• As I See It: Finding Balance In The Living Years

  November 14, 2011 Victor Rozek

  The shadows are just beginning to crawl down the massive sandstone walls as we struggle into our dry suits and neoprene socks. A thick pair of river shoes and a sturdy walking stick complete our outfits. It’s early morning and still cold as my wife and I prepare to embark on one of the legendary hikes in the National Park System, The Narrows at Zion. Zion is a long canyon carved over the centuries by the Virgin River. You enter the canyon from the south and it gradually constricts as you travel north until the walls close in and the

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• The Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a whole village of smart people to raise a market because no single human being can calculate all of the angles. That’s why there are laws against selective disclosure in the financial services market, and it is also one of the reasons why newsletters such as this one not only persist in the Internet Era, but have much broader impact than magazines used to in days of old. (But online publishing is, alas, a much more difficult and less profitable business than the magazine salad days of the 1980s and early 1990s.) In any event, it takes smart

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• Soltis: We Could Learn From Japan

  November 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  When Frank Soltis retired from IBM three years ago, he wasn’t looking for a rocking chair, a fireplace, and a membership in the Nerdy Book of the Month Club. He’s ridden in too many rodeos to hang up his saddle. The IBM i running on Power Systems is his arena. Soltis continues to travel around the world advocating for the platform and listening to what users and IBM business partners tell him about life on the Smarter Planet. Ever the optimist, Soltis is as reliable and dependable as the midrange servers he helped develop from the days of the System/38

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• A Radical Idea For IBM i Software Pricing

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Lately, I have been thinking a lot about IBM‘s pricing for the IBM i operating system and database. With Big Blue having long since converged its Software Group and its Systems and Technology Group, you would think that the heat would be off in some ways to upgrade hardware and for the company to focus on getting customers current on software. But IBM likes to sell new systems as well as operating systems to customers, and it needs to make money as much as midrange shops don’t like to spend it. I decided to take a look at OS/400,

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• Admin Alert: When You Can’t Answer Record Lock Errors

  November 9, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Recently, a client had a problem with Power i record allocation messages. When a program crashed with an RPG1218 record lock inquiry message, the system didn’t ask for a message reply. Instead, it automatically answered the message with a “D” to dump program data and end the job. The client didn’t want this to happen. He’d rather answer the message himself and retry the allocation. Here’s what happened and how it applies to all i OS shops. A Common Problem The first thing to understand is that this is a fairly common i OS situation. It isn’t magic or a

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• Meet JSON

  November 9, 2011 Alex Roytman

  If you have done Web application development with any modern toolset or technology lately, you have undoubtedly run across a trusty friend of mine: JSON (pronounced Jason). In recent years, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, has become the data interchange format of choice for Web applications. It has allowed many Web frameworks to flourish and has tremendously simplified my own job of creating IBM i web applications and frameworks. That’s why I decided to write a series of articles on JSON, in which I will explain the what, the why, and the how of JSON in detail. Let’s get going!

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• Add Powerful Generic Processing to Your Applications

  November 9, 2011 Ted Holt

  Each month I perform a ritual by which I attempt to placate the gods Sarbanes and Oxley. One task involves repeatedly selecting a certain menu option, filling the entry fields with different values each time. What an annoyance. Fortunately there are ways to eliminate repetition programmatically, and the use of generic names is one such way. A generic name is one that ends with the asterisk wild-card. Many CL commands accept generic parameters. I have written about this before. But when you want to run a certain command over a group of objects, and the command does not allow a

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• Kronos Launches New InTouch Time Clock

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Kronos kicked off its KronosWorks conference in Orlando, Florida, yesterday with the launch of InTouch, a new time clock platform that features a color touch screen, Internet cloud connectivity, and the capability to run applications for employees outside of common punch-in and punch-out times. The InTouch time clock is a relatively small device, with a seven-inch color LCD touch screen. Employees can clock-in and clock-out using any of the popular methods, including smartcards or biometric identification. The device prevents employees from punching outside of scheduled start and stop times, and also provides an attestation feature to allow employees to sign

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• SugarCRM Bolsters Development, Admin Features with Version 6.3

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  SugarCRM last week unveiled a new release of its popular open source customer relationship management system. With Sugar 6.3, users gain new administrative controls, better integration with third-party apps, and the capability to benefit from more open collaboration with the broad Sugar development community. The SugarCRM Open+ Developer Program was started in late 2010 to provide more collaboration and a tighter feedback loop with customers and the Sugar business partner community that writes add-ons. As an open source project, SugarCRM estimates there are 30,000 Sugar developers around the world, and more than 1,000 extension projects on SugarForge. Since the

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• Jack Henry ATM Deposit Solution Integrated with Core Banking Systems

  November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates last week announced that its ImageCenter ATM Deposit Management solution, which enables banks to accept checks directly without using an envelope, is now available as a fully integrated solution for all three of its core banking systems, including SilverLake, CIF 20/20, and Core Director. The race is on for banks to replace their old ATM deposit solutions that require envelopes with new automated deposit terminal (ADT) solutions that scan the check directly into the system at the ATM. Aside from customer convenience, it’s not surprising to find that money is driving the change. Jack Henry cites

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