I’ve been thinking about learning Cobol programming for awhile. I figured I would pull out my rusty old book, “REA’s Problem Solvers Computer Science”, since it is the only reference book that I have to Cobol.

Figured I would first get a Cobol compiler installed. So..


# yum search cobol
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
updates/pkgtags | 333 B 00:00:00
============================================= N/S Matched: cobol =============================================
open-cobol.x86_64 : OpenCOBOL - COBOL compiler
libcob.i686 : OpenCOBOL runtime library
libcob.x86_64 : OpenCOBOL runtime library


Well, this looks promising…


# yum install open-cobol
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package open-cobol.x86_64 0:1.1-0.20090209.fc17.2 will be installed
--> Processing Dependency: libcob = 1.1 for package: open-cobol-1.1-0.20090209.fc17.2.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: gmp-devel >= 4.1.4 for package: open-cobol-1.1-0.20090209.fc17.2.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: libcob.so.1()(64bit) for package: open-cobol-1.1-0.20090209.fc17.2.x86_64
--> Running transaction check
---> Package gmp-devel.x86_64 1:5.0.5-3.fc18 will be installed
---> Package libcob.x86_64 0:1.1-0.20090209.fc17.2 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Complete!


Great, this looks awesome! Okay, now how to use it?


man -k cobol
cobol: nothing appropriate.


Um…?


$ o
obconf oldrdist openssl os-prober
obex-data-server on_ac_power openvpn osx
objcopy onsgmls openvt ownership
objdump onto2vocabularyclass orbd oxygen-demo
obxprop open orc-bugreport oxygen-gtk3-demo
oclock openal-info osd_login oxygen-gtk-demo
od openbox osgmlnorm oxygen-settings
oggconvert openbox-lxde ospam oxygen-shadow-demo
okular openbox-session ospcat
oldfind openconnect ospent


Um…?


$ co
cobc colormgr command consolehelper-gtk coproc
cob-config colrm compgen console-kit-daemon core_server.py
cobcrun column complete consoletype
col combinedeltarpm compopt continue
colcrt comm consolehelper convertquota


Ummm…?


man -k cob
cobblerd_selinux (8) - Security Enhanced Linux Policy for the cobblerd processes
httpd_cobbler_script_selinux (8) - Security Enhanced Linux Policy for the httpd_cobbler_script processes
Tcl_RegExpExecObj (3) - Pattern matching with regular expressions


Ummm..?


$ co
cobc colormgr command consolehelper-gtk coproc
cob-config colrm compgen console-kit-daemon core_server.py
cobcrun column complete consoletype
col combinedeltarpm compopt continue
colcrt comm consolehelper convertquota


Oh, that looks like it might be it.


cobc --help
Usage: cobc [options] file...

-ftrace Generate trace code (Executed SECTION/PARAGRAPH)
-ftraceall Generate trace code (Executed SECTION/PARAGRAPH/STATEMENTS)
-fsyntax-only Syntax error checking only; don't emit any output
-fdebugging-line Enable debugging lines ('D' in indicator column)
-fsource-location Generate source location code (Turned on by -debug or -g)
-fimplicit-init Do automatic initialization of the Cobol runtime system
-fstatic-linkage Statically allocate non-USING LINKAGE parameters
-fsign-ascii Numeric display sign ASCII (Default on ASCII machines)
-fsign-ebcdic Numeric display sign EBCDIC (Default on EBCDIC machines)
-fstack-check PERFORM stack checking (Turned on by -debug or -g)
-ffold-copy-lower Fold COPY subject to lower case (Default no transformation)
-ffold-copy-upper Fold COPY subject to upper case (Default no transformation)
-fnotrunc Do not truncate binary fields according to PIC (ala MF)
-fnull-param Pass extra NULL terminating pointers on CALL statements


That looks like it, but still… um…?


$ man cobc
No manual entry for cobc


I’m starting to get a little annoyed now.


info cobc
...Nothing...


Okay, let us start off by checking out the OpenCOBOL website hello world page.

So, I start out writing my program.


IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. hello.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "Hello World!".
STOP RUN.


Now compile.


