The final straw was when the mouse driver wouldn’t work, either. I took the same devices home and they worked fine on my Win7 machine. She sold the pc to a friend and bought another one with Win7 installed. Everything worked fine

The problem seems to be that Microsoft designed this system to be a generic tablet for all devices–the home screen looks like my smartphone screen, and the natural tendency, and the expected behavior is to slide the icons around, only guess what–this doesn’t work on your normal desktop pc (no touch screen). And there’s no “desktop” mode to get you back to a normal pre-8 screen.

After doing further reading on the internet, I’ve seen several postings that suggest Win8 is not a big improvement over Win7, so I think I’ll stick with Win7 if I should need a new pc in the near future.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IBM-Brings-Windows-to-the-Mainframe-298629/?kc=EWKNLEAU11082011STR2

But, there is a way to make Cobol do it. It’s not quite as easy to implement, because you have to use several steps, but once you set up the template, it’s very straighforward.

You may have used the Cobol debug option to execute displays and special logic in your program, and displaying a list of all paragraphs executed is an extension of that option. Here are the steps.

003100 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
003300 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-370 WITH DEBUGGING MODE.
003500 INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.                       

Line 3300 is necessary, the lines before and after are just to show where to place it in your program. Then, right after PROCEDURE DIVISION, place this code. Line 12400 is necessary, as it’s a stopper for the DEBUG section.

011700 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
011800 DECLARATIVES.
011900 DEBUG SECTION.
012000     USE FOR DEBUGGING ON ALL PROCEDURES.
012100 DEBUG-DECLARATIVES-PARAGRAPH.
012200     DISPLAY ‘—PARA: ‘ DEBUG-NAME.
012300 END DECLARATIVES.
012400 MAIN SECTION.                           

Use this parm in your execution JCL:

//PS001   EXEC PGM=UMCCALL,PARM=’/DEBUG’

If you need to pass parms to your program, temporarily hard code it as a literal in your program, as I don’t think there’s an easy way to add them to this required parm.

There are some special compiler options that your shop has to have implemented for the standard Cobol compile–if these code changes don’t work, make sure that you have TEST(NONE,SYM,SEPARATE) in your compiler options.

I’ve used this version of Ready Trace in several different programs at GEICO, so I’m confident it will work for you. You probably won’t use it every day, but for those situations where you’re pulling your hair out trying to solve a problem, this may shed some light on your program logic.

Here’s a sample. Let’s say you’re coding a very complex series of “if” statements. It works. And you understand it. Until two or three weeks go by, and you have to explain to the users why a report line is showing things the way it is. You try to explain to the user why it reflects their stinking business rule. You even resort to looking at the code, and you get lost in the complexity. Geez, it looked so simple last week.

Okay, here we go–this is a way to capture the business rules, and the program logic at the same time. It’s basically a table with decision questions as column headers, and actions for the rows.

Here’s the business logic: if a student is a senior, he is allowed to take Physics II, but only if he’s a senior. Here’s how it looks in the table.

Notice that every combination of logic for Junior and Senior vs. the two level of Physics are taken care of. No ambiguity. Now, let’s add a little more complexity. A Junior can get into Physics II if he has a letter from his adivsor.

With a big table (many decisions), the logic gets hairy, but the with a logic table, you can make sure that every logic decision point is covered. If you try it, I think you’ll find that it makes things much clearer. And it has great value in capturing business logic.

The two dashes denote that it’s immaterial whether a Junior has a letter or not.

On the upswing?

I actually got two local job interviews last month. Granted they were referrals from friends, but nonetheless, things were looking up. I was fully qualified for both, but I didn’t get either position.

Could SAS work?

So. Cobol doesn’t appear to be panning out. I decided to try the SAS market, as I’ve used it quite a bit over the years, and I think I could pass muster on a technical interview. I created a SAS version of my resume and posted it on Dice. I got three emails the next day for SAS contracts, but none of them have led to anything further, yet. I haven’t given up on SAS, but I’m going with another tack in the meantime.

