Author: Mark

Beating Hobbits, and “an expected journey”

I know it’s been a long time since I put anything new up here. Partly because things have been busy, partly because there’s not been much to say.

But now we’re getting back into conference and travel season. SHARE is going on right now in Anaheim, planning is well underway for Impact, several other public events and customer-specific briefings are also going on.

But here’s a couple of travel stories to be going on with.
Read some short stories

Is there any value in product certification

I was prompted to write this by some recent conversations and news items about product certifications. Microsoft recently announced that they were ending their top level certification scheme. A more interesting certification process was the story about beer!

We have MQ product certifications. You can become a certified designer or administrator. But what’s the value of that? Is there any value?

My personal view is that there is close to zero practical benefit to getting these accreditations.

Find out why I don’t like the tests

This post was last updated on November 27th, 2021 at 03:01 pm

“Open” is not a good instruction at 35000′

Returning from SHARE over the weekend, I was sitting in the exit row of a 777. There are emergency doors just in front of these seats which gives plenty of legroom.

Emergency Exit on 777
Emergency Exit on 777

About half-way across the Atlantic I was woken by a woman who was trying to follow the instruction written on this door. I had to point out rather loudly that this was NOT the door to the lavs…

Everyone should know that these doors cannot actually open when in flight because of the pressure differential. But I still didn’t like the idea of testing the theory.

Is that a gun in your bag? Or …

Back home now, after a few fun days doing a couple of the European Hursley Comes To You events in Paris and Madrid.

One thing that made these sessions stand out from the US variety was the catering at lunch time. A cheese board in Paris, along with some really evil sticky desserts; beer and wine served with the nibbles in Madrid … So much more civilised.
Read about the “gun”

Being Producer/Director for someone else’s material

One of the hit sessions at this year’s Impact was not listed in the agenda. A bit like an off-off-Broadway show, it was given to a select few groups. This was the snappily-titled “MQ Workload Distribution in a Sysplex”, given by Lyn as part of the z solution suite activities. It talks about how different systems may process different amounts of work, and how this can be changed to more balanced distribution if you need to.

Since the initial run, she’s been asked to repeat the session for a bunch of customers, and there’s probably more requests than available time. So when she was visiting the UK recently, we took the opportunity to record the session and it is now available on youtube as a three-part playlist. (I quite like playlists, as it makes it easy to replace individual pieces without modifying the published URL.)

See more about the presentation

MQ on tour in Europe-ish

Now that Impact is out of the way, we are getting to the next round of the Hursley Comes To You and the Connectivity and SOA Summits. This time covering Europe (or countries that IBM seems to think are part of Europe).

The first one is at Stockholm next week, on June 11. Then it moves  to June 20 in Manchester, July 1 and 2 in Tel Aviv, July 8 in Paris, July 9 and 10 in Madrid.

And this blog is apparently partly responsible for one of them: the Paris event was requested by someone who had read my writing about the US events. And we were able to oblige.

The agendas are slightly different at each event, depending on the expected audience.

But I know that at Paris we are planning to include some deep-dive technical subjects. It will be done in English – sorry, but my French isn’t up to discussing performance tuning. Hopefully that will be OK. I’m looking forward to doing that one as I’ve not been to Paris for many years. Going to see if I can get the train over.

Following the rules

  • Company rules say that the pilot must make some chatty announcement as the plane gets to cruising altitude.
  • Company rules say that the pilot must make some chatty announcement as the plane begins descent.

Funnily enough, the weather doesn’t change a lot in the three minutes gap between these points on the short LAX/LAS hop.

Good news, Bad news

When I have an early weekday flight from Heathrow, I often stay at one of the nearby Hiltons the night before. It’s convenient, not outrageously expensive (especially with points), means I don’t have to get up at 4am to drive up the M3, and I can get a good breakfast in the lounge before going over to the terminals.

So I was doing that last night, checked in, went to check my email, and the laptop power supply went “pop”. No charging possible. I tried a new cable in case it was the fuse, tried different sockets, but it was clear that something was broken. Not a good thing to happen when you’re about to be away for a week with no real hardware support.

Continue reading