Archive for January, 2009

Possible denial of service hit on Gentalk.biz

I have noticed that today, I received almost the total bandwidth that I normally received in a month, in ONE DAY! I investigated this and found that a download link (the summary of the first Gentalk Gathering) was being repeatedly downloaded. I have therefore taken the decision to suspend downloads of items from Gentalk.biz for a few days. This will NOT affect the reading of articles on the blog, nor will it affect the aying of in-post videos, nor any links from the site.

I apologise for this action, but hopefully, normal service will be maintained soon.

PLEASE support me in this endeavour by returning in a few days time when I will announce that the download facility will have been restored – hopefully!

Thanks.

More events in the Gen Calendar

Don’t forget the first in the series of Jumar Solutions webcasts which will be starting in January. View the press release here, and sign up to the first of the webcasts about modernising your Gen systems.

I’ve seen some of the tooling that Jumar uses and in the right hands it can be powerful and exciting technology. But in the wrong hands, like any other tool, it can be potentially dangerous. Modernising Gen systems is easy, yet hard ! It’s easy because Gen is designed to be forwardly compatible with newer technologies and platforms, yet to leverage some paradigm changes, such as 3270 to Web, you need some assistance with the refactoring of the codebase – let Gen worry about generating code for the new platform – that’s straightforward – but refactoring code and converting older code to be web-friendly, or client/server friendly needs some help.

It’s great that there are tools in the ecosystem to migrate older languages (such as PL/1) and tools and services to evolve those applications forward toward the future.

Upgrade Assistance Program

Just this morning I listened to the webcast(first broadcast on 1.12.2008 about the CA Upgrade Assistance Program for CA Gen.

It’s a free program since its included in the annual maintenance fee – it allows upgrades to be planned in conjunction with CA to leverage their knowledge and experience in upgrading other systems.

Whilst not going as far as saying that upgrading is “risky”, it has to be acknowleged that an upgrade is probably one of the most fraught times for a system in its lifecycle after the initial go-live.

It’s usually almost impossible to do an upgrade without outside assistance – CA is a great place to start for a safety net!

One of the key points in the webcast for me is obvious, but not always stated – the farther the jump between releases, the more work will be required, since you will need to make all the small changes that have been made between each of the “nearer” releases.

If you are planning an upgade, I recommend that you listen to this webcast – 20 minutes well spent – but the final message was that 7.6 forms the basis for future releases, and will make upgrading easier in the future.

As advertisers must say these days -”other upgrade assistance tools/services are available”……

CA YouTube Channel

Just discovered this ! Check it out !!!

CA Gen and Mainframe 2.0

For those of you who may not know, “Mainframe 2.0” which CA announced at CA World 2008, (see also: here, and here)is an initiative designed to simplify mainframe ownership for organisations.

That’s great news for mainframe customers, but more so for CA Gen – because the tools that underpin the Mainframe 2.0 initiative are written in CA Gen !! – That means that pretty much all the mainframe owners who use CA tools will be running CA Gen applications on their mainframe!

Why else is this great news for CA Gen – because it shows CA’s commitment to the tooling is so strong that they are basing their entire mainframe strategy going forward on software written with it !