Planet i

It has been a long time since my last entry. Much has happened since then. I made two 2100 mile round trips by car back to Michigan, both of them in connection with my mother, who passed away in June at the age of 98. Other personal situations have cropped up too.

At my place of work, I continue attempting to gradually upgrade the system. In addition to my assigned projects and troubleshooting, I am attempting to use more modern techniques; but I find it interesting to look back and see what things I have tried and not tried to do.

One thing that comes to mind is that I am no longer determined to find a way to gradually move code to free-format. If I write new code, it will probably be in RPG-free; but I am no longer attempting to translate fixed format to free. The job is just too daunting; so many of the old programs are just hideously loaded with indicators, and to do a direct conversion, using Linoma’s RPG Toolbox, creates code that would, especially to a neophyte, be even more confusing than its fixed format parent. With proper use of the toolbox we can eliminate left-hand indicators while leaving it in fixed format, and the tool does a very nice job of cleaning things up.

In another context, I am making changes that effectively are advancing beyond RPGIV as presently constituted. Using IBM routines CEESCEN, CEEDAYS, and CEEDATE, I am trying to free the system from its self-imposed reliance upon a century that runs from 1961-2060 for 2-digit years, as well as the ILE RPG range of 1940-2039 for 2-digit years. The boldest move, of course, would be to change all date references in the data files to at least an 8-digit year, if not actual date formats; but in ancient code from multiple systems, that would take a prohibitive amount of time to convert hundreds of files and programs to do this. What I have done instead is create a number of programs based upon the IBM programs above to quickly do date conversions. In doing this, I am implementing a sliding century, such that the two-digit dates will always reference a century that references the current year as the 40^th year of the century. Currently, this means that my floating century is 1971-2070. In ten years, it will be 1981-2080.

A typical call would be: To convert Gregorian (MMDDYY) to Julian, we would call:

CALL ‘GTOJ’

PARM ING 6 0

PARM JUL 5 0

You may note that I am using the RPGIII/RPG400 style of calling the program rather than using the one-line form: CALLP(ING:JUL), which involves the creation of appropriate prototypes. The program GTOJ, for instance, does consist of a module DCONV, which sets up and runs the IBM routines, and module GTOJ, which sets up the input and output for DCONV. They are then combined into program GTOJ. All the routines ultimately use DCONV.

However, I could not see the point of the extensive housekeeping involved in making the programs that call GTOJ and the other programs modularized. You, of course, have to create prototypes for each of the programs (about 15 of them, at last count). Of course, I could put them all in one service program, which to my mind creates another layer of unnecessary complexity. The chief justifications for this seem to be performance and the ability to catch inconsistencies between parameters of the called and calling programs. To me, these are not sufficient reasons. In this installation, performance will never be an issue. Trust me. Our new machine (stupid word processor! I can’t put our favorite machine’s name here – OpenOffice keeps trying to capitalize it) runs at least 10 times as fast as the one it replaced. As for parameter checking, any errors last until the first test is run, after which they are corrected.

Another thing that I have cooled on is attempting to get away from MOVE, etc , in existing code. New code that I write contains very few MOVEs, except for enabling date arithmetic. I just don’t see the point in changing existing code to remove MOVE, unless by doing so I can make the code clearer. IBM has not implemented MOVE in freeform, so I don’t see a meaningful amount of existing RPG code being moved to freeform. This means that any RPG neophyte is going to have to learn to deal with both freeform and fixed RPG formats in his maintenance programming.

So time marches on. We continue to watch the progress of IBM with its initiatives regarding RPG, and we wait to see what impact it will have on our day-to-day work. In a small installation like ours, I don’t think we will ever be cutting edge.

Read the original at RPG and Programming.

Since I am a developer, I don’t usually go out of my way to make disparaging remarks about other software companies.  Oh, we programmers ARE an opinionated bunch, but we ALL have been humbled by the complexity of the environment we work in and the difficulty of accommodating the non-standard “standards” that apply.  But our basic mantra is: “Do no harm”.

I have encountered the egregious breach of that mantra just today.  Read on and have caution!

About a month ago a purchased a new laptop, as my Gateway was LONG in the tooth and was lumbering under the bloat of the latest development tools and frameworks.  It is an Acer Travelmate 8572.  With an Intel i7 64 bit processor (Quad Core!) I expected some great gains in speed and productivity.  Alas, I am not completely happy with it, even at 64 bits it won’t support more than 4GB RAM and the graphics resolution isn’t as high as I want  (but that is all another story).

I had installed Windows 7 Ultimate and have had very good luck with it.  Some incompatibilities and hassles, but overall, a good experience.  However, in the last few days my bluetooth headset has been acting flaky so I decided to install some updated bluetooth drivers.  No joy, I still had intermittent loss of connection.  So I decided to remove the device drivers, reboot and then reinstall.

Removing the drivers, no problem.  I rebooted and then attempted to reinstall the software.  It couldn’t find the hardware. DOH!  Function-F3 activated the hardware and the software started to install,  but first it began by uninstalling the software.  Progress bar got to about 75% and then just sat, and sat, and sat.  I saw plenty of hard drive activity but no progress.  So I decided to check email while I was waiting.  The shortcut said it couldn’t find the thunderbird.exe file that was referenced.  That’s weird!  I followed the link to the folder for Mozilla Thunderbird.  Not there! NO FOLDER!!!! Then my icons started to disappear off of my desktop.  So, I immediately shut down the system.  I restarted and now the entire desktop was gone and I was down to just some basic folders and programs on the start menu.  Basically nothing left in the Program Files folder.  The system was hammered.  After pondering what I should do and thinking I had picked up some nasty malware I started a System Restore.  It ran for about 45 minutes.  While I was running the restore, I decided to Google WIDCOMM and uninstall and delete and I found this:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/ffe5f236-da04-4c3c-8df9-696080ec9d0c

Basically the WIDCOMM uninstall will go rogue and delete the data on the C drive.  This is confirmed by Microsoft (signed driver!)  and so MS is an accessory to hard drive murder IMHO.  The negligence of WIDCOMM in producing such a flawed POS (piece of software) is unconscionable.  These folks apparently are clueless software developers and, no doubt, the software was probably developed off shore by low cost programmers in order to maximize their profits.

The System Restore did very little to get things functioning again.  So, now I will have to reformat and reinstall EVERYTHING!!  Thanks Widcomm!

Anyone game for a Class Action Suit against Widcomm?  I’ll lose at least a day of productivity.  That is worth a few bucks to me….

Read the original at Pete's Wordshop.

Read the original at Mike's IBM i PHP blog and more....

Read the original at Mike's IBM i PHP blog and more....