Requiem For A Software Company

Please note: The author of this article has requested to remain anonymous. They are NOT associated with midrange.com in any way. Once upon a time a developer had a vision for making writing software easier. An entrepreneur could see this vision too, so paid for the developer to implement this vision. Thus, was a software…

Asking Good Questions

Warning: This blog post is going to be part rant and part educational. Recently I’ve been dealing with a mailing list subscriber that does not understand how to ask good questions on mailing list. He has a habit of posting overly broad questions that, at least in my opinion, demonstrate that he has not tried…

Have DDS Files Finally Gone Way Of The Dinosaur

If you are still cranking out the traditional physical and logical file with DDS I think it’s time to get up to speed with SQL for both creating and querying files. For a long time I held onto using DDS, but with the capabilities in SQL if you are still clinging to DDS I think…

Why I Dislike Code Generators

Those of you who follow the midrange.com lists probably are aware that I’m not a big fan of application code generators.

This includes (but is not limited to) …

* Case Tools (AS/SET, Synon, etc)
* EGL
* SQL Pre-processors (RPG SQL, COBOL SQL, etc)
* JSP (to a limited extent)
* Various 3rd party application generators

The reason is simple … the code you write is not the code that executes.

The Green Screen Sucks, And Other Heresy

For years we have been hearing of its demise, even IBM tried to drive a stake through it’s heart with the much fangled Java? but ye old 5250 emulation, also known as green screen, and the programs written to run on it just won’t die. After eleven years as an administrator, programmer and manager using…

IBM i in the Cloud?

There’s a very interesting article in The Register (written by Timothy Prickett Morgan) about IBM getting into the ‘cloud’ computing space. One of the most interesting parts, at least to me, is the reference to IBM i … Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at Global Technology Services, says that IBM understands that there…

iSociety

Responding to a recent post in MIDRANGE-L about iSociety, Joe Pluta wrote … What a shame! I remember the enthusiasm in the i community when isociety was rolled out. If there is anything that I can do to help please contact me offline. I am more than willing to do whatever I can. I don’t…

RPG Open Access

Aaron Bartell wrote about the new RPG Open Access (RPGOA) feature available for IBM i. The biggest problem with RPGOA is the cost … it’s not included in the base OS or RPG compiler. The cost is $500 – $5000, based on your system tier. As the IBM i community has demonstrated repeatedly … charging extra…

Business Problems Will Solve the i Crisis

Everyone keeps harping on how our beloved AS/400s, iSeries and IBM i systems are going the way of the dinosaur but nobody seems to offer a way to remedy the situation. Many folks keep criticizing IBM for not running more space ads in industry publications or on television but I think they are missing the…

Reality Check: Workstation Backups?

As IT professionals, we are (or should be) quite obsessed with backups. The question is … does our obsession go far enough? Yes, I’m sure our IBM i systems are all backed up quite securely … with tapes being rotated and taken off site. Probably even a solid HA solution to mirror your operational environment…