Below is the highlights of new WebSphere MQ V7:

* JMS support tightly integrated into the runtime and configuration environment
* Publish-and-subscribe tightly integrated into the runtime and configuration environment
* Enhanced performance for JMS and publish-and-subscribe
* New MQI verbs and behaviours
* Supported Bridge for HTTP enabling Ajax applications to connect to WebSphere MQ queues and topics
* Enhancements for clients increasing resilience and throughput

Es sollte der Abschluss eines netten Tages werden. Denn bis zu jenem Moment war der Tag ja wirklich nett: Ausschlafen, aufräumen, meine Eltern bekochen, die sich erstmals in meiner neuen Wohnung die Ehre gaben – ein außergewöhnlich netter Tag also. Und um ihn ebenso nett ausklingen zu lassen wollten Herr N. und ich “mal schnell” auf einen Punsch gehen, denn den ganzen Tag über herrschte angenehm warmes Migräne-Föhn-Wetter – da ließ es sich auch abends draußen leichter ausharren als bei arktischen Temperaturen. Alles in allem ausgezeichnete Voraussetzungen für einen netten Abend.

Das erste böse Erwachen kam schon am Spittelberg, da Herr N. und ich jedes Mal vergessen, dass das arbeitende Volk sich allzu früh ins Bett begibt, und das Gros der Punschhütten ihre Pforten um 22  oder gar 21 Uhr schließt.  Doch Herr N. und ich wollten uns unseren nett geplanten Abend nicht vermiesen lassen. Da eilten wir also die schöne Siebensterngasse hinunter, vertieft in eine Konversation über die Lebens- und Schaffenskrisen, die derzeit unser Dasein beherrschen. Ist zwar weniger nett, diese Lebens- und Schaffenskrise, aber wir Künstler und Freischaffenden brauchen ja Lebens- und Schaffenskrisen, zwecks Kreativität und so. So liefen und kraxelten wir über die Dächer Wiens zum Museumsquartier hinüber, voller Vorfreude auf fette Beats, hippes Volk und heißen Ingwerpunsch. Doch als wir die Treppen vom Mumok hinabstiegen ist es so seltsam still und vor allem – leer. Und als wir erstmals in den Hof einsehen konnten traf uns der apokalyptische Anblick wie der Schlag: Der Eispalast, der wunderbare und einzigartige MQ-Eispalast, ist tot.

Touristen dachten erst, es wäre “a kind of modern art”, diese schwarze Vulkankraterlandschaft mitten im MQ-Hof. Sah ja auch tatsächlich so aus, nur fehlte das Schild mit Künstlername und Kurzbeschreibung. Ein einsamer Securitymann spazierte andächtig um die Ruinen herum, damit ja niemand ein Souvenir aus den verkohlten Überresten der Enzis entwenden konnte. Auf dem dem einzigen Enzi, der noch halbwegs als solcher erkennbar war, hatte jemand “Burn-Out-Syndrom” hingeschmiert. Fassunglos und voller Trauer standen wir um die Trümmer unserer kulturellen Zufluchtsortes herum. Natürlich bedauerten wir in erster Linie den Verlust des viel zu wässrigen und überteuerten Punsches. Doch vor allem galt: Wir mussten loslassen, loslassen von der Galionsfigur einer Wiener Subkultur, vom Wahrzeichen des Boboville-Winters und endgültig von unserem hohen Ross absteigen. Denn heuer wird es nix mehr mit dem Eispalast, der Großteil der Enzis ist den Folgen eines Kabelbrandes erlegen, und deren teure Wiederanschaffung wird sich wohl bis in den Frühling hineinziehen.

Seit jenem Tag trägt Boboville schwarzen Trauerflor, wer weiterhin nicht auf Punsch und Glühwein verzichten will, muss mit den anderen Christkindlmärkten vorlieb nehmen. Und die sind – bis auf den Spittelberg vielleicht – viel zu touristisch, viel zu kitschig, viel zu überfüllt, und einfach viel zu mainstream. Denn so ist es in Wien – zwischen Subkulturen bestehen tiefe Gräben – und zum Brücken schlagen fehlt die nötige Toleranz und Offenheit:  Offenheit auch Neues kennenzulernen und zu akzeptieren, auch wenn es noch so sehr “mainstream” ist und sich nicht in Naschmarktnähe befindet. Denn wir wollen ja anders sein als die anderen, so sehr anders und alternativ, dass wir gar nicht merken, wie gleich anders und gleich alternativ wir eigentlich sind. Jetzt, wo ein Zufluchtsort der Bobos weniger existiert, kommen wir erst drauf, wie sehr wir in unserer eigenen Seifenblase leben. Und wie klein diese Seifenblase ist.

