November 15th, 2009 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok No Comments »
Yes, I’m still alive. Things have been pretty slow this year and I haven’t had all that much to say here at DanZrobok.com. It looks like business is picking up in the 4th quarter and I find myself with an opportunity to work with iTKO Lisa, an SOA Testing tool.
I’ll get into more details about the product later on.
June 30th, 2009 dan Posted in Certification No Comments »
Just incase you were thinking of writing some IBM Certifications, there will be a new promotion in July called Take It Again which allows you to rewrite a failed certification test free.
I have to re-write my WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server and DataPower certifications and am waiting for this promo to start before I book my tests.
March 2nd, 2009 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok No Comments »
Yes I know, I’ve been an extremely delinquent blogger in 2009. I resolve to change that this month.
November 25th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, DataPower No Comments »
As I mentioned before, I wanted to create a demo of DataPower vs the WBI Suite for the conference that I attended today. The goal was to try and show the ‘wow’ factor of DataPower and turn a product that most only know from marketing slides into something real that could insprise the attendees. I came up short of that goal mostly due to time restraints and having some MQ issues. I thought that I would document the parts that cost me a lot of time:
Funny part is, the actual datapower work was pretty straightforward. I created an MQ Queue Manager and once I actually got the TCP listener port up everything worked fine. Creating a Multi-Protocol Gateway and rules to transform and encrypt were equally easy.
Anyway, it’s still cool to have my hands on an actual datapower XI50. It’s heavier than you think 
November 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, DataPower, Perficient, WebSphere Application Server No Comments »
IBM is hosting a WebSphere SOA Connectivity Briefing in Toronto: Strategies for recovering your IT budget with IBM WebSphere MQ & SOA Connectivity
Details:
Sheraton Center Toronto Hotel
November 25, 2008
8:00am – 12:00pm123 Queen Street West
Toronto Ontario M5H2M9
Phone: 416-947-4848
I’ll be there representing Perficient. My current plans are to get a DataPower box and hook up a little demo with DataPower pulling large industry-standard schema messages off MQ and transforming them and comparing that to the time it takes WebSphere Application server to do the same amount of work.
So if you happen to be in Toronto and would like to see a Datapower box in action, let me know and I can add you to the invite list.
October 31st, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, Humor No Comments »
Happy Halloween. Here is my WebSphere Integration Developer costume I sported two years ago. I’m a java component featuring fly over feedback and a busted attempt at a build.
October 29th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok No Comments »
I have to admit that I’ve been a very poor blogger over the last two months or so. It has more to do with a lack of day-to-day hands on with the IBM suite than a lack of topics to discuss.
I’m currently back with IBM (on a contract basis) working on an IBM Software Services for WebSphere gig, which means that I have access to the internal network again. This causes a problem for me, as I’m learning a lot about potential features included in future versions of products, but of course, I can’t discuss any of them until the product actually GAs.
Fear not internet, when I run into some juicy public information, I’ll be back here with guns blazing.
October 29th, 2008 syndication Posted in Business Integration, Certification No Comments »
Prepare for the IBM Certification Test 992, IBM WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced V6.1, Business Analysis and Design. This tutorial series covers information about the business process management industry and tool usage. We'll review general business process management concepts and modeling methodologies. In addition, you'll learn how IBM WebSphere Business Modeler relates to the SOA life cycle. Finally, you'll explore critical success factors for business process modeling.For anyone who is planning on taking the certification test for the Modeler product.
September 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok No Comments »
I’m currently in-between contracts right now, which means I don’t have my hands on a tool on a daily basis finding bugs and getting frustrated. I’m taking this time as a little break and tinkering with Linux and generally decompressing from a hectic year and a half at Perficient. Not to worry, once I’m back at a customer the daily updates will continue. In the meantime I’ll be syndicating whatever I find interesting.
