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Alex Woodie

Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.

  • CNX Turns The Crank On Valence

    August 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

    CNX recently launched a major new release of Valence, its development framework for creating Web-based applications for IBM i. With version 6.2, CNX has added a number of new features that assist with improving the appearance and functionality of screens, new RPG toolkit procedures, and better SQL parsing for database interactions.

    CNX’s Valence story stretches all the way back to 2001, when the Chicago, Illinois-based development and consulting shop started developing a third-party planning system that SSA (now Infor) BPCS customers could plug into their ERP systems. That early work on ATOMIC, as it was called, eventually turned …

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  • ASNA Generates First-Class C# from RPG with Encore

    August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

    ASNA this summer unveiled a new version of Monarch, its flagship offering for migrating RPG applications to .NET Core. The big new deliverable with Monarch 11 is the introduction of Encore RPG, which enables IBM i shops to convert their RPG directly into usable C# source code. The new product will help IBM i shops with aging RPG programmers make the gradual transition to C#, ASNA says.

    ASNA originally launched Monarch way back in 2004 as a mechanism for converting RPG code into a language supported in Microsoft’s .NET Framework (Microsoft replaced the .NET Framework with .NET Core back in …

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  • New GUI, Native SMS Come to Kisco’s iEventMonitor

    August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

    There’s a lot going on inside your IBM i server – too much for a single administrator to track it all, let alone do so in real-time. One product that helps automate IBM i monitoring is iEvent Monitor from Kisco Systems. With the recent release of version 7, the company has added a new GUI, support for native SMS messaging, and monitoring for SQL security certificate expirations and thread waits, among other new features.

    Kisco Systems rolled out iEventMonitor back in 2015 as a budget-minded system monitoring tool for IBM i shops. Starting at just $400 for a single LPAR, …

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  • Midsummer Security Indicators: Hot and Gloomy

    August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

    The hot summer heat is smothering Americans like a tight polyester jacket these days. Also having big impacts on Americans are hackers, security vulnerabilities, spam, and malicious emails, which seem to be peaking with the seasonal fry.

    Security software company Securin scanned 8 million addressable IPs among US state government systems, and discovered 119,000 instances of high-risk services that could be easily exploited, according to a report released yesterday, dubbed “The State of Cybersecurity in America.”

    All told, Securin found 3,700 exposed databases (Db2 among them), 3,400 exposed Secure Shell (SSH) endpoints, 2,780 exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) systems, and …

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  • Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

    July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

    Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

    For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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  • What Will the Next 35 Years of IBM i Hardware Bring?

    July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Will IBM move beyond 64-bit memory addressing for the IBM i platform? What about the potential for quantum processors in the next three-and-a-half decades? These were some of the ideas floated by retired IBM Chief Architect Frank Soltis during the recent celebration of IBM i’s 35th birthday.

    One of the reasons the IBM i platform is still kicking 35 years after the launch of the AS/400 back in the summer of 1988 is its capability to incorporate new hardware without throwing all the software developed for it into disarray. There are limits to this adaptability, of course, but it’s …

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  • Programmers.io Unveils Impact Analysis Tool for IBM i

    July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Programmers.io, one of the largest IT services and software development firm specializing on IBM i, last month unveiled a new impact analysis tool for IBM i that it claims will help customers get a better understanding of their applications as they prepare for modernization.

    Programmers.io is a Fort Worth, Texas, IT services firm that began working on the IBM i platform about a decade ago. Since then, it has built a considerable business around the platform, which accounts for nearly half of its 600 engineers. Many of these professionals are based in India, where the company recruits engineers to become …

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  • Infor Marketplace Offers Solutions for IBM i

    July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Infor, which is the biggest ERP vendor for IBM i, didn’t forget about the IBM i when it updated its Infor Marketplace recently. In fact, the software market features a range of solutions that can run on IBM i and work with Infor ERP solutions running on IBM i, the software company says.

    Infor originally launched the Infor Marketplace in January 2022 with the goal of streamlining the process of searching for and obtaining software that augments operations for its 65,000 customers. Third-party solutions available at the launch included Avalara’s tax automation software and talent management software from Visual …

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  • Serious New IBM i Vulns Exposed by Silent Signal – More On the Way

    July 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Two new vulnerabilities in core components of the IBM i operating system were disclosed by IBM last week, including one that impacts Performance Tools and another in Facsimile Support for i. Both vulnerabilities were discovered by Silent Signal, the Hungarian firm that discovered the recent DDM vulnerability, and both are considered high risk flaws that should be patched immediately.

    More security flaws exist in IBM i that will be exposed in the months to come, the company says.

    The first new flaw, CVE-2023-30988, pertains to a local privilege escalation vulnerability discovered in Facsimile Support for i, a native IBM …

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  • SoCal Gears Up for OCEAN Tech Con 23

    July 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

    Southern California’s IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event on its calendar: OCEAN Tech Con 23. The three-day, in-person event kicks off next week with a full slate of speakers and presenters who will discuss the latest advances in the platform.

    The OCEAN user group’s annual summer soiree starts the morning of Thursday, July 27, with a one-hour keynote by IBM’s IBM i chief technology officer, chief architect, and distinguished engineer Steve Will. The title of the address, “IBM i @ 35: integrate + innovate,” gives you an idea what Will will talk about.

    The educational component …

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