President's Message by Don Rima

Before I forget, there’s a special venu for this months meeting. For this month, we’re meeting at the Holiday Inn in Laurel, MD. Directions are at the bottom of the newsletter.

This month we’ve got a special feature speaker, Mr. RPG, Bob Cozzi! His presentation will follow one of our special one-day seminars on Web Development for CGI & RPG Programming. Folks, this is the subject matter that you have been asking for in both the JAM evaluations and the regular WAM evaluations. It’s not too late to signup for this power packed one-day’er on web based RPG programming.

Also, don’t forget David Prescott’s seminar in Richmond on Systems Management coming up on March 6th! Consider this your last reminder if you were thinking of going.

All the details for these and the full slate of seminars can be found at www.wash-midrange.org/seminars/.

OK, I’m sometimes asked, why is WAM worried about doing seminars in Richmond and other venu’s. Frankly, we’re including Richmond and Philly in our program schedule, because Richmond doesn’t have a User Group and there’s a lot of folks in the Richmond/Norfolk/Roanoke/Philly area that are unable to get away to the bigger conferences, like COMMON, but have been really in a need for current education resources. And, by bringing in a speaker to do more than one venu in their circuit, helps keep our costs down, and that keeps KB happy.

We’re toying with the idea of changing the venus of the seminars to be perhaps Roanoke, Richmond and College Park. We want to be able to provide as much resources as we can to our membership and fellow users in the area, as well as be able to leverage this into providing us with great speakers for both seminars and regular meetings. We know there’s a lot of AS/400 shops in the Shenandoah Valley area, as well as in the Richmond/Tidewater areas, and where we can share our resources to all our mutual benefit, we intend to do so.

It remains our goal to bring the best speakers and most timely topics we can find to our community, and to do so at User Group Rates. So, if you folks want this great accessibility to information, NOW’s the time to signup for some of them.

Don’t forget, a new meeting place for the March meeting. In April we’ll be returning back to our regular Holiday Inn venu at US-1 and the Beltway. See below for travel directions.

I’m curious how many of you are dabbling into linux and websphere. Frankly, the smart money in the industry has basically pre-announced those two as serious potentials for IBM statements of direction -- as if we really needed to finally see a document saying that. Anyway, I would be interested in knowing your feelings on these two items, so please drop me an email at dr2@cssas400.com when you get the chance and let me know YOUR statements of direction on linux and websphere.

And for those that are going to COMMON in Indy, have a safe trip and we’ll look forward to seeing all of you on the 18th.

March 2003 Meeting

This meeting’s session reviews several easy to create tools and routines that take advantage of the RPG ToolKit for OS/400, an add-on library (Service program) of procedures for the RPG IV programming language. Included are examples illustrating how to easily create and use User Space objects, perform high-level mathematical functions, retrieve system values, easily generate and retrieve a list of field or member descriptions all from within RPG IV. Source code is included.

Bob Cozzi’s website: http://www.rpgiv.com is one of the most popular (free) RPG sites on the Internet. Bob Cozzi has been in the IT world since 1977. He was a Manager with Tellabs, Inc. the Lisle, IL base Telecommunications Company, for 4 years before leaving in late 1984 to start his own company. Prior to Tellab’s he worked for The Perlman-Rocque Co. A Lemont, IL based distributor for McDonalds Corp. From 1983 to 1995 Bob ran his own, highly successful company, Cozzi Research, publishing books, magazines, educational products, and producing seminars for the computer industry. Bob has been a member of COMMON, a 20,000 member, all volunteer organization of IT professionals since 1980. During his tenure with COMMON, he has held numerous positions with both management and tactical responsibilities. In the Fall of 1999, he was elected President of COMMON, and helped turn around the organization faltering financial situation. Today Bob keeps busy doing everything from contract programming in RPG IV with CGI, to teaching corporations' staffs RPG IV and ILE.

Tuesday March 18, 2003
Holiday Inn in Laurel, MD
3400 Ft. Meade Road
Laurel, MD 20724
301-498-0900
6:00 PM Networking/Cash Bar 6:30 PM Dinner 7:15 PM Presentation

Directions:

From 495, take Baltimore/Washington Parkway (I-295)
Exit at MD 198 Laurel
Bear to your right and Holiday Inn is on right 1/4 mile.