July 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok No Comments »
From the blog ‘Ben means Business‘, Ben Jones lists the 7 reasons why corporate blogs suck. I really like the first reason:
Reason#1: Fear of Transparency
People who read blogs expect to “know” the author, and participate in discussions with the author and other readers. They enjoy an atmosphere that is genuine and has a “living room” feel. In other words, they expect you to acknowledge problems, fixes, and incidents instead of using your blog to further validate cover-ups. Remember, PR ploys are for people who read the newspaper. Blog readers are a different breed and they respect and embrace what’s “real”.
I like to think that transparency is what I am bringing that’s ‘new’ to the area of business integration and enterprise software. I’m willing to talk about the frustrations of being a consultant in the field in an open forum.
I’ve been feeling pressures abound to reduce the transparency, but I fear that will just add DanZrobok.com to the list of useless ‘corporate’ blogs. I’m uninterested in parroting marketing feature lists and pretending the earth is flat.
June 30th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, WebSphere Community 1 Comment »
I think some of my readers need a refresher course on exactly what I’m doing here and everything that I’ve contributed to the external IBM community (aka, the community that IBM does next to nothing to help thrive).
Anyway, I’ve hit a very big crossroads with respect to the external IBM community and my role in it. Over the next few weeks there will likely be some large changes that can range from status quo daily blogging to ceasing my newsgroup activities to flat out deleting danZrobok.com and forwarding it to icanhascheezburger.com forever.
If you read between the lines, I’m at a very VERY low point in my blogging career. If you have any kind of pick me up, I can use it right now.
June 27th, 2008 dan Posted in Business Integration, Dan Zrobok 6 Comments »
I’ve been running danZrobok.com now for about four months now and I’m curious as to who my readers are. Feel free to comment to this post as an introduction. I’m always in the market for topics to talk about in the blog or features of the IBM Suite of products that you’d like to know more about.
Some questions I’d like to know:
June 25th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, Oracle Fusion No Comments »
As my gig here in Toronto doing WebSphere Process Server implementations comes to a close, I’m going to be moving on to a new opportunity using Oracle Fusion and Oracle BPEL. This should be very interesting as I will be able to directly compare and contrast the two integration engines from the perspective of someone who knows the IBM software (some would say too) well.
I may have to update the title of the blog now
Of course, the WebSphere focus of the blog likely won’t change too much, but I do hope to keep everyone up to speed on what I think of the Oracle Platform as I go.
June 23rd, 2008 dan Posted in Certification, DataPower 8 Comments »
I re-wrote IBM DataPower Certification test 284 over the weekend and passed with a 75% when requiring a 60%. Taking the course made my life a lot easier. I still spent two hours writing and reviewing the answers but I was a lot more confident about passing when I ended the test.
I did notice that there is a bug in the Prometrics Windows based client (non web-browser) that you need to be aware of. One of the questions deals with “Which of the XMLs is invalid”, and the answers use xmlns to define namespaces. The problem is that the URLs follow the http:// format and the windows client is turning them into blue-underlined hyperlinks while removing the surrounding quotes. This will make three of the answers appear as invalid XML.
I have emailed the only person in IBM who I know is deeply involved in the certification organization and I hope IBM will either update the question or fix the windows client bug.
The other weird thing about the windows client was that I didn’t see an option to provide feedback directly when ending the test but not yet getting the score. I took a notes about questions that I really disliked and wanted to provide feedback on but I didn’t have the opportunity. The ‘paper’ I was given to record my notes on when writing the test was an erasable surface that had to be returned at the end.
Anyway, the test was pretty much the same one that I had written previously except that the hard questions were first which freaked me out a bit
June 2nd, 2008 dan Posted in Certification, Dan Zrobok, DataPower No Comments »
This is the course that I am attending this week. This will be nice as I’ll have a hardcopy of the course contents. Also, being able to go through the content slowly over a week with hands-on usage of the datapower box will be a huge bonus. When I was trying to learn the machine without the help of the exercises, I was overwhelmed by the number of options available and unsure when to use what. So far, I see nine attendees in the room. Lower than the other two times I’ve been here (WebsSphere Application Server v6.1 admin had a maximum room of 20 and WebSphere Process Server was the same).
Additionally, for attending this course I have two certificates for free certification test (WebSphere 284 firmware v3.6.0 and WebSphere 289 v3.6.1) .
