Author: Mark

Hidden rooms, fake backgrounds

Like many in recent months I’ve been doing a lot more communication using web conferencing solutions. All meetings are virtual, you can’t kick a person under the table to shut them up, you get very familiar with some nostrils from their camera angles, there are some who sound like they are talking through several layers of mud.

After the first few calls I had where there were comments about the drinks cabinet behind me (and at least one person proposing to measure the height of the fluid in each bottle to see how it changed by the next meeting) I decided to change the picture. And the audio. But not the bottles.

This post will talk about my setup and its use of a few technologies to make it all seem a bit more professional. I might not use all of this capability for internal discussions with one or two other people. But I think it helps particularly when doing presentations and education sessions to customers.

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This post was last updated on July 7th, 2020 at 09:43 pm

Updates for MQ metric exporters

The MQ metric exporters are a set of Go programs that deliver queue manager statistics and status to databases such as Prometheus and Influx. They have recently been updated, giving more consistent function and a much easier configuration. This post will explore and explain these changes.

For an introduction to these exporters, see some of my earlier posts in this blog.

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This post was last updated on November 27th, 2021 at 02:59 pm

A “major” update to the MQ Go package version

The Go language and toolchain did not have a good version control system when created. Systems built on Go could not easily define the levels of the dependencies underpinning the system. Various tools were developed to help with that such as dep and glide. But more recently, the Go compiler environment has defined modules as the way forward. The MQ Go packages are now available in a format that works with modules, with a major number version update to match. This post describes what has been done in the core MQ packages.

A separate post talks about changes in the mq-metric-samples repository that exploits these packages and enables monitoring in tools like Prometheus and Influx.

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This post was last updated on June 4th, 2020 at 09:44 am

MQ API Exits – FAQ

In the past few months I seem to have been been sent a bunch of questions about MQ API Exits from a variety of developers. Some of the questions were repeated so I thought I’d try to collect them, tidy them up, and turn them into an FAQ article.

API Exits were originally made available for one platform in MQSeries V5.2 and then extended to the rest of the Distributed family in V5.3 so they have been around for a while.

Exits are an advanced topic and I’m not planning on going into much general information about these exits. I will assume that someone interested in this article already knows the basic principles and is comfortable working in this environment. For more information on the interfaces see the product documentation and the sample amqsaxe0.c exit.

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This post was last updated on December 30th, 2025 at 10:04 am

Finding some positives

Have to find something good in the current situation, and here’s one thing that worked for me.

My passport expires later this year. I was a bit worried about finding a suitable gap in my schedule when I could do without it for a while. As soon as it became obvious there would not be any travel in the immediate future, I filled out the online form and used my phone to take and upload a new photo. The UK government site said the normal processing takes up to three weeks. 12 days later my new passport was delivered (with the blue/black cover). Much faster than I had expected.

I also need to get the US Global Entry renewal sorted out. That requires an initial background check from the UK which claims to take up to 2 weeks. I received the approval for that in 12 hours.

Just hope I get to use the passport soon…

MQ JMS and Spring Boot – improved efficiency

The efficiency of MQ JMS is now improved when used in a Spring Boot application.

The Spring Framework provides simple ways for Java programs to use a variety of interfaces. Its JMS component includes classes that help a program wait for new messages, similar to a Message Driven Bean. The default behaviour of the Spring implementation is known to be non-optimal when working with IBM MQ and I wanted to improve the efficiency.

This article shows recent improvements to Spring Boot and the corresponding MQ JMS Spring Boot component. They remove the need for application developers to know about, and to write code to deal with that inefficiency.

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This post was last updated on June 24th, 2025 at 02:44 pm

Accidental Plagiarism

This started out as a pleasant-enough chord/bass improvisation. Nothing special but I hoped it might inspire something.

Unfortunately, when I began to put a melody on top, it was sounding a little familiar. It’s a bit jerky because once I got to this point I didn’t bother cleaning up the performances.

This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 01:31 pm