Übrigens: Herr N. und ich überwanden den Verlust des MQ-Eispalastes relativ schnell und konnten trotz des Schocks  in einem Bobo-Beisl diesen netten Tag mit einem relativ netten Abend beenden.

Den 1-24 december bjuder vi på en julkalender här på liljeholmstorget.se. Varje dag får du ett unikt erbjudande från någon av våra butiker. Så håll ögonen öppna, det kommer garanterat att löna sig.

Julkalenderns erbjudanen kommer att meddelas via enkla youtubefilmer med personal från butikerna här på Liljeholmstorget. En av dem som är med på filmerna är Erik från MQ, som inte bara är filmstjärna i vår julkalender utan även blivit utsedd till årets glasögonbärare 2009. Så här skriver Erik på sin blogg:

“Nu är jag officiellt reklamfilmstjärna. Liljeholmstorget ska ha en liten interaktiv julkalender på sin hemsida och jag fick representera MQ och filma en liten sekvens. Kuligt värre! Dessutom filmade de en liten intervju med mig där jag fick berätta om livet som årets glasögonbärare…kommer inom kort till denna blogg.”

Kürzlich geriet der „Eispalast“ im Wiener Museumsquartier in Vollbrand, wo feuriger Punsch ausgeschenkt werden sollte..

Die Feuerwehr hat den Brand gelöscht, verletzt wurde niemand. Die umliegenden Gebäude – außer ein paar Glasscheiben – wurden nicht beschädigt.

Die Brandursache ist unklar, das Kriminalreferat des Stadtpolizeikommandos Josefstadt ermittelt, sachdienliche Hinweise werden unter der Telefonnummer: 01-31310-33850 erbeten.

SVT har börjat släppa bomberna kring Melodifestivalen. Tidigare presenterades första jokern och i förra veckan programledarna i festivalen. Snabbt la jag pusslet och i flera dagar har jag väntat spänt på att någon ska lösa gåtan. Det går vad det verkar inget vidare. Så i vanlig ordning blir det jag som får bära Sherlocks hatt.

Dolph Lundgren är programledare i år. Tillsammans med Måns Zelmerlöw. Och Darin är den hittills enda avslöjade jokern i år. De har naturligtvis inget gemensamt. Eller? Jo då. Kolla klippen…

När Zelmerlöw inte kunde medverka i reklamen fick MQ nöja sig med flickvännen Marie Serneholt som då blev joker redan förra året men till Melodifestivalen lyckas nu SVT genomföra grundidén.

Och tittar man närmare på det så blir det ännu mer intressant. Nyfiken på resterande jokrar? MQ radar upp nomineringarna…

Dogge Doggelito har skrivit en av årets låtar. Jessica Andersson sägs vara klar som medverkande. Och det är förvisso bara rykten, men rykten som viskar om A camp med Nina Persson som en av jokrarna. Osannolikt? Visst. Men i sammanhanget lustigt.

Lägg därtill superskrällen Andreas Wilson som överraskar med stort sångmässigt i reklamen och en efterlängtad comeback av textkungen Wille Crafoord och festivalen blir möjligen något att se framemot även i år.

En festival som verkar bli en längre version av MQ:s julkampanj 2008.

andra bloggar om svt, melodifestivalen, joker, programledare, dolph lundgren, måns zelmerlöw, mq, reklam, marie serneholt, dogge doggelito, jessica nadersson, a camp, nina persson, andreas wilson, wille crafoord

All over the city this weekend, T$F is in heavy preparation mode for the SCREEN FIENDS show this saturday.  Here’s some pics from the urban jungle.

Seen this REAK piece on the freeway on Friday.  Hot boy spot!
Nice KAER bomb next to it too, but the sun blew out that pic.
Props to WD, those are cool dudes.

REAK fwy bomb

Strolled down Beverly for an uncomfortable walk…

It’s funny how this BANSKY piece is being preserved.
His street art has ANTI-BUFF protection!
Lots of people tag near or on or over this piece.  You think if you tag on a Banksy piece you’re gonna get props of fame?  You won’t.  Some militant Banksy fan will carefully buff your work away from his.  Besides- do you’re own fuckin thing!

BANKSY on Beverly blvd

Here’s a perfect example.  Some ass clown went around Hollywood wheatpasting the image of the Monopoly character and his name “Alec” next to it.  Guess what Alec- YOU DIDN”T MAKE THE FUCKIN MONOPOLY GUY.  He’s been around longer than your ass!  In my mind it’s retarded- but someone else took action to make it clear to him.  This funny guy painted one of these Monopoly things adjacent to that Banksy piece…  shit ran for a couple days before someone dissed it hard!  If I were ALEC I would go buff myself!  Hahaha  you want that crossed out shit running hard on Beverly?  FAIL!

