I’m like a big kid and really looking forward to the end of October. But this doesnt involve witches, black cats, badly fitted fancy dress, an orgy of cheap plastic Halloween consumerism not does it involve kids demanding candy under threat of egging your car. It’s the Annual iSeries Developers Convention. October 25th-28, including the

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I’m like a big kid and really looking forward to the end of October. But this doesnt involve witches, black cats, badly fitted fancy dress, an orgy of cheap plastic Halloween consumerism not does it involve kids demanding candy under threat of egging your car. It’s the Annual iSeries Developers Convention. October 25th-28, including the

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So, there I was this morning sipping my cup of rather disgustingly nauseous Pumpkin Flavored Starbucks Coffee… You gotta try these things, because as my grandpa always said “nothing ventured nothing gained” but sadly the Judges awarded the beverage Color-7 Presentation-8 Taste-Yuk!… but I digress… Where was I? Ah yes, the wonderful IBM RPG Programming Language! What does

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So, back in the days of Sinclair C5’s, black and white TV licenses and pound notes, RPG was a bright new and vibrant programming language.

/me coughs and splutters slightly

Digging around an old Disk Drive (or perhaps I should say ‘winchester drive’) just looking to see if it was safe to throw away, I discovered some great old word documents that I put together back in the day. One of these was an RPG type test which was used to try to gauge the knowledge of people applying for programming roles within the Software House that I worked for.

I guess this was first written back in 91 and only goes to show how steady RPG is since it’s largely unchanged and still going strong after nearly 20 years:

 

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Well… ILE RPG certified programmers are special. But they are dying. Exist. Kaput. Or at least, they will be at the end of 2009! For some very strange reason, IBM have decided to kill the ILE RPG Programmer certification. As we all know, being an RPG Programmer is a rare skill set nowadays… and it’s

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IFS or DLS? The IFS is probably one of my favorite things about IBM i. The Integrated File System (IFS) is a layer of software that lets the rest of your ‘Windows’ World talk directly to that big Black IBM Super Server in the corner. The beauty of it is…. those widows machines don’t even know

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Today, I was talking *techie* to a colleague in I.T. who still calls the IBMi Operating System – ‘The AS/400’. *sigh* We bumped over a few technology sleeping policemen during the conversation. Software is easy to upgrade. Mindsets are sometimes overlooked. This reminded me of the importance of keeping our skill sets current. If we

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I just got the nicest Linkedin reference from Steve Brown of Atlantic Recruitment: Details of the Recommendation: “Nick is a triple A rated i Series Consultant. Every time I have recruited Nick for client projects he has delivered. But more than that, the feedback that I have had from clients has been that Nick always

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Fresh out today – thje latest build of the RPG Next Generation editor – 0.5.0 Open Source at its best and finally a nice, friendly, easy to use code editor for the IBM i. Download the latest version for here It’s at version 0.5 so still in early days yet, but with each minor release

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Upgrade RPG3 before its too late Many IBM Power i machines have been running steadily for years without business interruption. The hardware is incredibly resilient but development environments are in need of upgrading. The nature of the machine means applications written ten to twenty years ago are still running strong, so the need for change

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The IBM System i has a strong following, in part because companies have not generally been required to upgrade hardware or software on an arbitrary schedule. This means that many business are running legacy computer applications (for legacy read ‘old fashioned’) that have typically been running on green-on-black terminals for many years – “if it

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That will teach me. I just downloaded a seemingly harmless program called ‘Photo to Cartoon’ because i wanted to play around with some cartoon style avatars. Silly me. 🙁 Downloaded it and ran the install and it simply locked solid… *but* I noticed that my HDD activity light was going mental! Hmmm thought I… this

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