More COBOL resources

I recently came across this post which discussed adding COBOL to a function as a service (FAAS). It linked to several articles from 2020 that I also noticed back then. Here are some other COBOL resources mentioned in the post:

  • Open Mainframe Project – The Open Mainframe Project was founded in 2015, as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment.
  • COBOL Programming Course – Created by IBM and contributed to the Open Mainframe Project
  • FreeCodeCamp – Video that accompanies the course above (August 2020, 116K views – wow!) (1.5 hr)
  • YouTube – How to practice COBOL programming (15 min)
  • YouTube – Learn COBOL in One Video (2.5 hr)

Remembrance of the 2nd anniversary of the January 6th Insurrection

Two years ago today, Donald Trump sent a mob to the US Capitol to disrupt the counting of the Electoral College votes and attempt to have Donald Trump named the winner of the 2020 presidential election. We did not know then that this was the final step of a coup-conspiracy to keep Donald Trump as president. I was at my laptop computer, watching the events of the day on C-SPAN, thinking this was going to be the final step to take for the election of Joe Biden as president. Instead, a horrifying set of events unfolded where our democracy hung in the balance. In the end, the rioters left, and the counting of the electoral votes was completed. I have a liveblog that I created that day, it is still amazing to me the comments of the senators and congressmen/women who tried to protest the results of the election. The work of the House January 6th committee has documented what led up to the events of January 6th. In the published version of the report from HarperCollins, MSNBC legal correspondent contributed a foreward describing the eight crimes of this coup-conspiracy (parts of this are available as a podcast and a Substack newsletter, and discussed on the Brian Lehrer Daily Politics podcast).

Last year, there was a ceremony at the Capitol where the only Republicans in attendance were Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney. Today, the House Democrats met on the steps of the Capitol in remembrance of this event, with one Republican attendee.

Joe Biden gave a speech and awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to individuals who helped keep that election safe.

A remembrance rally was held in Washington DC:

Let us not forget, so that this cannot ever happen again…

This weekend, I learned that Mastodon provides at least two types of feeds, your toots (Your feed URL is [instance]/users/[username].rss or .atom, for example https://mastodon.social/users/brownpau.rss), and your toots with replies (https://zirk.us/@bsigmon/with_replies.rss). In addition, there is a service called OpenRSS which can also generate RSS feeds for different Mastodon activity.

Blogging from the train from Portland to Seattle, wifi is slow, but making do….