Re: What's up at COMMON? -- MIDRANGE-L

Sunday LINUX workshop was good, but brain numbing with 8 hours of lecture and labs. It was a good overview, and well presented. Any problems were overcome fairly quickly. You had to make a choice between the workshop, and Opening session/iSeries Town Hall.

Nice CL enhancements announced, but that seems to have leaked early, as there has been some discussion here already. I especially like the loop control (do while, do until, do for) with ways of exiting the loop(s) (nesting is allowed to 25 levels) I really like the CASE, WHEN, OTHERWISE structure to make coding easier to read. I no longer have to code Nested IF within Nested if within ... Matches well with my COBOL stuff. I also like that you can open and read up to 5 files. Can't write/update them with the CL commands, but that might be coming. Could QM - SQL to update/write records from CL. New INT data types to let you get to some API stuff you could not do. Talk about future releases doing pointers. PTFs are/will be available to allow code that was compiled on V5R3 with V5R2 in mind, to run on V5R2. That way if you have multiple machines/LPARs you can move one to V5R3 and use the new CL stuff. The new stuff won't compile on V5R2, PTFs only fix the run time.

Also some changes to the way IBM will handle time on the iSeries in V5R3. Thanks Al Barsa for a great presentation on the time changes. UTC will be the storage of date/time on the system, to be interpreted when displayed or used. Sysvals to set time zone.

Full sessions with handouts running out early.

No CUDS on Tuesday??? What's up with that? No dinner either.

Opening reception sponsored by IBM and AVNET was a fun event. There was even dancing - but it was not Al Barsa on the tables. He did his dancing in his time session. Ask the experts was early (5:15 to 7:30) and ended after that. What are we supposed to do with out CUDS that goes to midnight? I have too much blood in my alcohol stream!

Seems to be fairly quiet otherwise,

HTH Don!

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Jim Essinger
Senior Programmer/Analyst
UnLtd / SLFI / IMA
PO Box 730
Fruitland, ID 83619

208-452-4058 Extension 133
esinger@xxxxxxxx

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At 09:27 PM 5/4/2004, you wrote:

Its quiet here - announcement buzz at town hall Sunday, followed by broadcast from a room at common(not open to attendees)other then by perhaps ciber cafe or own Laptop connected ti Internet via wireless.. ( Audio?) No known attendee complaints.

A lot of Linux sessions one first day offered were pretty full.
--
Glenn Ericson
718 898 9805
gericson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> It's been really quiet here regarding COMMON...  OK, folks down there, set
> down your beer can's for a minute and tell us what's happening...
>
> Don in DC