Who ever got fired for compiling code?

Q. How do you fix a memory corruption in S-PLUS?
A. Use R.

The IBM AS/400 is an application-platform consisting of custom hardware, an operating system, and database. It is a quite interesting system giving you literally everything that you need to develop a custom computing environment for a company immediately “out of the box”.

Working to deploy a pretty typical Java based system with DB2 and WebSphere backing it up, my co-worker and I ran into a bug with the JVM. The issue revolved around the fact that the web-application layer utilized a byte-code engineering library that resulted in the revelation of a bug in the JVM itself. First level support explained that it was our bug so we provided a stand-alone example in straight Java and that got us to second level support.

They explained that they would look into it and that that we should watch for a release note in the next version of OS/400. This was getting kind of silly so our department wanted to cash-in in one of their immediate-support “get out of jail free cards” that you get when you spend hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars per quarter for IBM support. That got us to third level support.

Upon reviewing the issue that we researched, tracked down the exact situation where the bug occurred, and demonstrated a reproducible example, they expertly agreed that there was indeed a bug in their JVM, that they would have it fixed for the next release six months from now, and thanks for letting them know.

One of the value-adds of purchasing something from IBM is that every C-level knows that you can’t get fired for buying IBM. Something that you can’t have done either apparently is computing Java! 😛