• Finders, Keepers: Long Lost RSE Keyboard Shortcuts

  March 29, 2016 Susan Gantner

  If you have read many of my past Four Hundred Guru tips, you’ll remember that I write a lot about RSE (a.k.a. RDi) and particularly I write a lot about keyboard shortcuts. I’ve even created my own card with my favorite keyboard shortcuts. This tip is to confess that I’ve recently realized that I’ve been missing out on a set of shortcuts that I should have been using and including on my shortcut cards all along. I published a tip about a year ago about Playing with Blocks and I included an edited version of that tip on the back

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• Ease the Burden of Overloading

  March 29, 2016 Ted Holt

  A while back I said that function overloading is marvelous. I haven’t changed my mind. The same is true of overloaded stored procedures. The only negatives to overloading are a couple of annoyances that the system requires to maintain order. Fortunately, those annoyances are easily circumvented. Here’s what and how. Assume a table of items. Each item is identified by a five-digit ID code for internal use only. Customers use an alternate catalog ID to refer to items. create table Items ( ID dec (5,0), Catalog_ID char(6), MaterialThisLevel dec (5,2), LaborThisLevel dec (5,2), OverheadThisLevel dec (5,2), MaterialLowerLevels dec (5,2), LaborLowerLevels

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• Installing PHP on Your Laptop

  March 29, 2016 Chris Ringer

  In my introductory article I walked you through a crash course in PHP. Now I will show you how obtain a free PHP development environment on your laptop in two easy installations of XAMPP and Netbeans. This allows you the freedom to configure PHP and test your scripts as you choose without affecting a production website or needing management approval. However, if you need to manage PHP scripts on an IBM i, you will want to alternatively explore using Zend Studio. This full-featured IDE integrates directly with the IBM i and allows you to write and debug scripts

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• Healthcare Tech Trends Shape Industry And IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  The future of IBM i won’t be found in any crystal balls. And references to omens always seem so ominous, mostly because they are connected to end of the world scenarios. Predictions, in my opinion, have a greater chance of coming true when based on real world observations. What’s happening in the IBM midrange is the best indicator, but what’s happening includes all kinds of things–some good and some bad. Here’s an example. MEDHOST provides enterprise and departmental healthcare-related software to more than 1,000 hospitals. Along with traditional licensed software, it offers software as a service (SaaS), managed services for

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Her Master’s Voice

  March 28, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Someday there may be a portrait of Siri, the invisible aide of Apple’s users; an image of Google’s nameless virtual servant; an illustration of Amazon Echo’s helpful Alexa; or a graphic depicting Cortana, Microsoft’s attentive assistant. By contrast, IBM’s Watson, which talked to Bob Dylan, has an icon: a Haringesque homosexual planet. None of these characters has achieved the immortality of Nipper the terrier, its attention drawn before 1900 by the recorded voice of its master. A four-ton statue of the duped pooch still adorns the Arnoff Building in Albany, New York. His

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• Observing i: An IBM Power Systems Champion Perspective

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Pete Massiello is an IBM i advocate, a past president of COMMON the world’s largest IBM i user group, and owner and CEO of a consultancy that specializes in system upgrades, performance tuning, and hosted services. The IBM midrange is his bread and butter. Massiello recently wrote a report he calls IBM i State of the Union, a perspective on the landscape based on what he has seen and what he expects to see. If Massiello was limited to five words to describe his report, they would be: Do not dismiss this platform. He acknowledges that companies are migrating

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• A Peek At Upcoming Open Source Enhancements In IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Over the past 15 years, the open source community has driven a massive amount of innovation in IT. It has gotten to the point where IBM and Microsoft–two bastions of proprietary development–are now champions of open source. The open source wave is not quite as strong on the IBM i platform, but it appears that wave will gain momentum with the upcoming new release of the OS. It’s hard to quantify the value created through open source development of software. Last year, the Linux Foundation released a white paper that found the total value of the development of the

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• The Value Of Things That Don’t Change–And Those That Must

  March 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The wide expectation is that IBM will announce the next iteration of the IBM i operating system, up until now known as iNext and now thought to be IBM i 7.3, at its TechU conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12. That is a week ahead of when COMMON is hosting a webinar with IBM i chief architect Steve Will to talk about new features in the platform, so the cat is out of the bag. The word we hear on the street is that there will be significant enhancements to the database and to the security systems of the

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• Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives. Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to

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• Maxava Introduces Subscription-Based, Multi-Platform Systems Monitoring

  March 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  When does system monitoring become a big enough concern to an IBM i shop that specialized software would be considered? Often it’s when one person has the responsibility for monitoring multiple systems. It doesn’t really matter if the systems run on the same OS or if multiple platforms are involved. Multiple systems ratchet up the complexity. To take on the task, Maxava has stepped up its product development. Available now is Maxava Monitor Mi8, a cloud-based, subscription-priced, system-monitoring software for IBM i. And within two to three months, it will add the capability to monitor Windows and Linux systems as

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