New year and new beginnings, but before I kick off the new year I’m going to provide a quick look back at what happened during the year that’s passed.

• Fulfilled one of my childhood dreams and begun working for IBM.
• Bought a car.
• Decided I needed a drivers license and begun taking driving lessons.
• Found shopping at eBay and bought some cool stuff and a new server, IBM of course.
• Became a proud owner of a DEC PDP-11.
• Had the opportunity to see a DEC TOPS 20 at University of Uppsala.
• Thanks to my new job at IBM I had the honor to meet a bunch of IBM System Z mainframes in real life.
• Got acquaint with IBM AIX and IBM PowerSystems servers.
• Had one of the rooms at home become my computer collection room (a.k.a. the computer museum) .
• Bought an old Rital server rack for my computer collection room.

Well, that’s pretty much the interesting parts of my 2011 and I hope that 2012 takes on the challenge to top that. However there’s one thing more important than everything else, I managed to not scare away my fiance and my friends by being my crazy self. Since I had them drive me around and carry my heavy computers I’m grateful they haven’t told me to fsck off.

As supposed even I have a few new years resolutions, some more private than others. Two I can share with all of you is that I’ll be working hard to get my drivers license and the other is the same as I have given every year for a long time and that is to learn something new every day.

At last, but not least I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!!!

IBM has it’s roots back in the 1880s, but it was on June 16th 1911 the company Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, that would become International Business Machines Corporation, was founded. CTR was incorporated in Endicott, New York, USA through a merge of four different companies. These were the Tabulating Machine Company (with origins in Washington, D.C in the 1880s), the International Time Recording Company (founded in Endicott, New York in 1900), the Computing Scale Corporation (founded in Dayton, Ohio in 1901) and the Bundy Manufacturing Company (founded in 1889).

Through this merge CTR became a company with a wide range of products such as employee-time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers and coffee grinders. There was one more product that would become very important for the development of the IT industry, the punched card equipment, which originally came from the Tabulating Machine Company. However, CTR ended up a company with 1300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C; and Toronto, Ontario.

Today IBM has it’s headquarter in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York since 1964 and the building complex is an amazing 26300 square meters. The IBM brand was in 2010 valued to $64.7 billions and the company is highly ranked on many lists such as Fortune, Forbes, Interbrand and others. IBM employs over 350 000 people around the world and around 3300 of them are located in Sweden.

Over the years until this day IBM has contributed more to the development of IT and many other areas than anyone could ever imagine and continues to invests $5-6 million in research every year. Among IBM’s contribution with we find programming languages, relational databases, DRAM memory, RISC processors and a total of four IBM employees has been rewarded the Nobel price for their research.

Among IBM’s server platforms we find System/390 which is now known as System z and the RS/6000 AIX platform (later known as System p) that’s been merged with the AS/400 platform (later known as System i) to become Power Systems. Both the System z and the Power Systems platform has the ability to partition hardware providing true hardware virtualization, a heritage from the mainframe platforms. IBM also develops the supercomputer Blue Gene which in 2009 was rewarded with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Lately IBM has gained worldwide attention for their artificial intelligence project Watson that was exhibited on the game show Jeopardy! where it won against the game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

If anyone haven’t figured it out yet (hence the counter on my website) I’m proud and honored to become an IBMer in September this year and to join IBM on their continuous journey and challenge to build a smarter planet.

Early this morning Linus Torvalds announced that the next release of the Linux kernel will be given the version number 3.0.

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It
will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse
enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can
no longe rcomfortably count as high as 40.

He strongly points out that this lift of version number is not due to any major changes in the kernel, but more based on time since this year it’s 20 years since the first Linux kernel was released.

So what are the big changes? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

Personally I’m a bit disappointed since I was hoping for the 3.0 release to contain something awesome that I could really look forward to. Despite what Linus Torvalds says, it’s probably just me remembering the anticipation for the first stable 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 releases, which all of them was a great step forward for the Linux kernel. However, the 2.x release of the kernel has been around for quite a while now and on the other hand it’s reasonable to bump the version number around this time. To be honest, if there’s no super fancy new features in the pipe line for the next year or so, why not celebrate the 20 year mark with a Linux kernel version 3.0.

I wish the kernel development team the best of luck with Linux 3.0 and in the meantime we can keep a close watch at http://www.kernel.org for the actual release candidate to be published.

Source: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415

I’ve recently upgraded my Fedora installation to Fedora 15 with Gnome 3. I used Gnome Shell a while back but abandoned it when they changed the meny layout. The meny layout is now the one that made me abandon Gnome Shell before, but I think I could get used to it this time. Gnome 3 looks great and a part from the extremly reduced configuration options I belive it’s a huge step in the right direction for Linux on desktops.

Gnome 3 settings dialog.

My first impression of Fedora 15 was that mostly Gnome 3 was the big news, and that is the truth. Still they’ve managed to put in a very nifty little feature that toke me by surprise when I encountered it. Look at this wonderful thing, it’s not a very complex thing to create, but a really nice touch to the former user unfriendly Linux. I was trying to run a traceroute with the command mtr and look what happend.


