• Mad Dog 21/21: Not Weather, Nor Whether But When

  April 9, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In 1974, a band of self-styled revolutionaries, the Weather Underground published Prairie Fire, a manifesto explaining why and how to replace the government of the United States. Not only didn’t this happen, but two of the principals, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, have a couple kids and mundane jobs as college teachers. If they were out to change the world today, they’d be writing revolutionary apps, not manifestos, or composing essays praising or damning those apps. And just what are those transformational apps doing? Putting money where our mouths are: In our phones. For the past few years, people

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• Checking For Cracks In The Technology Foundation

  April 9, 2012 Dan Burger

  Have you ever come face to face with the reality that you are not getting what you paid for? You make IT investments like a Power Systems server running IBM i, but don’t come close to taking full advantage of the platform. The sad truth is that your hardware and software are loaded with unused capabilities. You paid for them, but you get value out of only the features you use. It’s sort of like paying the cable TV company for 150 channels, but never watching more than 10. This is not a recent phenomenon, but it does seem to

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• Dell Goes After IBM Mainframe And Midrange Apps

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The road is littered with the smoking hulks of the upstart system companies and smaller software firms that have tried to attack the IBM proprietary midrange and mainframe platforms over the past four decades. And based on two key acquisitions last week, it looks like PC and server maker Dell is gearing up to take a more direct run at the System z mainframe and its baby brother, the Power Systems-IBM i platform. Yeah, that ought to prick up more than a few ears in the IBM i market, and perhaps get more than a few vendors of application modernization

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• Some Thoughts About IBM’s Next Generation Platform

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software people at IBM are now firmly in charge of systems development at the company and are apparently trying to bring iterative software development techniques to hardware. The idea, in short, is to make hardware more modular as well as the systems software stacks that run upon that hardware so IBM can integrate new functionality into systems in an iterative fashion, perhaps several times a year, rather than a big bang system change every two or three years. This is not the dumbest thing I have ever heard. By picking up the pace, IBM could accomplish a number

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• Admin Alert: Readers Check in on Four Simple Rules for PTFs

  April 4, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  After posting my March 21st article on Four Simple Rules for PTF Management, I received so much good information from our readers on PTFs that I decided to pass it along in this follow-up column. Here’s some additional tips and techniques on PTF management that might make it easier to apply PTF fixes on your IBM i machines. Q: When does IBM refresh a Cume PTF package? A: Never Reader Richard Shearwood wrote in with this piece of information about whether IBM corrects cumulative PTF packages containing bad PTFs after the package is released. IBM never refreshed a cume

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• Cut the Gordian Knot

  April 4, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I just love those BIFs that IBM added to RPG. I can’t understand why anybody would use old RPG op codes instead of the BIFs. But I’ve run into a brick wall with %SUBST. Help! –Vince Allow me to explain Vince’s situation. He was assigned to revise a program someone else had written. The program reads a list of the file names in a certain directory on their network, and has to do other processing depending on file name extension (the part of the name following the last period). Here’s a program similar to the one that Vince had to

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• Index Advisor, Part 1

  April 4, 2012 Paul Tuohy

  The use of SQL within our applications is on the increase. After a shaky start in the early days of the AS/400, SQL has gone from strength to strength with every release of the operating system. The use of embedded SQL (in RPG) stabilized with V5R1 and really came into its own when free-form SQL was introduced in V5R4 and PTFed back to V5R3. But with SQL, and embedded SQL especially, there is always that lingering doubt about SQL performance when accessing data. We have all heard horror stories about the lights in the building dimming when a certain program

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• Dell ‘Wyses’ Up with Thin Client Acquisition

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Dell swooped in yesterday and acquired Wyse Technology, the well-known provider of thin clients and desktop virtualization products to companies around the world. If approved, the deal will give Dell’s desktop virtualization business a shot in the arm and bolster its existing OptiFlex thin client business. It will also give Dell 180 patents. According to Dell, Wyse ranked number one in thin client unit shipment volume during the fourth quarter of 2011, and has more than 20 million thin client units in the field, where they are used by 200 million people around the world every day. The San

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• New Templates Added to mrc Dev Tool

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Development tool maker mrc last week announced the addition of two new templates–the cross-tab report template and the data upload template–to its flagship product, m-Power. m-Power is a Web application development tool that uses a template-based approach to enable rapid delivery of new programs and functionality. After configuring new programs from pre-defined templates, m-Power generates Java code that runs on IBM i and all Java-enabled platforms. The new cross-tab report template makes it easy for developers to create a special type of report that combines row data with user-selected column data. The vendor says these types of reports are great

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• CCSS Cuts the IT Operations Fat with New ‘Cheat Sheet’

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are notoriously lean when it comes to the efficiency of their operations. And while the Great Recession forced many of us to find new and creative ways to further slash costs to the bone, a new “cheat sheet” from CCSS shows there’s still some fat to be trimmed when it comes to systems management. “Quite often it can feel as though all the fat has already been trimmed and there is simply no excess or flexibility with which IT managers can make further changes,” CCSS president and CEO Ray Wright says in a press release. “It requires

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