Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

22May/120

Warpstock 2012, Portland Oregon, USA

Embassy Suites Portland Airport

Well, after another round of considerations and deliberations, the Warpstock Board of Directors finally decided upon the Embassy Suites, Portland Airport for the site of this year's OS/2 & eComStation conference, August 17-19.

Full details are available on the Warpstock site, but meanwhile, here are a couple of highlights:

20Apr/120

Running RConsoleJ on OS/2

This article of mine first appeared on the Novell Cool Solutions site in 2004. As Novell has migrated much of the original content to their newer wiki format, and has still left some behind, my own searching took me some time to find it. So, I am reprinting the article here, with a link to the original article (working as of today).

Consider this a .1 update to the original, with references to the excellent OpenJDK 1.6 port we now have available for OS/2.

15Apr/120

Why I still use OS/2 (eComStation)

As a consultant, I look at computers and operating systems from a "best tool for the job" perspective. Some systems are better suited to some things than others. I wouldn't expect to play modern computer games, written for Win32 or Win64 on Linux or OS/2, no matter how far advanced Wine or Odin was/were. Likewise, I wouldn't consider running a web server on the Win32 or Win64 platform vs Linux or OS/2.

Along with other suitability considerations, I factor in my own (or the client's own) comfortability factor with a particular environment. The Mac object oriented desktop is quite nice, though it's not my environment of choice. On Linux, I prefer KDE to Gnome, but neither of those nor the Mac desktop nor Windows Explorer approaches the level of comfort, familiarity, or ease-of-use which I experience using the Workplace Shell, which is - for me, at least - the main reason I stick with eCS.

Stability concerns? These affect all platforms at one time or another. Unless the problems are inherent to the overall system design (Windows' weak security model and the dangers of the single registry paradigm), such things need to be considered in the course of business. that is to say, they happen. Cars break down, too, but I'm not quite ready to go back to a horse and cart (and carts break - ever change a wagon wheel?).

22Apr/111

The Telltale Hard Drive

And so it came to pass that my 160GB 5400 RPM Travelstar in my ThinkPad T43 became full. In late 2010, finding large 2.5" PATA drives was becoming more and more difficult. Searching, I found that Western Digital had just what I needed: a 320GB 5400 RPM Scorpio Blue.

I ordered the drive from a trusted supplier, never looking to find complaints about newer Scorpio or "Green" models (not that I would have necessarily viewed a Scorpio as a "green" drive, anyway). The price was acceptable, and the shipment was quickly delivered.

Using my favorite cloning utility, DFSee, I cloned much of my trusty Travelstar to the new Scorpio Blue. Some partitions needed changing, though: my handy HPFS eCS maintenance partition, for example, really needed to be migrated to a JFS volume, and my type 35 JFS data volume, consisting of two segments, really cried out to be recreated as a single type 7 JFS partition. As such, these took a little more manual work (read: xcopy /s/e/r/h/t).

Ah, the fun...