herb miller

I remember a Peanuts cartoon where Linus (7) and Charlie Brown (9) are leaning over the picket fence considering life. Linus asked “Do you think there’s one day on your life that’s better than any other?” Charlie Brown replied “There must be.” Linus paused then said “Suppose you’ve already had it”. For my colleagues who…

[Read more…]

I learnt to drive in the IBM Havant car park. On my second lesson I nearly kangaroo’d backwards into the Building 27 machine rooms. At the tender age of 16 years, 11 months and 28 days my Dad said I could have my first driving lesson, round the IBM Havant car park. There was a…

[Read more…]

I once closed a Severity 1 APAR (bug) as “User error” – then re-released every module in the online system to correct it. The system was HVP (High Volume Products – an internal ordering system) I was responsible for the rewrite of the online system. Each online program had an edit on a list of…

[Read more…]

I once brought down both the Development and Production mainframes by running the same SQL query on both of them. When we first started using DB2 the performance was not good enough for online production systems but was OK for decision support. We had a system where the developers had access to both the development…

[Read more…]

There are now over 1400 entries in the Silver Bullet (SB) list (example Saxon Base) When I was working for Chris Winter on the Silver Bullet project we started a collection of word pairs where the first word started with an S and the second started with a B The list now contains over 1400…

[Read more…]