Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Experimental Node.js Chatserver For IBM i
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRainer Ross, the intrepid IBM i developer that we profiled in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago because he had developed a hotel search engine that mashed up the IBM i platform with Big Blue’s Watson cognitive analytics software, has another project he has been working on. And Ross wants to get the word out that all of us need to work to get more applications running on the Power Systems-IBM i combination to ensure the longevity of the platform.
First, here is his sense of what we have to do to broaden the appeal of IBM i.
-
IBM Grants After License Amnesty For Software Maintenance
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreUnless a Federal judge overturns* the deal, IBM is going to be granting amnesty to customers using Power Systems iron who have let their Software Maintenance, or SWMA in IBMspeak, lapse. This maintenance service is available for the systems software, compilers, middleware, and related core software that is used by IBM i or AIX shops, and there are a lot of customers who have falling off the SWMA wagon. IBM wants to get them back on.
In an announcement letter sent to business partners, the Power Systems division and the U.S. Technical Support Services unit of Global Services are jointly
-
Considerations For Implementing Encryption On IBM i
February 18, 2015 Leo Salvaggio
… Read moreAlthough it started out as a technology aimed at the financial industry, data encryption has become the standard among all industries. Think about it: health records, social media accounts, and state and local records all contain personal information. At the same time, security breaches are becoming commonplace.
According to the “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States” by IBM and Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of a data breach is $5.9 million. That is a big price tag for an organization to pay for something that could have been prevented. That cost does not even take into
-
IBM Europe Deals On Power Systems, Raises Storage Prices
February 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the new year under way, with IBM shipping a substantially completed Power8-based system lineup, and with the company eager to ramp up its Power Systems sales, it would be reasonable to expect for Big Blue to be wheeling and dealing here in the first quarter of 2015. As it turns out, IBM has been quiet as a mouse on the deal front in the United States and Canada, but the company is cutting deals in Europe to bolster Power System sales. At the same time, paradoxically, and no doubt due to the strengthening US dollar, IBM Europe is raising
-
IBM Leads In Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
February 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is crowing like a chanticleer about its recent ranking as the top provider worldwide for both hybrid and private cloud infrastructure for 2014. The latest research shows that Big Blue is growing more or less at the same pace as the overall cloud, but it is a distant third behind the industry juggernaut, Amazon Web Services, and is growing at half the rate of the industry upstart, Microsoft Azure.
IBM has staked a big part of its future on the cloud and ponied up $1.2 billion last year to build out existing datacenters operated by its Global
-
Git To It
February 10, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In my last article we learned about Ruby methods and encapsulation. During the various exercises there were many code changes made and we didn’t really have a simple way to keep track of how the code changed from one version to the next. That’s where source change management (SCM) tools like git come into play and is what we will be diving into today.
The git Website says: “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large
-
Row Value Expressions Simplify Complex Row Selection
February 10, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf you like mile-long, messy, obfuscated, hard-to-read SQL, the kind that makes sane people want to cuss and spit on everybody and everything, then this tip is not for you. And please don’t apply for a job in my shop. But if you have better things to do than debug SQL, then I have a simple but clever technique for you.
Suppose the chief bean counter walks into your office and asks for a spreadsheet of general ledger transactions. He wants the current-month transactions for accounts 120, 135, 180, 192, and 198. Here’s how a novice would write the query
-
Create Excel Spreadsheets From DB2 Data With PHPExcel
February 10, 2015 Bruce Guetzkow
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
It is amazing that so many users manually key from a report into a spreadsheet for further analysis. PHPExcel is a tool that you can use to write directly to a spreadsheet for them. Here are the steps that you need to take to install and create a simple spreadsheet from DB2 data using PHPExcel.
Getting Started
The following are requirements to use PHPExcel on Power Systems on IBM i:
- Zend Server must be installed and running
- PHPExcel must be downloaded and installed
For the purposes of this
-
IBM Layoffs Not As Dramatic As Rumored
February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do.
Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of
-
German Hotel Search Engine Mashes Up Watson And IBM i
February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems.
An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the