Fix Pack 7.0.0.1 (V7.0 Fix Pack 1) for WebSphere Message Broker v7.0 is now available. http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg24027267

You can see what is new in 7.0.0.1 by looking in the Information Center

The new WebSphere Message Broker Accounting and Statistics facility can help you monitor message flow performance and resource usage of a broker or execution group at the message flow, node, or terminal level, and can . . . → Read More: Monitoring message flow performance with IS02]]> My DeveloperWorks article on Monitoring message flow performance with the WebSphere Message Broker Explorer Accounting and Statistics facility has finally been published!

The new WebSphere Message Broker Accounting and Statistics facility can help you monitor message flow performance and resource usage of a broker or execution group at the message flow, node, or terminal level, and can thus be a tremendous help in solving performance and resource utilization problems.
Hopefully you will find it a good starting guide for working with the new Accounting and Statistics views in IS02

The same is also true for testers: “My tests . . . → Read More: Compiling – xkcd.com]]>

The same is also true for testers: “My tests are running”…

I certainly learnt a hell of a lot, and the 4 day course was a lot of work and very tiring. The exam however made all that seem relaxing. I have never sat a full day . . . → Read More: Red Hat education]]> I spent all of last week on the Red Hat Rapid Training and Certification course trying to learn more about linux.

I certainly learnt a hell of a lot, and the 4 day course was a lot of work and very tiring. The exam however made all that seem relaxing. I have never sat a full day exam before, and it is not exactly a peacful exercise. Unfortunately I cannot say much about the exam as I have signed a non-disclosure agreement about it, but parts were easy and some parts were hard.

As it turns out some parts were very hard as I did not get enough marks to qualify for Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) – I did get enough for Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT).

I am really a Debian user at heart, but the Red Hat course showed how similar the two can be, though there are certain parts that have differences. The biggest difference is probably that when you install a new server program/package in Debian, it comes with a fairly normal config file and starts up running. In Red Hat the config will be fairly restrictive and the service will not be started for you, nor will it be set to restart on reboot.

I have no plans to move away from Debian though, but the Red Hat experience was really informative and the course certainly got me setting up things I would probably never have done otherwise…

I won’t mention too much about the films and books other than to say Dune is an incredible book, I will be buying the whole set of them soon, Star . . . → Read More: Back to work]]> So my week off was really nice. I watched films, read books, took a quick day trip to the new forest with a friend down from London.

I won’t mention too much about the films and books other than to say Dune is an incredible book, I will be buying the whole set of them soon, Star Wars IV is far more dated than I remember (i guess it has been ~15 years since I last saw it), Batman and Batman Returns are slightly dated, but the incredible directing of Tim Burton makes them incredible nonetheless.

I have barely had time to do any real work even though I have been back for two days. Blue Fusion is taking up a lot of my time at the moment. On Thursday week we will be setting up for the event to run, so that leaves little time to finish everything off. Expect lots of posts about Blue Fusion after then as I will try to describe the activities we are running.

I just wish I had more time in the day so I could catch up with all the blogs I neglected to read on my week off.

Unfortunately I have not had a camera with me (and my phone camera isn’t . . . → Read More: Hursley going American…]]> I noticed the stickers that are up on eightbar » Blog Archive » Sometimes We’re So American a week or so ago. I have no idea when they arrived, but they did strike me as being very, very American. It felt very odd.

Unfortunately I have not had a camera with me (and my phone camera isn’t going to do much good for anything), so you’ll have to pop over to eightbar for the photo.

Why? Well, Windows needed security patches applied, which involved several reboots, a few hard resets and lots and lots of waiting… Is it any wonder that I am trying to move . . . → Read More: Windows has wasted my morning]]> I got into work nearly 2 hours ago, and am only now able to actually do any work.

Why? Well, Windows needed security patches applied, which involved several reboots, a few hard resets and lots and lots of waiting… Is it any wonder that I am trying to move to Linux?

Bit of a shock, though I do wish I could have had the chance to play with them at uni… I am struggling to find time to learn much about them during work so it will probably be a slow road to actually . . . → Read More: Students think mainframes are cool]]> According to The Register, Students think mainframes are cool

Bit of a shock, though I do wish I could have had the chance to play with them at uni… I am struggling to find time to learn much about them during work so it will probably be a slow road to actually using them.

I have also put up some photos of Hursley where I work. Unfortunately the house had scaffolding up, but the japanese garden was nice and the sundial was surprisingly . . . → Read More: Recent photography]]> A week ago I went to the Tower of London and took a few photos

I have also put up some photos of Hursley where I work. Unfortunately the house had scaffolding up, but the japanese garden was nice and the sundial was surprisingly accurate

I checked out the RFID lab at work recently and found that there is far more about RFID than I thought I knew. For a start there are several passive chips, most being the short range . . . → Read More: The RFID Hacking Underground]]> Wired has and excellent article tilted The RFID Hacking Underground and it is a really interesting read on RFID security problems.

