Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2008-09-20.) Well, how many do you have? I’ll admit to 4 on my Windows XP Laptop (and 2 versions of 1 on my ASUS EEE PC, running Linux)… I firmly believe in having an “emergency browser”. At 0ne time that would have been Internet Explorer – for two reasons: To recover a brokenContinue reading “How Many Browsers Do You Have On Your Machine?”

(Originally posted 2008-09-19.) In recent releases RMF have put the machine serial number into both SMF Type 74 Subtype 4 (Coupling Facility Activity) and SMF Type 70 Subtype 1 (CPU Activity). Actually we get two fields in each case: Plant Number and Sequence Number, which you can put together as eg “51-12345”. Soon we’ll getContinue reading “Minor Good News On Coupling Facility Performance Reporting”

(Originally posted 2008-09-18.) Since I got back off vacation in L’Hérault in late August I’ve been working on adding z10 support to our CPU analysis code. It’s quite a substantial set of changes – and I don’t think I’m finished yet. But I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned so far. But firstContinue reading “System z10 CPU Instrumentation”

(Originally posted 2008-07-31.) As I mentioned in this blog post DFSORT just shipped a new FINDREP function to do “find and replace”. I mentioned an example of where I might use it to replace SMFIDs in SMF records. That example generally works well. But suppose (say, for SMF 42-6 Data Set Performance records) I wantContinue reading “Replace String A With String B But Not If It’s Part Of String A1”

(Originally posted 2008-07-29.) Yesterday DFSORT announced a new set of functions – as PTF UK90013. The documentation for it can be found here. Every year or so there’s a new set of DFSORT functions – and generally they’re “out of cycle” with z/OS releases – although they are incorporated into subsequent releases of z/OS. ThisContinue reading “New DFSORT Functions”

(Originally posted 2008-07-11.) A couple of days ago I attended the pilot of a “Web 2.0 and System z” workshop in the Boeblingen lab. I’m pleased to say the room was full – both with IBMers and non-IBMers. And I think my presentation – which was basically a rant about Web 2.0 Behaviours and whyContinue reading “Web 2.0 and System z Pilot Workshop – And Other Conversations”

(Originally posted 2008-07-11.) In the same meeting with RMF Development as ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW was discussed we talked about Parallel Sysplex instrumentation. (Both XCF and Coupling Facility aspects.) One thing I hadn’t noticed is the appearance of Subchannel Busy Percentage as a number in the following three places: In Monitor III In the Spreadsheet ReporterContinue reading “Coupling Facility Subchannel Busy in RMF”

(Originally posted 2008-07-11.) I mentioned ERBSCAN and ERBSHOW in this post from January. This is a handy pair of tools for displaying SMF records – most notably the ones produced by RMF. For the uninitiated you type ERBSCAN in ISPF 3.4 against an SMF data set and it pops up a list of SMF records.Continue reading “ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW – More Good News”

(Originally posted 2008-06-25.) Many of you will have, by now, installed the Adobe AIR runtime. Most probably it will be to run something like Twhirl. At this point many of you will be asking “what’s Twhirl?” If I said it was a nice desktop application that makes using Twitter so much easier I hope youContinue reading “First Impressions Of Programming With Adobe AIR”

(Originally posted 2008-06-21.) The same Kevin Keller I mentioned in this blog post is running a one day pilot of a “Web 2.0 and System z” workshop on July 8th, in IBM Böblingen. It’s designed for customers, though some of the audience will undoubtedly be IBMers. I’ve looked at the agenda and, while I’m onContinue reading “Web 2.0 and System z Pilot Workshop”