Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Happy Holidays And Big Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2017
December 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young.
It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had
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How Do You Do That with RDi? Part 2: Compile
December 13, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn an earlier tip, I began a series on how I do things using RDi that some people seem to prefer doing in PDM. In that first tip, I talked about various ways to copy a source member. In this tip, I’ll talk about compiling with RDi.
I must confess to being baffled by the number of people I talk to who, while they do all their editing in RDi, always go back to PDM to do their compiles. To me, if you don’t compile your code with RDi, you’re missing out on a huge time-saver: the ability to
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Talking Change Management With Chrono-Logic
December 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter.
To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i
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Freebie IBM i Software, And Some Hardware Withdrawals
December 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are coming into the home stretch for the Power Systems and IBM i business here in 2016, and there are still some things going on that we need to tell you that Big Blue is up to with the product line. We have discovered that IBM is giving away certain licensed program products for the IBM i operating system for free, and that it is also mothballing a bunch of peripherals starting next year.
The freebie software deal was unveiled in announcement letter 316-187, which actually came out on October 11 along with the fall IBM i 7.2
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Hidden Deals Related To Power Systems In The IBM System
December 5, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is a big organization and when it comes to the IBM i business, it has been focused on selling through the channel, and has had control of the top several thousand key accounts, for so long that making deals formally and vocally is not something it feels it needs to do. But if you poke around inside Big Blue, you can find all kinds of weird things.
It is helpful sometimes to poke around in the RPQ and PRPQ portions of the IBMLink central information system, which has all announcements, marketing and sales materials, and documents relating to Request
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Server Sales Slow Across The Board
December 5, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe major suppliers of servers to the datacenters of the world that are public have turned in their financial results in recent weeks, and those numbers do not look good even though they are nothing as alarming as what we saw ahead of the recession in 2001 through 2003 or the Great Recession that started at the end of 2007 and we think ended maybe two and a half years later. We may or may not be heading into a national or global recession in the coming year or maybe the one after that, but as far as the server
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IBM Tweaks More Power Systems Peripherals
November 30, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt takes a bit of time to drill down into the annual Power Systems announcements from Big Blue, which in the case of this year happened across September and October. We have told you all about the new systems, such as they are, and updated IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 software releases, as well as various other components. In this week’s installment, we are going to drill down into some of the new peripheral cards that IBM is putting into the Power Systems iron.
First up is a new cryptographic accelerator, called by the unwieldy name of the PCIe Cryptographic
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One Way To Condense A Verbose Spooled File
November 29, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreIBM i includes many reports that we can use to glean a lot of information. If you run packaged software, the vendor likely includes many other reports. The problem with such reports is that they often contain more information than what you need and want. After all, they’re written for the world at large, not tailored for you. It may be that a utility that resides on your system can transform reports into something more suitable for you and those who use your system.
First, let’s get a report.
DSPLNK OUTPUT(*PRINT) DETAIL(*EXTENDED) DSPOPT(*USER)
Running this command on one of the
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Odds and Ends
November 29, 2016 Hey, Gurus!
… Read moreThe end of the year is upon us and the holidays are fast approaching. That sounds like a good excuse for some odds and ends. I hope you find something helpful here.–Ted
Hey, Ted:
I’m writing in response to Michael Sansoterra’s article, Native Regular Expressions In DB2 For i 7.1 And 7.2. I don’t use regular expressions much, but our C# development team does. Here’s a regular expression that I find to be of help.
// count the slashes in the URL Dcl-S Count Packed(4); Exec sql set :Count = REGEXP_COUNT('/qibm/ProdData/Java400/bin/JavaDoc','/') ;–Steve
Three decades or so ago, when
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Fundamentals: Parameter Passing
November 29, 2016 Jon Paris
… Read moreEven though high-level languages make it unnecessary–and in many cases, difficult–to understand what is going on “under the covers,” I have always found a basic knowledge of internal processes to be invaluable. This is particularly true when it comes to resolving mystery bugs. I was reminded of this recently by a number of problems related to parameter passing that appeared on Internet lists and also in my email directly from customers.
My need to understand internals is due, at least in part, to the fact that I learned assembler and other low-level languages at an early stage in my career.