Welcome to the new Mycroft Systems Newsletter, previous editions were posted regularly by John Mycroft. Since he left our shores we have been somewhat distracted by the day to day running of the business and apologise for the non appearance of this newsletter for the past six months. We will be endeavouring to produce new newsletters on a regular quarterly schedule. The good news is that since the last edition lots has been happening to our array of software offerings, so we have oodles of up to the minute news for you.
This magazine is provided in HTML format, if you would like a plain text version let us know at subscriptions@mycroft.co.nz. To save your clogged up and overworked email systems we are just sending out the URL to the newsletter. Have a look at the wonderful PKZip desktop utilities that will save masses of space on your email system. If you would like to unsubscribe from the magazine let us know at idontwantthisrubbish@mycroft.co.nz and you will be removed from the subscription list.
What ever happened to.....
Catch up with the continuing saga of our erstwhile leader, gasp in admiration at his latest adventures, be amazed that he isn't in custody. More....
New versions
There are lots of new goodies and extended functionality in the new version 5.6 for z Series and i Series. Read all about it....
Chocolate Mathematics
What's it all about, be amazed and astounded. Amaze me now....
Prize
Competition
Your chance to get something from us without an order number. Take me to the competition....
Moore's law didn't cover this.
Intel's Hyperthreading technology explained (sort of), do you want it, do you need it, does it work or is it a case of 'stitch this jimmy'. More....
VIP Version 2 unveiled.
Lots of new functionality and features in SDS's real time z/OS IP Monitor.
Tell me about the four virtues of network monitoring....
The jokes.
As you may be aware MSL has gained a Scottish management flavour. Have a laugh at the Scots....
Convert your ugly
3270 applications into HTML with ease.
No one believes us, but is true, honest Guv. The most cost effective and really, really easy way to covert your boring old 3270 applications into real HTML. Go on convince me....
Useful Web Links
Steve's recipe of useful web links. Take me there....
The Old Fart ? The Saga Continues
It's been six months since John left us (in the lurch) following his calling to become a missionary in the America's. Over this time we have had numerous queries regarding his well being, location and contact details. Although most of these communications were from debt collectors, Time Life subscriptions department and the Salvation Army we though that you might enjoy an update of his escapades so far.
Once John had completed the mountain of paperwork for the US immigration department declaring in triplicate that he wasn't a notorious villain, terrorist or drug smuggler he went though the usual vetting procedures to make sure he had been telling the truth. Apparently this consists of running his name and date of birth through a global series of law enforcement computers. Few amongst us would be surprised that his name lit up warning lights and identified him as a scofflaw, transgressor, trespasser, wrongdoer; crook, gangster, hood, mobster, racketeer, thug; fugitive, outlaw and jailbird. Unsurprisingly the US immigration department refused his application as they apparently have a surfeit of home grown scoundrels with similar qualifications.
However in this case the systems had identified another New Zealander with the same name and a very similar date of birth as John. After much pleading and wailing the Americans relented and allowed him the necessary paperwork to migrate.
Months before John left the country he carefully researched the ideal automobile to purchase on his entry into the US. He examined the minutiae of fuel efficiency, drivability, resale values, comfort, safety and sex appeal and decided on the all American Subaru Forrester as the ideal vehicle. At this point in the tale I will paste John's email of the week into the document, I apologise in advance to anyone from Port Stockton who happens across this missive.
"As a few of you know already, we have finally arrived in Asheville, NC. It's been an interesting trip, not one that went entirely to plan. The bit as far as Bellingham, WA was a delight (except for the US immigration officer on the Canadian border who had inadvertently attached his backside where his head should have been) but then things went a little astray. I'd bought a car over the Internet from the Subaru dealer in Bellingham. When we got there, the cruise control didn't work (they'd discovered that during the pre-delivery check) so "Can you call back tomorrow?" Fortunately, we had booked our hotel in Bellingham for 2 nights so calling back tomorrow was no problem. They lent us a highly lavish Oldsmobile which we took to a couple of beaches on Puget Sound just to show em who was boss. They couldn't find what was wrong with the cruise control the next day, either so I suggested we took the car without and got it fixed when we got to NC. Life ain't that easy - without cruise control, the speedo doesn't work, either. So, back again the next day when it still wasn't fixed. So we had a nose round the yard and found a red Forester (we'd ordered a silver one though Susan had wanted a red one - my car!) with the souped up stereo pack in it (which I had wanted but wasn't prepared to stump up an extra zillion dollars for. That'll do so it's hey ho for the open road.
