Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Add Powerful Generic Processing to Your Applications
November 9, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreEach month I perform a ritual by which I attempt to placate the gods Sarbanes and Oxley. One task involves repeatedly selecting a certain menu option, filling the entry fields with different values each time. What an annoyance. Fortunately there are ways to eliminate repetition programmatically, and the use of generic names is one such way.
A generic name is one that ends with the asterisk wild-card. Many CL commands accept generic parameters. I have written about this before.
But when you want to run a certain command over a group of objects, and the command does not allow a
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IBM Powers Up Software Development Lab With Rooftop Solar Array
November 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has a Power Systems and System z software lab in Bangalore, India, appropriately enough called the India Software Lab. While there’s plenty of good IT talent in India and the Indian government likes for IBM to invest in the local economy to get the local business, Bangalore does have its problems. And a big one is that its electrical grid and power supply is not up to snuff.
This can wreak havoc on a software lab that needs to keep Power and mainframe iron up and running to do software development and testing. IBM installed a fleet of backup
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Arrow Electronics ECS Unit Keeps Humming In Q3
November 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, we told you all about how the IT distribution business of master reseller Avnet did in the third quarter, and this week, it is time to take a gander at what is up with its rival Arrow Electronics, which is also a big distributor of IBM systems, storage, and software.
In the quarter ended in September, the Enterprise Computer Systems group at Arrow grew by 26 percent, to $1.54 billion, and it even managed to grow its operating income by 51.4 percent to $53.7 million. The electronics components distribution business, which is larger at $3.65 billion, grew
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U.S. Unemployment Rate Inches Down, IT Sector Adds Jobs
November 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe job situation in the United States has improved in the past three months, but the growth in the workforce is still not sufficient to keep up with population growth, much less make much of a dent in the unemployment rate, which remains stubbornly at high levels.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly snapshot of the American workforce based on surveys of employers and of the unemployment rate based on surveys of households. The household data showed that the unemployment rate ticked down one measly tenth of a point, to 9 percent by the end of
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Profits Boom As Magic Software Snaps Up BluePhoenix AppBuilder Biz
November 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreEarlier this year, when IBM i development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises turned in some explosively growing financials, we commented that the company, which was flush with cash, might soon be on the prowl for acquisitions because of that hoard. And indeed it was. Last week, Magic Software shelled out $17 million to acquire the AppBuilder product line and customer base from BluePhoenix Solutions.
While it is perceived as being mostly a vendor of IBM mainframe development tools, BluePhoenix sells tools that work on other platforms. The AppBuilder workbench is a code generator that can spit out code for
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Fun With IBM i Software Pricing
November 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, as I was building the Power 7 motor comparison monster table to see how the pricing on the new Power7 Gen 2 machines, announced on October 12, stacked up to the prior Gen 1 machines, I kept thinking about the sticker shock that comes with that IBM i 7.1 license fee. No matter how you try to massage it or rationalize it, IBM i represents somewhere between 65 percent to 85 percent of the cost of a base configuration of activated processors and systems software running on it. Even when you add in memory, storage, and other peripherals
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Adobe Flash Builder for the iSeries Programmer, Part 3
November 4, 2011 Shannon O'Donnell
… Read moreNOTE: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In my previous articles in this series, I showed you how to use Flash Builder to create a customer information GUI. You learned how to add visual components such as input text boxes, drop down lists, and even a tab navigator control. In this article, I will show you how to make your GUI into a server client that talks to Websphere Application Server Express running on your iSeries, and I will show you how to exchange data with the iSeries DB2/400 database.
I will also demonstrate how
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Admin Alert: What To Do with Vendor Profiles During an Audit, PLUS Two Other Great Features
November 2, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreSystem auditors generally don’t like i OS vendor-supplied profiles. You know, those user profiles that vendors require for software installation, ownership, or running special jobs. Some vendors even require you to give these profiles security officer (*SECOFR) or security administrator (*SECADM) authority. This can create audit points because auditors generally don’t like excessive security officer-enabled profiles on the system. Here are two strategies for handling this situation.
What Is a Vendor-Supplied User Profile?
A vendor-supplied user profile is any profile that exists on your i OS system in order to load software objects, or run vendor programs. It may also
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Adaptable Data Areas
November 2, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf you’ve worked in IT for more than 15 minutes, you’ve undoubtedly been asked, “How hard would it be to. . . ?” The people who depend on the systems we support are constantly thinking of new and better ways to make information systems more closely resemble the reality of business. Every little thing you can do to ease the effort to modify software is worth doing. Here are two extremely simple ways to reduce the amount of effort required to change the length of a character data area.
Consider a data area, FacInfo (Facility Info), that contains one item
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Debugging Authority Failures, Part 3
November 2, 2011 Patrick Botz
… Read moreAuthority failures are the result of attempts (i.e., actions) to access objects to which a user profile is not authorized. Several IBM i features, such as job logs and QHIST, contain some authority failure information. However, the system audit journal has all the information you need, and the OS provides easy-to-use tools to help you quickly find it. These tools are the audit configuration system values, the CPYAUDJRNE command, and the STRSQL command.
Audit System Values
To begin auditing authority failures, configure three system values: QAUDCTL, QAUDLVL, and QAUDLVL2. QAUDCTL is an on/off switch for auditing specific objects, specific user