• Big Blue Changes Gears Slightly With IBM i TR Plan

  April 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The coronavirus has infected over a million people around the globe and forced hundreds of millions of employees to work from home. But it won’t stop IBM from announcing the next batch of Technology Refreshes, ostensibly IBM i version 7.4 TR2 and IBM i version 7.3 TR8, sometime in the next couple of weeks. Its plans for sharing the information, however, have changed.

  IBM has essentially shuttered its lab in Rochester, Minnesota, which falls under that state’s social distancing orders to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. More than 80 percent of the United States is …

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• The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.

  The hope is that this is temporary, …

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• Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

  April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

  When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (and …

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• Unperspective: To Which Side Do You Belong?

  April 6, 2020 Trevor Perry

  I recently presented one of my motivational life/work balance keynote sessions to a small group. If you’ve attended one of my sessions, you’ll know I hand out crayons and paper for audiences. We use these to engage the audience in drawing and writing (poetry), with a simple premise – now you are an artist and a writer. You came to my session with fewer skills than when you left.

  Of course, there are many audience members who grumble about the concept of being “forced” to use a crayon – after all, crayons are for kids. It’s an opportunity to point …

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• Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.

  They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …

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• Sending Your IT Department To The Teledoctor For A Checkup

  March 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Quite a few of us in the world are going to have experience with telemedicine in the coming weeks, if we have not had it already, and so barriers to providing medical service are going to come down. The same kind of remote health experience is available for IT departments from a relatively new company called Chordia Consulting, which has created a remote IT healthcheck that now has a variant tuned specifically for IBM i shops and their special characteristics.

  And in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Chordia’s co-founders, both ex-IBMer’s with experience in the IBM midrange, are …

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• The IBM i Community Adapts To The New Normal

  March 30, 2020 Alex Woodie and Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we enter the third week of the unprecedented coronavirus lockdown that has shut down large swaths of our country, IBM i shops are adapting to the “new normal” along with everybody else. For essential employees in certain industries, that means working in an uncertain and potentially hazardous environment, while for the rest of us, it means telecommuting from home.

  If you work in finance or insurance along the two coasts, chances are good your headquarters has been closed down and your colleagues sent home to work remotely from laptops, smartphones, and PCs. But if your company makes or moves …

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• Guru: Calling RPG Programs From Python, Part 1

  March 30, 2020 Mike Larsen

  In a prior article, I showed how to pass parameters to a Python script and execute the script from an RPG program. Based on feedback and my own curiosity, I wanted to see how I could pass parameters to an RPG program and call it from Python. After a bit of research, I found the Python interface itoolkit.

  itoolkit is an open source project provided by IBM as an interface to the XMLSERVICE toolkit, which allows us to call RPG programs, service programs, CL programs, and PASE Shell commands. itoolkit can be installed using an SSH terminal with …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 30

  March 30, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  There’s no hiding from the global pandemic so we’re facing COVID-19 head on just like many of the leaders around our IBM i ecosystem who have stepped up to protect their employees and assist other companies scrambling to adapt and survive. To that end, we have added a new section to Monitor called “COVID-19 Response Updates” where you can look every week to get the very latest news and solutions related to the coronavirus. Many of the vendors in our community are offering solutions free or at a reduced cost to assist others at this time of need so be …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 13

  March 30, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We hope everybody is keeping safe during the coronavirus outbreak. The PTFs are a-rolling again, and that means the IBM i PTF Guide is updated to keep you up to speed.

  The first new thing is that there is a Direct URL for Access to Digital Certificate Manager. For example: http://9.5.123.234:2001/QIBM/ICSS/Cert/Admin/qycucm1.ndm/main0.

  There are updates to the primary IBM i releases that still get patched, as follows:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • Java
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • WebSphere App Server V8.5
  • Content Manager OnDemand for i
  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • Java
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • WebSphere App Server V8.5
  • Content

  …

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