• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Guru: Going Dark In RDi

  August 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  In this article I am going to show you how to configure RDi for dark mode. Dark mode is where the background of an application is changed from white to black. Some say that dark mode makes text (and especially code) easier to read. Others say it’s more difficult to read. Personally, I am a convert, but I know other developers who hate it. Maybe you should give it a try and see which you prefer.

  Recently, there has been a lot of debate about dark mode (mostly prompted by Apple introducing it as an option in its operating systems), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 19

  August 19, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Today marks one year since we lost our friend and colleague Dan Burger. It still doesn’t seem real most of the time, but we have forged ahead, like he encouraged us to do, although we all still miss him. I started writing this feature for him, intermittently at first when he was too sick to do it, and I was glad to do it because it was one of the few things I could do to help. Now I write it every week with a weird mixture of sadness from being reminded of losing my friend and pride as I …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 32 And 33

  August 19, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s “ketchup time” here at the IBM i PTF Guide, and we have two weeks of stuff lined up. So let’s just go through it in order and get you all current.

  In Number 32 of the Guide, there is a Security Bulletin for Vulnerabilities, which includes CVE-2019-0196, CVE-2019-0197, and CVE-2019-0220 in the IBM i operating system as it related to the HTTP Server. Here’s the link. Releases 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 of IBM i are affected.

  • Release 7.2 – SI69901
  • Release 7.3 – SI69900 and SI69828
  • Release 7.4 – SI69187 and SI69189

  There is a new …

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• Guru Classic: Looking for Commitment, Part 3

  August 14, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles about commitment control was originally published in March of 2009. (See Related Stories below.) The content of the articles has been updated for free-form RPG. In this article, I will take a closer look at how commitment control works by looking at the journal entries for commitment control. I will also discuss the LCKLVL and CMTSCOPE parameters on the STRCMTCTL command.

  Commitment Control And Journals

  Commitment control is dependent upon the use of a journal. A journal is used in conjunction …

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• Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  August 14, 2019 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

  RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …

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• Guru Classic: Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 1, Navigation

  August 14, 2019 Susan Gantner

  I wrote the original version of this tip a few years ago but I still find a lot of RPGers aren’t using keyboard shortcuts as much as I think they should be. Since shortcuts can make you so much more productive, I’m re-visiting this topic with a few updates for changes in more recent versions of RDi. It’s also a follow-on to my last Guru Classic tip on RDi keyboard shortcuts.

  I’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers in recent years. I suspect that has a lot to …

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• Setting The Stage For The Next Decade Of Processing

  August 12, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is no secret that Moore’s Law is causing all kinds of grief with chip designers working in all parts of the IT stack. It was bad enough to run out of clock scaling when Dennard Scaling stopped, and the industry has done a great job in making processors more parallel and allowing for them to offload processing to various kinds of accelerators, either on the die, in the package, or in the chassis over high speed interconnects. But even this is running out of gas as processors keep pushing up against the reticle limits of lithography machines because the …

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• Is Authority Collection The Right Thing For IBM i Security?

  August 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In the past two releases of IBM i, Big Blue has added new security capabilities in the form of the authority collection that allow administrators to see exactly what authorities users need to use their applications. While some welcome authority collection as helping to tighten the security of IBM i applications, others in the IBM i community wonder if the new information is helping at all.

  Authority collection debuted in 2016 with the launch of IBM i version 7.3. When the feature is activated, it monitors what authorities (such as ALLOBJ, SECADM, and so forth) are being called as users …

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• Guru: RDi Code Coverage Without SEPs

  August 12, 2019 Susan Gantner

  My last Guru tip provided an introduction to RDi’s Code Coverage tool that you can use to determine how complete your tests are. In that tip I discussed how to run it using Service Entry Points (SEPs). In this follow-on tip, I’ll continue the exploration of this tool with some additional details plus introduce you to an alternative way to run a Code Coverage session.

  Before going into the alternative approach to running Code Coverage, there are a few details I didn’t mention in the first tip.