$ cobc -x hello.cob
hello.cob:1: Error: Invalid indicator 'I' at column 7


What? I thought I just copied and pasted stuff! After reading the doc a bit more, it becomes obvious. The cryptic message, “The I of IDENTIFICATION must be at the column 8 ( 7 spaces before ).”, really means, put 7 spaces before each line. Now this is starting to feel like Python…

Okay, so fix some spacing.


IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGAM-ID. hello.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "Hello World!"
STOP RUN.


And compile


$ cobc -x hello.cob
hello.cob:2: Error: syntax error, unexpected "Identifier", expecting "PROGRAM-ID"


Awww, snap. I didn’t copy and paste. PROGAM-ID != PROGRAM-ID. So fix some code.


IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. hello.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "Hello World!"
STOP RUN.


And finally…


$ cobc -x hello.cob
In file included from /usr/include/stdio.h:27:0,
from /tmp/cob3740_0.c:6:
/usr/include/features.h:330:4: warning: #warning _FORTIFY_SOURCE requires compiling with optimization (-O) [-Wcpp]
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -ldb
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status


Oh, come on! Fine…


# yum install ncurses-devel
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package ncurses-devel.x86_64 0:5.9-7.20121017.fc18 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Complete!


Okay, try again.


$ cobc -x hello.cob
In file included from /usr/include/stdio.h:27:0,
from /tmp/cob3928_0.c:6:
/usr/include/features.h:330:4: warning: #warning _FORTIFY_SOURCE requires compiling with optimization (-O) [-Wcpp]
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -ldb
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status


Do some googling….


# yum install libdb-devel
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package libdb-devel.x86_64 0:5.3.21-3.fc18 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Complete!


One more try!


$ cobc -x hello.cob
In file included from /usr/include/stdio.h:27:0,
from /tmp/cob4020_0.c:6:
/usr/include/features.h:330:4: warning: #warning _FORTIFY_SOURCE requires compiling with optimization (-O) [-Wcpp]


Hurrah! Just one nasty warning. We’ll ignore that for now.


$ ./hello
Hello World!


Isn’t it beautiful?

-Kim

I’ve finally rebuilt my website using WordPress. This time I built my site using child themes. See this.

I am not sure this is always a good idea though. For example, if you build your site off of another theme, and that them is updated, it could potentially break the functionality of your site.

Using child themes may work best in the case that you are selling the themes. It would be an easy way to build a single theme with the base functionality, and then provide add-ons themes to that theme. As far as modifying the themes, it can start to become a puzzle of where do I to make this modification or that modification.

I think in some cases, using a child theme can be helpful, but at the same time, it could be healthier to just keep all the files together. What are your thoughts?

-Kim

Today is host migration day. I’ve been migrating off of a VPS to shared hosting. The main goal is to give myself more time to work on projects, and less time managing the webserver.

We’ll see how everything goes. I’ve got one site setup so far. Only many to go.

I’ve been doing some work with Hadoop Mapreduce lately. The thing I find odd about the model is the lack of pause/resume/recovery. Correct me if I am wrong, but I just don’t see any support for this type of behavior.

-Kim

If you haven’t noticed, but kernel.org got hacked recently. Security is a rather interesting topic. I believe that most, if not all systems are hackable.

Reason systems are hackable:

-Software is flawed. All software is flawed because people are flawed. Computers today usually contain millions of lines of code to help people perform simple tasks. In those millions of lines of code, there can be all sorts of potential flaws a hacker could exploit. An example is the Playstation 3 USB hack. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz)

-People are flawed. Evan if you have software that is perfect, you can usually convince people to do something stupid. Take Kevin Mitnick for example(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick). Most of his hacks were social networking hacks.

In the end, I think it is important to remember that we are not secure. Things are going to get stolen, and we should have a plan B. In the case of Kernel.org, they had a plan B. Git was a distributed source control system, so it didn’t matter if someone nuked their servers, they had copies of the source control all over the place.

-Kim

I have a Spanish blog that I am trying to keep. Well, it is more about learning about Spanish.

It has taught me how to add the ñ to a url. That was fun. You can learn more by going here. Typing with a spanish layout is sometimes difficult because of all the changes.

You can check the site by going here.

-Kim

Since I’ve been dealing with a large number of videos lately, I figured I would create a blog for them.

You can check the blog out by going to here!

-Kim