GSIS sues Questronix and IBM

GSIS fails running their software made by Questronix running on IBM DB2. GSIS sues Questronix and IBM. That’s sounds like GSIS bought fresh milk from the grocery store, then it expires. They still drink it without looking at the expiration date. They get stomach aches, then they decide to sue not only the grocery store, but the farm and probably even the cow. More here at ABS CBN News.

Added info as shared to me by Bert Peronilla through Facebook who has a PhD in Computer Science:

I like your analogy on the GSIS, IBM, Questronix situation. Here are some technical details as I understand them as of today (July 24, 2009.)
GSIS claimed that the application crashes were found by IBM Toronto Lab to be caused by an “overflow” condition when the table space exceeds the limit of 2 TB. This limit of 2 TB for a table space in one partition for DB2 Version 9.1, (which is the one used by GSIS,) is documented in IBM manuals for this version of DB2. Proper performance monitoring of the application should have alerted GSIS that they were approaching the 2 TB limit. However, this was not caught by GSIS and this led to the “overflow” error.
DB2 should have caught this “overflow” condition and issued a WARNING message, followed by a graceful shutdown of the application instead of allowing the application to crash. IBM has sent a DB2 special build to remedy this error which was installed on the GSIS system as of May 26, 2009. Questronix claims that this “overflow” error is no longer occurring after May 26, 2009.
IBM cannot be sued for this error because it is clearly documented in all IBM software contracts that it does NOT guarantee that the software is free of bugs. If GSIS obtained their DB2 directly from IBM and had a Maintenance Agreement with them, IBM will try to fix any program errors to the best of their ability, and if they are not able to do so, this gives the customer the opportunity to try to get their money back. Only for what they paid for DB2; IBM contracts have a Disclaimer that they cannot be sued for any consequential or any other damages.

I like your analogy on the GSIS, IBM, Questronix situation. Here are some technical details as I understand them as of today (July 24, 2009.)

GSIS claimed that the application crashes were found by IBM Toronto Lab to be caused by an “overflow” condition when the table space exceeds the limit of 2 TB. This limit of 2 TB for a table space in one partition for DB2 Version 9.1, (which is the one used by GSIS,) is documented in IBM manuals for this version of DB2. Proper performance monitoring of the application should have alerted GSIS that they were approaching the 2 TB limit. However, this was not caught by GSIS and this led to the “overflow” error.

DB2 should have caught this “overflow” condition and issued a WARNING message, followed by a graceful shutdown of the application instead of allowing the application to crash. IBM has sent a DB2 special build to remedy this error which was installed on the GSIS system as of May 26, 2009. Questronix claims that this “overflow” error is no longer occurring after May 26, 2009.

IBM cannot be sued for this error because it is clearly documented in all IBM software contracts that it does NOT guarantee that the software is free of bugs. If GSIS obtained their DB2 directly from IBM and had a Maintenance Agreement with them, IBM will try to fix any program errors to the best of their ability, and if they are not able to do so, this gives the customer the opportunity to try to get their money back. Only for what they paid for DB2; IBM contracts have a Disclaimer that they cannot be sued for any consequential or any other damages.

Watch Cable TV for Free Online

Most of the time I work in front of the computer and after work, once I get home, I work again at home. And again in front of the computer. I can say I see the computer monitor more often than the TV screen. A few years back, I remember my room where I had a 35″ TV with cable TV and worked at the same time. Even if I do not pay full attention to the TV, once I hear something that catches my attention, I pause for a while and watch what I heard, and goes back working. And the TV is always left on any of the 3 channels: TechTV (Became G4:TechTV and today is G4TV), National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Now with my situation in the US, I have no TV in my room and I have no plans of buying one in the near future. There is a TV in the living room, but I need work to be done so I just skip the TV all together. Although I have an external USB TV box, my other PC is busted right now, and I do not want to run my work and my TV on the same PC since the software just consumes too much resources.

But recently, I just learned about the Free Cable TV streaming online. So when I am working, I can run this software that streams Cable TV through my Internet connection for free. Although it is another program running on my desktop, it does not use much resources and does not do any observable slow down to my computer.

Removing and Preventing Viruses and Spyware/Malware

Just because you know how to use the computer, sometimes all your relatives and friends ask the same questions over and over again. How to remove or prevent viruses and spywares. Since I used to teach at a computer school, sames questions used to arise and that is also when I started blogging. I used to give out a page on my students blog about anti-virus and anti-spyware but it is no longer updated. But since I still have several friends asking about them, there is a tutorial site that has a page about this on Newbie.org. And it seems to have the proper links in there as well, so I suggest checking that site out as well.

Watching over your kids without watching?!?!

