things did not work too well. It was a while before we were able to access the ClearQuest data. I am doing a couple backups of my ClearQuest data myself just in case. I cannot afford to be offline from ClearQuest for more than a day or two.
Enterprise Generation Language
IBM has announced their Enterprise Generation Language (EGL). This is a new language to help with modernization legacy systems. The big idea is to convert legacy apps to the EGL. Then you can compile the EGL to a modern language and platform. Some applicable legacy environments to convert from in clued green screened terminal apps. The benefit from the conversion is that you can avoid any 3rd party licensing costs.
A main destination language that EGL targets is COBOL. You can compile EGL into COBOL for the IBM CICS or iSeries hardware platforms. You can also compile the EGL to Java to run on Websphere or Tomcat. Finally you can compile EGL to JavaScript to run in a web browser.
All of this EGL business is a shortcut from manually porting legacy code to a specific target system. A lot of legacy code has already been rewritten in Java. However the EGL case does sound good if you need to target multiple environments. Just convert the legacy code once to the EGL. Then you let the software do the hard work of porting to multiple environments. How do you like that?
The IBM Cloud
IBM recently announced that they are providing a free public cloud for development and test. This will allow developers to quickly work in a virtual machine. Obviously they are doing this to get their cloud to catch on, and generate paying customers later. I like the idea.In conjunction with their cloud service offering, IBM has released the Rational Software Delivery Services. These are a bunch of tools to do development and test in their cloud. So far I have not done any cloud computing. But IBM seems to be making it very easy to try out.
Now that IBM has led the way with a free offering, I wonder if competitors like Amazon will follow suit. There is nothing better that companies coming out with free services for developers.
Justice Problems
I recently read that the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has it out for IBM. They have been trying to persuade the U.S. Department of Justice to look into monopolistic behavior at IBM.Here is the heart of the matter. Previously IBM had licensed their OS to run on other mainframes. However they discontinued this policy back in 2006. Now competitors that sell mainframe clones want to force the company to relent.
Information Week magazine seems to think that this is just good business practices followed by IBM. They are not giving their tools to competitors. What do you think?
Open Configuration Management
Last year IBM created the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration. It is also known as the OSLC. The group has defined their OSLC CM 1.0 specification. In essence it defines how to integrate with a change management system.The OSLC is not specific to IBM's products. It is an open standard. However you can expect ClearQuest to conform to the standard. Maybe this can help me have some custom program interact and even control Clearcase on my box.
This reminds me of how Microsoft opened up a spec for tools to interact with Integrated Development Environments before. Their Visual Studio followed the standard and allowed developers to write plus ins. This seems like a promising move that will benefit all.
Big Artificial Intelligence
Do you remember IBM's Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov in chess? Well that was the early edition. Now IBM has another computer that is poised to beat humans at a tough game. May I present Watson to you.Watson will test its understanding by playing Jeopardy against Ken Jennings. Ken is the all time champ in Jeopardy history. Sure any program to do a Google to try to answer Jeopardy questions. However that will not help the computer beat a smart human like Jennings.
The Watson system will use some smarts to process the language from the host. Then it will analyze a database to determine the best answer. Get this. It will respond in a robot voice. I was expecting some weird metal robot from the 70's. However Watson is just a program running on a special IBM computer. To tell the truth, I am not sure I will be cheering for the computer. I like Ken Jennings.
Rational Insight
I just heard that IBM has released the Rational Insight tool. The press on the product says it does a lot of things. However the executive summary is that it assists with managing software development. So I don't think us rank and file developers will be using it.Rational Insight will give management a bunch of metrics. I assume it plugs into the other Rational Suite of tools to collects its info. I would prefer if it did this without bothering me (a very busy developer).
In studying this new software offering a little more carefully, it seems that it is a set of tools itself. One part of the tool deals with requirements. Another deals with architecture. I hope that my customer agreement under which we license the Rational Suite includes this new tool. I would like to play with it a bit. Or maybe there is a free download somewhere in the IBM web site. I will let you know what else I find.
Change
Yesterday I got this week’s issue of Information Week. IBM had taken out four full pages ads in the magazine. That’s a large portion as this is a thin weekly magazine. The theme of these ads was “Conversations for a Smarter Planet”. Here is the kicker. I had no idea what they were talking about.Two of the four ad pages were giant images. The other two pages had the following headlines: (1) A mandate for change is a mandate for smart, and (2) How can we make our smart systems smarter? These pages then had a lot of text on them. The closing line was “Join us and see what others are thinking at ibm.com/change”.
I figured these ads were just teasers, and that the meat was at the web site. I decided to bite. There seemed to be five bullets at the bottom of the page. Somehow I already got to the second bullet which was about intelligence. The byline was “intelligence to build solutions for business.”
By clicking some buttons I proceeded to the next bullet. The text talked about smarter governance. There were also links to topics like SOA and RFID among others. I saw something about being green and recycling as well.
At this point I had viewed some ads in the magazine, and was trying to navigate the web site. But I still had little clue as to what IBM was selling. There were two further bullets at the bottom of the page which were inaccessible. They were collaboration and infrastructure. No matter how many links I clicked, I could not get these buttons enabled.
Yeah I know IBM is making some good money these days. However I don’t think their latest advertising efforts are working. At least they make not sense to me.
VOB Versus View
I normally deal with only two views for my development work. One view is my development view which holds C++ application source code. The other view is my database view which holds scripts and stored procedures. These two locations for code I work with are also located in separate VOBs.Whenever I need access to the data from one of the views, I mount the VOB for that specific view. This works fine when I just work with one of these views. However strange things happen when I mount both VOBs. Each view can see the folders in the expected VOB, as well as the other VOB.
This would be cool if I could get access to everything I need through one view. However it does not work like that. If I have the database VOB mounted, but use the development view, I can see the database folders. However I cannot do any work with files in those folders. I have to use my database view to access the files correctly.
What is this? This can’t be the normal way Rational Clearcase works. It just does not make sense. I get that I may need to use more than one view to access more than one type of files. However why is everything visible in the view, but not usable? That seems like something is wrong.
I would not put it past the people who set up my views and VOBs. Perhaps they configured stuff incorrectly. The problem is that I don’t know a lot about the details of how views and VOBs work. However something is wrong in the first place if the tool allows you to set up a bum configuration in the first place.
In the past I never thought I would say this. But I am starting to miss PVCS Version Manager. We had a clunky old version of that software made for Windows 3.1. However there were a lot of things that worked right and easily in that system.
Clearcase View Problems
I continue to have problems with views I do not access frequently. Personally I blame the Clearcase admins who manage our customer's repositories. They got some type of scripts which disable then delete inactive views. I would not mind if my views got deleted and I could recreate them. However once the script does its job, the view remains but I cannot use it.Normally you need to open a trouble ticket with the help desk to get issues like these resolved. But I have found that is more trouble than it is worth. I took matters into my own hands. I had work to do. First I viewed the properties of the View (no pun). Then I clicked the Advanced tab. I copied down the Global Address of the view.
With the Global Address location in hand, I navigated the network to the location. Each of my views had a folder on the network. Usually I would not like to mess with file structures that Clearcase uses. But I needed to get past this problem. I renamed the directory for my old corrupted view. Then I was able to recreate the view. Problem solved. Something still sucks with this process though.
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