Once more all went to plan until we hit a snag outside Fort Stockton in Texas. A "snag", in case you don't know, is a cast iron lorry mudguard. When you run over it at 70 mph, it goes "TUNK" very loudly under your car. Two miles down the road, you notice that your petrol tank that was full 10 miles ago is now only 3/4 full. Let's take a look under the car - waddayaknow, we're gushing petrol. Everyone out! Let us stand safely on this piece of desert that is nothing but thornbushes, rattlesnakes and very hungry mozzies. (I can be imprisoned for 20 years in Texas for damaging the local flora - I ripped apart a sagebrush to make fly-whisks for us all.) We called the Subaru "get you home service" on Susan's cell phone - Verizon have a bizarre service on their cellphones - if you dial a number, a voice comes on the line asking you to dial it again. The voice then says "Thank you" very nicely and hangs up. So we dialled 911 and, after what felt like half an hour but was more like 30 minutes, a tow truck turned up. (Note to Hollywood producers - our car was still gushing petrol but had not yet burst into flames, blown up or fallen over a cliff). A mere 2 hours after leaving Fort Stockton, we were back in Fort Stockton again. (For a complete list of Fort Stockton's attractions, see the back of this email). The tow company called Subaru who said they would be delighted to pay for our car to be towed to the nearest Subaru dealer - in El Paso. We were heading for San Antonio. To save you rushing for the atlas, El Paso is 250 miles west of Fort Stockton, San Antonio is 300 miles east. After very little negotiating, Subaru agreed that, if we'd shell out an extra $100, they'd get us towed to San Antonio. Considering that saved us going 500 miles we didn't want to go and saved us at least 2 nights in a hotel somewhere we didn't want to be, it seemed a bargain.
Pop quiz - how many spare fuel tanks does Subaru have in the USA? Those of you who guessed "none" are spot on. So, having popped our tank on Friday, a new one was expected from Japan on Thursday. Somehow detecting how delighted we were to hear this, the folks at Subaru in San Antonio pulled the fuel tank out of a new Forester and stuck it in our car instead so we were on the road again (to Dallas, having rented a car for the weekend and driven down to Houston, home of the world's worst drivers). Three glorious days in Dallas involving getting in no cars at all, hardly, restored our sanity.
Anyone remember Doug Ewen? (Not many hands up for that one - Doug's a guy whose software we used to sell). Turns out he has a house in Asheville so, on spec, I sent him and email asking if he knew anyone who had a house to rent in Asheville for a month or so. "Me!" says Doug so that's where we are right now. Doug gave us the key about an hour ago and pushed off to Florida. There's even a chance that he will need my services installing SIM2000 (a Y2K date simulator) in Dallas later this year. "A bit late?" I hear you cry. Maybe the Texans use a different calendar.
So here we are in Asheville with a list of things to be done before the end of the week that is as long as your proverbial arm. I have to get a social security number - you can't buy a hamburger here without one. We have to register the car again, arrange driving tests (so long as I don't have to parallel park - it's unbelievably hard to do on the wrong side of the road). And the car is overdue for its first oil change and service. Most importantly, I have to find something better than Budweiser to drink. I've had varying degrees of success thus far, usually involving beer from Colorado though Boston and California have both turned up good-uns. I have also broken a solemn promise to myself by giving in to the temptation of draught Guinness and Bass - on both occasions I had a very good reason but you'll have to wait until the movie comes out to find out what.
