Give me your money!!!!

My wonderful wife Amy @alyates is running the race for life this year.

Amy and me in the forest

She runs the race in memory of my mum and my step mum who have both had battles with cancer.  I'm not going to talk at length how bad cancer is and how a cure is just around the corner.  We all know the former and I don't know enough about the latter to have a reasonable opinion.  However I would like to think that people might want to spare some spare change and through it at her just giving page.

Or you can simply text:
AMYY83 £1
to
70070

to donate via your phone.  SMS donations are also linked to that page.

Ask the bill payers permission, don't spend your last £1 here etc.  But if you can spare a little cash and help us eradicate this terrible disease then Amy, me, Cancer Research UK and cancer sufferers past present and future will all be greatful

Losing Weight

I am trying to lose weight.  Being a nerd being able to track my progress fascinates me so I keep a good spreadsheet up to date showing my progress.  In the interest of openess I am going to make that information public.  Obviously I will not be making my spreadsheet publicly editable but I am happy to share the result.  This post will automatically update whenever I get weighed and upload the new weight.

Why am I doing this?

1. I believe in honesty and transparency.  
2. It keeps me honest (If I feel people could be tracking me I am more likely to keep going)

Being productive

I hate spending the day working hard and then realising that I have actually accomplished NOTHING:

My to do list was as long as it was in the morning

My inbox was even fuller

I was frazzled!

I was working longer and harder each night just to try and start the next day with a clean slate, my efforts were always in vain.  I looked on-line and being the natural northern skinflint tried to find some useful resources that might help me out.  YMMV but they might help you too.

How to live on 24 Hours a day

This book is free on amazon kindle, if you don't have a kindle then you can download the free app for your phone/tablet or there is web application that you can use.  Although the book is old, the points made are still relevant.  One of the main focuses of the book is that if you want to do something then you can always make time for it, if it's important enough then the phrase "there aren't enough hours in the day" will cease to apply.  I know I have used this phrase before, in particular while watching stupid TV programmes.  I had to ask the question, is what I want to achieve more important than watching TV? If yes then my priorities are wrong.

Bit Literacy 

Again another free e-book, This book shows how digital embodiments of physical objects causes us to become overloaded.  Take music as an example. We used to buy music on CD, Cassette, vinyl etc but now buy it digitally, because we no longer have a physical 'thing' to organise we tend to make multiple copies, have disorganised filing structures etc.  Ask a vinyl collector where his copy of tubular bells is and he can find it.  How many digital users could do the same.  The same paradigm applies to email, calendar, to do lists etc.    Mark Hurst (author) has finally got me to the point where I have a ZERO length inbox.  twice a day (no more) I go through my email and ruthlessly use one of three actions against it.

1. Do it and Delete it
2. File it (into a place which is indexed)
3. Save it as a to do with a start date

Now my inbox is free I am no longer drowning in digital email.  I can see the new stuff and I can action it accordingly.  I now longer and constantly interrupted by having to firefight my inbox.  The same applies to my personal email too. 

How to be a productivity Ninja

Some very good tips in here (a lot shared in the other sources) that I agree with.  Especially around the matra of just getting stuff done.  Don't moan and winge about it just do it and then "It's done".  

Testing in the open

Over the last part of the year I have been looking at ways of sharing our internal test process with our customers. Some of our managers have been a little reluctant at spilling the beans of how we test such a quality product. But here are my reasons why I think this is a good idea.

Confidence Building - if you know how much time, effort and ingenuity goes into the test process then that will build your confidence that the new release is ready for production use.

Customer Relationships. Extensive testing of the product shows that the manufacturer really cares about the product and thus the customers that buy it.

Sharing of ideas. If I tell you what scenarios I have run to test a particular component, it might sprout potential usage scenarios for your business or application

Now I am not suggesting that we throw the doors open wide and allow every customer to peruse our test infrastructure. IBM is still in the business of protecting it's intellectual property so we do need to ensure that we protect any new ideas though publication or patent before talking about them.

