Author Archives: Martin Packer

Prepare To Evacuate

It is rare to need to evacuate hardware. But being rare is not an excuse to neglect to plan for it. Obviously I’ve been sensitised to the question by real customer situations – though I don’t intend to describe the situations in any detail; This post should prove useful enough without doing that. When IContinue reading “Prepare To Evacuate”

What’s Important? CICS Transaction vs Region Goals

When assessing how well a WLM policy protects key work it’s necessary to understand how much CPU is used at each importance level. \ If there is very little work at a lower importance (higher importance number) a CPU crunch will leave work at this importance level vulnerable to CPU queuing. Let me give aContinue reading “What’s Important? CICS Transaction vs Region Goals”

Remember Memory

In Engineering – Part 8 – Remote Access Detection I talked about reasons why LPARs might go cross-drawer. One reason I didn’t give was about memory. (I should perhaps remind you that on modern machines a logical processor accessing Level 4 Cache or memory in another processor drawer incurs a significant performance penalty, showing upContinue reading “Remember Memory”

Two Of These Are Not Like The Others

They were simpler times back then. “Back when?” You might ask. When PR/SM got started – in the mid 1980’s – a machine might have two or three LPARs. Similarly, when Parallel Sysplex got started the number of members was very small. For reference, a z17 ME1 can have up to 85 LPARs, and aContinue reading “Two Of These Are Not Like The Others”

Modern Machines, Modern Metrics

Modern Machines, Modern Metrics In z17 Sustainability Metrics – Part 0 I wrote about the new z17 Sustainability Metrics, or “Power Consumption”, if you prefer. This post isn’t part 1 – as I don’t intend to go into much detail about what I’ve learnt so far. I have learnt things, of course. During the SummerContinue reading “Modern Machines, Modern Metrics”

md2pptx 6 Is Another Big Step Forward

If the purpose of Version 5 was to add the ability to use Python in the context of md2pptx the purpose of version 6 is to extend md2pptx’s automation capabilities still further. This time instead of Python it’s AppleScript. The context is different too: With Version 5 the Python support runs the user-supplied code asContinue reading “md2pptx 6 Is Another Big Step Forward”

md2pptx 5 Is A Big Step Forward

A while back I experimented with executing user-provided Python. It seemed a small step at the time, but I had a hunch it would turn out to be a much bigger thing. Coding it was straightforward but two things delayed releasing it: Documentation is tricky. The python-pptx API is (necessarily) not for the faint ofContinue reading “md2pptx 5 Is A Big Step Forward”

mdpre Comes Of Age

I wondered a while back why I hadn’t got mdpre to 1.0. It turns out there were still some things I felt it needed to have it “graduate”. I suppose I should explain what mdpre actually is. It’s a tool for preprocessing text into Markdown, This text is “almost Markdown” or “Markdown+” so you canContinue reading “mdpre Comes Of Age”