pcs305's blog

So I've been laid-off due to a company merger. My last day of work was Friday, October 30th 2009, but I was walked out the door Tuesday the 27th of October. Me and what I suspect was about 300 to 400 other employees. It was one of those things that you know was going to happen after the merger was announced but when it came it was still a big shock.

The month before Christmas and the month of Christmas is not a good time to be laid of. If you look on the job boards you will see that CICS System Programming openings are few and far between and you can almost count them on one hand!

IBM Impact 2007 - IBM® Impact 2007 is just around the corner, May 20-25, in Orlando, Florida. This is IBM’s premier conference on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), WebSphere®, Messaging, and CICS®. With over 325 technical sessions, this event represents a great opportunity for you to get the very latest product information, deep dives on the latest technologies, and much more from the IBM labs for you to sharpen your skills and stay on top of your technical game. [CICS News!]

I've added a Football World Cup Tip(Prediction) game for those interested in playing around with it. I will keep the scores updated as much as possible. So here is some CICS Worldcup fun. (I have no idea how Football and CICS can be related and will gladly accept some suggestions :-))

It's been awhile since my last update, post or blog entry. Things have been a little bit hectic for me but I will make a concerted effort to try and keep things rolling here. There are a couple of improvements that needs to be done on the site itself. For instance currently the news feeds are not searchable and I'm working on a fix to include all news feed items in a site search. (Doing a Google search will show the news feed items on the site but a site search won't)

How do you access you're CICS data? Is it thru plain old BMS and a 3270 terminal? Or perhaps you are using SOAP or HTTP via CWS?
Whatever it is you are doing, or planning to do, do not convert you're BMS maps in CICS to XML before presenting it to the enduser.
If you do do that, put a call in to you're legal department and ask them to take a look at
U.S. Patent Number 6,981,257 B2.

Here is an abstract of the patent: