dale lane

WebSphere MQ SSL Configuration Checker got released by IBM as a freeware application today.

It’s an application that I initially wrote earlier this year. It’s a tool that has been used by WebSphere MQ Service since last May with customers reporting SSL errors. The idea was that it’d be easier to ask customers to run a single executable tool which collects (hopefully!) all the information that we’d need to diagnose the problem, rather than asking them to send us their channel definitions, certificate labels, environment data, etc. etc. Over time, I’ve been extending it and improving it, to broaden the range of problems that it can identify, and it’s now got to the point now where a customer can hopefully run it on their own without needing us to review the output.

As a result, it has now been released as freeware – what we call a ‘SupportPac’ – to make it more widely available. Who knows – it might avoid a customer needing to wait for us to respond to a problem report to identify what’s wrong with an SSL setup?

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Delegates from the Institution of Engineering and Technology visited IBM Hursley this evening for an event billed as an opportunity to see some of our latest software development work.

They got to see presentations and demonstrations of six recent Hursley projects – one of these was my pitch about the Extreme Blue project that I worked on last summer.

I’ve not been a member of one of these professional bodies before, so it was fun to see what the event was like. The attendees were an interesting mix – some were retirees wanting to keep up to date with the latest news, some were professionals from other businesses looking to network and learn about what else is going on, and some were university students at the start of their careers. Some came in suits, some were in jeans and a sweatshirt. Some were young, some were old. The one thing that they had in common was a curiosity and an interest in technology.

It was a lot of fun – I enjoy the chance to do presentations like this, and they asked a lot of thought-provoking questions. I don’t get to do this sort of stuff at work nearly as often as I’d like!

It’s been a few weeks since I started working-from-home on a regular basis, so I thought tonight would be a good time to stop and think about how it is going.

When my daughter was born, my wife took a year off work to stay at home with her. For the second year, she started working part-time, so we started Grace at a local nursery Monday to Wednesday while my wife worked. After Grace turned two last month, my wife went back to work full-time. We didn’t feel the time was right for Grace to be in full-time childcare, so as an intermediate step I started working from home on Thursday and Fridays.

I was nervous about whether I’d get any work done with a two-year old in the house, and whether Grace would be able to cope without the level of attention that she gets in full-time childcare. But so far, it’s working.

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The IBM Education Assistant now has some WebSphere MQ content.

If you’ve not seen the ‘Education Assistant’ before…

IBM Education Assistant integrates narrated presentations, Show Me Demonstrations, tutorials, and resource links to help you successfully use IBM products.

The range of topics that are covered by the new WebSphere MQ materials is a little narrow (some XA stuff, security topics, and a bit on the new accounting and statistics features we added in version 6), but they’re a nice start. It’s great to see WMQ included, and I hope to see us add more soon.