DB2 cataloging gave me a surprise yesterday. I was under the impression that you don't need to reboot a Unix machine in most cases, certainly not after any installation or configuration change. DB2 catalog (actually uncatalog) command made a dent to that impression.

To make my rant effective, let me quickly discuss what is cataloging.

Is something wrong with the IBM's download director or has my network gone bad? I work for a consulting company that is an IBM partner and as a result I can download stuff from IBM's partnerworld website. I used to choose the download director, which is an applet that makes multiple connections and can pause and restart and download. But every time I choose the download director, it stops working after a while. My laptop shows that I am (wirelessly) connected, my desktop shows that the (wired) connection is alive but nothing works!!! No page loads and the download director shows "connection refused" message. The ipconfig command returns all the values except the "Connection specific DNS suffix" entry shows nothing next to it.

There are very few people in the software development community who haven't even heard of Ruby and rails yet. Ruby is a new programming language and rails is a framework to create MVC applications. The Ruby and Rails combination is believed to make the web application development fairly easy. Some call it better perl http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 and others believe it will take over the web application development world. Time will tell the future of Ruby but for now I have decided to check it out.