Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2008-01-28.) We’ve been issued new guidance: Delete SPAM rather than mark it invisible. Disallow posting comments after, say, 30 days. The latter appears to work at the individual entry level. Three of my entries have become particularly troublesome (for some unknown reason). So I’ve set them to “no more comments”. If you findContinue reading “Moron SPAM :-)”

(Originally posted 2008-01-11.) Very few people spend as much time as I do down in the guts of individual SMF records. But for those who do ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW is an invaluable tool… ERBSCAN, issued in ISPF 3.4 against an SMF data set, presents you with a list of SMF records and some VERY highContinue reading “ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW – A Parameter You Might Not Know”

(Originally posted 2008-01-02.) Every once in a while 🙂 I do something really dumb… Thanks to Debra and family for the bath bomb… Rather than throw it in the bath wrapped I chose to cut it open and pour the contents in. The result? Rather like bathing with dead flies. 🙂 And, no, I wasContinue reading “Outstupided – Part Umpteen”

(Originally posted 2007-12-21.) As I’ve mentioned before I’m using Roller’s “Referer URL” page – for my developerWorks blog – to analyse where my blog hits are coming from. (It’s an informal exercise because I can only really work with hits that involve a search engine of some sort – and some 80% of my hitsContinue reading “An Unexpected Benefit of Pornospam”

(Originally posted 2007-12-14.) Occasionally you’ll (hopefully briefly) see SPAM comments on this blog. I’m grown up about this sort of thing and just remove the comments when I see them. I hope you’re grown up enough to cope with this irritating phenomenon as well. But I’ve gotten fed up with having to mark these commentsContinue reading “I’ve A Little Button To Banish SPAMmers”

(Originally posted 2007-12-12.) Thanks to Oliver Robinson for pointing this out to me: In MXG Newsletters Numbers 50 and 51 Barry Merrill discusses MXG / WPS support in what I think is a detailed and fair way. (Oliver, for the record, works for WPC who develop WPS.) Barry and I discussed WPS and MXG overContinue reading “WPS and MXG”

(Originally posted 2007-12-10.) Nowadays – actually thenadays 🙂 but more so nowadays – the value of a web page is related to how well structured it is. Well structured from a mashup programmer’s point of view… As I often say you have to assume that people will want to take your web pages and mashContinue reading “Mashinations”

(Originally posted 2007-12-06.) This is really just a test of some Firefox Extension code of mine… but it’s kind of interesting in its own right… The following is a table containing the country-level summary of Search URLs that somehow get a reader to my blog on any given day. (I have another table ranking searchContinue reading “Where My Searches Come From”

(Originally posted 2007-11-30.) This is a great song for a great cause… I saw Queen + Paul Rodgers play this in 2005 in Hyde Park. Actually Paul did nothing – Roger Taylor sang it. 🙂 But now they’ve worked on it as part of their current studio sessions and have rushed it out – forContinue reading “A Great Song For A Great Cause”

(Originally posted 2007-11-25.) In September 1997 DFSORT Release 13 was shipped (to coincide with the release of OS/390 Release 4). It took a nice idea from Syncsort and extended it. In case you didn’t know OUTFIL allows you to read an input data set (and perhaps sort it) and write to multiple output files fromContinue reading “Memories of DFSORT OUTFIL”