Here be our new permanent email address - we can still be reached at the old Compuserve address but Compuserve hates handling email with pictures in or that comes from Hotmail. They also employ no English speakers on their help desk but that will be fully investigated in the hardback edition of this saga."
John and family have settled in Ashville and he is contracting to the highest bidders in the area, I honestly didn't know that Belgium is in the Ashville locale but that's where he is giving his next Cobol course.
John can be contacted at johnm@agands.com
PKWARE Releases New Versions of PKZIP for iSeries and zSeries
Newest versions enable efficient and secure
information transfer between datacenters and other computing users within, and
outside, the Enterprise
PKWARE,
the leader in Trusted ZIP Solutions for the Enterprise, have announced
enhancements to its award winning PKZIP products for iSeries midrange systems
and zSeries mainframes. The new functionality now enables datacenters to
compress and secure files of virtually any size and number, and to automatically
create self-extracting files, making it easy to send large files across and
beyond the enterprise. Secure ZIP files created by PKZIP for iSeries and zSeries
can also be unzipped and decrypted by external Windows recipients using the
freely available PKZIP Reader.
PKZIP for iSeries and PKZIP for zSeries are already used by 60 percent of the
Fortune 100 companies, including 12 of the top 14 financial institutions in the
U.S. and over 20 percent of all mainframes worldwide. The new features
strengthen the interoperability of ZIP files across computing platforms, making
it easy to transfer data efficiently and securely between mainframes, servers
and desktops.
"PKZIP enables significant reductions in storage, bandwidth and processing
requirements for midrange and mainframe computing platforms," said Tim Kennedy,
President and COO of PKWARE. "Our latest versions of PKZIP greatly enhance the
ability of datacenters to transfer information efficiently and securely with
other users within the enterprise -- as well as the extended enterprise."
PKWARE's patent-pending Secure ZIP technology combines encryption with the
zipping process, allowing organizations to realize tremendous savings in
bandwidth, CPU cycle time, and storage. With the PKZIP cross-platform solutions,
datacenters can now easily implement data security solutions that maximize their
existing investments in computing, storage, and network infrastructures.
PKWARE today announced two other initiatives to extend the interoperability of
the Secure ZIP file compression standard: New licensing programs for PKZIP
Reader and Secure ZIP, and the PKZIP Reader Partner Program. The licensing
program is intended to enhance interoperability among all ZIP users and vendors.
The PKZIP Reader Partner Program provides organisations with a license to
redistribute PKZIP Reader, the free unzipping and decrypting utility, to their
business partners and customers. With PKZIP Reader, firms can quickly, easily
and inexpensively extend their security initiatives to those in the extended
enterprise.
Take me back to the top....
Intel Hyperthreading Explained
Intel's latest releases of the Pentium 4 processors all support Hyperthreading technology; this technology was previously available on Intel's high end Xeon server processor range. This technology simply splits one physical processor into two logical processors, which may or may not be of benefit to you depending upon several factors.
Don't think that just by purchasing a Hyperthreading processor you will be able to actually run Hyperthreading, you will also need;
As always you never get something for nothing, there is a processor overhead when you employ Hyperthreading expect a processor overhead of around 6%. If you are running a single application that isn't Hyperthreading aware (and most of them aren't) or if you are running an unsupported operating system then go into the BIOS and turn off Hyperthreading, your system will run faster.
Where Hyperthreading is of a real benefit is where you are concurrently running multiple applications especially where one of the applications is a real processor hog. The heavy application will happily run on one logical processor and you can browse the web, play games, watch movies or run other applications quite happily on the other logical processor. In our testing we ran some very processor intensive DVD copying software on one logical CPU and happily ran Microsoft Excel on the other. On a single CPU system (of the same specification) running any other application had proved almost impossible.
When software developers release newer versions of their applications that are Hyperthreading enabled then processor heavy applications run much more efficiently.
