• New i5s Added to IBM’s Express Advantage Deal

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While most of the midrange was focused on what was happening at the COMMON i5/OS and OS/400 user group meeting last week, IBM was also hosting its annual PartnerWorld business partner event, which was in St Louis this time around. At that show, IBM announced that the new user-priced i5 515 and 525 servers have been added to its Express Advantage marketing program. The Express Advantage program was created for North American resellers and business partners last year, and was expanded to 23 additional countries last week. Express Advantage is how IBM takes on the small and medium business market,

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• A Post-Mortem on a Peppier COMMON and an APB for a Black Ford Mustang with a Big Dent

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thanks to grand jury duty last fall, I missed the COMMON conference in Miami Beach, Florida, last September. So my recollection of how last week’s COMMON event in Anaheim, California, turned out is based against my recollection of the spring 2006 event in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a year ago. If I had to guess–and I have to since no one at COMMON has given out the official numbers yet–there were probably 1,500 or so attendees at the show in Anaheim last week. If this turns out to be the case, it would represent a slight increase over attendance at the Minneapolis

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• IBM Grows Chips Like Snowflakes Using Natural Processes

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the dreams of the nanotechnology revolution is to harness natural forces and processes to create self-manufacturing products. (This is also, as it turns out, one of the nightmares that people have about nanotechnology.) Last week, IBM said that it has figured out a way to create a chip made from vacuum-insulated nanowires, and had manufactured the chip using processes nicked from Nature. The process that IBM has created for the Airgap Microprocessor emulates the same self-assembling processes that are used to create seashells, the enamel layer on our teeth, and snowflakes, according to Big Blue. As is typical

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• SOA Will Be Used in Half of the Enterprise Applications Created in 2007

  May 7, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to research and analysis done by Gartner, the services oriented architecture (SOA) technique for creating composite enterprise applications is going to be all–well, to be more precise, more than half–the rage. By Gartner’s reckoning, more than half of the new mission-critical “operational applications and business processes” that companies create in 2007 will be created using SOA techniques. And looking further out, Gartner believes that by 2010, more than 80 percent of these applications and processes created that year will use SOA techniques. But don’t think the transition to SOA is necessarily going to be a smooth one, even

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• BCD Bringing PHP Generation to WebSmart IDE

  May 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  System i development tool provider Business Computer Design Int’l this week unveiled plans to add PHP to its WebSmart integrated development environment (IDE). With WebSmart PHP, which is scheduled to go to beta in June, System i developers will be able to develop Web-based PHP applications that will run natively on i5/OS and DB2/400, in addition to other operating systems and databases. The PHP scripting language is making strong headway as a Web development language on the System i. Since IBM announced its partnership with Zend Technologies last year and brought Zend Core for i5/OS to market, System i shops

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• Monitor for Specific Messages in RPG

  May 2, 2007 Hey, Ted

  I have a CL program that calls another CL program and monitors for specific escape messages. No big deal. I put multiple Monitor Message (MONMSG) commands after the CALL. Suppose I want to call the second CL program from an RPG program. How do I monitor for the different errors? –Ray OK, Ray, let’s set this up for the readers. Let’s suppose your program, which we’ll call SOMEPGM, can return escape messages MYM2101 and MYM2105. A CL caller monitors for those messages like this: CALL PGM(SOMEPGM) PARM(&whatever) MONMSG MSGID(MYM2101) EXEC(DO) /* do something */ ENDDO MONMSG MSGID(MYM2105) EXEC(DO) /* do

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• Overcome the Page Control Limitations of iSeries Access Printer Emulation Sessions

  May 2, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

  Over the years, iSeries Access virtual printer emulation sessions have been used to successfully print a variety of spool file reports from System i and AS/400 systems to a local PC printer. Regardless of the report’s page attributes (page orientation, lines per inch, characters per inch, number of columns, etc.), the printer emulator will often successfully and automatically correct the output and automatically adjust the spool file’s page settings to print successfully to a local printer. However, in other cases it seems like it takes quite a bit of tinkering to get various spool files to print correctly to a

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• Admin Alert: Dealing with i5 Critical Storage Errors,

  May 2, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Part 2 In the last issue, I discussed some tricks for monitoring your system to detect storage problems. Today, I want to shift the focus from determining when your disk storage is filling up to what you can do to increase available drive space. I’ll do this by providing a checklist of several different techniques you can perform to retrieve system storage space that you might have thought was lost forever. Finding the Right Cure for Your Storage Woes Disk drive capacity issues can cause system problems when i5 storage usage passes the 90 percent level. Performance degradation starts

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• MySQL Database Getting Closer Ties to the System i

  May 1, 2007 Alex Woodie

  The System i is about to get a second supported database. Last week at the MySQL user conference, IBM and MySQL announced plans for MySQL to offer professional support for the open source database running on i5/OS, and to enable DB2/400 to work as one of the database “engines” that plugs into MySQL. The plan, when completed, has the capability to bring thousands of new Web 2.0 applications to the System i, and loads of DB2/400 data–and business credibility–to the upstart MySQL database platform. For years, there has been one, and only one, database management system for the AS/400, iSeries,

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• Quadrant Updates Forms Package, Content Management System

  May 1, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software made two separate but related product announcements this week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. The first concerns the unveiling of a new electronic payment module to Formtastic, the company’s forms management software for i5/OS. The second involves the addition of customizable workflow functionality to IntelliChief, its new Windows-based document and content management system, which is being aimed squarely at medium- to large-size System i shops, in addition to existing Formtastic users. With Formtastic version 5.4, Quadrant has added a new Electronic Payments Module that allows System i users to send money electronically using the Automated Clearing

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