• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 2

  January 21, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  I feel a bit like I am having a small flashback to the Year 2000 software bug, but the trip is a little different but still involves the warping of time. As you see in IBM support bulletin MA47217, the Service Action Log within the Hardware Service Manager can’t seem to get over 2018. Literally. If you try to put either “2019” or “2020” in the From or To year fields, it flies up into its own black hole. This doesn’t appear to be affecting any other areas of Service Tools, or logging – so far.

  Here’s the precise …

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• Guru Classic: Automatic Or Static Storage?

  January 16, 2019 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published in August 2008. One thing that has changed in the intervening 10-plus years is that I find a lot more RPGers regularly using subprocedures now. Something that hasn’t really changed much is that many of those using subprocedures still don’t fully understand the behavioral differences between automatic and static storage. The concepts and handling of automatic versus static storage haven’t really changed. So the only modifications I’ve made for this reprise of the tip is to update the style of the code example.

  If you write RPG subprocedures, you should know about the …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs – %SCAN and %CHECK

  January 16, 2019 Jon Paris

  Many RPG programmers seem to get confused about the usage and operation of a number of built-in functions (BIFs). In particular the BIFs %XLATE, %REPLACE, %SCAN, and %CHECK seem to cause a lot of confusion. In this tip, I focus on %CHECK and %SCAN. I decided to re-visit this particular tip because of the recent introduction of %SCAN’s companion BIF %SCANR and a related enhancement to %SCAN itself. More on this later.

  The %SCAN BIF has been with us since V3R7, when it was introduced along with %EDITC and %EDITW, to improve string handling. %CHECK, on the other hand, is …

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• Guru Classic: Call Again And Again And Again . . .

  January 16, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2011 and recently came to mind when I had a discussion with a programmer bemoaning the fact that he could not (so he thought) have a recursive process in RPG. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. 

  In programming terms, recursion is the process whereby a function may call itself. Traditionally, this is something we are not used to in RPG. Programs and subroutines cannot call themselves. Or if you did somehow …

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• Security Posture Mixed As Feds Say ‘Shields Up’

  January 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Raise your shield.” That’s the message the Federal Government sent to American businesses last week as part of a new cybersecurity awareness campaign. But according to a recent survey of security professionals by Syncsort, the majority of enterprises, including IBM i shops, are confident in the security protections that are already in place. The big question: Have they actually done enough?

  The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) kicked off a new security awareness campaign last week called “Know the Risk, Raise Your Shield.” The NCSC says that foreign intelligence entities are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies” that are …

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• IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.

  In any event, on January 1, IBM …

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• Guru: Easy Date Difference

  January 14, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  The dates in our database are stored as seven-digit packed-decimal values in the common CYYMMDD format. In 2018 I wrote an SQL query that reported the number of days between two dates, but it quit calculating properly as soon as it started using 2019 dates. Can you tell me the proper way to find the difference between two dates in days?

  –Becki

  I don’t know if “the” proper way exists or not, Becki, but I can show you how to do the required calculation. SQL has some handy built-in functions that address your problem.

  The DAYS function returns …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 14

  January 14, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  With 2018 firmly behind us, we are already looking into the future to guess what we might look ahead to in the months ahead. Our very own Editor-In-Chief Tim Prickett Morgan will be leading this charge when he joins a panel of experts, including IBMers Alison Butterill and Ian Jarman, to dissect the results of the 2019 IBM i marketplace survey. Tune in to this webinar to hear (instead of read) what Tim thinks is next for our little ecosystem. You can find the link in the “Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings” section below.

  Top Stories From Outside

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 1

  January 14, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  The new thing is that it is 2019, and I am convinced it will be a better year.

  In Volume 21, Number 1 of the IBM i PTF Guide, the first of the new year, there is a whole bunch going on. There are HIPER groups and new patches for Db2 Web Query for i V2.2.1 all around on the current releases – that means IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. And there is a new Backup and Recovery groups, a new HTTP group, and a new MGTools group for the newer IBM i 7.3 and 7.2 releases.

  The …

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• Listen In To The 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of you took the survey last fall, and now it is time to go over the results and take the pulse of the IBM i customer base.

  On January 17, Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host two webinars going over the results of the survey, and I plan to attend as do two other familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager, and Ian Jarman, who had that job before and is now an executive in the IBM Lab Services division – to talk it all out.

  This is the …

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