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Guru Classic: More iSphere Goodies
March 4, 2020 Susan Gantner
This Guru Classic tip is my third in a series exploring the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover two additional ways in which iSphere expands the RDi toolset. There are a few details that I’ve updated in this new version of the tip due to updates in either RDi or the iSphere tool itself. Plus I have added an additional tip based on how I’ve seen one of these features utilized.
Binding Directory Editor
I’ve long been baffled at the lack of support in RDi for binding directories; it seems like something modern developers certainly use. In the …
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Boadway’s 25-Year Performance Shows No Let Up
March 2, 2020 Alex Woodie
Batch jobs running a little long? Throw some hardware at it. For as long as Mike Boadway can remember, that’s been the default response to dealing with most performance issues on the IBM i server. But when today’s fast Power9 processors and Flash drives fail to move the performance needle, maybe it’s worth reconsidering Boadway’s approach to tweaking the code and the data instead.
As the CEO of MB Software & Consulting, Boadway makes his living off solving other people’s IBM i performance issues. Since founding the company in 1995, Boadway has used his proprietary software to deliver an …
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The Gamification Of Good Coding Practices
February 26, 2020 Nick Blamey
There are many things that are important about creating good code, but perhaps the most important is the idea that there are good coding practices and that everyone coding, no matter what the programming language and no matter what the type of application they are creating, should adhere to some standards of quality.
It is often the case that those have spent decades automating different aspects of businesses with systems like the IBM i and its peers have been the most resistant to brining automation to the very work they do in development and operations. But if the DevOps movement …
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Guru: Copy OUTQ To PDF
February 3, 2020 Bob Cozzi
A long time ago I created a CL command named Copy from OUTQ (CPYOUTQ). This command allowed you to selectively copy spooled files from one OUTQ to either another OUTQ or to the IFS as a PDF or text file. My customers use it all the time for monthly archiving of spooled files and redistribution of output. You may have it on your own system.
Being one of the handful of original advocates for the so called “Openness APIs” for IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), I quickly embraced the system APIs and have used them extensively throughout the decades. One …
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Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1
January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie
We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.
For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.
“IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …
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Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?
January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie
In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.
HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …
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Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says
December 9, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM i and mainframe professionals who have grown weary of defending their systems against people who want to replace them with more “modern” X86 and cloud platforms found an unlikely ally in the form of Gartner, which earlier this year published a report that cautioned against making rash, emotionally charged technological decisions when it comes to big iron migrations.
“Replacing existing systems because people perceive them to be old can be a costly mistake,” Gartner senior analyst Thomas Klinect and vice president Mike Chuba wrote in a March piece titled Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May …
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Samba Patch Caps Busy Year for IBM i Security
December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM last week patched a moderately severe security flaw in IBM i’s Samba implementation that could enable hackers to access data they really shouldn’t be able to access. The disclosure caps a rather busy second half of the year for security patches on IBM i that saw 26 emergency PTFs and Yum updates for Node.js, Python, the Apache HTTP Server, OpenSSL, ISC Bind, IBM Navigator, and even Db2 Mirror for IBM i.
On November 26, IBM issued this security bulletin to let people know about the new flaw in the Samba client. The flaw could allow a hacker to not …
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Guru: End Of Year Feedback
December 2, 2019 Ted Holt
The year has flown by. Before we know it, it will be 2020. The century is flying by, too. We’ve almost consumed a fifth of it. That seems like a good excuse to see what we might glean from some of your feedback. It’s been a while. More to come next week!
Several readers wrote regarding the need to remove hard-coded values from programs. Jim brought up the problem of compile-time tables and arrays.
I find cases where data is hard coded (state names, product categories are a few examples) for tables or arrays in dozens of programs.
I wish …
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Four Hundred Monitor, November 13
November 13, 2019 Jenny Thomas
It may not be a question as old as time, but the debate will rage on for what seems like that long. Mac vs. PC, which is better? Essentially, a Mac is a PC because a PC is a personal computer, which is what a Mac is. But most people associate a PC as a computer that runs the Windows operating system, not the operating system made by Apple. Regardless, in our first story below, IBM’s CIO says Big Blue has found that its employees are happier using Mac devices in the workplace. It’s an interesting development and maybe the …
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