We would not recommend that you try to upgrade your existing systems to the Hyperthreading standard, but if you are purchasing new hardware there is little price difference to upgrade to Hyperthreading enabled systems.
1. First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to have chocolate. (try for more than once but less than 10)
2. Multiply this number by 2 (Just to be bold)
3. Add 5. (for Sunday)
4. Multiply it by 50 - I'll wait while you get the calculator................
5. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1753....
If you haven't, add 1752..........
6. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.
You should have a three digit number ....
.
and
.
The first digit of this was your original number (I.e., how many times you want to have chocolate each week).
The next two numbers are ..........
YOUR AGE! (Oh YES, IT IS!!!!!)
THIS IS THE ONLY YEAR (2003) IT WILL EVER WORK, SO SPREAD IT AROUND WHILE IT LASTS. IMPRESSIVE, ISN'T IT?
The Four Virtues of a Good Mainframe Network Monitor
SDS White Paper, October 2003
T
he more complex the network, the simpler the monitor has to appear. In other words, the monitor has to watch over TCP/IP traffic, report on multiple stacks and systems, catch today's problems yesterday, and fully inform service-level agreements, without getting in the network's way. The monitor interface has to present far more data than any 3270 screen, and still make quick sense to users. It has to be readily available from all kinds of platforms. And it has to serve a technical support staff that, more and more often, grew up with the Internet rather than green screens.Hence the four requirements for a truly useful network monitor:
1. The monitor reports network status and performance fully, in real-time, without itself hindering performance.
2. The monitor provides a central view of
all of your network's z/OS hosts, TCP/IP stacks, applications, and connections.3. The monitor provides simple, intuitive navigation to full details regarding every resource and event on the network.
4. The monitor provides easy-to-use, graphic tools for network diagnosis, management, and repair.
In short, a good mainframe monitor is low-overhead, it provides a central view of nearly everything and intuitive navigation to almost anything, and it simplifies z/OS operations. Think efficient data-collection architecture: Getting MIB data without SNMP requests. Measuring stack traffic without constant packet tracing.
Think graphic summary reports: A single screen showing you health of multiple TCP/IP stacks on a z/OS system, and of multiple z/OS systems. Intuitive links to individual TCP/IP resources: stacks, interfaces, applications, and connections. Equally intuitive links to other z/OS resources: Enterprise Extender, CICS, VTAM, and CSM buffers,
And think simple graphic tools for network diagnosis: Packet trace results in real-time. ICMP and UDP pings. Operator commands to any z/OS system from one browser screen.
This is a plan for a pretty ideal health and performance monitor for z/OS and TCP/IP.
| New in VIP 2.0 | |
| ? | Enterprise Extender monitoring. |
| ? | Automatic discovery of all applications on local systems. |
| ? | Connections Explorer: easy searches for specific groups of TCP connections. |
| ? | Issue system operator commands to all your z/OS systems from within the VIP browser interface. |
| ? | VIP will send alerts by e-mail. |
| ? | Export performance history to comma-delimited data files. |
| Standard in VIP | |
| ? | Browser-based, real-time monitoring |
| ? | Whole-network summary displays |
| ? | Quick, intuitive navigation to precise details |
| ? | Graph recent history |
| ? | Versatile alert system |
Think it's to good to be true, give us a call and you can take it for a free test drive.
Months of implementation time? Technology that requires weeks of classroom instruction? Hundreds of thousands of dollars of software and new platform costs? Who made this the norm for web-enablement of mainframe applications?
Apparently not the customers paying the
price.
