• Guru: Refactoring RPG – Indicators

  July 30, 2018 Ted Holt

  Occasionally I hear someone comment about how terrible indicators are. I don’t think they’re bad. Indicator-laden RPG helped me graduate debt-free with a computer science degree and housed, clothed, and fed my family for several years. I prefer to say that indicators were good for their time, but now we have better programming techniques that I much prefer to use.

  Refactoring code to reduce or even eliminate the use of predefined indicators (not indicator variables) can pay off big in benefits. The fewer indicators a program uses, the easier it tends to be to read, understand, modify, and debug that …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Sacred Families

  July 30, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  Catalonia is an autonomous region in the northeast corner of Spain. Its people prefer the Catalan language to Spanish or Occitan. During the past two centuries, Catalonia has been beloved home to many artists and, notably, architects. In Barcelona, Catalonia’s largest city, the magnificent cathedral Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family) is finally approaching completion nearly 100 years after the death of its inspiring architect, Antoni Gaudi. Sagrada Familia is one reason Catalonia is a mainstay of Iberian culture comparable in stature and influence to the position in information technology held by IBM.

  Although IBM no longer has the …

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• Introducing Four Hundred Guru Classic

  July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application modernization is all the rage in the IBM i market these days, and for good reason. There is free form RPG that opens up new possibilities, and a slew of new programming languages and frameworks from the open source community that have been added to the platform. Just like some applications need to be updated and some don’t, some tech tips and tricks need to be updated while others don’t. Four Hundred Guru Classic is a new edition of The Four Hundred that is going to reach back into the archive of tech tips and tricks and amalgamate and …

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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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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 25

  July 25, 2018 Dan Burger

  We hope you’re not getting tired of hearing about blockchain because a lot of companies are pinning their hopes to this burgeoning technology. IBM is one of many global IT leaders pouring talent and money into mastering blockchain with an eye on big payoffs in the future. This week we also take a look at what companies and individual employees can be doing to improve their futures, including ways to certify your skills. And there’s a new battle brewing between the U.S. and China as the race to exascale computing heats up.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (The Street) …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Number 20, Volume 29

  July 25, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  There’s not much to report this week in PTF Land. Even HIPERs, which should come out every two weeks, are overdue. But you can still check out the usual archive of the IBM i PTF Guide below to help you work through the PTFs in chronological order.

  This week wasn’t a total loss. I attended the Ocean Tech Conference, in Costa Mesa, California, where techno-nerds and old friends had great fun and learned a lot, too! Briefly, the new ACS tool is a work of art! Creating service programs is easier than ever, and the new PDM add-on for RDi …

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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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• Outsourcing Comes Back Home

  July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Getting a full-time job at a company that uses an IBM i platform as its main backend system is not any easier now that it was a decade or two ago, but getting work in the field – particularly as an independent contractor or one working from an outsourcing provider located within the United States – seems to be looking up.

  To get a feel of what is going on out there in the IT job market, we had a chat with Harley Lippman, founder and chief executive officer at Genesis10, which provides job placement services as well as …

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