• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 34

  August 26, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s still summer here in PTF Land, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, so there is not a lot of action right now. In this week’s episode of the IBM i PTF Guide, we have new SAP support info for the 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 releases of IBM i and we also have a new Content Manager Group PTF SF99652 for 7.4 and updated groups for 7.3 and 7.2. You will also find updated Backup and Recovery Group for 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2.

  As for New (Updated) Links in this week’s Guide:

  • SSHD, RUNRMTCMD: Remote Command Execution from

  …

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• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Guru: Going Dark In RDi

  August 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  In this article I am going to show you how to configure RDi for dark mode. Dark mode is where the background of an application is changed from white to black. Some say that dark mode makes text (and especially code) easier to read. Others say it’s more difficult to read. Personally, I am a convert, but I know other developers who hate it. Maybe you should give it a try and see which you prefer.

  Recently, there has been a lot of debate about dark mode (mostly prompted by Apple introducing it as an option in its operating systems), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 19

  August 19, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Today marks one year since we lost our friend and colleague Dan Burger. It still doesn’t seem real most of the time, but we have forged ahead, like he encouraged us to do, although we all still miss him. I started writing this feature for him, intermittently at first when he was too sick to do it, and I was glad to do it because it was one of the few things I could do to help. Now I write it every week with a weird mixture of sadness from being reminded of losing my friend and pride as I …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 32 And 33

  August 19, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It’s “ketchup time” here at the IBM i PTF Guide, and we have two weeks of stuff lined up. So let’s just go through it in order and get you all current.

  In Number 32 of the Guide, there is a Security Bulletin for Vulnerabilities, which includes CVE-2019-0196, CVE-2019-0197, and CVE-2019-0220 in the IBM i operating system as it related to the HTTP Server. Here’s the link. Releases 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 of IBM i are affected.

  • Release 7.2 – SI69901
  • Release 7.3 – SI69900 and SI69828
  • Release 7.4 – SI69187 and SI69189

  There is a new …

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• Guru Classic: Looking for Commitment, Part 3

  August 14, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles about commitment control was originally published in March of 2009. (See Related Stories below.) The content of the articles has been updated for free-form RPG. In this article, I will take a closer look at how commitment control works by looking at the journal entries for commitment control. I will also discuss the LCKLVL and CMTSCOPE parameters on the STRCMTCTL command.

  Commitment Control And Journals

  Commitment control is dependent upon the use of a journal. A journal is used in conjunction …

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• Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  August 14, 2019 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

  RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …

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• Guru Classic: Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 1, Navigation

  August 14, 2019 Susan Gantner

  I wrote the original version of this tip a few years ago but I still find a lot of RPGers aren’t using keyboard shortcuts as much as I think they should be. Since shortcuts can make you so much more productive, I’m re-visiting this topic with a few updates for changes in more recent versions of RDi. It’s also a follow-on to my last Guru Classic tip on RDi keyboard shortcuts.

  I’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers in recent years. I suspect that has a lot to …

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• Setting The Stage For The Next Decade Of Processing

  August 12, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is no secret that Moore’s Law is causing all kinds of grief with chip designers working in all parts of the IT stack. It was bad enough to run out of clock scaling when Dennard Scaling stopped, and the industry has done a great job in making processors more parallel and allowing for them to offload processing to various kinds of accelerators, either on the die, in the package, or in the chassis over high speed interconnects. But even this is running out of gas as processors keep pushing up against the reticle limits of lithography machines because the …

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