• Mad Dog 21/21: Kenya Hear Me Now

  March 12, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  How do you win a war no matter how it turns out? You sell weapons to all sides. That is what IBM is doing in Kenya, where Vodafone’s Safaricom runs the fabulous M-Pesa mobile payment system. M-Pesa’s transaction volume dwarfs that of Kenya’s banks, five of which have now hired IBM to help them get a piece of the action. Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel, also powered by IBM, has similar ambitions in mobile telephony and micropayment. M-Pesa is an offspring of Islamic hawala funds transfer; this worries Interpol as it fascinates the Gates Foundation and cheers IBM. Everyone in

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• The Abacus IBM i Test Drive Gains Renewed Relevance

  March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Catching product transitions to conduct a little bit of new business is a tricky thing, and it is particularly difficult when the product transition that you are trying to take advantage of moves suddenly and unexpectedly. Just ask Abacus Solutions, which launched a virtual test drive service for IBM i 6.1 at the end of 2009 just as IBM was getting ready to stop selling i5/OS V5R4. And then Big Blue, at the request of customers facing the Great Recession, changed its mind and kept selling V5R4 a little longer. The idea behind the test drive service was simple

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• Judge Tentatively Rules For Vision In Maxava False Advertising Suit

  March 12, 2012 Alex Woodie

  As the false advertising lawsuit brought by Maxava against Vision Solutions slogs into its third year, the Federal judge overseeing the case has issued a tentative ruling on a preliminary matter. Judge George Wu in December rejected Maxava’s summary judgment motion, and stated he remained open to Vision’s summary judgment arguments. The jury trial originally scheduled to begin last November was delayed, and there’s no trial date currently on the docket. IBM i high availability software maker Maximum Availability (as the company was then called) filed a civil lawsuit against its larger rival Vision Solutions in December 2009, alleging that

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• Take The 20i2, Year Of IBM i Un-i-ty, Survey

  March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As The Four Hundred explained three weeks ago, Trevor Perry, IBM i advocate extraordinaire, is once again trying to shepherd the IBM i community for its own good, and is on a mission to understand how people talk about the platform formerly known as the AS/400. And he needs you to take a survey, so why don’t you help out? Several weeks ago, Perry has launched www.ibmi2.com, a site that has a mission of building unity in the IBM i community. Just like you and me, Perry wants to help the IBM i community, and he’s one of

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• SUSE Linux 11 SP2 Tuned For Power And System z

  March 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are a Linux user on IBM‘s Power Systems or System z mainframe servers, then you might want to take a gander at the latest Enterprise Server release from SUSE Linux, the commercial Linux distributor owned by software conglomerate Attachmate since last year. SUSE Linux has puts out Service Pack 2 for its Enterprise Server 11 variant of Linux, basing it on the new Linux 3.0.10 kernel, as you can read in the release notes for SP2. The update to the new Linux kernel also includes updates to the key portions of the open source stack,

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• IBM Is Betting On The Power Of Cloud

  March 12, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  “Get your head into the clouds and get back to work!” If your boss has recently issued you this order, you are not alone. There was a time when being accused of having your head in the clouds meant you were spending too much time daydreaming and not enough time producing real work. But, according to a recent IBM study, the number of companies turning to cloud computing is expected to more than double in the next three years. The study, titled The Power of Cloud: Driving business model innovation, surveyed 572 business and technology executives worldwide. The goal

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• The New England Guide To IBM i

  March 12, 2012 Dan Burger

  The annual training and education event known as the Northeast User Groups Conference has been an IBM midrange tradition in New England. It draws primarily from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine. And it’s unique because it combines the several active local user groups from New England along with devoted volunteers from areas where local user groups no longer exist. This year’s conference is scheduled for April 2 through 4. As anyone who is connected with a local user group knows, it takes a group of dedicated volunteers to row the boat. In this case, they’ve been

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• Commenting Interactive Code

  March 7, 2012 Ted Holt

  The tips I regularly feature in this august publication deal with some aspect of source code syntax. Today I turn my attention to another part of the programming process. I want to talk about a work habit that you might find useful. I would say that everyone who writes any type of source code at all knows the importance of comments, but that would be incorrect. I have followed (and written) too much code that was inadequately commented. Effective comments in source code serve as a great boon to the humans who must read or modify source code. As Ashley

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• Interpreted CL Members

  March 7, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I am thinking of writing a program that will read a source member of CL commands, interpreting them and running them dynamically one at a time. I can think of several situations in which such a utility would be more suitable than compiled CL programs. Before I re-invent the wheel, I want to know if IBM i already has something like that. –Tom Yes, there’s something like that. You can do this sort of thing with input spooling. I’ve only used input spooling on occasion, so I’m not an expert, but I can show you how it works. Create a

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• Admin Alert: Getting Started With An i 6.1 Upgrade

  March 7, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  For the second time in two years, my organization is participating in a multi-partition/multi-machine i5/OS V5R4 operating system upgrade to i 6.1. The second time around is interesting because I can build on lessons from last year’s upgrades. In the hope that it can help you with your V5R4 to 6.1 upgrades, here are some of my notes for planning the upgrades. Deciding Between Upgrading To i 6.1 or i 7.1 With IBM dropping support for i5/OS V5R4 and the fact that Big Blue hasn’t released the i 8.x operating system yet, customers still have a choice whether to

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