You’ve got to be kidding, right? I’ve generally thought you were trying to show better approaches for coding issues. Are you advocating falling back to bad fixed-format techniques? The only conclusion that makes sense is that you’re testing the waters to see if anyone’s paying attention. Or just trying to drum up traffic to your site.

What about a data structure that would have performed the split? Or an EVAL operation using built-in functions to convert to character format, substring it, then convert it back to the decimal fields? Both of those wouldn’t rely on the “magic smoke” multiply and

Dear Esteemed Colleagues:

One of the best parts of writing for this newsletter is hearing from the readers. Whether what you write is laudatory or not, I appreciate your wisdom and your willingness to share it with me, and I regret that I’m not able to answer every email I receive. To end the year, here are some of your comments, with my replies or comments in italics, for the benefit of fellow readers.

–Ted

Hey, Ted:

Thanks for the maze article. I enjoyed reading every part of it. It reminded me that a maze is a curled tree

We recently watched our month-end backup drag on forever. Occasionally, a job log message would appear saying that an object was in use and couldn’t be opened. Do the i5/OS backup commands “wait” on locked objects? Does that mean if several objects are in use, the backup wastes time waiting, or does it save other objects until it times out waiting for the locked items?

–Mike

Mike went on to say that he understood his system shouldn’t be locking objects when he’s performing a month-end backup, but his suspicion is that the locked objects are log files from various third-party