A good solution would be to share our test plans with customers who are within our beta programme. If you are on the CICS beta program would you be interested to see how we are planning to test the new function to be delivered?

I found a bug (but one I wasn't meant to find)

The biggest issue with being a tester is that it is habit forming. After a while you find yourself looking for bugs and when things do fail you find yourself trying to recreate them so you can narrow down the exact set of circumstances that cause the bug.

I have found a bug on my blackberry.

My phone has this cool feature called bedside mode, in this mode all the radios are turned off making it impossible for calls,email,sms etc to ruin a good nights sleep. The phone also has a feature that turns off the radios when battery power gets too low. Once the phone is being charged the radios will be turned on automatically.

The above two functions work well in isolation but when they are tested together there is a bug. Here is my bug report:
Abstract: battery charging causes phone to turn radio on even in bedside mode

Description:
1)Let battery drain so radios are powered off automatically
2)Plug phone into mains
3)turn bedside mode on
4)Once battery power becomes normal the radios will turn on again (even though bedside mode is on) and your sleep is disturbed by incoming messages.

So what do I do now. If this was a project that I was testing then there would be a well defined process for me to raise this issue with the development team. But I am just a customer. I had a search on RIM's website and couldn't see a way to raise a defect or even contact the support team.

Hobbit @ Impact

Hello and welcome from IBM Impact 2010. I have made it to the venetian hotel in one piece (although my suitcase got damaged and will need replacing - oh well)

Just spoke to a CICS customer. He had just registered and found us sat around the table. We spoke and over that brief conversation we discussed his environment and pain points and we offered CICS function that could help him such as the CICS explorer.

Although impact offers fantastic sessions with great speakers I often think that it is these small interactions that weren't scheduled or forced but just two technical people, one with problems the other with indepth product knowledge is where the real magic happens. I hope that the customer has gone away with a few ideas that he can think about during the week. When he gets back to his day job he can try them out and see what works and what doesn't.

This is why Impact is such a great event. Customers have access to whole teams of people from IBM who aren't just the sales teams but the engineers who design/build/test the software that they use. We are techies but we want to understand they issues you may have, the experiences you have and offer our insight and support where we can.

If you are at impact please don't hesitate to grab a speaker or IBMr and talking to them. If they don't know the answer to your question I'm sure they can find the right person who will.

Web 2.0 & CICS

Just been putting the finishing touches to a demo that I want to present at Impact 2010. I'm presenting a piece about web 2.0 and how it relates to CICS. Once part of the web2.0 story is the ability to render data as ATOM feeds and expose that feed to external consumers.

I wanted to show how easy it was to expose a CICS file as a ATOM feed and then consume it within a AJAX web page. This would allow me to respond to a users request via a web page without having to reload the entire page. Making the UI cleaner, more efficient and well 'sexier'!

The demo took very little time to create. I took the CICS File A sample and quickly created the necessary CICS resources to allow CICS to expose it as a ATOM feed. A quick test in the browser showed me that all was working well and that I now had a REST style interface for my file. CICS still handled the file and ensured that authentication was properly handled. My existing demos that use that file didn't have to change, BUT I had managed to levarge this file to new consumers. Ah my next point - writing that AJAX web page.

I am not an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programmer. To be honest I haven't written anything 'webby' for quite a while so my skills were a little rusty. However I had a quick google and found lots of snippets of code that I could use to allow me to make a asynchronous call to CICS to get some data:

The nice thing was a I was able to use standard AJAX calls to interact with CICS. I didn't need any special IBM framework just standard Javascript. Also I didn't need to be an amazing javascript programmer. I just bolted some code snippets together and got something really cool to work.

In a real company this would mean that we would be able to create web 2.0 components that connected directly to CICS. This would provide a up to date interface that customers expect. You wouldn't even think that CICS was involved.