Store and Forward

I’m often amazed by the amount of synchronicity in the world.  Most recently I’ve been flooded from all sides with discussions about disaster recovery and of those, almost all wanted to achieve a zero recovery point without sacrificing performance.  Since this requirement violates the laws of physics I’ve had the opportunity to write up my response several times and refine it a bit.  I’m posting it here for posterity.

Continue reading →

The new WMQ Security book is into the review stage now and coming slowly along.  The four weeks we were all together in Raleigh flew by so fast it is amazing how much we were able to get done.  The down side to this is that now we are all back at our regular jobs and have lots of text to review and edit.  It’s progressing slowly but surely.  The next step is to get it published for public review and edit before finalizing the content.  I’ll post more when we get to that stage.

Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit of a roadblock on the project.  I had a slight bout with kidney stones that resulted in some laser surgery.  The surgery went great but one of the side effects of the meds is to lower your blood pressure.  Mine is already well controlled, and since losing a lot of weight its actually a bit on the low side anyway.  Combined with the meds, it tanked and I spent a couple weeks feeling unbelievably fatigued without knowing why.  Eventually I thought to check my blood pressure and figured it out.  Fortunately, I live in Charlotte and own a very fast sport bike.  Noting gets your blood pressure up faster than riding a bike that will easily do 140mph, on a highway posted at 65mph, stuck in traffic doing 30mph.  Problem solved.

So now I’m back to work on the book and splitting time with other projects.  Among those is a webinar tomorrow called Lessons learned for WebSphere MQ V7.1 and V7.5 security from the upcoming Secure Messaging Scenarios with WebSphere MQ IBM Redbook.  Click the link to register.  The presentation begins at 8am PDT / 11am EDT which should be 4pm UTC (assuming I got my daylight saving time calculations correct).

What are the topics?  Well let’s just say that during the residency we stumbled across a couple of things that surprised the team.  Considering who else was on the team – Glenn Baddeley, Neil Casey, Long Nguyen, Jørgen Pedersen and Morten Sætra – the fact that we were surprised by some of our findings was a bit unexpected.  I forget what the exact count was but between the six of us we have something like a century of WMQ experience, much of it in security.  We are a tough group to surprise so it occurred to me the things that tripped us up might make a good preview for the book.  Thus was born tomorrow’s webinar.

I’m also planning for the upcoming WebSphere MQ Administration seminars, also hosted by WebSphere MQ Insights.  The next one will be in Chicago in October, followed closely by another one in London.  Since these are in person, attendance is limited so register early.  I really like these because it is sized like a conference breakout session but it is all in one room for several days.  That makes for a much more participatory event and the ability to tailor content to the attendees.  Tag-teaming across three presenters also keeps the sessions fresh and brings more breadth of experience to bear on any questions or issues raised.  I wasn’t sure if I’d like this format as much as the conferences but it turns out it is better as a speaker and, based on feedback from the first one, as an attendee as well.

A rather unusual situation this year is that I won’t be attending WebSphere Technical Convention in Berlin.  I’ve tried to attend these for the last six years but this year it happens to coincide with the Hursley Connectivity Days event and it looks like I’ll be there instead.  Think of it as Hursley Comes to You in reverse.  On the one hand, I’ll still be able to meet with customers and also colleagues in the Hursley Lab.  On the other hand, I’ll not only miss WSTC, I’ll miss the Halestorm concert in Berlin on the 14th.  Damn!

OK, to sum up: Security book on the way, preview it in the webinar tomorrow @ 11am, WSMQ Admin seminars in Chicago and London in October, driving 30 in a 65 on a 140mph vehicle causes blood pressure to rise, Halestorm rocks.