Al Barsa Scholarship Challenge 2010 Wrapup

I’m please to announce that the Al Barsa Scholarship Challenge 2010 was a great success. $1,260 was raised with an additional $1600 in matching grants for a total of $2,860! Thanks to the following members of the IBM i community who donated: David Vasta Brad Stone Norm Dennis Michael Smith Carl Novit Wayne Evans Bryce…

COMMON Board Elections 2011

Recently COMMON sent out an email blast notifying people announcing the candidates for the next board of directors election. Running for the three board positions available are … Jeff Carey Robert Krzceczowski Phil McCullough Russell Meyer As I did last year, I’ve offered each of the candidates a guest author spot on this blog. As…

Al Barsa Scholarship Challenge 2010

As many of you know, the COMMON Education Foundation’s Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship is very important to me. A discussion thread on MIDRANGE-L was the impetus for the scholarship and midrange.com has made a yearly contribution. This year, however, I want to try something different. I’m going to borrow something from public broadcasting … and…

ExtendedIOException in Java

If your java application starts encountering a ExtendedIOException error while trying to access files in the IFS, check to see if you’ve got a 3rd party security exit program in place. I just had a rather frustrating diagnostic problem with a customer … they installed a recent upgrade to our product and the java application…

IBM Power System Technical University

I’m currently at the IBM Power System Technical University conference in Las Vegas. Originally I wasn’t going … but a scheduling problem with another person in my office came up and I got tagged to pinch hit for him. So far the conference is going well … although I’m only here for the “Solution Center”…

Simon Coulter

This is a very sad month for the IBM i community … First Lukas passed away … and today I learned that Simon Coulter, also a frequent contributor to many midrange.com lists, passed away after a rather short battle with cancer. Simon had remarkable insight & intelligence … and was always willing to help solve…

Auf Wiedersehen Lukas

I learned today that my friend, and frequent midrange.com contributor, Lukas Beeler passed away recently. I received an event invitation from Lukas’s Facebook account … but the content was in German. I ran it through Google’s translate function and, although far from perfect, the resulting text made mentioned “died in intensive care”. It also gave…

IBM i in the Cloud?

Aaron Bartell posted an interesting link to a new Frankeni Technology pursuit: IBM i Personal Development in the cloud (leaked by iGor, aka Jim Oberholtzer, on the WEB400 list). This should be VERY interesting … watch that space.

COMMON 2010

Well, another COMMON Conference & Annual Meeting is in the bag. I’m currently at my departure gate in Orlando Airport and I figured this is a great time to make a post (especially since they have free wifi). My current, totally unscientific, impression is that attendance was up. I’ve heard other people, including COMMON officers,…

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…