• Four Hundred Monitor, March 13

  March 13, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  This week, our own ITJ editor extraordinaire Alex Woodie takes on the omnipresent dinosaur perception that, even with so much new and exciting tech happening, the IBM i just can’t shake. It all began with a story about the city of San Francisco and the tax property assessment tool it run on “a Cobol-based system called AS-400.” That quote might make you cringe, but Alex points out “the problem isn’t so much the platform, but the applications that run on it.” You can find the links to both articles below and have your own debate, as well as find links …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 10

  March 13, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  All you people looking for some PTF action, you have some stuff to keep you busy this week. So grab the coffee and let’s get going. First of all, there are new HIPERs for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3, as well as Database group PTFs for IBM i 7.3. And don’t forget to check the defectives below.

  As for new links in the IBM i PTF Guide sheet this week, try these on for size:

  • System: IBM Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) for i
  • PTF: Temporary Storage PTFs – All Releases

  And now, for your weekly tip: Before there …

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• Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems

  March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen

  The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)

  For me, all of this pales in comparison …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• Guru: Manage Filters in RDi

  March 11, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  The longer you have been using Rational Developer for i (RDi), the longer the list of filters you are trying to manage. Maybe you have started to get clever with the naming of filters and/or you spend a lot of time using drag and drop to try and keep your filters in some kind of order.

  The good news is that RDi does provide a means of grouping filters — Filter Pools.

  This is a (very) cut down example of filters in my Remote Systems view. Let’s see how we can use Filter Pools to make this list more manageable. …

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• As I See It: The Corporate Perp Walk

  March 11, 2019 Victor Rozek

  Ever do the corporate perp walk? No, not the one with the handcuffs and the coat thrown over the wrists. That’s reserved for guys with lawyers who think the coat will distract us from the reality that their client is getting arrested. I mean the one reserved for the little guys where they give you a cardboard box for your stuff, 10 minutes to pack it, take your badge, and have security escort you in a walk of shame through the building while your colleagues pretend not to notice. Then they dump you at the curb like yesterday’s garbage, left …

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• Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes

  March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …

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• Guru Classic: What’s That Name, Again?

  March 6, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in February 2013. I recently had to hunt out this article when visiting a client. The content is even more relevant as the use of SQL stored procedures continues to grow.

  One of the great things about writing articles and tips is that people will drop you a note to ask a question or tell you how much they liked (or disliked) what you wrote. But even better is when someone drops you a line to let you know they have taken what you wrote and extended it.

  Such was the case with …

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• Guru Classic: Custom Perspectives In RDi, Part 2

  March 6, 2019 Susan Gantner

  In my earlier tip I described how to create a custom perspective and I also described one scenario when custom perspectives come in handy. I promised to follow that up with another way to use custom perspectives.

  I’m often asked questions such as:

  • How do I keep my Outline from disappearing when I’m in full-screen edit?
  • How can I see my RPG Indentation view alongside the full-screen editor view of the source member?

  Custom perspectives can be used as one answer to both questions.

  Of course, when you’re in full-screen edit, you can “peek” at any of your views (such …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs, %XLATE and %REPLACE

  March 6, 2019 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: I’m revisiting this classic tip since the original was written back in 2009, long before the introduction of free-form data declarations. In addition, I’ve updated this tip to point to the new %SCANRPL BIF, which impacts this scenario. And, of course, I still regularly encounter RPGers who are confused by the differences between the %XLATE and %REPLACE built-in functions (BIFs). Part of that confusion of course is the result of wishful thinking on the part of those frustrated by the limitations of %XLATE!

  The first thing to remember when deciding which function to use is that %XLATE operates …

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