IBM MQ Archives - Page 9 of 9 - Mark Taylor's Blog

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.

Countdown to Impact – a historic perspective

The Impact conference starts in 10 days in Las Vegas. For the speakers that means we need to finish up writing presentations, although that seems to happen later and later at each event.

Many conference regulars will be there: myself, Lyn, Morag, Ralph as well as executives and some others who aren’t allowed out in public so often, and the marketing people. As always, this is a busy week not only for the public talking but also the stream of meetings that we participate in. Going to Vegas is not a jolly, and there’s often attempts to NOT be sent.

There used to be a much stricter deadline for finalised presentations, as material was only distributed in physical formats. So it had to be submitted several weeks in advance.For some subjects that was fine, but it made it harder to deal with late-breaking changes, such as if an expected product announcement was cancelled or a new feature altered its implementation.

I was digging through my cupboard a few weeks ago and found the book of presentations from the 1998 MQSeries Technical Conference in Washington DC – properly published and bound. Very nice, but heavy and for those of us who try to fly with only hand-luggage a bit awkward. Back then, we also often used boxes of real acetate foils, carefully separated and hopefully kept in order; there was no guarantee of projection systems even if we had laptops with us. (That DC event has special memories for me, though it’s not why I kept the book.)

It’s interesting looking back at that old material. Features of MQ that were considered interesting or exciting but which are no longer used; and the converse, features that are still critical to customers. Here is the MQSeries V5.0 presentation from 1997/1998 as an example. The “web admin” feature is long gone in that form, as is the DCE Directory Service support. But transaction coordination is still very heavily used.

Although we try to predict which features are going to have a long-term value when planning new releases of MQ, these “What’s New” presentations do show where we got it right and where we didn’t.

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.

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.

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.

MTTI

After MTBF and MTTF, I came across a new related concept here.

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.

MQ0P Event formatter — 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

Draft MQ Primer available (for a short time)

In a previous post I wrote about getting the 1999 MQSeries Primer updated.

Now other people can get to see if it was worth it by going to ~~http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4930.html~~ http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp0021.html where they will find this short document.

Update: The draft has moved location – part of the process of giving it the same form-number as the predecessor redpiece. Annoying it happened during this draft process, but the draft address has always been temporary anyway,

About this blog

Brief introduction to me and what this blog is likely to be about:
I work on the development of the IBM MQ product, one of IBM’s extremely successful pieces of software. It’s developed at IBM’s Hursley laboratory near Winchester in England where I have been for more than 30 years.

My normal description of Hursley is that it is a typical English village – one shop, one church and two pubs. Except for the 3000 people working at the IBM site behind it.

My activities in MQ have meant I have been involved in lots of different aspects of the product – security, performance, administration, monitoring and more. It’s also meant that I’ve spent a lot time travelling, working away from the office desk, talking to people individually or in front of conference and seminar audiences.

This blog started out primarily to record stories about some of the non-technical pieces of what I do. For example planning, preparation and travel stories; talking about some of the aspects of MQ that are not necessarily part of the code.

But for various reasons this resurrected and relocated blog is now going to also have some MQ technical material. There are now copies of blog posts I’d posted to other platforms, but going forward I expect to post newer articles too.

The blog started in 2012 and languished for a while, so there was quite a large gap when nothing was published. I’m hoping to be more assiduous in future. Though the copied articles from other sites have preserved their publication dates to fill in some of those gaps.

I’m also going to talk about some other stuff I do around music. And how the hobby occasionally intersects with the MQ work.

And there may be guest authors on here too.

This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 01:30 pm