• 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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• REPLACE to Replace Characters in a String

  July 27, 2011 Skip Marchesani

  In V5R3, IBM simplified the manipulation of character strings with the implementation of the INSERT and REPLACE functions in SQL. INSERT allows the positional insertion of one or more characters in a string and REPLACE scans for all occurrences of a target string and overlays or replaces the target string with a replace string. INSERT was discussed in my previous article, and now I will discuss REPLACE. Prior to the implementation of REPLACE in V5R3, scanning for the existence of a target string and replacing it with another string was not very easy. A positional replacement could be performed

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• XIV Clustered Disk Arrays Get More Oomph And Capacity

  July 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has kicked out the third generation of its XIV clustered disk arrays, high-end machines for delivering lots of bandwidth and high-end software features such as thin provisioning, snapshotting, asynchronous and synchronous mirroring, and hot upgrades of cluster components. Big Blue bought disk array upstart XIV back in January 2008 so it would have a clustered disk array that was more expandable and more resilient than the monolithic DS8000 series of high-end disk arrays, which are based on Power Systems servers. The XIV machines are based on Intel Xeon processors running Linux, with main memory serving as cache for disks.

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• TMW Nabs Appian for Truck Routing

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  TMW Systems has acquired Appian Logistics Software, a developer of routing and scheduling optimization software for the transportation industry. Appian’s Windows-based software is often found deployed alongside TMW’s dispatch management systems, including those running on the IBM i OS. Oklahoma City-based Appian Logistics’ flagship product, called Direct Route, is used to create the quickest and most efficient delivery routes given several variables, such as time, location, vehicle capability, and work rules. In addition to Direct Route, the company developed several add-on solutions, including DRTrack, which provides GPS tracking; a territory planning tool, called Territory Pro; a fleet sizing tool

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• IntelliChief Touts Install at Bergquist

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Bergquist, a supplier of parts for the propane industry, has streamlined its purchase-to-pay processes with the installation of document management and imaging tools from IntelliChief, the software vendor announced this month. Bergquist is a Toledo, Ohio, company that supplies equipment and technical assistance for customers in the propane industry. The company operates three distribution centers covering 60,000 square feet that house more than 12,000 items, such as regulators, valves, gauges, fittings, cylinders, and various other accessories. The company recently implemented IntelliChief, the Windows-based suite of document management, imaging, and workflow solutions that was spun off by Quadrant Software just

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• Flux Hooks Up with MFT Consultancy

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Job scheduler developer Flux last week announced a partnership with File Transfer Consulting that will bring its customers a new resource for designing managed file transfer (MFT) systems. Flux is a Java-based suite of workload automation and MFT tools that are used to streamline the flow of work and documents across servers, including the IBM i server. The software, which we wrote about last month, can initiate remote services over the Web via REST and SOAP interfaces, and uses a Web browser for all design and management tasks. Flux is now one of the tools that File Transfer Consulting

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