Author Archives: Martin Packer

(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”

(Originally posted 2008-06-20.) Take a look at my German colleague Kevin Keller’s new blog in Web 2.0 and z/OS. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what runs on z/OS that the rest of the world would regard as modern. 🙂 I say “modern” rather than “Web 2.0” because I feel the latter term isContinue reading “Kevin Keller’s Web 2.0 and z/OS Blog”

(Originally posted 2008-06-19.) Hats off to Jonathan Feinberg (who’s created a number of neat sites inside IBM) for creating Wordle. The above is a nice depiction of the keywords for my blog. Click on it for a bigger version. Go to here to make your own from any sets of text you like.

(Originally posted 2008-06-16.) I’m not sure if anyone’s done this before. Certainly I’ve not seen any results… We’re beginning to write up some tests the “A Team” (Alain and Pierre) ran before their return to France. Which provides me with some test data. Fortunately I had a stab at mapping the new fields this dataContinue reading “Coupling Facility Structure CPU – An Interesting Test”

(Originally posted 2008-06-12.) It’s fair to say I’ve written very little in terms of book words these past two days. That’s because I’ve been “doing research” on how the cache structure counters really work. “Doing research” is a euphemism for “finding out how the heck the darned thing works”. Which is in itself a positiveContinue reading “Cache Structure Information”

(Originally posted 2008-06-10.) I had to eat a little bit of humble pie today – because I made an elementary mistake. I’m going to share it with you – to save you making it, too. 🙂 And I’m very sure I’m not going to make it in a customer situation. (Residencies are great for makingContinue reading “Coupling Facility Structure CPU Time – Initial Investigations”

(Originally posted 2008-06-04.) Sometimes reading the SMF manual buys you less than you thought. I had completely ignored a nice little field – and the code I inherited to analyse SMF 74 Subtype 4 Coupling Facility data ignored it as well. R744SLEC in the Request Data Section for a structure is described by the textContinue reading “A Minor Fact About Lock Structures”

(Originally posted 2008-05-27.) The other three residents are busy doing extensive setup work – and we hope to have some nice measurements later on. (I’m not sure how much later on there actually is, mind.) 🙂 So I have no RMF or DB2 SMF to play with yet. 😦 > Meanwhile I’m beginning to comeContinue reading “Is It The Structure Or The Content That’s Important?”

(Originally posted 2008-05-23.) So, I’m about to start writing. At last! As a team we had a discussion yesterday about how to deal with performance numbers. One of the roles I’m playing on the team is “the guy who writes about performance numbers”. So we came to the following conclusions: We really can’t talk aboutContinue reading “Performance Numbers and the Redbook”