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.
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In Support Of IBM i Technical Competence
August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie
The lack of IBM i skills in the midrange community has been debated at great length, in this publication and other venues. Whether there’s a critical shortage of IBM i skills or not, nobody will argue with the fact that it’s important to keep one’s technical abilities up-to-date, which is the focus of a new educational outfit calling itself IBM i Competence that’s holding its first official event this week in Scandinavia.
IBM i Competence was founded by Power Systems Champion Torbjörn Appehl earlier this year with the goal of providing targeted educational sessions on specific IBM i topics for …
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GDPR Compliance On IBM i A Work In Progress, Survey Finds
August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie
About 50 percent of IBM i shops say they’re compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to a recent survey by SoftLanding Systems. However, about a quarter of survey respondents say they have a way to go before they’re confident in their GDPR preparedness, the IBM i vendor says.
GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, made big changes to laws governing how companies and other organizations are allowed to collect, process, and store data about European Union citizens. While not every American firm is required to adhere to GDPR, those that do business with …
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Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month
August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie
IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.
The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …
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Visual LANSA Goes Low-Code With High Tech Update
August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie
As one of the original advocates of fourth-generation language (4GLs), LANSA knows a thing or two about the value of abstraction layers. While the hype around 4GLs has long since passed, LANSA continues to build on its foundation with new features aimed at keeping customers ahead of the technology curve. That work is on display with the recent update to its “low-code” environment, Visual LANSA version 14 SP2.
Visual LANSA is LANSA‘s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for creating modern graphical applications. The IDE employs numerous techniques to minimize the amount of Rapid Development and Maintenance Language (RDML, its …
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CIO Summit Brings Execs Up To Speed On IBM i
August 6, 2018 Alex Woodie
The IBM i server is mystery to many. Not only does it run on abnormal hardware – at least compared to “standards-based” X86 computers – but its programming languages, user interfaces, and administrative tasks can seem otherworldly to the uninitiated. For Alan Seiden, the organizer of an IBM i-focused executive get-together known as the CIO Summit, dispelling the platform’s mystery represents something of a personal challenge.
The next CIO Summit is in about two months, and Seiden, who’s a well-known PHP on IBM i expert as well as the founder and principle of the Seiden Group, is looking forward …
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Syncsort Unveils MFA, Bolsters IBM i Security Suites
July 30, 2018 Alex Woodie
Syncsort last week unveiled new security and auditing capabilities for its IBM i user base, including a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution dubbed the Cilasoft Reinforced Authentication Manager for IBM i, as well as new releases of the Cilasoft and Enforcive security suites.
Developing and selling security software has become one of the focuses for Syncsort, the Pearl River, New York, company that previously concentrated on developing mainframe data integration solutions and extract, transfer, and load (ETL) technology for distributed Hadoop clusters.
Since it merged with IBM i high availability vendor Vision Solutions last year, Syncsort has acquired several …
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More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i
July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie
Open source may be the future of IBM i. It certainly seems that way at the moment. But if open source is going to soar to new heights on the platform, it will need better integration with the existing processes in place to monitor and manage the platform.
That’s the opinion of JK Grafe, the CEO of Quad Nova Group, a Jacksonville, Florida-based IBM i consultancy that has offices up the Eastern Seaboard. By Grafe’s own admission, open source is a great thing for the platform. But the difficulty in seeing what’s actually going on with open source workloads …
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IBM i Gets An Influx Of Machine Learning Tooling
July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie
Thanks to the new RPM and Yum open source software delivery methods unleased by IBM earlier this year, IBM i shops can now run the latest in Python-based machine learning tools, including NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn.
Interest in using Python to build machine learning models has exploded in recent years, and we’re now at the point where Python is considered to be the predominant language for doing data science, followed closely by R, which is taught more in academic settings.
While the capability to train or run a machine learning model isn’t generally the number one requirement for organizations …
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IBM i Slated to Support Java 11
July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie
Don’t look now, but Java is in the midst of a major upheaval that will not change not only how the programming language is used by the wider world, but also how it’s used on the IBM i platform. For those running Java on the midrange platform, the forthcoming release of Java 11 is the one to watch.
While Java has (sort of) been open source since Sun Microsystems released the object-oriented language into the world 27 years ago, it took much more solid steps toward being a true open source project last year when Oracle announced plans to release …
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Db2 For i Innovation: Expect The Unexpected
July 23, 2018 Alex Woodie
When it comes to planning the future of the database at the heart of the IBM i platform, there’s a lot to be said for taking a conservative approach. Why mess with success? But that’s not necessarily the route taken by IBM’s architect for Db2 for i, Scott Forstie, and the IBM i community is the better for it.
As the business architect in charge of Db2 for i, it is Forstie’s job to ensure the database meets the needs of IBM i shops around the world. IBM has a duty to protect the investment that its clients have made …
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