• COMMON Europe Updates Top Concerns i Budget Data

  August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In my analysis of the preliminary Top Concerns data coming out of a survey done by COMMON Europe, I noted that on the budgetary data, the European IBM i user group had mixed customer, business partner, and IBM survey response data together when what it should have done is just look at the customer data. They are the ones cutting the checks on Power Systems iron, after all. As it turns out, taking out the IBM and business partner data did not change the budgetary picture all that much, which is a coincidence of unusual proportions. Take a look:

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• Lessons from a Bad MSP Trip

  August 8, 2011 Dan Burger

  A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about hosted services in the IBM i market. Although there are many offerings, the only area where there’s a noticeable customer interest is in data backup and recovery. You can find plenty of vendors offering everything from exclusively backup to disaster recovery and high availability. Competition is good, but comparisons are not always easy. Services and prices vary and sometimes surprises are not pleasant. The perception of managed service providers is pretty good overall. There are many more companies that are pleased than those that believe they were mistreated. One of the

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• The IT Sector Creates Jobs In July, Boosting A Jittery and Jumpy Economy

  August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a job, no matter how much it might annoy you, it is a good thing. Having two, like I have to so the ends will meet somewhere not near the poorhouse (as if the world had those any more) is probably a better idea, if you have the energy or time. There are still 13.9 million unemployed people in the United States, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it doesn’t look like either they or those who dropped out of the statistics because they have stopped looking for work will find

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• Vision and Maxava Prep for November Trial

  August 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM i high availability software rivals Maxava and Vision Solutions will be back in a Los Angeles courtroom today to hear a judge’s ruling on the discovery process in Maxava’s false advertising case against Vision. Disagreements over what documents should be admitted as evidence have delayed the case. The cut-off for discovery is slated to end Friday in preparation for a November 22 trial. There is no sign that the false advertising case that New Zealand-based Maxava brought against its much larger Southern Californian competitor in December 2009 is any closer to an out-of-court settlement, as the vast majority of

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Debit And Taxis

  August 8, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  “You talkin’ to me?” That’s what Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, said, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as he practiced drawing his gun. His thin clients included characters played by Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd. Today every one of New York’s 13,087 yellow cabs has a thin client that isn’t as pretty as Foster or Shepherd. It is a mobile computer that includes a self-service payment terminal talking to banks in the cloud by cellular radio. Its screen displays videos so awful you wish for Bickle and his gun. And that’s just for starters. When

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• The OCEAN View: More Skills, Less Blame

  August 8, 2011 Dan Burger

  The best use of an IT manager’s time is planning IT strategy. Many would say this sounds good on paper, but the reality of the job pushes this best practice down the priority list. There are many sickening symptoms that arise, not the least of which is a disease that affects the IT staff. It’s called skills atrophy. Its weakening effects may not be noticed in the early stages. Yet, one day, when business units call on IT to do some heavy lifting, the muscle isn’t there. The next sound you hear is the complaining of the business strategists. Just

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• IBM Uncorks RPG Open Access Trial Version

  August 8, 2011 Dan Burger

  The scarecrow got a brain, the tin man got a heart, the cowardly lion got courage, and the RPG developer community finally got a free trial version of Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. It took a lot of patience and a lot of suggestion box stuffing, but IBM did deliver. Whether this small but significant step will lead to a surge in modern RPG development is yet to be seen. But it is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Most importantly, it shows IBM’s support for RPG, one of the few programming languages created by Big Blue for business

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• Lean Mean Green Screens

  August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How many green screens are still out there in the world? Too many is the obvious smart-aleck answer to that question, and more than you would expect is probably closer to the real answer. I cut my teeth on Z80-based machines and then an Apple IIe and a handful of different machines with character-based interfaces long before I ever saw a Macintosh or a Unix workstation in college. After all these years, an IBM 3270 or 5250 green screen, or even a DEC VT terminal, are not shocking to me. They remind me of my youth and while I wouldn’t

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• Admin Alert: A Starter Program to Find Damaged Objects in i OS 6.1.1

  July 27, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  After a damaged object prevented a full system production backup in my shop, I was asked to devise a technique for detecting damaged objects on the system. This week, I’m presenting my starter CL program that looks for damaged objects as a template for approaching the issue, in the hopes that others can add to and expand on this code. How Objects Get Damaged iSeries, System i, and Power i objects can get damaged in a variety of ways, including: Electrical outages where the power is quickly cut off before the hard drive has a chance to finish writing all

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• Solving iSeries Access Data Transfer Problems and Detecting Disk Damage

  July 27, 2011 Hey, Joe

  I’m having a problem downloading a file using iSeries Access Data Transfer from System i. Whenever I perform my download, I get the CWBDB0099 and SQL0420 errors shown below. I can click OK and still download the file, but I’d like to get rid of this error. What’s going on and how do I fix it? –Laura Here’s the error message that Laura is referring to and what I did to solve it. After researching, I couldn’t find any references to the CWBDB0099 error with the SQL4020 sub-error. There were plenty of references to the CWBDB0099 error with sub-error SQL0181,

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