I checked out the RFID lab at work recently and found that there is far more about RFID than I thought I knew. For a start there are several passive chips, most being the short range ones (several cm range). The new UHF chips work at a range of several metres, but are much larger in size.

RFID is booming at the moment because of the UHF chips long range, and the fact that the US and Europe have agreed on a common frequency to operate them on, so you can use one chip both sides of the Atlantic.

Work has a cool demo of a goods truck being loaded, and the truck actually tracks what is on/off the back of it. It will tell you when you have brought the wrong container on and should really speed up shipping of goods eventually (If you have seen the IBM goods tracking ad where the boxes are telling the driver he is on the wrong road, then you get the idea)

Easter was fun, photos from a trip to birdworld near Farnham to come soon, along with a whole set of sorted photos (you may have noticed I deleted almost all my photos that were up, as there were too many bad ones and they needed sorting. So . . . → Read More: About Time]]> It is certainly about time I wrote a new post…

Easter was fun, photos from a trip to birdworld near Farnham to come soon, along with a whole set of sorted photos (you may have noticed I deleted almost all my photos that were up, as there were too many bad ones and they needed sorting. So I now will have a quarter of what I had online before).

Just before Easter I changed departments at work. It was pretty much a new job but without leaving the company (which is one of the reasons I love working for IBM, I have so many possibilities of what I can do and never have to search for a new employer to do it all).

I now work on the performance team (still on Message Broker), and it is my job as part of this small 4 man team to analyse the results of automated tests to see if i can figure out why any drops in performance have occured and reverse them. Another task I will have to do is analyse the jobs that take to long (the jobs the software does in real world use preferably) and try and find ways to make the code faster and hence speeding up the overall performance.

For the latest version the team managed to get an overall speed increase of well over 50%, so I have some big shoes to fill (I am taking over from a guy who is leaving the team).

This job will certainly give me in depth knowledge of the product, wich hopefully I can put to use by getting in touch with customers and helping them out a bit (I believe there is a set up for advertising my skills to customers as a kind of informal expert to them), but first need a little more experience with it.

I have been meanging to blog for ages, and have other things I am looking at with keen interest, but have not really had the time to do it yet. Just to give you a teaser, one thing I have been looking at is X10, which is an appliance control system which allows you to control lights and other appliances remotely over the power cables in your house. I would love to play with it, but do not really have anything I want to control at the moment. I also plan to look at then getting status and control onto the internet so that I can play with it all remotely (along with getting it on my XDA, not to mention a blogging client specifically for blogging from my XDA)

I have to work late, and am not really liking the idea but am amazed it has taken 6 months for it to happen. I currently have a break in my testing, for various reasons, so thought . . . → Read More: Free Pizza & New Friends]]> The good news is I get free pizza at work today… The bad news is I get it at 6.30pm.

I have to work late, and am not really liking the idea but am amazed it has taken 6 months for it to happen. I currently have a break in my testing, for various reasons, so thought I would introduce a few blogs I have recently started reading:

• illsley.org – A colleague from work. Joined at the same time as me but working in a completely different area (Web services I think)
• The lost outpost – A new friend I met through Blue Fusion last week. Also works for IBM, but works up in Southbank mostly (though I am not entirely sure what he does)
• eight bar – A blog of several people from Hursley Labs (also including Andy Piper, of The Lost Outpost). Some really interesting posts, mostly on Emerging Technology and Pervasive Computing. See the following posts for more info

• Tilting at Thinkpads
• Film Start for a day: Live – This one sounds good. I have not watched the movie yet, but it should be interesting as this guy has most things in his house hooked up to the internet (His mobile phone, and in fact my XDA, get a message when a mouse trap goes off in his house!)
• They also pointed out that all new game consoles will use IBM processors

I am thinking of getting involved with all the emerging technology stuff, as my old XDA would be perfect for playing with it (assuming its battery lasts long enough), and so you may see some interesting posts from me after all…

update: 22:27

Well, we have done a whole pile more testing. One developer came in to write a fix for the installer. A build is supposed to kick off at midnight in order to produce a new version to do final checks on tomorrow and give us new real cd’s and dvd’s to verify…

Worth a pizza ?

I still need . . . → Read More: Blue Fusion]]> So Blue Fusion has finished for the year. IT was incredible fun, and got in at least one paper (the Hampshire Chronicle did send a reporter, but no photographer so I took photos of the event for them as the official photographer for the event) but I have not yet found their article online.

