BBC reports that Apple and Cisco has reached a settlement on the iPhone brand name.

Apple and Cisco Systems have resolved their dispute over the iPhone brand, with both companies agreeing that each can use the name for their products.

There are no details on what type of agreement is reached. Probably Cisco would have seen that trying to protect iPhone in court is not worth the money! By now everyone already identifies iPhone as the “cool mobile from Apple”. 

Today I came across fileswap, which allows you to upload a file and then get a file in return! It is a funny idea and I tried a few files. Most of the time I got interesting image files in return. Obviously the quality of the stuff on this network will depend on how people use it!

As you can guess, only text files, image files and pdf documents are supported. You cannot upload executables or zip files. This means most of the malicious stuff is automatically excluded. There is also a 500KB file size limit in place.

Another interesting site similar to this is the LinkSwap which allows you to swap links instead of files.  The risk with links is that it can go anywhere. Hence there is an approval system in place.

Another clone is the SketchSwap. This is the most interesting of all since it allows you to swap hand drawn images. Some of them are pretty good!

When you start Web application in RAD 6.0 (Rational Application Developer 6.0), the first thing you need to configure is the database access. In this article, I will show you how to configure DB2 database access in RAD. I assume that DB2 is hosted on a Windows machine.

First thing you need to configure DB2 is the DB2 universal JDBC driver. These can be taken from DB2 server installation or from DB2 connect installation. The files you need are,

db2jcc.jar
db2jcc_license_cu.jar
db2jcc_license_cisuz.jar

Copy these files to a folder. This can be anywhere(I would suggest that you keep this under Rational root folder).

I assume you have already created a server configuration in RAD. Now right click on the server (from server window) and click on “Run administrative console”. This will open up the administrative interface. Typically it runs at “http://localhost:9060/ibm/console/“.

Login by giving any userId. Click on “JDBC providers” under “Resources”. On the right side you will see JDBC providers listed. Click on “New”. Now select values as shown below.

Click on Next. Now fill the driver paths in the Class path as shown below. You need to change this to point to the folder where JDBC jars are stored.

Click on Apply button. Once you have pressed apply button, you will see a Save link above. Click on Save and then click on “Data sources” link on the right side. Fill in as shown below. Please substitute your DB2 server configuration (IP address, DB name and port etc.). Also note the JNDI name, which you will use in your application.

Click on “J2C authentication entries” on the right and fill in as shown below. This should be the DB2 userid/password. After completing this, press apply and return to Datasource screen.

Now you need to select the userid alias you have created from “J2C authentication entries” under component managed authentication alias as shown below. Please note that this is in Datasource screen.

Now you can apply and save the settings. Click on “Test Connection” to verify the settings. If you see a successful message, you are all set for DB2 access from your Web application!

Any problems? Mail me!