midrange.com – In My Humble Opinion

It’s time for the COMMON Conference once again … this time in Orlando Florida. This conference will be especially auspicious because it’s the 50th anniversary of the COMMON organization.

If you would like to say Hi, stop by the MKS booth on the expo floor.  You can also pick up an official midrange.com button.  I also have a handful of midrange.com ball caps with me … and I’ll be giving those out on a fairly random basis.  There might be a couple of hats that will be auctioned off at the main event and/or the COMMON Education Foundation.

Read more »

I’ve recently been working on an ILE RPG program that needs to read a SQL table that has a VARCHAR column encoded with CCSID 1200 (Unicode).

Since RPG doesn’t normally handle Unicode, it takes a little extra effort to process the contents.

Here’s a quick example of how you handle this data …

Read more »

Here’s a quick tip for troubleshooting API calls:

If you are calling an API and notice that data you are expecting isn’t being provided, verify that you are allocating enough space for the return values and telling it how much space you’ve allocated.

Many APIs require you to allocate space to hold the returned info – but if you don’t tell the API how much space you’ve provided, it will only return the information that fits in the space it knows about.

Read more »

The year end is approaching fast … and now is the time to get those pesky charitable contributions sent in in order to be considered for 2009.

The COMMON Education Foundation’s Al Barsa scholarship is a charity I consider well worth an investment … and I encourage you to send what you can.

midrange.com has just faxed the CEF a contribution for this year. I plan on making it a regular contribution, so long as finances allow it.

http://www.common.org/foundation/scholarships.html#barsa

While I’m at it … I’d like to wish everyone in the IBM i community the very happiest of holidays and a successful new year.

Time for a little politisizing here  … well, not really.

With the COMMON conference a few months away, the COMMON organization announced the candidates for the next board of directors election.

Running for the three board positions available are … Read more »

Thanks to Bryan Dietz, we found another “oopsie” in a PTF cover sheet …

Warning, this contains language that some might find objectionable … but most will laugh.

Read more »

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are going to be a lot of major changes at the next COMMON conference … and some of those changes are having impact:

Jon Paris & Susan Gantner are not going to be presenting.

I know for a fact that Jon & Susan are extraordinarily popular and good presenters at COMMON.  Whenever someone asks me what sessions to attend, I always say “Anything by Jon & Susan completely justifies the cost of the conference”.

I have a suspicion about other popular presenters … Scott Klement, Paul Tuohy, etc … but haven’t heard anything concrete yet.

Jon & Susan: I for one am going to miss you.

p.s.: FWIW: This was not unexpected.

Aaron Bartell, and a few others, came up with a pretty neat idea:  A Linux desktop for IBM i developers (and/or users).

Based on Ubuntu, the desktop environment would provide tools that an IBM i developer needs.

• 5250 Emulator
• IDE
• Mail
• Web
• Etc…

A list has been created to coordinate the project … LinuxDesktop4i.

Check it out if you’re interested in moving away from Windows or Mac.

Trevor Perry’s recent blog post Asleep at the wheel asks “How many of you have told someone outside this community about this amazing platform?”

Well, I for one, can say that I did just that … and continue to do so as often as I can.
Read more »

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts … building tools can be a fun & rewarding part of the job.

As part of a recent programming task, I had to do some analysis on commands to determine what parameters were supported in the SQL variant of the language compiler and what parameters were not supported.

I knew that the QCDRCMDD command could extract a commands definition to XML … and a little digging determined that the JT400 object Command could do it in Java.

A little bit of XML processing and I could get some good analysis very easily…

Read more »