Posts by Larry D

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Java is legacy

I have coded COBOL, PL/1, etcetera. I did a Java course in 1995 @ Sun ! It's old.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

While it's still useful and I use it there are limitations at the mo.

A person, way above my paygrade as CTO at top 10 global bank, said it was not currently scaleable because of the effort in checking the results. That rings true from my experience.

"it" i.e. AI cannot currently fully understand context. So (say) generated SQL joins can be silly. You can, I presume, get around this with a sufficiently detailed system prompt describing he data model. However, that can be a lot of work to write. And some data models are, for no good reason, nuts.

I have always written nice modular code that is well documented. Mainly because I'm an old fart who can't remember what/why I coded what I did. The idea of trying to debug this AI code is something else. I have found the AI generated doco looks excellent but is sometime plain wrong.

So I wonder how maintainable vibe code is is . Or is that just another AI prompt + learning?

I've been coding since the 1980s and I will stick with vibe coding. But be sensible.

F

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Robyn Denholm is a woman

Robyn Denholm is a woman

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

I once did a spec (remember those?) for an outsourcer to fix a performance problem. They announced they had implemented in production. I saw no change. They did not realise it was a 2 page spec so had only done the stuff on page 1.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

We were a small regional team working for a large government department writing (mainly) SAS reports in the early 1980s. We had end users who we would help write their own reports using the data sources we had available in the department. Sometime they would be shocked at having to ask the 193cm guy with a mohawk dressed in pyjamas but I was preferable to my scary boss. Eventually this helping morphed into some training material that we presented to our local end users in a hands on session over 3 days. I vaguely recall may have had some trainer training. All good. Then HQ realised they had a problem with SAS end users too. They found out we had been giving training and obtained our material. HQ "training division" would rewrite our material and have people with no idea of SAS present it around the country. Could we "observe" the first sessions in another city? I think my boss refused as he was incandescent about how they had stolen/mangled our material and the idea of "professional" trainers presenting it rather than techies. Anyway, I said I would not mind going to "observe". In those days a freebie flight with accommodation, taxi chits and meal allowance seemed pretty lux plus I had friends in the other city I could catch up with on Department coin. I envisioned I could sit at the back of the class and "observe" and basically lounge around not doing much then go out on the razz with mates. We got the first break with me having to intervene and correct when the "professional" could not understand the foil or nonsense came out or I had to answer "technical" questions. This was every every minute or so. The "professional" trainer was dying and knew it. Plus the punters were getting annoyed at having to swivel around from front to back to listen to me. So he gave up and I took over. That was OK as I'd done presented the material before, knew my stuff and I had brought our original stuff. A bit nerve wracking and draining but I found I was quite good at the training thing. People were happy enough.

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Postgres, TiDB etcetera are eating SQLServer alive in the corporate space. I think MS have given up.

Microsoft builds open source document database on PostgreSQL, suggests FerretDB as front end

Re: We screwed up...

You can export onenote to .mht files which is basically HTML. Even the corporate version.

Yes OneNote can be chaotic, particularly when using the mobile version where the app is sub optimal for organising, but at least it's searchable.

At a new site I dump all my learnings about the site in to my own OneNote. Then people complain I have this resource and why can't I put it into their terribly organised formats (OneNote or whatever). Don't blame OneNote for messy minds.

Is SQLServer abandonware? Probably. I know corporates moving to Postgres or whatever when SQLServer hits scalability limits. Does Microsoft's Linkedin use SQLServer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DgU8T69VRo&t=13s

BMC's $1.6B victory over IBM is TKO on appeal

Contract with the devil

My understanding is that IBM GS (now Kyndryl) had a global contract with BMC so their outsourced customers could use BMC products. Typically the BMC products can do more, more efficiently. Sometimes the products are just are just equivalents, like BMC Control-M vs IBM OPC/TWS, in which case having the license arrangement allowed customers to outsource operations to IBM/Kyndryl without having to convert all their Control-M stuff to TWS. Now IBM and Kyndryl have separated this has become contested ground. We have moved from IBM/Kyndryl to another outsourcer (worse than Kyndryl if you can imagine) and IBM are now continually trying to get us to convert from BMC, normally willfully ignoring the complexity and downsides. Our dingbat MGMT entertain these approaches. Just seems like BAU to me.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

I remember OS2 1.3 EE which included DBM - an early version of Db2/2. When IBM came to port that to NT it ran faster so they held off as faster on NT than OS/2 was not allowed. Turns out the OS/2 file system HPFS had a bug that Microsoft fixed in NTFS. So IBM held back releasing a version for NT until OS/2 HPFS was fixed. By then IBM had lost both the OS and the database war.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

I remember optimising the Oracle CPU and seat licensing at one site by moving apps around and getting rigorous with offboarding userids of people that left. A fair bit of work but it paid off. Next thing I know Oracle then ring our switch who put them through to me. "Can we change the licensing model?" I played dumb like I was cleaning staff.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Large Oz Government Department with large Amdahl mainframes. Water cooled. Being government they took the cheapest quote for the water cooling system maintenance. The company that got won the quote, still in business I see, found they could keep costs low by not doing any maintenance at all. So filters not regularly changed per spec. Eventually the pipes clog and freeze then burst spraying water directly at the side of one the Amdahls, which kept on working fine but was powered down before the water went above the false floor. No come back on any party...

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

enshittification

I think most sites stopped (ground to a halt) at 6.5 and didn't go on. I was told the interface for Notes mail was based on snail mail interactions. It dated badly. But it was good in 1994. One of our team swapped a whole lot of problem/change/incident/bug forms and workflow to in return for free licenses. These turned up in the next release of the base Notes product. He later moved to the UK and won Dragon's Den.

It was terrible in 2008. I remember being told by my Notes administrator not to send invites from gmail as it crashed Domino mail. I don't miss it although the forms, workflow and (non-relational) databases could be good - at times. I'm continually amazed at how bad vendors get forms and workflow even today. IBM and Oracle both had OK products at various times that fell victim to enshittification.

MS tries to do forms/workflow in Sharepoint/Teams but it is really rubbish - really embarrassingly bad stuff you would not pay for. But corporates do.

I recently got a new personal laptop and wondered what was eating my network bandwidth. It was MS Teams chewing bandwidth even though I was not using it. So uninstalled Teams on my personal laptop but forced to use it at corporate work.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Who ported CICS to AIX?

In 1995 I installed and configured CICS/6000 on AIX (not my normal DBA job but they had no one else who could spell CICS available). My impression was that the CICS port was written by MicroFocus. I seem to recall Microfocus copyright notices coming up with the IBM ones. Maybe I'm wrong but this case is a little weird to me.