Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2012-09-06.) I hope you like my new blog banner – in honour of the new zEnterprise EC12. We actually announced the zEC12 (for short) the day I returned from vacation. Great planning, IBM! 🙂 It’s taken me a while to catch up – and changing the banner was an important step. 🙂 I’veContinue reading “New Blog Banner – In Honour Of The New zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12)”

(Originally posted 2012-08-04.) I’m not a capacity planner but I play one on TV1 sometimes. A customer asked me about the subject of zAAP Capacity Planning so I thought I’d post a few thoughts here. (Almost everything I say here is equally true of a zIIP.) The main point is I don’t think it terriblyContinue reading “zIIP / zAAP Capacity Planning”

(Originally posted 2012-07-10.) I can tell when a CICS region came up – without looking at CICS-specific instrumentation. What’s more I can repeat the "trick" for any of MQ, DB2, IMS, etc – and so can you. I’ve just started work on a new piece of reporting. I’ll call it "raddrspc" as that’s the nameContinue reading “The Low Down on Up Time”

(Originally posted 2012-07-07.) It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In this Social Media age I’d say indirection comes a pretty close second. Indeed there’s a nice term for it: "link love". Standard advice is not to just post links to the content of others. In reality the word "just" should probablyContinue reading “DSECTs To DFSORT Symbols”

(Originally posted 2012-07-02.) DFSORT’s Arithmetic operators can do many things but the one thing they can’t do is take the square root of a number. You might think that’s minor but it means you can’t calculate a Standard Deviation. (Variance is fine but dimensionally not so nice when used in conjunction with the Mean.) AndContinue reading “Square Roots In DFSORT”

(Originally posted 2012-06-30.) The CICS Monitor Trace SMF Record (Type 110) has got to be one of the most complicated SMF records in existence – and for good reason. Which is precisely why I’m not going to attempt to process the raw records in my code. (And why PMCICS doesn’t support releases after a certainContinue reading “Another Way Of Looking At CICS Monitor Trace Data”

(Originally posted 2012-06-24.) It’s been a while since I last posted here. And that’s been more a matter of being incredibly busy than anything. Some of you will have seen me "on stage" – there having been several conferences and user groups recently. Some of you were with me at the zChampions meeting and someContinue reading “Two Kinds Of Pipes”

(Originally posted 2012-05-12.) With just over a week to go I’ve got my presentation materials in for this great conference: IBM System z Technical University 21-25 May in Berlin. I hope to see many friends – old and new (old and young) 🙂 there.   For the record my three sessions are: zZS08 – IContinue reading “IBM System z Technical University 21-25 May, Berlin”

(Originally posted 2012-04-29.) If you think this title is obscure bear in mind the original working title was "Send In The Hobgoblins". 1 🙂 When I started to write – actually before the "mind mapping" stage – it was going to be all about inconsistency in the way bits of systems are named. You'll seeContinue reading “He Picks On CICS”

(Originally posted 2012-04-12.) I was pleased when Julian Bridges (who I worked with in IBM Global Services for a number of years) told me he had access to a z/OS Release 13 system. He agreed to write a blog post on the enhancements to the ISPF editor in Release 13 and this is that blogContinue reading “Guest Post – z/OS Release 13 ISPF Editor Enhancements”