• As I See It: Induced Labor

  April 23, 2007 Victor Rozek

  I’ve been reading a lot lately about the great American labor shortage. Boomers are beginning to retire and expire, the theory goes, and corporations are scrambling to find sufficient legions of white-collar professionals to fill the void. Having looked in all the closets and finding no professionals lurking within, they have little choice but to continue outsourcing high-tech jobs and taking reluctant advantage of foreign labor through the H-1B program. And it sounds so probable too, except for that free market thing. A funny thing is supposed to happen in a free market economy when there is a labor shortage:

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• Merrill Lynch Takes a Closer Look at IBM’s Server Sales in Q1

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes to server sales, the first quarter is never a particularly fun one for IBM. For IBM’s historical and IT budgetary reasons–it is hard to say which one is the chicken and which one is the egg in that situation–companies with enterprise systems have tended to do a lot of their shopping in the latter half of a year, particularly as the year is ending and budget funds will evaporate if they are not spent. Similarly, having shot their budgets in Q4, they are not in a position to consume more gear in Q1, so they tend

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• Marywood University Offers Five-Day RPG Crash Course

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a newbie programmer that you need to get up to speed on RPG, you might want to check out a new introductory crash course in RPG programming from Marywood University. The university, which is located in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is offering a 3-credit, 5-day course that runs from June 4 through 9 called Introduction to RPG and RPG IV. Marywood is a business and managerial science college that offers bachelor of arts in business administration degrees with a focus on Business and Information Technology from within its Arts College. It is also one of the few

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• IBM Goes Vertical with Chip Designs

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are trying to limit the distances between any two points, one way you can do that is to move from two to three dimensions and thereby pack things in vertically. This is what humans discovered as they went from caves to homes to McMansions and from towns to cities to megalopolis. So it is only natural that IBM researchers have worked out ways to stack electronic circuits, thereby making the distances between the components shorter. This is important for two big reasons. First, by going 3D with chips, the shorter distances mean that electronic signals can travel faster

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• JDA Has a “Flying Start” in the First Quarter

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  JDA Software hosted its annual Focus user conference in New Orleans last week, and took the occasion as springboard to talk about preliminary financial results for its first quarter ended March 31. And the numbers, which have been driven by JDA’s acquisition of supply chain software provider Manugistics last year, are continuing to improve. JDA said that it expects sales for the quarter to be between $89.7 million and $90.7 million. Software license sales during the quarter will be $17 million in the quarter, with $4.2 million coming from the formerly independent Manugistics, which contributed $36.5 million to the top-line

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• DataMirror Expands into New Digs and Operations in Europe

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability and data transformation software maker DataMirror said last week that it is going to put some feet on the street in two countries in Europe to help it expand its business. DataMirror said that it would be opening offices in the Italian cities of Milan and Rome and would also open an office in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Milan is the industrial center of Italy, and Rome is its business center and capitol, while Amsterdam is the industrial, business, and governmental capitol of the Netherlands. So these three cities are obvious ones to expand into in their respective

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• California Software Rebrands Itself as Infinite Software

  April 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application migration environment specialist California Software has rebranded its company to reflect the name of its most recent products, Infinite Software. The company makes its living helping customers move their mainframe and i5/OS-OS/400 applications to Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms. The fact that California Software’s products (as well as those that it acquired from the formerly distinct Unibol) are used to move applications off the System/3X, AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 platforms over the past three decades does not make the company popular among some platform enthusiasts. But, application rehosting environments are nonetheless part of the ecosystem, and

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• Calling SQL Functions Directly From a High Level Language Program

  April 18, 2007 Hey, Mike

  The Create SQL Function from the article SQL Cross Platform Interoperability: The Proper Function creates a CLE *srvpgm on the iSeries. Can this be accessed from an RPGLE program? If so, what would the prototype look like? I am not familiar with C and cannot get this to work, so far, on my own. –Gene Note: The code accompanying this article can be downloaded here. This astute reader noticed that when creating an SQL-based function, DB2 generates an ILE C service program behind the scenes. This prompted the reader to inquire if there was a way to call the

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• My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE

  April 18, 2007 Susan Gantner

  When using RSE for editing my CL, DDS, RPG or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other Windows-based applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing. These include some very common ones such as: Ctl-C to copy, Ctl-V, or Shift-Insert to paste, and Ctl-X or Shift-Delete to cut.

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• Two Ways to Audit Your Backup Strategy

  April 18, 2007 Hey, Joe

  Nice article on five things that kill backups. In regards to auditing backup results, however, I find it a little tedious to check joblogs as you recommended. I prefer to use the Display Log command for reviewing the system history log to check backup results. It’s easy to spot missed objects from this display. I also like to use the Display Backup List command (DSPBCKUPL) for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. –Bill Thanks, Bill for bringing up two ideas I hadn’t thought of when I wrote that article. Here are the details on what Bill is discussing and how it can help

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