That's why we built z/Web-Host? for mainframe users. With z/Web-Host, you get results in hours, not months. z/Web-Host is the easiest way to transform the capable, back-end logic of your existing 3270 applications into fully functional web-browser based applications. With z/Web-Host you can take the old look and feel of tried and true applications and rejuvenate them with pull-down lists, full color and graphics, even a completely different layout altogether. All without touching a single line of code in the original applications. Just take a look at the kind of dramatic changes you can accomplish:
Transform your Apps into Easy to Use, Intuitive Web-Browser Apps
With z/Web-Host you can transform your 3270 screens into rich, web-browser applications that anyone can access and understand without any training. What's more, you can use any Web design tool you prefer, including FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Hotdog and others, to layout the look and feel of your screens. Using z/Web-Host's Advanced HTML Templates, you store the new layout with definitions of the data on the original screen, and z/Web-Host will merge the data dynamically to create the web-browser output. This means you can even use your in-house web designer to layout the new look of the mainframe applications.
And since z/Web-Host runs natively on zOS-OS/390 or VSE/ESA, there's no need to add extra time, cost and support issues by using additional platforms just to get to your mainframe data.
Let us convert some of your screens for free so you can see for yourself.
A tech community bringing you the latest headlines and news from around the web. http://www.neowin.net
All net tools has dozens of the most useful tools available online, from Currency Converters to Anonymous re-mailers, http://www.all-nettools.com/
Free software downloads, audio tools, internet utilities, http://www.analogx.com/contents/news.htm
FILExt is a detailed database of file extensions and programs that use them. http://filext.com/
This archive contains Usenet Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) postings in HTML format and in text format. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/
System optimisation information, Hardware reviews and user-submitted reviews for motherboards, processors, graphics cards, sound cards?.. http://www.sysopt.com/index.html
Scottish Humour
In the beginning when God was
creating the world, He was sitting up in Heaven with his friend, the Archangel
Gabriel. God started to tell Gabriel what he planned for Scotland.
"Gabe," says He, "I'm going to make this place something special...I'll give it
high majestic mountains, purple glens, streams laden with salmon, golden fields
of barley from which a whisky-like nectar can be made, coal in the ground, oil
under the sea, and the best-looking men and women in the world..."
"Hold on, hold on!" interjected the bold Gabriel, "Why is it that you are being
so kind to these Scots? You are giving them everything and being so nice..."
God, the Almighty, replied, "Not really, just wait till you see the neighbours I
give them!"
A Scotsman was shipwrecked and
finally washed ashore on a small island. As he regains consciousness on the
beach, he sees a beautiful unclad nymph standing over him.
She asks, "Would you like some food? "The Scot hoarsely croaks, "Och, lassie, I
havna' ittin a bite in a week and I am verra hungry!" She disappears into the
woods and quickly comes back with a heaping helping of haggis.
When he has choked it down, she
asks, "Would you like something to drink?" "Och, aye! That haggis has made me
verra thirsty and I wad verra much like a drink!" She goes off into the woods
again and returns with a bottle of 75-year-old single-malt Scotch whiskey.
The Scotsman is beginning to think that he's in heaven when the unclad nymph
leans closer and says, "Would you like to play around?"
"Och, lassie, don't tell me ye've got a golf course here too!"
Jamie burst into the house and proudly announced to his father, "I ran home behind the bus and saved ten pence." To which his father replied, "You could have done better son. You could have run home behind a taxi and saved five pounds."
The winning entry mailed to callumm@mycroft.co.nz will have not one, not two but three bottles of premier New Zealand Wine delivered to their doorstep. We would tell you what the wines were but it depends what we have left in the cellar come delivery time.
The Questions
How many English words of three letters or more can you make from 'Mycroft'. Plurals are not allowed words, all words will be ratified using the 2000 Oxford English Dictionary (because that's the one we've got).
Which company invented Ethernet.
Complete the following series of letters O U E U I A ?
Rules
The winning entry will correctly answer all questions and have the highest number of acceptable words in question 1.
In the event where more than one winning entry has an equal number of words for question 1. and has answered questions 2 & 3 correctly the winning entry will be the deemed to be the one with the earliest delivery date and time stamp as shown on our email server.
Past and present members of MSL and their families are not allowed to enter the competition.
MSL's decision is final.
The closing time of the competition is noon Friday 28th November GMT.
The winner will be notified by email and the prize will be delivered to the address of their choice.