CICS in Slovenia

Last month I was invited to attend a CICS conference in Slovenia as the guest speaker.  I will be honest and say that I didn't know where slovenia was so here is a helpful google map of the area:

The wonderful local team in Slovenia had organised a range of CICS customers to attend and listen to the awesome stuff we added into CICS 5.1.  Over the day I introduced the new release to them, extolled the virtues of cloud based application deployment, Gave them the news that we had removed JVM Pool support but replaced it with our JVMServer.  We finished with the history of CICS Connectivity and DUMP analysis.

The local IBM team were magnificent hosts and kept us well supplied with food and drinks throughout the day.   They also hosted a 3 course lunch which was enjoyed by everyone there.  So a big thank you to Peter Pavkovic and his team for all his hard work in organising the event.

During the conference I heard a lot of stories from CICS customers about which technologies they liked in CICS and which ones they were looking forward to.  All the customers were on CICS 4.2 which is fantastic!  There is an awful lot of value in keeping with the current version of CICS.  If you stay current then you will find it easier to migrate release to release, exploit the new technology as it comes along and so increase you business value.  Finally it will help you to understand the strategic direction of the product.  The reason why these customers hadn't migrated to V5.1 (released Dec 2012) was that it required a z/OS upgrade to v1.13.

The customers that I spoke to were very forward looking and like the rest of the CICS team see CICS not just as the backend processor but as an integral part of the enterprise.  Transactions flow through CICS, and permeate the whole enterprise.  They understood that modern access to CICS applications and data was how they were going to be able to support their business in the future.  These customers were avid web services users, were planning to move java code off of other application servers and embed it into CICS.  Finally were interested in moving their applications to be deployed and consumed in a much more agile way.

One question that I did get asked but could not answer was if there was a developer trial of CICS 5.1.  I am glad to say that there is.

The CICS developer trial allows you to (for free) download and install an evaluation copy of CICS 5.1.  It's fully functional and you can 'play' with all of the new functionality and see how this version of CICS will transform the way you think about your applications.  For more information you will need this link:

CICS v5.1 Developer Trial

Thanks again to the lovely customers and IBMrs I met in Slovenia.  I had a lovely time and wish you all the best in your CICS work

The bat phone

"Holy smokes batman, CICS has a problem what should we do"
"Easy robin ... ... Call the bat phone"

 

This is the CICS out of hours support phone.   CICS is a high quality product and doesn't have a lot of problems. Getting a problem happen out of hours is fairly rare.  However since CICS powers most financial institutions businesses when this phone rings the problem could be very urgent.  IBM provides 24x7 support to our customers. This week I will be the person answering this phone.  There are 2 ways this could go:

1. I end up with no sleep and am very grouchy (no change there then)
2. No one rings! 

Actually the most interesting thing that I have learnt is that older phones have an INCREDIBLE battery life.  I have had this for 4 days now and it has not needed a charge!  

Decoding encryption on slashdot

For this years April Fools Day joke www.slashdot.org decided to 'encrypt' all posts.  Here is an example of the encrypted text:

Na nabalzbhf ernqre jevgrf"Nf Qryy'f (QRYY:ANFQND TF) obneq erivrjf guerr pbzcrgvat cebcbfnyf sbe gnxvat gur pbzcnal cevingr, vapyhqvat n $24.4 ovyyvba qrny yrq ol sbhaqre naq PRB Zvpunry Qryy naq Fvyire Ynxr Cnegaref, gur pbzcnal unf naabhaprq vg vf ragrevat gur 

I decided that as obviously this was a joke it wasn't going to be encrypted with anything difficult, thus if I couldn't crack it in my lunch hour then I should hang up my boots.

Finding a way in

The first step in solving any problem is to find something to latch onto.  For jigsaw problems this is often to find the corner or side pieces to build the frame.  For this puzzle I thought could I find an plaintext word that might have been used in the ciphertext.  'Most' slashdot posts start with:

beltsbear writes"Following a reasonable view of drug patents, the Indian courts have decided that making small changes to an existing 

 The interesting bit is that the story starts with writes.  If this is true of the encrypted version then it would mean that f('writes') = jevgrf  where f is the encryption algorithm

Pulling it apart

Both the words contain 6 characters.  I wondered if this was a simple encryption algorithm like a ceaser shift.  

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

                      |-----------------------| (13 CHARACTERS)

Each letter was simply shifted 13 spaces across.  This is known as a ROT(13) algorithm.  It requires no key.  Plenty of online tools exist to decode such text.  thus:

Na nabalzbhf ernqre jevgrf"Nf Qryy'f (QRYY:ANFQND TF) obneq erivrjf guerr pbzcrgvat cebcbfnyf sbe gnxvat gur pbzcnal cevingr, vapyhqvat n $24.4 ovyyvba qrny yrq ol sbhaqre naq PRB Zvpunry Qryy naq Fvyire Ynxr Cnegaref, gur pbzcnal unf naabhaprq vg vf ragrevat gur 

became

 An anonymous reader writes
"As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the 

Going back to work

This wasn't difficult but I did enjoy pulling the puzzle apart and figuring it out.  At least I don't have to give up the day job

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?