The TechnicalCounsel(sm) News – December 2010
Volume 7 Number 2 December 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Welcome to the December issue of The TechnicalCounselSM News, our consulting practice's quarterly newsletter. We hope that everyone has a happy and safe New Year's season.

In this issue:

Using OpenVMS Technologies to Build an Agile Computing Base presented at Connect 2010 OpenVMS BootCamp

As part of the 2010 Connect OpenVMS BootCamp, Mr. Gezelter presented Using OpenVMS Technololgies to Build an Agile Computing Base on September 14, 2010 in Nashua, New Hampshire. An encore of this presentation was done two days later on September 16, 2010.

Cloud computing is often discussed these days. Cloud computing may be freshly coined, but its principles have a long history. Managed properly, OpenVMS clusters are effectively a “cloud.” OpenVMS clusters, when configured correctly, and with some members provisioned as fractional virtual machines, agilely enable continuous rightsizing, increasing the already impressive flexibility of OpenVMS to a new level. This increased flexibility and improved efficiency improves overall availability and reduces operating and capital costs.

We understand that many who would have liked to attend the BootCamp were unable to fit this event into their schedule. As a contribution to the entire OpenVMS community, we are making the audio tracks from these presentations available to the entire OpenVMS community.

The complete abstract of this talk and information about the presentation, including MP3 audio tracks for both presentations, can be found at:

http://www.rlgsc.com/openvms-bootcamp/2010/agile-openvms.html

2010 Trenton Computer Festival and Professional Conference presentations available

Mr. Gezelter did three presentations at the 2010 Trenton Computer Fair and associated Professional Conference on April 23-24, 2010.

He presented Square Pegs/Round Holes: Toolset Strengths and Weaknesses, IT and Ethics: Guidelines for Professionals, and Disposable Virtual Machines; each of which draws on his experiences dealing with client problems in the information technology sphere.

The complete abstracts of these talks and information about each presentation, including the slide sets for all three presentations, can be found via:

http://www.rlgsc.com/trentoncomputerfestival/2010/index.html

The OpenVMS Consultant explores continuous rightsizing, leveraging F$PARSE, and hierarchically customizing SYLOGIN processing

The OpenVMS Consultant, Mr. Gezelter's column on OpenVMS.org, continues to explore topics of interest to OpenVMS users and managers, exploring OpenVMS' rich suite of functionality. This embracive functionality provides significant opportunities to leverage inherent OpenVMS capabilities to streamline costs, both in the hardware context and in terms of software complexity. Some installments cover standard functionality that is often not fully understood, other installments explore using facilities in innovative ways.

Recent installments in the column have discussed continuous rightsizing; using F$PARSE to implement standard OpenVMS filename defaulting within command files; and a variety of ways to leverage the SYLOGIN facility – implementing and debugging system, group-wide, and applications-specific login extensions without the need to alter user's individual LOGIN.COM files.

Future entries will explore other topics within the OpenVMS universe. The entire series can be accessed at:

http://www.openvms.org/Gezelter

Ruminations – An IT Blog explores diverse issues of technical and general interest

Ruminations – An IT Blog continues to explore general IT issues with broader implications. Recent entries have examined a variety of topics, some directly IT-related, and others applicable to security and processes. Recent articles have addressed a wide range of topics, all of which have interesting implications.

Topics have included the recent changes in Transportation Security Agency (TSA) search procedures, and their implications for public safety; the challenges of information flow in today's online world where capabilities previously the province of nation states are now available gratis online; whether the Google Streetview capturing of unencrypted Wi-Fi data was a privacy issue (or should we be more concerned about far less identifiable parties); covert emplacement of GPS recorders without warrants and the privacy implications of the information recorded by those devices; the use and creation of disposable virtual machines; and the business implications of greatly expanded transactional reporting enacted by the US Congress, a subject that is of particular import for corporate IT staffs; and how inexpensive hosting accounts can be utilized as a “data serving cloud” to improve the performance of in-house web applications.

All entries in Ruminations – An IT Blog can be accessed via the blog's home page at:

http://www.rlgsc.com/blog/ruminations/ruminations.html

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(c) copyright 2010, Robert Gezelter Software Consultant, All Rights Reserved.
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