Never thought I’d say it…

Government work is starting to look pretty promising. As unemployment has gone up in the public sector, gov’t jobs seem to be increasing, too. And I’m only two hours from DC, the mother lode of gov’t contracts. I’ve worked in DC before, so I know I can deal with working there.

I’ve had a search agent set up on usajobs.com for months, but have been pretty much just monitoring those leads, not following up on them. Time to get serious.

Only time will tell, but I’m hopeful. Hey, at least I have a plan.

Let’s say you’ve got a simple drawing, where you have three boxes, representing three processes, connected with arrows, going from right to left, like so.

Now, you want to insert an “if” symbol between the first two boxes.

With Word, you have to select the three rightmost objects, Prog B, Prog C, and the arrow in between, then”group” them, and then you can drag the group to the right to make room for the new box. If you later decide you want to insert a new box between Prog B and Prog C, you have to un-group the group, and then group the Prog C and the arrrow, to move them around. What a pain.

In Visio, it’s a little easier, because you can simply draw a box around everything you want to move, and it automatically creates a group on the fly that you can move around. Easy enough for a simple diagram, but this creates a lot of clicking and drawing to make room inside a complex drawing.

Excel to the rescue

Surprisingly enough, the answer comes in a tool that I never would have guessed could be useful for flowcharting–MS Excel. Here’s an excellent article that shows how to do it.

And the best part is in how to make room for inserting new objects into the drawing. You simply drag your mouse over a partial row or column adjacent to where you want to add space, and insert new cells. The article referenced shows a nice diagram and full instructions on how to do it.

The elegance of this simple capability, for me, overrides the abundance of advanced capabilities in say, Visio. And, you can even link one flowchart to another, using tabs, with a hyperlink to another tab.

Easy text boxes

And another bonus. In other programs, like Word and Visio, in order to insert a text box, you have to go through a series of steps to define the text box. With Excel, you just select a cell and start typing. How easy is that?

These two features, combined with the other basic tools that Excel gives you for flowcharting, make it my tool of choice from now on. Even outside the mainframe world.

Usually, one just copies the code from a similar program, but there are still many details to take care of. The join parameter of sort, however, can make this process much easier. Let sort (either Syncsort or DFSort–they both work the same) take care of all the messy details, and you just code what happens after all the matching has taken place.

Let’s take an example: you have file A and file B, and you want to replace a field in A with a field from B only if the records match.

1. Create a sort step in front of your Cobol program. Code the sort parm like this:

SORT FIELDS=COPY                  �
JOINKEYS FILES=F1,FIELDS=(358,10,A)
JOINKEYS FILES=F2,FIELDS=(145,10,A)
REFORMAT FIELDS(F1:1,600,         �
                F2:1,200),FILL=C’X’

F1 is file A, with a DD card in the sort of SORTJNF1, and file B is F2, with a DD card as SORTJNF2. The FIELDS parm defines the field to match on: position 358, for 10 characters in file A, and position 145 for file B.

The reformat parm defines the output record: the 600 bytes from file A, and 200 from file B. It can be part of the record or the whole records, just as in an outrec or inrec parm.

Note the fill character–X. I use it here, but you can also use something “safer,” like high values, if you’re worried that multiple X’s could be confused with valid data.

Now, the output record will consist of an 800 byte record, made up of record A joined with record B, and will only be done for those records that have matching fields from file A and file B.

So, the hard part is done. You don’t need to worry about any of that messy logic in your cobol program. Define the input file in your Cobol program like this:

01  IN-A-B.
    03  RECA PIC X(600).
    03  RECB PIC X(200).

And you’re done. There are more complicated conditions, where you also want to work with unmatched conditions, where you want to process all records from file A that are not matched on file B. In that case, you use an extract parm card in the sort:

This will still give you joined records of 800 bytes, but the unmatched record will be all X’s. So, you can easily check for that condition in your Cobol program. If RECA = all ‘X”, then you have an unmatched condition for RECB. And vice-versa.

