Messaging, Music and Moving Around
So on my MQ travels this week, I elected to drive to visit a customer. Typically driving to a customer who is less than 200 miles away is faster and with less hassle then flying (Take off your shoes! Put your laptop in a bin! Bend over!). Or so I believed.
Beliefs are meant to be tested, and mine were.
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.
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.
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”
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.)
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.
But this time I am at the Morumbi Hilton. A lovely hotel, with an outstanding staff.
So on the plane down here a lovely young woman sat in the center seat of the “economy comfort” row. We started talking, and she is part of a group coming to Brazil for an MBA project. She’d never been before, so I helped her fill in her immigration forms and answered some questions. 3-4 days in Sao Paulo, then 3-4 days in Rio for her group. The excitement just radiated from her.
Continue to read the warnings
Funnily enough, the weather doesn’t change a lot in the three minutes gap between these points on the short LAX/LAS hop.
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.
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.
While on a plane, I suddenly noticed a very familiar scent. At first I could not quite place it, then I turned to the lady beside me and asked ‘Do you stay at a lot of Hilton hotels?’ She looked surprised and replied that she does. She had just applied some of the lotion we all liberate from the hotel as they are in TSA approved sizes (and it’s really nice lotion).