mainframe, I hardly knew ye

Here is a little bit about the IBM mainframe.

The mainframe is considered "dead" or dying or whatever. That's all well and good, but to paraphrase Twain, "news of its death has been greatly exaggerated." I program on the mainframe (via ISPF/TSO) most of the time. I do some java work as well, but we have batch systems that do a lot of stuff on the "big iron" as the old-timers like to call it.

To me, it's all the same. I don't mind programming in either world because really, it's the problem solving that I enjoy about coding, not the technologies per se. On the "green screen" I don't enjoy only being able to see 24 lines of code at a time, that is tiresome. On the newer stuff, I'm annoyed that perfectly good systems have to be re-written because their codebase is going out of support. There is shit running on the mainframe that's been there forever. And that's comforting.

At any rate, I've been doing this for 10 years and you know how it is . . . you're somewhat constrained by the code which precedes you. "Oh, I have an example of that job in my workpds." So you copy it and that's the thing you use when you're doing task A. I was/am no different.

Flash forward about 8 years. I'm working on a QMF (Query Management Facility - ISPF application which interfaces with IBM's DB2 database product) report and discover that QMF can call REXX scripts. What's REXX? It's a scripting language. And it works on any computer that IBM makes - including the mainframe. And, quite frankly, it's freaking awesome. Not the language, per se, but the fact that I *FINALLY* figured out how to use it. I'm not going to go into all the details now (this post is already too long), but how about an analogy for now? It's like having a hammer your whole life and then someone suddenly gives you a screwdriver. Sure, you got lights-out awesome with that hammer and hell, you'd even use it to screw shit, but wow does that screwdriver make things simpler.

Posts to follow detailing what I've discovered. It was kind of like finding the nose on my face, but better late than never, right?

larry don't read this twice

Well, I've been all panty-twisted tonight trying to find my super-secret, ultra-fun fantasy football draft spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is directly responsible for in-excess of 1% of any winnings I've ever had playing fantasy football, meaning it's netted me about 5 dollars.

But, the spreadsheet, she is comforting. She also took a really long time to develop and will fill out a person's team as it goes, on a separate "teams" sheet. If you do any work with excel, you can appreciate that it did not take five minutes. In fact, it took a lot of man hours, no doubt. And no doubt, my company would be very upset if I were to lose all that work, because, truth be told, I did a lot of the "development" at the office one year. I figured, hey, it's like work, right. It actually was and I learned a lot about excel. Unfortunately, I have yet to apply any of that new-found knowledge. Oh well.

At any rate, my yahoo email account saved the day. I had a version of it in the way-back sent folder. And much gnashing of teeth subsided. The moral of the story is, save everything. Times 10. I have an external disk, a couple of redundant disk/partitions (ok, I haven't raided them yet), but it's best to keep things in multiple places. Next step is remote storage.

Storage is cheaper by the day and losing stuff is annoying and costly to recreate. Knowing this, I've also been on a kick of trying to only create simple text files. I figure, these will be forever durable, or at least much easier to recover when all our applications have fallen into the dustbin of history.