J. Rhoads Research / formerly MobyApp

Hey followers, I have been off the radar for a while. Happy to say I am back. I've been under a lot of deadlines at work --gotta love SOA applications ! Well I won't be talking about SOA , I will be talking its brother, cloud computing. I was reading an article about a trip into the secret, online cloud. A guy from San Jose, CA wanted to know what this magical cloud was. So he started asking some questions and eventually toured an IBM datacenter . He was amazed, yet came away with some valid questions and concerns. What happens to the data? What if IBM closed its doors? Is it secure? What if a datacenter goes offline? I guess good faith in a cloud provider is needed.... He brought up some interesting points. As I work in the Government, there has been talk of using the cloud. Actually we would have to build our own cloud and have government entities give up their data and applications in order to drop them into the cloud. Maybe build a GSA cloud and put things like HR, benefi...

So I thought LPARS started back in the 1980's. Apparently they started back in the 1960's, who knew :) Here is an email I recieved from a reader of my blog: Jerry, Here’s the response I got back from the mainframe folks at IBM. Pretty interesting history…virtualization/lpar’s can be traced back to 1960! In early 1960, IBM used an internal tool call CP-67 to create virtual systems to test S/370, a predecessor of z/OS. The tool eventually became a commercial product in 1972, VM/370. After many iterations of VM/370, in the early 1980s, Poughkeepsie baked the assembler code of VM into "machine code" (we now call it microcode) such that it ran much closer to the hardware. This was to reduce the already single digit overhead of VM and create LPARs at the machine level as opposed to create LPARs at the OS level. So the LPAR code in z and p today can trace their genealogy to CP-67. If I equate virtual machines to LPARs, then the use of "LPAR" really started in...

I have often spoken of how I love the green screen! Nostalgia aside, a mainframe computer was (and still is) a scalable solution, if you needed to run more programs you cut out another logical partition also known as a LPAR. LPARs were first used on old systems like the IBM ESA/390 circa mid 1980’s. Eventually you had to add more processors, memory, and disk space to your mainframe –alas buy it by the drink! I often hear this phase; buy it by the drink. I often wonder what it really means. In looking to the past, I know this task was accomplished with mainframes. Every CIO that I know of wants to employ the “buy the drink” idea. Question is how do their direct reports develop a solution and execute that solution? I think this is going to require some thinking out of the box. Cloud computing or grid computing is a solution for a "buy it by the drink" requirement. The boundary of a system should be the datacenter, inside it is chuck full of storage, processors, and memory. Goog...

Jerry's mobile thought of the day: Peel the Onion!

I am starting my new company, MobyApp LLC. Look for My Fitness Buddy and The Bar Hop from Captain Ahab --MobyApp. Here is a screen shot showing my dabble with the iPhone SDK!

Apple just approved an iPhone application which lets users find their nearest CANNABIS dealer has been approved by Apple. Simply named CANNABIS, the $2.99 app lets users search by city for their nearest medical cannabis suppliers, doctors, clinics, lawyers and other relevant organisations. Also while checking for CANNABIS, I came across the CALIFORNIA HERBAL CAREGIVERS (CHC) application. This app goes for $ .99 and boasts it " allows you to obtain your weed in a legal, medical, and convenient fashion". Plug in your zip code and/or search by city and you will be linked up with one of 700 Medical Dispensaries. Wow, I could say something, but I will not! But I will say there are a lot of apps out there --I better get busy on mine. "And that's the way it is" -Walter Cronkite 1916-2009

Jerry's thought of the day is: "technology will not solve your people problems"