February 1998

• Buyers Guide: AS/400 Line Printers - Features of available AS/400-attachable lie printer models.
• In This Issue -
• Letters -
• Making Time for Change: Resist or Move Forward - Wayne Madden explains why embracing opportunities for change is essential to moving forward in your professional and personal life. He discusses the three primary ingredients of change: motivation, time, and planning.
• Beware of Creeping Meatball-ism - Don't settle for meatball-quality staff, says Bob Tipton. Learn how to attract the best and brightest IT talent to your shop in the midst of a shrinking pool of qualified candidates.
• Thriving After RPG Boot Camp - An e-commerce consulting job was waiting for Jef Benedetti at the end of an intense 10-week RPG training program - one that you may want to copy or enroll in yourself.
• AS/400 Performance Ratings - You must be careful with the inferences you draw from the published AS/400 CPW performance ratings. If you don't fit the profile on which the ratings are based, your capacity planning may be overly optimistic. Rick Turner explains when and how to use the ratings to estimate capacity.
• E-Commerce Is Collaboration - Nahid Jilovec describes how e-commerce is really a form of collaboration between trading partners, and she reviews some of the tools today's businesses are using for collaborative e-commerce.
• IT Career Planning into the 21st Century - Robert Tipton examines how professional accountability and liability, development of a common body of knowledge, and Year 2000 legal battles will influence your future career plans.
• AS/400 Education: At the Crossroads. - Mary Lou Roberts examines the lack of AS/400 programmers and how IBM's Partners in Education program enlists Business Partners to help schools develop curricula to train more AS/400 programmers.
• Erasing the Gender Line in IT - Ann Lewkowicz discusses how to create a working environment that embraces all employees.
• Sending Files with FTP - In this second article in the RPG IV Tools series, Julian Monypenny provides the SNDFTPF command, which lets you use your TCP/IP network and FTP to transfer files between any systems on the network, including Unix and Windows 95/NT systems.
• Java Class Anatomy - IBM Toronto lab developers Phil Coulthard and George Farr continue their series on Java for RPG programmers, focusing this time on the makeup of a Java class.
• Loading the Data Warehouse, Part II - Scott Steinacher outlines the steps to transform data and propagate it to a data warehouse and examines several types of replication techniques to help you.
• Windows 95/NT Data Access Middleware - Chuck Lundgren explains the different types of application middleware, such as ODBC and OLE DB drivers, DLLs, and APIs. A longer version of the article at http://www.news400.com provides a middleware buyers guide and vendor list.
• Software Globalization and POSIX Locales - By enabling a program to adapt at runtime to new system environments, POSIX locales provide an efficient solution for creating globalized software. In this article, Ibrahim Batthish introduces some basic facts about locales on the AS/400. An expanded version of this article at http://www.news400.com provides the details, including code examples in ILE C.
• Scan Message File - You can't code a new application to use an existing message description unless you can find it. Bradley Stone's SCNMSGF utility searches a message file for messages that contain a user-specified string.
• Configuring Client Access's Native TCP/IP Connection - Michael Otey explains how to set up Client Access for Windows 95/NT's native TCP/IP support, which takes only minutes and performs significantly better than AnyNet/400.
• Keep an Eye on Your AS/400 with Auditing - Denis Seiler explains how to set up the AS/400's auditing capability, which lets you track changes to system objects so you can better enforce your security policy. The article also includes a CL utility, CVTAUDJRNC, that formats audit output so it's readable and performs some audit-management functions.
• The Case of Locating Client/Server Capacity - Using trace data, Dan Cruikshank and James Stewart demonstrate how to proactively determine a new client/server application's workload on your AS/400.
• Tech Corner -
• Are there any special hardware concerns to consider when upgrading to a new AS/400e series processor -
• New Products & Services -
• AS/400 Image Campaign Needs Polishing - Cheryl Ross presents opinions from NEWS/400 readers and Gartner Group analyst Tom Bittman about the AS/400's image in the computer industry and how IBM can improve its AS/400 advertising and marketing strategy. (Cheryl Ross, ADVERTISING, AS/400, DIALOG BOX, IBM, IMAGE, MARKETING, news400.com (February 1998))
• Street Talk -
• Newswatch -
• I’ve heard that programs using restricted machine interface (MI) instructions won't convert to RISC. -
• What’s the significance of a program’s validation value, and what happens to the validation value du -
• Simulate Multidimensional Arrays in RPG with Subprocedures -
• Showing Undisplayable Characters -
• Using Stored Procedures -
• Tape Save Problem -
• Physical File Triggers -
• Direct-Attached TCP/IP Printing -
• Client Access Asynch Connection -