• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 21

  May 26, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Hello everyone. First, a reminder. Our apologies, ACS 1.1.8.7 is the most current version of ACS, and is not being pulled in favor of 1.1.8.8. Assumptions were made at the case level that were later resolved and not communicated to us. Again, our apologies. The current version if you apply the fix will read “TESTFIX_1.1.8.7” in the Help/About. If you download the ZIP file, the Help/About will read “1.1.8.7 Build 1170” if it includes the fix.

  Here is a link to the document that tells you how to do this and here is the link to the patch itself. …

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• A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning

  May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.

  This is …

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• PHP Decisions Loom as Original Distro Reaches End of Life

  May 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have five more weeks until Zend Server Basic, the PHP runtime used by thousands of IBM i shops over the years, reaches end of life and will no longer be offered, supported, or updated with security fixes. Customers that want to continue using PHP safely beyond July 1 will need to obtain a new license or move to a new PHP runtime.

  The long history of Zend Server Basic stretches all the way back to 2006, which was the year when the PHP runtime became one of the first open source technologies to be adapted to run …

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• Guru: Generate SQL for Dependents

  May 24, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  Way back in October 2014, in the article Find A View Of A View Of A View. . ., I detailed a stored procedure that, given the name of a table or a view, provides the full list of dependent views and all of their dependents and all of their dependents, etc. This is a stored procedure that has served me well in the world of DDL, where it is common to have views of views of views.

  In this article I will describe a follow-on stored procedure that will generate the DDL for a given table/view and all …

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• As I See It: Orwellian

  May 24, 2021 Victor Rozek

  In last month’s article, I expressed ambivalence about our increasing reliance on technology and its growing dominance even as it slips ever further from our control. The challenge presented by a host of computer technologies is how to maximize their benefits while minimizing their potential for harm. And the more powerful the technology, the greater the temptation to weaponize it.

  I closed the article with the following statement:

  We are already using artificial intelligence on an enterprise scale. It won’t be long before it’s used on a planetary scale. Computer intelligence is evolving much quicker than human intelligence. According …

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• COMMON Heads To Ohio With Hybrid NAViGATE Event

  May 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  COMMON this week is welcoming members back to its first in-person event in over a year. The physical fun will commence in Columbus, Ohio, where it will hold its NAViGATE conference for both in-person and online attendees this Monday through Wednesday.

  More than 250 sessions will be presented by 100-plus IBM i experts during COMMON’s three-day show. Each session will take place live (as opposed to being pre-recorded, which became quite common during COVID-19) and will be available to folks who travelled to the Columbus venues as well as to people logging in over the Internet.

  The NAViGATE schedule …

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• IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

  May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

  That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …

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• Ransomware Epidemic Hits Epic Proportions, And IBM i Shops Take Notice

  May 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The ransomware outbreak hit home for millions of Americans last week when attackers shut down a major East Coast pipeline as well as a hospital network on the West Coast. For IBM i shops, the events are a potent reminder to re-evaluate network security and data protection systems to ensure they’re resilient from attack.

  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of Mr. Robot last week as news spread of the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline network, which provides 45 percent of the gasoline for the entire East Coast of the United States through 5,500 miles of …

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• Guru: How To Acquire The IBM i Administration Runtime Expert Product And PTFs

  May 17, 2021 Dawn May

  In past articles about the Administration Runtime Expert, I mentioned that you install the ARE licensed program product on your central system, but I never documented steps on how you acquire the 5733-ARE program product. I apologize for this oversight since, as it turns out, obtaining ARE is not immediately obvious.

  To get the 5733-ARE product, you must log into the IBM Support website and go to your Entitled Systems Support page. Under My Entitled Software, select Software Downloads. You need to select your system that is entitled to IBM software, the category of IBM i, and then …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 17

  May 17, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Here in southern California, where a couple of the IT Jungle crew reside, we are in the throes of May Gray, soon to be followed by the equally depressing June Gloom. It’s our own weird little season between Spring and Summer marked by overcast mornings followed by a peek of sunshine if you’re far enough from the coast. The current news cycle is reminiscent of the May Gray/June Gloom with a mix of ho-hum but a glimmer of what we have to look forward to. Read on for the latest industry and related news, and don’t forget to check out …

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