Archive for the ‘ibm’ Category

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Support U 2

Friday, February 8th, 2008

An article I wrote for the Hursley intranet. There is nothing confidential in it (and it took me long enough to write!) so I thought it’d be good to share.

The first phase of Support U 2 – a pilot mentoring project for young people run between business, charity, and government agency – came to an end with a celebration evening in the Clubhouse.

What was the project all about?

Support U 2 was started to help hard to reach young people – people not in education, employment or training, and identified as being unlikely to change this without some additional effort.

IBM’ers are already mentors for young people through programmes like MentorPlace. Youth charity, Solent Youth Action (SYA), work with young people through volunteering placements, activities and youth groups. Government agency Connexions provide advice and counselling to young people.

All of this happens already, and makes a massive difference to the lives of thousands of young people.

The unique aspect of Support U 2 was how these organisations worked together. The project brought them together to make a focused, coordinated effort to change the lives of young people identified as being at risk of remaining NEET.

Rather than offer separate programs, they pooled our resources – IBM’s business expertise, Connexions’ expertise at working with NEET young people, and SYA’s expertise at finding young people engaging, educational placements and activities. This was brought together to produce an intensive, coordinated package, tailored to each young person.

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Posted in charity, ibm | 1 Comment »

Adding remote system admin support to PowerShell (before PowerShell V2)

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Jeffrey Snover of Microsoft has written a very interesting post on PowerShell cmdlet development, prompted by the release of my latest updates to the WebSphere MQ PowerShell cmdlets.

By way of background, the cmdlets let you administer WebSphere MQ from the Windows PowerShell command prompt and scripting environment. One of WebSphere MQ’s biggest strengths is the breadth of it’s platform support, so it was no surprise that one of the most requested features to be added to the cmdlet library has been to be able to use PowerShell with WebSphere MQ queue managers on non-Windows servers.

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Posted in code, ibm | Comments Closed

Explaining PowerShell for WebSphere MQ

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

I’ve made a start on a series of posts designed to introduce how to use Windows PowerShell for WebSphere MQ admin. There is a bit of a learning curve for people new to PowerShell, so rather than try to explain everything in one go, I’m planning on breaking it down into bits, covering one topic a day.

If you’re curious to see all this PowerShell stuff I’ve been working on for months, head on over to the WMQ blog:

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Posted in ibm | 5 Comments »

PowerShell for WebSphere MQ

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

This has been far too long coming, but finally you can administer WebSphere MQ systems from Windows PowerShell. An extension for WebSphere MQ containing thirty-eight new PowerShell cmdlets is being released as “MO74: WebSphere MQ – Windows PowerShell library“.

I’ll write a more technical blog post that describes what sort of stuff you can do with the SupportPac. That might have to wait till next week – as is unfortunately often the way the WPS day-job is taking up a lot of my time! But in the meantime, I just wanted to write a quick post to say “I finally finished version 1, and got it out the door”! 🙂

Update: Want to see what it can do, but don’t have time to try it out? Download the zip file and take a look at the doc “A cookbook for ‘PowerShell for WebSphere MQ'” (powershellcookbook.pdf) that is in there. I’ve put a bunch of examples of commands there with sample output.

Update 2: I’ve made a start on describing how the PowerShell stuff can be used on the WebSphere MQ blog

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Posted in ibm | 11 Comments »

The z/OS challenge

Monday, November 12th, 2007

For the next couple of days, I will be mostly skiving.

We’re doing the “z/OS Real-world Challenge” – a fairly shocking name, but the idea is that we get a few days out of the office to brush up our IBM mainframe sys-admin skills. We will be given a pretend scenario detailing customer requirements, then have to work out what we need to satisfy them – including how to install, set-up and configure any products that we need.

Not sure what we will be using, but it’s apparently a safe bet that it will include JCL, Java, WAS, DB2, COBOL, Assembler, CICS and WebSphere MQ among others.

Some of which I’ve never gone anywhere near before! 🙂

At the end of it all, our efforts are examined and graded by some more experienced architects.

It’s a chance for us to try our hands at some new things, as well as test some of our preconceptions on the best way to use products that we think we know. Should be fun!

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HackDay (and more) at IBM

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

I blogged about my HackDay projects last night, kinda assuming that everyone would know what I was talking about, and what “HackDay” meant. But so far not a single friend or family (outside IBM) has understood, so I’ve had to try and explain it a few times.

As with many times where I get to explain about things that I get to do at work, people have been impressed and surprised with the variety of stuff that goes on at Hursley.

Even just this week, whether it’s the presentation I gave last Wednesday to a group of NEET young people on how to write CVs (as part of a mentoring program that I got to start with Hursley’s support), or going up to Bransgore in the New Forest for a day this week for a team environmental volunteering challenge, I like that I can feel proud of what we do. And that doesn’t even include the big annual things like running a National Science Week educational event for hundreds of local school children.

We do some cool stuff. Friday’s HackDay was no exception.

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HackDay – hack attempt 3 – a ‘social camera’

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

It was the afternoon of HackDay… and I’d tried a couple of hack ideas without a massive amount of success. I wanted to have something functional to show by the end of the day, so thought I’d give something easy a try.

I’d spent quite a bit of the morning getting to know the Windows Mobile camera API, so I thought I’d try and use it in an application.

Background
My Windows Mobile cameraphone comes with a basic camera app. Then you can do what you want with your photos.

The idea
I thought I’d try writing an alternative camera app that makes it easier to do some things with photos – such as uploading to flickr, posting to a WordPress blog, sending by email, and so on.

Why?
Without sounding like a Kodak advert, photos are more fun if you can share them. Anything that makes that easier could be a good thing.

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Posted in ibm, tech | 1 Comment »

HackDay – hack attempt 2 – screen brightness

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

After my less-than-entirely-successful first hack, I started a second idea yesterday afternoon for the IBM HackDay.

Background
Windows Mobile smartphones include a screen brightness control. When indoors or in low light levels, you can turn the screen brightness down to maximise the battery life. When outdoors or in bright ambient light, you need to turn the screen brightness up in order to be able to make out things on the screen.

The idea
The plan was to write something that would use the camera in my cameraphone to work out the ambient light level. And then use this to programmatically alter the screen brightness as appropriate.

Why?
It takes seven screen-taps to change the screen brightness – so it’s not very quick. Something that did it for me would improve the usability of my phone.

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