• Help Fund the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship

  November 14, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  The Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship, created in 2008 to honor the beloved advocate of the AS/400 platform, is looking to up donations with a challenge grant. The challenge grant is sponsored by midrange.com, which has pledged to contribute a dollar for every dollar contributed by other people (up to a maximum of $300). The challenge will count for any donations made between now and December 24. Contributions should be made directly to the COMMON Education Foundation here. Midrange.com needs your help tracking the donations, so after you make your contribution, please email midrange.com owner, David Gibbs, here,

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• Profits Grow Faster Than Sales At Jack Henry In Fiscal Q1

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Jack Henry & Associates, a software and services provider for the financial sector that has a decently sized IBM i business, has turned in another good quarter of sales. In the quarter ended in September, which was Jack Henry’s first quarter of fiscal 2012, hardware sales, which includes Power Systems running IBM i as well as other platforms, rose by 7 percent to $15.8 million. Software license sales skyrocketed 30 percent to $12.3 million, and support and services revenues were up a more modest 5 percent but weighed in at $220.3 million. (Within the support and services segment, Jack

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• John Opel, Former IBM CEO, 1925-2011

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  John Opel didn’t want to run a hardware store after college and the great irony (pun intended) is that he ended up running IBM, the largest data processing hardware company in the world at the peak of its mainframe and midrange prowess. Opel, who was 86, died on November 3. He was IBM’s fifth CEO and without a doubt one of its better ones. Ginni Rometty, who will be IBM’s ninth CEO when she takes over on January 1, has several sets of big shoes to fill. (Well, the assumption is that Lou Gerstner’s were not that big physically,

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• ASNA Readies Wings Update For Next ‘palooza

  November 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  Having application development tools at your disposal is all well and good, but having the skills to make use of them in a big way is what really makes the boat float. That’s why a company like ASNA came up with the idea 11 years ago to host a tech conference for the users of its products. If you are admittedly not one of the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to developing and modernizing applications the ASNA way, the ASNApalooza conference is a wise choice to hone your skills with hands-on lab sessions, meetings with the big

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• Add Powerful Generic Processing to Your Applications

  November 9, 2011 Ted Holt

  Each month I perform a ritual by which I attempt to placate the gods Sarbanes and Oxley. One task involves repeatedly selecting a certain menu option, filling the entry fields with different values each time. What an annoyance. Fortunately there are ways to eliminate repetition programmatically, and the use of generic names is one such way. A generic name is one that ends with the asterisk wild-card. Many CL commands accept generic parameters. I have written about this before. But when you want to run a certain command over a group of objects, and the command does not allow a

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• Meet JSON

  November 9, 2011 Alex Roytman

  If you have done Web application development with any modern toolset or technology lately, you have undoubtedly run across a trusty friend of mine: JSON (pronounced Jason). In recent years, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, has become the data interchange format of choice for Web applications. It has allowed many Web frameworks to flourish and has tremendously simplified my own job of creating IBM i web applications and frameworks. That’s why I decided to write a series of articles on JSON, in which I will explain the what, the why, and the how of JSON in detail. Let’s get going!

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• Admin Alert: When You Can’t Answer Record Lock Errors

  November 9, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Recently, a client had a problem with Power i record allocation messages. When a program crashed with an RPG1218 record lock inquiry message, the system didn’t ask for a message reply. Instead, it automatically answered the message with a “D” to dump program data and end the job. The client didn’t want this to happen. He’d rather answer the message himself and retry the allocation. Here’s what happened and how it applies to all i OS shops. A Common Problem The first thing to understand is that this is a fairly common i OS situation. It isn’t magic or a

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• Arpeggio Introduces IBM i Security Monitoring Solutions

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Arpeggio Software last week unveiled SIFT-IT Free Edition, a new IBM i security monitoring utility that, as the name indicates, is free. The free edition of SIFT-IT automates the monitoring and review of IBM i security logs, while an enterprise version provides expanded log coverage, in addition to real-time notifications and technical support. SIFT-IT is the first product suite for Arpeggio, which was founded by the developers behind TrailBlazer Systems’ ZMOD file transfer product. SIFT-IT Enterprise keeps an eye on the key logs, journals, and message queues that the IBM i OS and third-party apps use to collect security-related messages,

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• Lavastorm: An Analytic Power Tool for All Seasons

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The folks at MDS Lavastorm Analytics have created an analytic tool that defies easy description. On the one hand, Lavastorm is a lightweight ETL tool for cleaning and validating data. But it’s also a graphical, drag-and-drop SQL editor. It provides classic reporting and dashboard functionality, but also detects fraud and other irregularities in billing systems. It’s a cross-reference tool, and a business rules engine too. It slices and dices–and does just about everything but make julienne fries. But perhaps most surprising of all is it’s commonly used in IBM i environments. Traditionally, business intelligence tools are used by non-technical business

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• Attachmate Masks IBM i, z/OS Data Within the Emulator

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Ensuring the security of information is the main driver behind Attachmate‘s latest terminal emulation software release. New features unveiled last week in Reflection 2011 R2, such as the capability to mask data on live screens and the capability to prevent users from logging on via unencrypted connections, are designed to prevent the unauthorized access of data from host systems, including IBM i and z/OS servers. Locking down enterprise host systems is not always a straightforward task. While industry regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA are pretty clear in describing what types of activities won’t be tolerated, it’s another task

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