Fitness the long road back Week 1

Got to get fit , GOT TO GET FIT, want to go back to fencing but I would be an embarrassment at the moment, so I have set my self a baseline first

23/04/2017

Run 2.4 Miles (3.9 KM) to the Park and back 1 : 33:45 Fail

1 x Complete 7 Min Workout : 4 out of 12 Fail

25/04/2017

1 x Run 2.4 Miles (3.9 KM) to the Park and back : 31:22 Fail

Complete 7 Min Workout : 5 out of 12 Fail

27/04/2017

1 x Run 2.4 Miles (3.9 KM) to the Park and back : FAIL WORKING LATE

Complete 7 Min Workout : FAIL WORKING LATE

FootNotes
  1. So the passing score for the Army 2 miles run (I have no idea which Army the US one I expect is 19:30 for an old fart like me I have no idea if that is carrying pack or what but its a good start, the park I will be using for fitness is 1.2 miles away, Sooooo 19.30 which equals 1170 Seconds, Pro-rata that: ( 1170 Seconds / 2 ) * 2.4 = 1404 seconds = 23.24, that will be my baseline the end goal will be the top mark in the old fart chart of 13:36 which Pro-ratas to 16.20 (hahahahahaha)[]

Modern Web Dev on Iseries

I have recently been merging very old tech (RPG on ISeries) with modern tech (angulaJS 1.6) and it has brought a whole bundle of fun little issues on the ISeries side that I thought I would just note down.

I am NOT an RPG programmer (and never will be), but if you are ever having to deal with REST services (or Web Services) being hand cranked1 for you by a Iseries Dev, there are some of the issues that you may hit

  • Truncation: JSON data can quite easily pop the string limit on ISeries, so your Iseries Dev will have to do this “write to file” thing to get round it, if your JSON is over about the 6Meg limit then you are really going to cause some speed issues.
  • Inconsistent data types: Given that the PUT/GET/POST services are all coded separately, you will get field formatting issues especially if changes are made retrospectively, a Field that is a string in the GET may be a numeric on the PUT, you just have to keep a grip on it and try not to go for the easy option of “we will get it working then come back and fix it later”
  • Leading zeros on numerics: If you are passing decimals less that 1 then the Iseries is going to want to send them as “.000” rather than “0.000” thus invalidating the JSON, don’t be tempted to turn these numbers into strings, they CAN be formatted correctly.
  • Character sets: A lot of the activity seems to be UTF-8, and you may get a fair amount of issues revolving extended character sets, if you are getting errors that are simply baffling when you send stuff to the ISeries, check the formatting of the characters that you are sending.
  • Alternating Parameters: You may be used to REST services in the format “NameParmeterName2Parmeter2” well this causes problems apparently, so you have to deal with them in the format “NameName2ParmeterParmeter2”

A lot of RPG Programmers will not have done this kind of programming before, so testing the results will be a pain to them, may I suggest that you get chrome and https://client.restlet.com/ installed on their machine so they can test and https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/ so they can test the results they are getting.

FootNotes
  1. Yes hand cranked, The ISeries is very good at dealing with text formats and handles REST/MarkDown and its developers have had lots of practice at coding to such, this combined with the extreme pricing of bolt on features <cough> gouging </cough> mean that its most likely your client will drop the bundle of fun on a developer.[]

Coming Up For Air

Well that was a hell of a first quarter, a crazy mix of stuff that all HAD to be done, just surfacing on the Easter weekend

so what did I miss:

Connect 2017

First year in what seems forever that I was not pounding off to the US in Jan for the yearly pep conference on all that is IBM, alas a thousand things conspired to stop me this year but mainly just too many client deliverables to take the time off, though it seemed I got on the big screen.




From what I could see from other peoples blogs the conference was a good one, and that we are finally shaking off the older stale parts of what we do and getting on with the new stuff.

what with UKLug/ICON not being on this year looks like my only conference will be Engage, where I will be speaking, this years dodgy session is: “Choose your own adventure: Update/Convert/Replace” at 13:30 on Tuesday in Room C (Gorilla 3).

IBM Champion stuff

Not spent any time in the chat and even missed the yearly swag frenzy (but thanks to Amanda she is going to bring me some stuff over), but I have been doing lots of IBM champion things in that I have been upgrading a variety of IBM tech as well as integrating it with other modern stuff, just not been very visible.

Qualifications

Hmmm I was supposed have got a s**t load of Salesforce qualifications by now, I have had opportunity enough, free training (thanks to bluewave) and what not, but still spend all my time DOING stuff rather than learning stuff, must MUST get a grip on that. also on the radar is docker and the other platform support bits we are looking at for LDC Via

 

On the plus side I have solved a huge number of client crises in these last few months and made a number of clients very happy, so that is a excellent thing 🙂

Onwards!