Growing up kids is enjoyable, you do not really want to spy on them, and still give them enough freedom to breathe, but you still would want to monitor them in a way just to ensure they are going up in the right direction.

In the information age, the Internet has been a tool that has been used in both good ways and bad ways. And I guess one concern of many parents is what do their children do online? Chatting and emails have been tools also of the malicious people looking for targets of prey, from pedophiles to scammers, phishing attempts and plain robbers getting information about your home. With the high volume of pornography, illegal gambling, illegal selling of drugs online and adult dating websites, you would want to take some extra precautionary measures.

One way to be sure is by the user of keylogger programs. A good keystroke logger can make parents feel more secure without staying over the shoulder of your children. A leader in the keystroke logging software is Spectorsoft. and you might want to check them out. They have been mentioned in several TV programs and magazines. They can monitor emails, blogs, surfing activity, chatting and more. This may also have other applications in the business world as well as in private investigation purposes.

Cool Freeware for PDAs

I found this cool site with a nice software for PDAs, Newsland. On my previous Palm’sthe m100, IIIxe, Zire 7.1 and Treo 600, I was a fan of AvantGo. But now that I got my new Treo 700 smartphone running on Windows Mobile. Newsland is the perfect replacement for AvantGo and I am happy using it synchronizing all the news I like, especially when I want to keep up to date with the latest in science and technology.Newsland is the perfect news application tool to keep up-to-date while on the go.

Treo, no graffiti but their is a solution!

I had an old blog posting somewhere here about my Treo on what I liked and what I do not like.

The PalmOne Treo 600 has no Graffiti. Graffiti, aside from what it really means, this is also the name of the writing system software in most Palm PDAs. You learn how to write their way to digitally input real text that can be editable. It is somewhat like a character recognition software to converts what you write into real font letters but you have to follow their proper way of writing.

Being a Palm m100, Palm xeIII, Palm Zire 71 user… the graffiti system was into my way of writing already. For me, it was way faster than the on-screen keyboard or any type of keypad. When I got the PalmOne Treo 600, I was dissapointed they took out the Graffiti software from the whole system and it had a tiny qwerty keyboard instead. That sucked for me. I had my Treo for several months now and just adapted to the qwerty keyboard system.

But I decided to get MobileWrite 3.5, mobile handwriting recognition software. Finally I can run Graffiti again on a Treo! I found this in a promotial PalmGear mailing list I am a member of and decided to get Sudoku and Kakuro since I got addicted to playing Sudoku already.

PIM Software

Way back 1996, when I started shifting to my IT career… I used no software for Personal Information Management. For email, I used Qualcomm’s Eudoraâ„¢ but this was for email alone. And the old pen and small notebook did the rest for my everyday planning. After sometime, I started using Microsoft Outlook®, since it integrates email, contacts, notes, task and the calendar very well.

Being concerned with company expenditures, I was at first against the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) since I viewed it as another company expense and the pen and paper, whiteboard and corkboard in the office works fine. But as my former partner Terence Teves was persistent in getting PDAs, I was convinced to give it a shot.

So I started with a Palm m100. And I was happy it would synchronize well with Microsoft Outlook®.

After using Palm® m100, I have used a Palm® xeIII, Palm® Zire™ 71 and now I am using a Palm® Treo™ 600. During those times, I have been jumping from Microsoft Outlook® to Palm® Desktop for my calendar, task and notes. I liked the power Microsoft Outlook® offers but seems to have trouble when it gets really filled up. And it was the email that fills up Microsoft Outlook® so much. And I have used the scanpst tool to fix the outlook.pst file many times in the past and there were times I had unrecoverable data. So those were the reasons I would go back to Palm® Desktop and use something else for my emails.

Since the late 1990’s, I would jump back and forth from Microsoft Outlook® to Qualcomm Eudoraâ„¢ and since last year, I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user. For the past year I was happy with Palm® Desktop and Mozilla Thunderbird combination totally departing Microsoft Outlook®, but recently my Mozilla Thunderbird has been very slow. After opening it up, it takes some time before I can display the email messages and it always gives this dialog box that it is still processing the folders. I guess this happens once it gets filled up too.

The new Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 looks very attractive and promising as I have seen the new interface on someone else’s computer, but buying Outlook is just another problem to face too. And in the past, I always had the same problem with Microsoft Outlook® that when the outlook.pst file gets so big, that is when problems come out. But then again, I think it happens to all email softwares when they get so filled up.

I guess the best solution is simply go through your emails, and do not archive them all. Delete all those sales emails from all these subscriptions, delete the mailing list emails that are already out-of-topic, and look for some nice way to archive the emails. I wish there was an easy one-click way to export all the emails in a nice way to different database formats for better archiving.