Author: Mark

Let it snow. And snow. And snow.

A good number of customers and IBMers are here at the University of Minnesota to hear about our latest connectivity products. And that’s despite some horrid weather.

Snow in Minneapolis
Snow in Minneapolis

I’m sure the city tourist agencies don’t like this, but when we’re doing the HCTY gigs, one of the first things we think about is “how easily will we get out of this place.” There’s no time to enjoy the places we go to; we just have to be ready to get to the next location.

And on this batch of locations, so far, we seem to have been too-closely followed by snow and ice There was an ice storm in Bentonville that disrupted many of the flights in and out of town on both the night before and the day after. And now in Minneapolis there’s been a huge dump of snow. At least they are used to it here, and the flights (mostly) look OK for getting to Colorado.

MQ V7.1 and V7.5 Redbook now fully available

The MQ V7.1 and V7.5 book from which the new Primer was extracted has now completed its journey through graphics design and editing and is available here in pdf, epub and (in a few days) hardcopy. Thanks to those people who provided comments on the draft.

A couple of the other authors wrote about their experiences in this blog post.

V7.1 Redbook

MQ on tour

This week is the start of the Hursley Comes To You (HCTY) events for 2013 in North America. We start tomorrow in Jersey City before moving to Bentonville, Calgary, Minneapolis, Colorado Springs and Toronto. The agendas vary a bit by location but basically it’s a discussion of many current Hursley products, going into as much detail as time and interest allow. So we talk about MQ, MB, WSRR, Mobile etc.

For us, these are just like the gigs I did in a band, many years ago. Get into town, do the show, move on to the next one … But generally we now get to stay at nicer hotels. And we fly rather than drive. And we do change band-members speakers regularly.

For customers and partners, it’s a great opportunity to meet up and talk. As well as the scheduled agenda, there’s one-one meetings available with all of us.

And the best bit – it’s FREE.

Reading the emergency card

A kind-of followon  to my earlier post about safety briefings. I just got off a flight where I was sitting next to a dead-heading pilot on her way to another job. Before takeoff she very carefully reviewed the safety card. That struck me as unusual – it’s one of those things I only expect first-timers to do.

Though I have to admit I can’t see those cards without thinking of Fight Club.

I’m not really that colour

I didn’t know this video had gone live, and found it by chance while looking for something else.

I think it was the first time I’d done anything long direct to camera, and that shows. And I’m not really that John Boehner/Dale Winton (trying to cover different country reference points) colour. But it was a fun thing to do one afternoon while we were writing the book last year. Hopefully the video release means that the final edited version of the redbook is closer too.

 

How simply can you describe MQ?

Came across this XKCD graphic, trying to describe the Apollo 5 rocket using just the most common 1000 words in English. Which has led to this page, allowing you to try to express an idea with the same limitations.

So I started to wonder about how to explain MQ, and quickly found that “message” is not in the permitted list. It could be made easier if there were a linked thesaurus, but that takes some of the fun away.

I did get as far as “conversation between computers can continue even when one not running”.

This post was last updated on November 18th, 2019 at 03:36 pm

Show, don’t tell. MS0P education on youtube.

I’ve just released a new version of SupportPac MS0P V7.1.0.2 containing a couple of new features. This package started out as my attempt to learn Java programming and it did one thing only, formatting MQ event messages into readable text from within the MQ Explorer.

MS0P Event Formatter

Over the years it has grown into a collection of utilities, still mostly for the Explorer, but all aimed at making it easier to use MQ. Although the package contains documentation, we all know how much people read the books (at least it’s not an InfoCentre format). And so I decided to produce video demonstrations as an alternative.

Continue reading “Show, don’t tell. MS0P education on youtube.”

This post was last updated on November 18th, 2019 at 08:56 pm