  I mentioned that Code Coverage uses the debug engine. What I didn’t mention …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 12

  August 12, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  It often seems like there aren’t any new ideas any more. Instead, newer versions of old ideas come back around every few decades (1980s fashion is one current example), or in the case of our first featured article this week, every few hundred centuries or so. For instance, the Trojan Horse was likely the inspiration for the most recent method of breaking into data, another idea that isn’t new but is a simple twist that can result in a frightening outcome for IT managers. You can read about “warshipping” as well as get a little taste of the IT news …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 31

  August 12, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Here’s what’s new with PTFs for the IBM i platform here in the summer of 2019.  There are new HIPER PTFs for IBM i 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 as well as a new Java Group for IBM i 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4. IBM has also released SF99675, which is a stack of Hardware and Related PTFs for IBM i 7.4. MGTOOLS is new for IBM i 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4, and finally MQ for IBM i V7.1.0/V8.0.0/V9.0.0 are updated for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3.

  Here are the New and Updated Links in the IBM i PTF Guide this …

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• Stacking Up IBM i And Windows In The Clouds

  August 5, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So how does the IBM Cloud running IBM i stack up against the main competition in the midrange, which is on premises Windows Server plus SQL Server from Microsoft as well as that same stack running in the Amazon Web Services cloud? We can’t give you a definitive answer, but we can give you some food for thought as you ponder how good of a deal Big Blue is giving customers who want to put IBM i on the cloud.

  Making comparisons between on premises iron and cloudy infrastructure is difficult and problematic. The good thing about a public cloud …

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• Midrange Dynamics Speeds Table Updates In Db2 Mirror Clusters

  August 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  With the launch of Db2 Mirror with IBM i 7.4 in June, IBM heralded the age of continuous availability on the midrange platform, bringing IBM i up to par with Windows and Linux platforms. However, while the new software keeps production data in perfect synch, it’s not so great at keeping up with changes to underlying database tables. That’s an area that Midrange Dynamics is addressing with its change management software.

  With Db2 Mirror, IBM has essentially extended a single-server database implementation into a clustered database with two active nodes. As soon as a piece of data is created, updated, …

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• Guru: Passing Parameters To Python

  August 5, 2019 Mike Larsen

  Python scripts offer great benefits to developers, whether used standalone or in conjunction with RPG programs. As I’ve been exploring Python and recently I had a need to execute a Python script from an RPG program. In addition to executing the script, I also wanted to pass it parameters.

  One of the benefits of passing parameters is to give us the ability to soft-code programs or scripts. Soft-coding makes programs more flexible and re-usable, and helps to reduce maintenance.

  To illustrate how to do this, I’ve coded a very simple RPG program and an even simpler Python script. I’ll start …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 5

  August 5, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The temperatures are still rising outside but summer is winding down, especially for those of us with school age kids who know their carefree days will soon be replaced with reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the IT world, this is the time of year when we start to get our second wind. The fall conference season is just around the corner, and solution providers are looking to do a last push, and we are ramping up to make sure we keep you in the loop for all of it. In the meantime, enjoy the last few weeks for summer and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 30

  August 5, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It is definitely summer in IBM i PTF Land. There are a few things to report this week, but not the deluge it has been in prior weeks. There are updates to the Backup and Recovery Group for IBM i 7.4, 7.3 and 7.2, and the SAP 7.1 Final update. There is also a new MGTOOLS for all of the current releases.

  As for tips, August 1 was National Water Balloon Day, and we did not know there was such a thing. But it is the first Friday every August. Go figure. We will be going through new and updated …

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• Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

  July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

  That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …

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• Cloud ERP for Less than $400 Per Month? Now There’s a Concept

  July 22, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What do you call a full-fledged ERP system running on a private IBM i cloud that costs less than $400 per month for three users? If you’re Software Concepts – the Massachusetts-based ERP vendor behind the bold new deal – you might call it just what the IBM i ecosystem needed.

  The IBM midrange server has always been something of an enigma in the IT business. Tucked between the giant mainframes running Fortune 100 outfits and the PCs favored by one-man shops, the AS/400 and its progeny have catered to midsized organizations that demand advanced business functionality, but not the …

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