Adventures in systems land

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net

I got a call from the IBM IP Law dept today, it seems that having a DNS with IBM in it isn’t allowed. I knew this, but figured they’d let it slip in my case, apprently not. So for those of you with RSS subscriptions, and bookmarks, please change to using http://cathcam.wordpress.com until I work out the details.

As I’m getting older my hierarchical storage isn’t what it used to be, I can’t recall things as well as I used to and the things I can recall are only event driven, still thats not a bad thing. So I’m using this blog to document work and technology related happenings, to help me remember, and to share a little light.

I started my first Cathcarts Corner, a read only blog in I think spring of 1996. I covered new technology for IBM servers and some of the exciting new emerging software technologies around the Internet. That same year I did the first ever demo of a web server with a Java applet linked to a backend CICS mainframe system at WWW5 in Paris, radical at the time, how far we’ve come!

For months, no, years, I’ve been meaning to restart my official IBM web site, Cathcarts Corner, but the time was never right. When I stopped updating it, it was because I was I’d moved into a key architecture and design roll in what was then a radical new area, not sure what I wanted to say publically or which way things would go, I decided silence was better than confusion.

After that the time never seemed to be right to restart. IBM’s adoption of Grid? Business rules workload management? The on demand operating environment? Virtualization? Web Services distributed management? I didn’t know where to start.

I moved to Austin Texas to take up the role of Chief Solutions Architect for IBM System p. at the start of October. A few people have asked me what the title means, what my role is, and the answer is, what ever I can do for the n+1 generation of IBMs’ Unix servers. I’m leading the effort to raise the thinking up above a purely hardware or software role to one of thinking about how customers will use the systems and what form, function and packaging would be appropriate in the timeframe for those systems.

Whatever the job title means, and yes I made it up myself, what I know is that now is the right time to restart a web presence. Rather than blog away on developerworks where many other IBMers hang-out, or or Livejournal where I keep my personal blog, I figured it would be good to give WordPress a test drive. Over the next few months I’ll get my ibm.com site updated and use it as a means to hold files, papers and presentations that I’ll link to from here, but this will be my primary professional blog.

++Mark.