Pulse conference is coming up next month

Pulse is the Tivoli conference event that happens each year in Las Vegas.  Pulse will again take place at the MGM conference facilities, beginning February 23rd. 

There is System z content at Pulse.  If you are interested in what's happening specific to System z and Tivoli at Pulse, here is a link with more information:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/pulse/zsessions/index.html

The most common passwords of 2013

If you use one of these passwords you may want to make a change.  A study has released a list of the most commonly used passwords in 2013.  Some of the usual suspects remain on the list.  The top five are 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, and abc123.

Needless to say, having a weak password is one of the most common security exposures out there.  Remember watching 'Jurrasic Park' ?  How did the kids hack into the bad guy's computer system?  He left the UNIX root password remain the default (which is usually root).

Here's a link to the article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-25-most-common-passwords-of-2013/

Upcoming z Technology Summit events

Beginning next week there will be a series of z Technology Summit events at various cities in the US and Canada.  The z Technology Summit will provide multiple tracks and a set of updates on what's new and interesting in System z.

Here are the event tracks:
Track 1 - The Gold Standard for Enterprise Computing
Developed for: IT Management, IT Architects and Line-of-business Managers in zEnterprise installations
Track 2 - DB2 for z/OS® – The Database for Big Data and Analytics
Developed for: DB2 DBAs, database architects and Database Managers
Track 3 - Enterprise DevOps
Developed for: Software and application developers and testers, IT application architects
Track 4 - Middleware is the Growth Engine for the Mobile Revolution
Developed for: Application system architects, CICS programmers and administrators
Track 5 - Data Center Operations – Cloud and Systems Management Update
Developed for: Operations managers and system programmers

Washington, DC January 21, 2014 Costa Mesa, CA February 4, 2014 Chicago, IL February 12, 2014 Toronto, Ontario March 20, 2014
To attend here's a link:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/2014summit/register.html

The mainframe turns 50!

It's a new year and it promises to be an interesting one in the area of the mainframe.  It was a milestone for me when I turned 50 (I won't admit to when that was).  Well, guess what.  Believe it or not the mainframe turns 50 on April 7th of 2014. 

It's been quite a run, and to commemorate the event IBM is publishing a weekly mainframe journal.  This journal will aggregate mainframe content across many sources.  Here's a link:
http://bit.ly/mfwkly