'Practical Implications of POWER7 and i/OS 7.1': Logicalis IT Forum, Bath Spa Hotel, Wednesday 24 March

The next Logicalis IT Forum meeting will be on Wednesday 24 March at the Bath Spa Hotel, Bath, with dinner and overnight stay on Tuesday 23 March.

The topic will be 'Practical Implications of POWER7 and i/OS 7.1'.

I am delighted to announce that our speaker will be Gottfried Schimunek from IBM Rochester. Gottfried is a Senior IT Architect and has been taking a lead role in application and product development projects for over 25 years. Currently he is the Program Manager and Technical Consultant for IBM i on IBM Power Systems in the ISV Enablement team. His primary interests are performance measurement analysis and capacity planning of applications. Gottfried is a frequent presenter at customer, user group, and technical conferences around the world.

The draft agenda is:
9.30am Introductions and POWER7 Overview
11am Break
11.15am IBM i 7.1 and beyond
12.45pm Lunch
1.30pm Power System Blade Integration
2.30pm Performance Capacity Planning and Energy Estimation (with short break)
3.30pm POWER7 Performance considerations and optimization
4.30pm Close

We know that many potential delegates will be attending the POWER7 overview in February given by Rod Adkins and Ross Maury of IBM; while there will obviously be some overlap, our focus is on the implications of the new hardware and operating system from an applications perspective (ISV and bespoke).

If you would like to discuss any additional related topic, please let me know.

Please get in touch with me if you are interested in attending, or if you have any queries.
Email mandy.shaw@iperimeter.co.uk
'Phone +44 1225 436302
Skype shawmandy

An example of good online service

I've just upgraded the tracker on www.iperimeter.co.uk to the chargeable version (so that I don't have to show the tracker icon on my pages, and also so that I can get more easily interpreted statistics and exclude my home IP address from them; it also means that casual browsers no longer have theoretical access to the IP address information of other visitors, which I think is a little iffy from a Data Protection perspective).

This is the third Extreme Tracking tracker I have bought (following my husband's website and the Ashton Singers one).

The extremetracking.com website is very quick, simple and clear to use, and I can even easily find and print off a VAT invoice. I have never needed to request technical support from them, and the only time I contacted customer services I received a speedy and effective response that did not appear to have been cut and pasted from a set of standard paragraphs.

After all my moans on this blog about certain other software and service providers, it's nice to be able to praise something unreservedly.

iPerimeter website updated

www.iperimeter.co.uk had remained untouched for over a year ... not good. Anyway I have added some recent experience and some older stuff that may be of interest to some people (there wasn't anything about Domino on iSeries on there, for example). I've also incorporated a couple of links to customer references on the Logicalis UK website.

It's difficult to know what potential customers are looking for - it'll probably need a few more iterations.

The look and feel and navigation need serious work, but that'll have to wait until another time.

Chandos Singers, Holy Trinity Church, Bath, Saturday 6 March

Music for a Time of Penitence

Adam Michna Mass for Lent (c.1650)
Michna Requiem
Victoria Salve Regina (double choir, c.1592)
Vaughan Williams O vos omnes (1922)
Poulenc Tenebrae factae sunt (1938)
Poulenc Tristis est anima mea (1938)
Bernhard Lewkovitch Exsultate Domino (1952)
Lewkovitch Laudate Dominum (1957)
Kenneth Leighton Quam dilecta (1966)

Debbie Warren Soprano and Recorder
Simon Caldwell Baritone and Violin
Chandos Singers
Malcolm Hill Conductor

Tickets £8.00 at the door (£5.00 for full-time students)

For more information, visit http://www.chandos-singers.co.uk

Ongoing problems with AVG Internet Security (paid version 8 on XP)

I can't find any sensible forum to post these issues on, so I have reported them to AVG using their diagnostics tool (which took half an hour to run each time, using at least 65% of my CPU throughout, and which, amusingly, wouldn't actually connect to AVG on the first two attempts because, or so I assume, their firewall (or right hand) doesn't know what their own software (or left hand) is doing).

Further entertainment is to be found in the fact that, once you've reported one problem, you can't change the subject of your report (e.g. from Firewall to Identity Protection).

In case any of this is of interest to anyone else, I will update the status of these reports via comments on this post. (I am prepared to bet a reasonable sum that this is the last I will hear of any of it, and that I will be using a different product as soon as this licence expires - sadly not until August 2011.)

******

Hi
I have a problem with my AVG firewall taking ages (often several minutes) to identify the adapter/profile.
This happens especially when connecting Cisco VPN client, but also when I first connect my wireless adapter after rebooting the PC.
This is seriously impacting my productivity, as I connect and disconnect my Cisco VPN client many times a day.
I can find no reference to this issue in any of the forums or FAQs.
Please advise how I may resolve it.
Many thanks
Mandy Shaw

******

PROBLEM WITH AVG IDENTITY PROTECTION
How do I switch off the automatic scan for a specific program? Microsoft ActiveSync (which surely does not need to be scanned at all, let alone every single time) nearly always starts up too slowly on my Windows XP PC, because of your Identity Protection scan, for my mobile 'phone Bluetooth sync to work without timing out on initial connection.
This is seriously affecting my productivity, please let me know how I may resolve it.
Thank you
Mandy Shaw

******

Review of 2009

When I set up the iPerimeter business, and started this blog, I made a list of projects for 2009. Let's see what happened ...

