• Yes, IBM i Shops Have AI Options, Too

  April 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies of all shapes and sizes are encouraged to adopt artificial intelligence these days. Most of today’s AI tech, however, was developed to run in open systems and X86 environments. But there are a growing number of AI options from IBM and its partners for customers that want to keep their data resident on the Power Systems platform.

  There’s no denying there’s a lot of hype around AI today. One can scarcely turn on the TV or open a magazine or Web page without being inundated with claims of how leading organizations are using AI to gain a competitive edge, …

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• RTPA Looking For A Few Good Software Reviewers

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Throughout the six decades of commercial computing, one thing has been universally true. Every good application development or system management tool, from the simplest debuggers all the way up to complex DevOps systems that can absorb multiple continuous streams of new code being mashed up against old code without making a mess of things, got its start because some programmer or administrator was so annoyed at how something worked – or more precisely didn’t work – that he or she created a new tool that did the job a whole lot better.

  This is precisely the beginning story of Real-Time …

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• Guru: Dealing With RPG Errors and Embedded SQL

  April 8, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted! I’m having trouble using some of the new techniques I learned at the RPG and DB2 Summit. Below is a screen shot of a program I am writing. I cannot figure out why the compiler doesn’t like it. Can you see anything that would be causing the declarations to fail?

  — Mike

  I glanced over Mike’s code and noticed that he used a correlation name in the SELECT and WHERE clauses, but did not define that correlation name for any of the tables, like this:

  SELECT x.onefield, x.twofield, x.redfield, x.bluefield
  FROM MYTABLE
  WHERE x.onefield = :TestValue;
  

  He …

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• As I See It: Why The Long Face?

  April 8, 2019 Victor Rozek

  For an increasing number of Americans, the elusive search for happiness starts and ends each day with screen time. Smartphones, symbolic of a larger attachment to, and dependence on technology, have become the fifth appendage, glued to their owners like fake fingernails. They amplify and simplify, offering seemingly endless relationships without the need for relating, and limitless connection without the bother of bonding.

  To keep the voracious social media beast fed, most of us have become both content providers and consumers. Everyone, it seems, is flogging their own reality show. Each day we post our next episode and anxiously await …

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• Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

  These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …

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• IBM Clarifies Java Options Following Oracle License Crackdown

  April 3, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are wondering how to maintain their Java environments following Oracle’s recent decision to restrict access to Java runtimes and development tools should pay close attention to some recommendations that IBM is making concerning Java, particularly how it impacts Access Client Solutions (ACS).

  Oracle is slated to ship a critical security update for Java Standard Edition (SE) 8 in a week and a half. But unless you have bought a commercial license for Java SE 8, your business won’t be getting that update, which could leave your systems vulnerable. That’s because in late 2018, Oracle made some …

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• IBM Patches New Security Flaws in Java, OpenSSL

  April 3, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM this week patched a series of flaws in IBM i’s Java environment, including a pair of very serious problems in the OpenJ9 runtime that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, in addition to a series of less-severe Java vulnerabilities. The company also fixed a new flaw found in IBM i’s OpenSSL implementation.

  A total of seven Java flaws that impact IBM i versions 7.1 through 7.3 were addressed with one security bulletin issued by IBM on March 29. IBM issued Group PTFs for each release of the operating system to address them. A single OpenSSL flaw also …

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• Attention Synon Users: You Can Automate Your Move To RPG Free Form And DevOps

  April 3, 2019 Philippe Magne

  (Sponsored Content) Depending on who you ask, there are about 1,000 IBM i shops that used the CA 2E (Synon) CASE tool to create their applications and are still using this tool to maintain those applications. This is not an easy task any more, and there is a much better way.

  After three years in development and very stringent testing with five early adopter Synon shops, ARCAD Software is rolling out what it calls Modernization as a Service, or MaaS for short, which seeks to completely automate the move from Synon generated code to modern RPG Free Form, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 3

  April 3, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  It was nice to see some of our IBM i community getting into the April 1 spirit this week, even if it did make the job of finding news of the week tricky for me. I almost fell for Profound Logic’s “rebrand” into Profound Logistics, and I enjoyed seeing the iTech Solutions new superhero work uniforms. There was some real news this week as well, which we have gathered and summarized for you in true Four Hundred Monitor fashion. Read on to find out what’s up in the IT world, and don’t forget to check the calendar for upcoming webinars …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 13

  April 3, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  This week in the IBM i PTF Guide, we are obsessing about security. There is a security bulletin out that explains that there are multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime that affect IBM i. There is consequently a new Java Group for all three releases – IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. See this link for further details.

  There is also a separate security bulletin, CVE-2018-14647, relating to Python that affects IBM i, and this affects all three currently supported releases as well. See this link for the scoop. For Python 2.7 …

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