And, you can use this same sort processing to match up 3 files. I’m sure you can see the possibilities. I always use this technique now when I have to match up two files. Try it, and I think you’ll agree that it will make your coding not only faster, but easier to test.

After trying to find something on the company web site, I finally just called a guy that had helped me recently with an unrelated problem, but at least he had a connection to CICS. I got the answer with a simple email, “newc.” Sure enough, that was the transaction that I needed to get it done.

Why is this so hard?

Companies have set up intranets to make things easy to find. But, they never are. Sure, I can always find the cafeteria menu, but I can’t find any reference to a CICS expert. It would be so easy to do.

The answer

1. A forum (or wiki). You could post a question, and everyone could benefit from the answer, by doing a search on whether someone had posted it before.
2. A list of subject matter experts. Duh. Like someone who does a lot of CICS programing. And someone who’s a systems programmer.
3. An area in the company directory where people could list their areas of expertise.

Another example

Here’s another example that fits in this category that I thought was pretty funny. I was trying to find a sort option that would let me replace a character, x’20′, with a blank. After searching on the internet, I found the solution–a parm card called findrep (find and replace). I tried it. Abend. Huh? Oh yeah, my installation hasn’t upgraded Syncsort to that level. We might have it, but who would I call to ask? No clue.
Yes, I could try the Help Desk, and I might actually get to the right person, but you know how that goes–”Tell me what Syncsort is, again?”
I’ve even tried, when I was an employee, to elevate ideas like this to upper management. I never got a response. I think they think I’m just trying to get them to look at a social network implementation. I can’t seem to get my point across.

Take this freebie

So, if any IT management execs are reading this, you have a green light to bring up this brilliant suggestion as if it were your own. You’ll get a guaranteed good response from my peers.

My last contract ended on May1, and I’ve been looking for a job for 3 months now. I keep a spreadsheet of jobs I apply to, and I’m now closing in on 65.

The funny part is that I had two job offers in the same day, 3 weeks ago, and it looked like my job troubles were over. I was on my way to a job interview with a new team at GEICO, my previous contract site, and since I had only left there two months before, and I had the exact qualifications they were looking for, it was pretty much just a formality. On the way to DC for the interview, I got a call from a contracting company in Richmond that Bank of America also wanted me. This was a no brainer, since I wanted to stay in Richmond, and this would keep me local. The money was less, but it was close enough to the GEICO rate where I could make do.

As I said, this was 3 weeks ago. And still, I wait. For some reason, there are multiple layers of approval, and I keep getting feedback that still someone else has to approve something,  and it should happen “any day now.” I certainly have wished at times, that I had kept on driving to DC that day.

Anyway, back to job hunting in general. Here are some of the things I would recommend:

1. Get your resume on dice.com. My last three out of four jobs have come through recruiters calling me after finding my resume on Dice. You can set up a job agent on Dice, just like Monster, and most companies out there, and you will be deluged by so-called job opportunities daily. But not one of them has ever panned out for me. I think companies put stuff out there just to build up their resume database.
2. Let ALL your friends know you’re looking. This is no time to be bashful. My last full time job came about through a friend.
3. Maintain or join a professional organization like AITP (Association of Info Tech Professionals). You should do this even if you have a job. The networking potential is easily worth the money and time investment. And sometimes, you can actually learn something new and useful about IT.
4. Be visible on LinkedIn and Facebook. Use Twitter, but more for searching than advertising. I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in finding a job through LinkedIn and FaceBook, but this is more a matter of covering all your bases than anything else.
5. Bombarding the internet with your resume is a waste of time. See #1 above.
6. Work on finding a job EVERY day. This is no time to relax. Also use Indeed.com and any other job web sites that you hear about. And track the ones you apply to. It’s easy to forget what you did two days ago. This will also help you meet the job search requirements for unemployment.
7. Have multiple versions of your resume. If you can do analysis and P/A work, have a version for each one.
8. If you can work out of town, do it. It increases your chances of finding something. Especially if you live close to a major city, like Washington, DC. That worked for me, as I got a 6 month contract there with GEICO for my last assignment.

And then cross your fingers.