Specific IT related projects for 2009:

• Establish a successful, focused and well marketed iPerimeter business

So far so good, though the marketing bit is in the eye of the beholder ... The focus has been very much on strategic architecture and System i, with a few dabblings in Domino. Would like to do more information security stuff.

I'd like to work on a redbook in 2010 - I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming residency list on the IBM website.

I also need to take positive steps in 2010 to keep my IBM software knowledge up to date.

• Update my System i skills

Done - e.g. I went on Mike Cain's marvellous DB2 on i performance class at IBM Bedfont in June, and have used the results extensively. I have been much closer to the coalface than in recent years, and have benefited accordingly.

• Develop my skills and experience in the area of information security

Not done - one for 2010.

• Extend the reach of the Logicalis IT Forum, especially by recruiting new member organisations

The Forum has been very successful in 2009, despite the economic climate, and we have new member organisations. The improvement is largely down to Nigel Gillespie's excellent topic and speaker selection - thank you Nigel. Hoping to go from strength to strength in 2010.

Non IT related projects for 2009:

• Help set up a website for the Ashton Singers of Winchester

Done, ish, but the excellent design provided by one of my fellow singers is not yet implemented because I need to acquire some CSS and Javascript skills. One for early 2010.

Singing achievement of 2009 was singing Barak in Handel's Deborah - 4 arias + recits - the biggest solo I've ever done by a factor of at least 20 - I did manage to knock over a large candlestick.

• Finish renovating my new house, and move into it

Moved in, but still much work to do.

• Attend a Saints home match that results in at least one point

Not done - entirely my problem, not Saints' - life in League One does at least mean we are more likely than not to win in any given week (dangerous thing to say). Haven't been nearer the Northam End than the quick weekly look provided by the Football League Show.

Thoughts on wikis

Over the last few years I have, like everyone else, put more and more information into wikis.

I've used three main platforms: MediaWiki (Choral Public Domain Library, http://www.cpdl.org/), PBwiki (e.g. http://iseries.pbwiki.com/) and TracWiki.

Those who have known me for a while will be aware of my tendency to bang on about information as an organisational asset, how difficult it is to get people to share information at all, and the consequent need to provide information repositories with capture mechanisms that involve minimal time and effort to use.

Information is more or less useless if it's inaccurate, if it's unclear, if you don't belong to the audience for which it was written, or if you can't retrieve it in an effective and timely manner.

So I was, and remain, delighted with the concept of a wiki, which allows easy capture, sharing, review and correction of information, which can give it a structure that permits effective retrieval and avoids duplication, and which encourages accuracy and clarity.

However, the devil has turned out to be in the detail.

When people put information into written form, it may be well structured, or it may be a brain dump. In my experience, any structure comes from the author's head and is internal to the document under preparation, unless the individual's day-to-day work specifically involves structured documentation. Therefore, in my view, if we are to get information out of people's heads and readily usable by others, we have to start with the content, and accept that structure may need to be added later.

If you ask someone to document something for you, they will typically create a Word document. It may have diagrams and complex tables. There may be careful formatting aimed at making the information easier to understand.

All wiki platforms I have used appear to make the following assumptions:
1) Formatting, beyond a very basic level, doesn't matter
2) People are prepared to put time and effort into learning and using the platform and/or its WYSIWYG editor
3) All content fits cleanly into a predefined structure
4) Once the information is in the wiki, people don't need to get it out again
5) Users are IT literate and have a conceptual interest in the wiki as a platform

The first alarm bells started to ring for me when I realised that not all wiki platforms used the same markup language - surely, if anything needed an open standard, this does.

I then started to wonder (and I still do) why wiki markup languages existed at all except as a structure-imposing superset of normal HTML. Do all wiki developers really want to waste their time writing the world's umpteenth not-very-good WYSIWYG editor?

I tried and failed to rename wiki pages (come on, chaps, even the most basic HTML editing tools let you change page names and automatically update all the relevant internal links for you). Structure is surely not a once-and-for-all thing.

I searched in vain for ways of adding links that did not involve two browser windows plus cut and paste (the honourable exception is PBwiki).

I pasted Word information into wiki WYSIWYG editors, even Word information that had been saved as filtered HTML and then put on the clipboard from IE, and most of the formatting disappeared (except, again, on PBwiki).

I attempted to export a set of wiki pages from one wiki and put them into another, or even to generate a PDF with all the linked information in it ... Surely I'm not the only one who wants to use the wiki for capture, maintenance, and day-to-day information retrieval, but still to have the option of publishing the results in final form? And surely I'm not the only one who gets fed up with one wiki platform and decides to try another?

To sum up, to say that I am disappointed with what has happened to a fantastically simple and brilliant idea would be a major understatement.