Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2011-03-23.) … or "The Nightmare That Never Ends". 🙂 The concept of a babble phase comes from Child Development: When children are learning to talk they start by making sounds they think might get them somewhere. (Some might say that’s a phase they never leave.) 🙂 Such a developmental stage is called "theContinue reading “Exiting The Babble Phase?”

(Originally posted 2011-03-17.) A while back I set myself a technical challenge: To learn how to program an Android device. NOTE: I don’t have a real application in mind, just idle curiosity and a degree of annoyance at the prerequisites to be able to program an iPhone (apart from as a WebApp). Here’s what I didContinue reading “Learning Android Programming”

(Originally posted 2011-03-13.) There’ve been times in the past when a request for extra data in SMF has been met by "you can issue a DISPLAY command to get that". (Another variant is "you can go to the HMC for that".) I’m here to tell you why I don’t think that’s a brilliant answer: SuchContinue reading “When Display Commands Aren’t Good Enough”

(Originally posted 2010-01-24.) I’m beginning to look at performance data slightly differently these days… As well as plotting things by Time Of Day (which our tools have done for 25 years) I’m beginning to plot things more directly with load. (Time Of Day is sort of code for With Load but not really – tellingContinue reading “WLM Velocity – “Rhetorical Devices Are Us””

(Originally posted 2010-01-22.) In the interstices between finishing off a "rush job" piece of analysis for ONE customer and a conference call with a vendor on behalf of ANOTHER it’s time to catch up with a piece of news… As some of you will know I have a new job in IBM… I’ve joined SoftwareContinue reading “Going Global”

(Originally posted 2010-01-16.) … swear at it. 🙂 No, I KNOW that’s not right – but it’s (for me) an irresistibly bad pun. And it’s a natural reaction, too. 🙂 In a recent customer situation I looked at the RMF Workload Activity Report data for a number of service classes. One WLM Sample count wasContinue reading “If The Cap Doesn’t Fit…”

(Originally posted 2010-01-04.) First of all, a happy and prosperous 2010 to one and all. As with most vacations it’s been a time partially filled with playing with technology and learning stuff there isn’t (legitimate) time to learn about during the rest of the year. So, lest the rest of this post make you thinkContinue reading “What I Did On My Vacation”

(Originally posted 2009-12-07.) If you use RMF Postprocessor you won’t see this one. If you use Service Units rather than CPU seconds fields in the SMF 72-3 record you also won’t see it. It’s only if (like me) you use the CPU time for zAAPs in your CPU Utilisation calculation that you’ll run into thisContinue reading “zAAP CPU Time Bug in Type 72 Record – OA29974 Is The Cure”

(Originally posted 2009-11-30.) Thanks to Marna Walle for pointing out this change: In z/OS Release 11 there is a requirement for an additional 1608 bytes of ESQA per address space. To put that in context, I’ll do some obvious maths: That’s about 1.6MB per 1000 address spaces. It just might be of interest to certainContinue reading “Plan Your ESQA Carefully For z/OS Release 11”

(Originally posted 2009-11-27.) A new set of function was recently made available for DFSORT via PTFs UK51706 and UK51707. In this post I want to talk about the new JOINKEYS function, and try to add a little value by discussing some performance considerations. I’ve had the code for a couple of months and have playedContinue reading “DFSORT Does JOIN”