I still need to sort through the photos and put a few online so you can see them. There are also posts on some blogs (I will be introducing this blog soon) and also a post here.

The week was great fun, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to really write about it, though the Blue Fusion website should eventually get some write-ups put on to it, though I am not sure when that will happen…

My robots performed quite well, and all the other activities were wonderful. The finale was excellent as we had a computer rendered (very old school 2D rendering) triathlon using the athlete that the kids had been training all day. 2 heats and a semi-final later . . . → Read More: A great start]]> Bright sparks is over, and happened to go rather well on Friday.

My robots performed quite well, and all the other activities were wonderful. The finale was excellent as we had a computer rendered (very old school 2D rendering) triathlon using the athlete that the kids had been training all day. 2 heats and a semi-final later we had a winner and a hell of a lot of noise (we had convinced the kids that they had to cheer for their athlete to help him go faster, and while the microphone sensor did work it did not affect anything except the people above us). Upper management are somewhere above us as are human resources. One woman I spoke to said it was refreshing to have kids screaming as it is usually very quiet, but we were happy to have unleashed the screaming monsters all the same.

Monday saw the start of Blue Fusion (which is for the 15/16 year old group as opposed to the 12/13, and used to be known as Young Visions). We swapped out DIY Timepiece, in which one had to construct a timer and scales from random pieces of stuff, and in its place put in Eco Sim, in which the schools had to work out a compromise between avoiding global warming and taxing their population to revolt. Eco Sim had some serious problems during the day and was close to being pulled, but some fixes tonight will hopefully see it through the week.

My robots did well even though there was some confusion with the scoring and the scores had to be adjusted later which hopefully didn’t upset too many schools. All looks good with them for tomorrow – some more glue to hold certain parts together (the rubbery kind that peels off so as not to damage the Lego) and new hosts tomorrow to score it and help the kids and everything is set.

I had plenty of fun taking photographs of the event and if possible will (i.e. if I am allowed to keep copies and display them) I will put some up online. The best activity to photograph was probably Search For A Planet, as the room was dark except for a 80 inch (or so) plasma TV and two UV lights (or blacklights) to help illuminate everything. A splash of UV reactive paint here and there made everything slightly more colourful.

Search For A Planet is probably the only activity that actually asks the schools to attempt any maths, and some of the schools really failed spectacularly with this part. I really wish I knew what physics is on the GCSE syllabus as acceleration and gravity seem almost like alien concepts to most of the kids (apart form one who had long hair, a leather biker jacket and looked like The Fonse (how the hell do you spell the guy from happy days?), or quite like I did during my A level years. This kid managed to get most of the way to the perfect planet on his own, leading his school through all the astrophysics which he quite clearly knew well. It almost worked, until the other students in his school took over and started playing with the selections and then it all went pear shaped…)

Blue Fusion starts tomorrow, with Bright Sparks being the first day (which is for the 12-13 age group). My main activity involving lego robots . . . → Read More: Long Hours]]> It is 9:30pm, and I have just left work… I hope I don’t have to do this too often, but at least it was not actually work that kept me in the office.

Blue Fusion starts tomorrow, with Bright Sparks being the first day (which is for the 12-13 age group). My main activity involving lego robots looks sorted, which is a nice relief – the truth will come out tomorrow as the children start playing it but hopefully not breaking it.

There is an interactive area for the kids, which has all sorts of activties. One I hoped to to is a version of Lights Out. Lights out is an old computer game where you are given an n x n grid of squares randomly coloured either black or white. When you click on a square, it and all its neighbours invert colour. The idea is to get all the squares to be the same colour.
I have spent a long time inventing a “dance mat” type controller – 25 foot pad buttons. I took apart a keyboard to use its controller and built the pads with overhead transparencies to make a membrane style switch. With foil lined contacts and a sheet of plastic with holes in between as a spacer.
The idea was that you step on it and the keyboard control circuit sends a keystroke to the computer, making it fairly easy to use in a program.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Most of the keys work fine, giving a nice keypress (though it does repeat easily) but a few keys seem to generate one keypress when the pad is stepped on, and then repeat a different key until the pad is released. I cannot understand why.

The idea has now been shelved, as trying to code the software to work will take a long time. I hope to try another computer at some point and see if it is a problem that the floor mat was not plugged in from computer startup, but am not hopeful.

I feel like I have wasted a lot of time trying to get it working, and now have to drop the idea… Maybe I will find the time to get it working for next year, though it won’t be an easy problem to solve.

Tomorrow will be an early start. I have to catch a train at 6.30 so that I can get in early enough to be in before the schools start arriving, and have to make sure everything is ready (in particular my robot activity).