• The 10-Year Security Itch Needs Scratching

  May 20, 2013 Alex Woodie

  In 2004, PowerTech unveiled its first report on the state of security for the iSeries server, as the IBM i platform was then called. The report uncovered major problems at iSeries shops involving passwords, remote access, and user profiles. Fast forward to April 2013 and PowerTech’s 10th annual report, which uncovered systemic problems with–you guessed it–passwords, remote access, and powerful user profiles. If you think back to 2004, computer security issues were just beginning to grab headlines. Microsoft was under daily threat from hackers seeking to expose vulnerabilities in its products, which it would patch every month on “Patch Tuesday.”

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• As I See It: To Ad Or Not To Ad

  May 20, 2013 Victor Rozek

  I never found Leonardo DiCaprio believable as an actor. No matter the costuming or how much makeup they trowel on his face, he always comes across as being a 12-year-old playing dress up. (He’s not unlike Tobey McGuire in that regard, but at least Tobey knows enough to make movies that appeal to 12-year-olds.) So when a moving flash ad for DiCaprio’s new opus, Gatsby, darkened my computer screen, it was both annoying and amusing. It did interrupt my browsing, but it also conjured up images of a child in a tuxedo throwing fits. Not everyone finds advertising amusing,

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• COMMON Europe Cancels Its June Conference

  May 20, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  COMMON Europe has given a jolt to the IBM i community, and right as we are approaching the 25th birthday–the silver anniversary, in fact–of the “Project Silverlake” machine that became the AS/400 minicomputer. After a hard look at the attendance data for its European Power Summit 2013 a month from now, COMMON Europe made the tough decision to cancel the event. In a statement published on the COMMON Europe site, the European Power Summit Organizing Committee that is organizing the pan-European and pan-platform event, said that the event in Annecy, France, near Switzerland and a positively beautiful location, was

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• ISV Advisory Council: Untold Secrets And Free Advice

  May 20, 2013 Dan Burger

  Being more responsive to customer needs is a common theme these days. Companies can quickly get into hot water by neglecting customers either completely or by choosing favorite segments, such as those with the biggest budgets. IBM‘s customer consciousness, as it applies to the Power Systems and IBM i community (the focus of IT Jungle newsletters), includes the independent software vendors (ISVs). The IBM i ISVs are hugely important. Big Blue must wish it had a similar vendor base for its other platforms. Responsiveness to customers depends on awareness. To improve its awareness of ISV customers, Big Blue formed

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• Making Hadoop Elephants Drink From Silverlake

  May 20, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, I talked generally about big data and the use of tools like the Hadoop big data muncher created by Yahoo to emulate the very early unstructured data processing and related file system created by Google to power its search engine. While you do not have to take a snapshot of the Internet and index it continuously, as Google did when the Google File System and the MapReduce batch processing method was created, you do have your own big data challenges. Well, they are probably more accurately described as midrange data problems, to be honest, and if

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• Adding A Job Queue To A Batch Subsystem

  May 15, 2013 Hey, Joe

  I want to add another batch job queue to my QBATCH subsystem for submitting reporting jobs that take a long time to process. I want to put them in their own job queue so they can just chug away in QBATCH without interfering with my other batch work. How do I add another job queue that I can submit these jobs to? –Bob Adding batch job queues to QBATCH is easy. All you have to do is perform the following steps and you’ll be able to create another QBATCH job queue in no time. Check to see how many jobs

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• Bind By Slash-Copy

  May 15, 2013 Ted Holt

  I advise, recommend, urge, admonish, and even cajole RPG programmers to quit using subroutines and start using subprocedures instead. Yet I still hear from people who work in shops that allow the use of RPG IV (a.k.a. ILE RPG), but do not allow binding to modules and service programs. Today I offer two ways to use subprocedures that do not require ILE binding. But first, let’s have a quick review of ILE binding of subprocedures into programs. 1. Bind by copy The object code of the subprocedures of a module is copied into the object code of a program

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• Search SQL Source Using System Catalogs

  May 15, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  The green screen PDM and the GUI Rational Developer for i (RDi) tools provide developers an easy way to search through source code to find a specified text literal. But what if these tools don’t have access to all your code, in particular the SQL code? Many developers may not be keeping an up-to-date source copy of their SQL persisted stored modules (functions, procedures and triggers) and further, may not be keeping a copy of the source at all. If this is the case in your shop, never fear, for DB2 for i maintains a record of the source statements

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• The Sweet 16 Of Mobile App Dev Tools for IBM i

  May 14, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Over the last 12 months, there has been unprecedented progress in third-party mobile development tools. Whether your shop wants to take a native or a hybrid approach, or whether it wants to use pre-built templates or to build from scratch, this is a great time to bring IBM i content to the latest iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows mobile devices. Here is a handy dandy roundup of 16 of the most well-known mobile development tools for the IBM i platform. A quick scan of the 12-year Four Hundred Stuff story archive shows a flurry of mobile activity in the last

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• Aqua Data Studio Gets Better at Big Data

  May 14, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Programmers and analysts who use the newly released Aqua Data Studio version 13 from AquaFold will be able to work with large data sets housed in specialty databases, including Hewlett-Packard‘s Vertica and EMC‘s Greenplum. Aqua Data Studio is a Java-based utility designed to provide programmers, database developers, and systems administrators with a single interface to work with multiple databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 for i, DB2 for z/OS, Sybase, MySQL and others. The software helps users administer, explore, and query their databases; create SQL scripts; explore entity relationships; conduct comparisons between files, directory structures, and database schemas;

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