Two Potential New Presentations – Coming Soon?

(Originally posted 2012-12-08.)

Every year I like to debut one new presentation, though that isn’t a firm rule: In 2012 I debuted “Send In The Clones” (SITC)¹ and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (IKWYDLS), but actually only the first one was written in 2012.

Of course presentations are “slow trains coming”: I widely trailed my desire to write IKWYDLS in 2011 and finally revealed it early this year. (In fact it evolved through the course of the year into “I Know What You Did THIS Summer” and I now refer to is as “I Know What You Did This Last Summer”.) 🙂 Or “IKWYDTLS” for short.

SITC arose much more spontaneously – being initially a presentation for a customer working group. (And it still has some of that genesis in it – with a rather pointed “where from here?” slide left in.)

The point of the above is generally I don’t just get up one day and decide “today I’ll put on a show”: You have to “record” before you can “gig”. (Of course I do just say stuff sometimes.) 🙂

So what about 2013?

I have two ideas swirling around in my head, and I’d like to know if either appeals to you:

1. Time For D.I.M.E.
2. The Life And Times Of An Address Space

Time For D.I.M.E.

This is more a “campaign” presentation in that I really do think it’s time (judging by my customer set) for customers (particularly those running z196 and zEC12 machines, but also z114) to consider memory usage afresh. (DIME is, of course, short for Data In Memory Exploitation.) (With the advent – a while back but practically into 2013 – of DB2 Version 10 this becomes even more relevant.)

This is probably the presentation my management would be keener I wrote – though it’s one I personally feel strongly about anyway.

The Life And Times Of An Address Space

I like to write occasionally about more abstract things, things with less immediate punch in their message. This presentation is very much in that category. Its origins are, I think, the lower-level pieces of IKWYDTLS. When giving that presentation I had to gloss over the address space piece. And there was so much more I wanted to say than was even on the slides. And stuff has happened this year that makes it even worse – as regular readers of this blog will know.

I also think there’s something of a (pseudo-)intellectual framework to be espoused here: For example, we can view batch jobs and CICS regions as looking very different but actually there is much commonality. I’d like to explore that.

(There is a practical benefit as it’s important to use the commonality but respect the differences when designing reporting.)

I also think it’s important to get beyond the idealised address space and into practical examples, such as CICS and DB2.

(Somehow BBEdit, which I’m writing this in, seems to have learned to prompt me with the words “CICS” and “DB2.) 🙂

So How About You?

What do you think of those two ideas? Feel free to comment here or in any other way you like. The aim is to take these two ideas (and any others) and turn them into useful material, whether actual presentations, blog posts, analysis code or whatever.

The next step is probably to inflict more of my handwriting on you. 🙂 And, as I’m not so good at graphics, I might collect some napkins from around the world to draw them on and post photos of these rough drafts as we go along. 🙂 Now wouldn’t it be fun to do a presentation composed entirely of photos of drawings on interesting pieces of paper, sides of cows, people holding placards² etc? 🙂

Notes:

¹ Queen fans tend to refer to songs and albums by obscure sets of initials, so that “TMLWKY” is “Too Much Love Will Kill You”, “NOTW” is “News Of The World” etc.. TMI? Perhaps. 🙂

² I see CICS has already done it. 🙂