[amelia@forth ~]$ mtr ping.sunet.se
bash: mtr: command not found...
Install package 'mtr' to provide command 'mtr'? [N/y]
* Running..
* Resolving dependencies..
* Waiting for authentication..
* Running..
* Resolving dependencies..
* Downloading packages..


After this, the mtr window appeared running a traceroute against ping.sunet.se. I’m amazed at this brilliant idea for a desktop Linux distribution, but at the same time I pray that they’ll never ever implement a feature like this in any of the enterprise server distributions out there.

Check out the rest of my Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 screenshots at: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/fedora-15-with-gnome-3/

I’ve been working on moving all my computers to one room where I can play around with them. It’s almost finished now and all computers and network equipment is in there, but nothing is hooked up to anything yet. That will have to be a later project. Here’s a sneak peek on my computer room, and don’t forget to check out the gallery for all pictures.

See full gallery album here: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/computer-room/

Finally it’s here, my eagerly awaited PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation.

My very own DEC PDP-11/23

A very nice guy named Pontus had one left over which he was willing to give away if I came to pick it up. Said and done, now I’m a proud owner of a DEC PDP-11/23 from 1979. Today I powered up my PDP-11 for the first time with XXDP, next I’m going to see if I can get CP/M running on it. In the end I hope for some kind of Unix, but one step at the time. Hopefully my books on PDP-11 that I ordered on Amazon will arrive soon.

DEC System 20 @ Update, University of Uppsala

This very nice guy who gave me the PDP-11 is also a member of the computer club Update at University of Uppsala and invited us to a guided tour of their collection of old computers.  It was love at first sight when I saw their DEC System 20 lined up in the corridor and I couldn’t resist taking some photos to bring with me home.

Check out my gallery for more pictures of there two beautiful computers.

PDP-11/23

DEC System 20

One of my customers has taken all of their AlphaServers out of use and since I just adore these servers I asked if I could have them. To my delight they agreed. Today me and my fiancé together with a good friend and co-worker went to my office and our data center to bring them home. Now I have a piece of computer history at home, what I got my hand on is following:

• 1x Digital AlphaServer 4100
• 2x Compaq AlphaServer ES40
• 1x Compaq AlphaServer ES20
• 3x Digital DSBA356-RD
• 1x Digital Something RAID Array

Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998 and later Compaq was bought by HP. During this whole time the Aplha processor architecture was developed and manufactured until April 27, 2007 when the most recent AlphaServers reached their end of general availability. At this time HP had developed the Itanium processor together with Intel to succeed the Alpha processor. However the AlphaServers are still supported by HP until sometimes during 2012, but according to HP the end of support might be delayed.

Even though AlphaServers has it’s own processor architecture the AlphaServer run various operating systems. It will run a bunch of UNIX based systems, first of all it’s designated Tru64 UNIX but also Linux and BSD. It also run OpenVMS – a mainframe-oriented operating system which despite it’s name is not an open source software product. To much surprise some of the AlphaServer models also run a version of Microsoft Windows NT specially ported to the Alpha processor architecture by DEC.

My gallery is nowhere close to finished, but you could see some pictures at: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/saving-a-piece-of-history/

Today we had an entertaining and exciting afternoon at work. Yesterday I did the last check about data migrated from our old SAN and today some of my co-workers decided it was time to get it out of the data center. Some short info on the SAN: it’s an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 800 a.k.a IBM Shark SAN, it provides the enormous amount of 6(!!!) TB of disc space and it’s HUGE. See for your self:

I’m relived and lucky that no person at all got hurt, but I can not promise you that the SAN is still fully functional. However it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it was, it’s an old IBM giant steel monster.

For more pictures take a look at http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/ibm-shark-san/

It’s been a long long time since I wrote my last blog entry. Frankly, I don’t find myself a very interesting person and I certainly don’t have any interesting to blog about. I just do the ordinary boring stuff every day like go to work and study. Well, not that I think anyone still reads this blog by now but I could write about just that, my ordinary boring life. Except that I just don’t get why people do that, why would you tell the world about all the boring and plain stuff you do every day? Who is interested in that?!

What I find even less interesting and actually a bit frustrating is people that have a blog and never post anything on it. Yep, that would be people like me. At this point I’m considering to just delete my blog forever or if I should bother to try posting something interesting or at least somewhat entertaining a bit more regularly. Since my website would be even more boring if I didn’t have a blog that’s a pro for keeping it, the con on the other hand is that I don’t have anything interesting to blog about.

I could blog about things like that Ubuntu 10.10 was released today, but mostly everyone I know that got a blog are doing just that. More interesting could be to try it out and blog about it, but wait a few hours and the same people that bloged about the release will have that subject covered as well. I guess people find that interesting to read about and I don’t blame them, but myself I’m a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora user who don’t find it very interesting to read about new releases. Oh okey, I admit new RHEL releases is a bit interesting to read about. A side from that, why does everything seem so utterly boring and uninteresting to blog about? Could it be that everyone else already did or is it because they already know?

If we, for now, assume that I will keep my blog and I want to write about things that would interest not only my nearest and dearest. Assuming that the possible topics are within the categories about me and my life, computers or all of the above. What would you find interesting to read about from my point of view?

Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.