• Mad Dog 21/21: For Blue It’s Difficult, For Meme It’s Easy

  September 16, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Thomas J. Watson started using the slogan “Think” while he was still at National Cash Register. He took it with him to CTR, which became IBM. It’s still part of IBM lore. “Think” has outlasted the typewriter, once a ubiquitous desktop symbol of IBM. “Think” is a meme, an intellectual artifact broadcast by cultural intercourse. IBM’s meme opened minds and doors to computing. Today, a different meme is the harbinger of technological progress in the white-collar workplace. It is the Staples slogan, “That was easy,” and its corporate curio kin, a red button that says “Easy.” For more than

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• IBM Aims NextScale Hyperscale Boxes At Clouds–And Possibly Power8

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is not quite as ready as it may have seemed to get out of the X86 server racket, at least not judging by the launch last week of the NextScale server line. And maybe, just maybe, the NextScale line of minimalist machines will sport current and future Power processors to give service providers and cloud builders a cheaper and denser alternative than the Flex System chassis announced a year and a half ago to build Power-based clouds. The future of the IBM i business may depend upon it, so getting Power processors inside of the NextScale nodes is

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• It’s Time For Security Administrator Roles At IBM i Shops, Skyview Says

  September 16, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s time for system administrators to give up security-related tasks and hand them over to a dedicated security administrators in IBM i shops, says Skyview Partners. While the jack-of-all trades approach has succeeded in keeping costs down, the risks of losing data are becoming too great to rely on the skills of a generalist, says the company, which just published a new guide describing the role of an IBM i security administrator. “Security administration can no longer be lost in the list of things that a system administrator is supposed to do on a regular basis,” says Skyview president

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• Slices Of i For The Little Guys

  September 16, 2013 Dan Burger

  Replacing chaos with calm while solving the mysteries of computer voodoo could earn you a pretty good reputation in the which-planet-am-I-on world of IBM midrange computing. It’s not that you’re more likely to get zapped here in the i zone than in any other IT fun house, but coming to grips with things like managed services and cloud computing have their own i-flavored outcomes here. Even for the little guy who is wondering how he fits into the MSP and cloud action. Larry Bolhuis has an idea or two about the MSP and cloud computing topics and a few other

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• Admin Alert: Six Tips For Managing IBM i Spooled File Storage

  September 11, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  While recently reviewing system storage on an IBM i partition, we were shocked to discover that spooled files (SPLFs, pronounced spliffs) took up over 10 percent of our usable system storage. Based on that experience and what my shop learned cleaning it up, here are six techniques for keeping your spooled file storage under control. The Big Six For Spooled File Storage Management Don’t have FNDBIGSPLF? Get FNDBIGSPLF!!! Check your IBM i cleanup parameters (GO CLEANUP) to delete old job logs and system generated output Check for automatically scheduled jobs that are generating unnecessary spooled files The 2.5 million-page

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• Thinking In Pointers

  September 11, 2013 Ted Holt

  Suppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about. Consider a command: CMD PROMPT('Do something')

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• Retrieve The Call Stack In DB2 For i

  September 11, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here. Troubleshooting problems is often a costly component of application maintenance. Consider the case when the user reports an application crash. Exactly what program crashed? Was it the UI logic or business logic embedded in a service program? If it was a service program, what procedure was running? What was the chain of events that led to the problem? Knowing what the call stack looks like can help answer many of these questions, thereby reducing costly investigation time. Since writing “persistent stored modules” (a.k.a., SQL routines) is increasingly popular

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• Kisco Unveils the Newly Renamed iFileUtility

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s already been five years since the last major name change of the platform formerly known as AS/400. Just the same, there are still a lot of products out there that have some variation of ‘400 in the name (including, ahem, some IT Jungle products). One product vendor that’s been working to clean its lineup of the ‘400 name is Kisco Information Systems, which recently unveiled iFileUtility. iFileUtility is a native green-screen tool used to browse and maintain IBM i databases. The product enables users to view and update single records, or view and update groups of records simultaneously.

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• User Defined Dashboards Now Shipping from mrc

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Earlier this year, mrc announced a feature of its m-Power development environment called user defined dashboards that puts more power in the hands of users. The product, it turns out, wasn’t quite fully baked. But now, we’re told, it’s ready to roll. User defined dashboards are designed to enable users to pick and choose what graphical elements (such as charts, graphs, and tables) they will see on their dashboards and also where they are placed on the screen. After selecting the screen elements required for, say, a sales dashboard, the users save their work. The users can then access the

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• Infor Delivers Better ERP Hooks Into Salesforce.com

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Infor customers can now feed data from multiple, disparate ERP systems or even multiple divisions of the company into their Salesforce.com implementation using its latest Inforce connector, the company announced in August. Inforce is a collection of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that automatically populate data from Infor’s back-end ERP and financial systems into the front-end Salesforce.com CRM offering. The first Inforce offering for sales professional debuted in early 2012, and was followed up with two more, for marketing and customer service disciplines. Inforce’s new multi-ERP and multi-company capabilities will enable larger organizations to take advantage of the solution.

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