Fellow bloggers

I have only a handfull of blogs related to mainframe that I visit regularly. I know it's a very personal choice. Still I'd like to put them under your attention, in case you didn't know them. I find them important as they often give a second opinion on certain matters.

I've already metioned Willie Favero's DB2 for z/OS blog who always has some interesting news on DB2 and brings it in a very intelligible way.

There's of course the well-known Mainframe Weblog with most recent posts by Timothy Sipples.

There's also Kristine Harper's Newbie Blog. It has been a bit quiet on her blog, been she now seems to have found her second breath with topics on 'Mainframe Listservs' and some of her 'Favorite ISPF Commands'. Maybe Kristine was inspired by the discussion a couple of weeks back on the IBM-Main Discussion List opposing ISPF and XEDIT to one another. I have the intention of coming back to that too in a later topic as I once made a comparison of the most important commands and settings for both editors.

This week I added three others. First there's the Mainframe Performance Topics blog by Martin Packer, who brought the zNALC Apar OA20314 under my attention.

Another blog is Mainframe Weekly with a more or less weekly comment on mainframe. Main contributor is Trevor Eddolls. Recent topics include 'Big Blue goes green', 'CICS V3.2 - Do I need it ?' and 'SOA - Same Old Architecture'.

Last but not least, there's James Governor’s Monkchips. Where do I begin ? James also contributes to the Mainframe Weblog : "James is Principal Analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, LLC. He leads coverage in enterprise architecture and frameworks, assisting clients with application development, integration middleware and systems management issues, as they relate to operational and business process optimization". James covers a much wider range than mainframe in his own blog, it's not even a main focus, but when he comments on it, it's usually spot-on. Recently he commented on the use of the Microsoft HIS (Host Integration Server) put to discussion by Timothy Sipples in the Mainframe weblog and also posted the reply of Charles Fitzgerald (Microsoft general manager of platform strategy) on the Mainframe Blog.

So as I always say, just check them out.
And if you're as lucky as I am, you have an extra long weekend to do so : our Labor Day is on the first of May instead of on the first Monday of September in the U.S.