Alec is a toy!

Stickers mobbing everywhere.
They only last a couple days…  except some of these joints.

Continuing destruction in ATLANTA by NOS (T$F)

This is a mixed-media outdoor piece.

NOS - T$F

Not much to say here except…enjoy!

Rob Lowe:

Gilles Marini:

(Recognise him? You may have seen him in the Sex and The City movie)

AQworlds is a MMORPG version of AdventureQuest, the popular browser game.  The developers of AQworlds have a track record of excellent online games, including AdventureQuest, MechQuest, and Dragon Fable, and Aqworlds is no exception.  With relativity good graphics and an interesting plot line, AQworlds will hold your interest for hours.  Currently, there are only a few classes available, but the developers plan to have more.  Some of the classes include, mage, warrior, healer, leprechaun, rustbucket, dragonslayer, paladin, and rogues.  Each with its own special abillity and armor.

As to the armor and weapons, there are tons of choices available to you.  Literally, thousands.  You can customise your armor for color, and class armors can give you special powers.

Of course, every gamer knows that it is all about the weapon, and you want to be envied right?  Well you can be!  There are tons of shops, quests, and opportunities to get a truly rare weapon.

And when I say tons of quests, I mean tons of quests.  You cant walk down the street without encountering quests.  Of course, you have a choice.  Including the choice between good and evil.  Want to be part of an evil undead empire?  You can be!  (I am!  Long Un-Live the Shadowscythe!)

Anyway, it is another great game made by the BattleOn team, sure to have you wasting hours of your time.

Just a quick tip in MQ Adapter in 10G:

When we use JMS Adapter or AQ Adapter, It’s almost straight forward in the wizard that you can dequeue the message based on Correlation Id which will be prompted as part of the wizard. In AQ Adapter, you can even write SQL where condition while dequeue the message.

But in case of MQ Adapter, the wizard doesn’t show (Atleast till 10.1.3.4) anything to filter upon dequeue.

However you can edit the dequeue WSDL and pass any of the below mentioned paramaters for JCA Operation to conditionally dequeue the message.

FilterByMsgId – This property sets the message filter option based on the
messageId. This property is not mandatory. The value provided for this
property must be a hexadecimal-encoded value for some messageId.

FilterByCorrelId – This property sets the message filter option based on
the correlationId. This property is not mandatory. The value provided
for this property must be a hexadecimal-encoded value for some
correlationId.

FilterByGroupId – This property sets the message filter option based on
groupId. This property is not mandatory. The value provided for this
property must be a hexadecimal-encoded value for some groupId.

Ref: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/bpel/pdf/10133technotes.pdf

it took me almost 2 hrs to get into work recently. “so what!” you long distance commuters might exclaim without a trace of sympathy. however, usually my pleasant drive to work can be executed in less than 15 minutes. so that’s an 800% degradation in the efficiency of my morning commute. and given it made me very late for an important meeting with a client, had an adverse effect on my stress levels and a knock-on effect on the rest of the entire day, making me subsequently late for most other appointments spreading, sharing this inefficiency with everyone else my day brought me into contact with. big deal. why the rant many days later? was the main reason for this inordinate delay to my journey due to certain bottle-necks in the route i take from the maybush area of southampton to ibm hursley? perhaps. or was the actual main cause on this particular day the dreadfully inclement weather? – the heavy rain pummelling the roads and severely reducing visibility? possibly.

but i’d like to argue for another root cause. a different ultimate reason to the road chaos. it might seem too obvious to be profound but here goes: the rush hour. the simple fact that in that short window of time, everyone had simultaneously brought their cars onto the road to fight to get to work. stand back for a moment and think about it. we synchronize our daily commutes for maximum disruption. we batch up all the day’s traffic to try and execute it all in the same small slice of time. is there a solution? my usual habit is to begin my working day early, checking email, planning the calendar, determining whether i’ll be more effective getting things done at my desk in hursley or at my home office. as a result, when i do commute into the office my day- and journey – starts a little later than most. this does mean i park further away from my desk than i otherwise might, but on the other hand my commute is stressless and traffic-free and above all efficient. in short, i’ve learned how to un-batch myself from the rest of the traffic and improve my efficiency.

can IT learn a lesson here? does it needlessly batch data processing, unnecessarily synchronising network traffic and processing? yes. i see it all the time. in every size of company, every industry, every geo, every stage of IT sophistication. batch transfers. overnight updates. regular, daily tasks. all coordinated simultaneously so that one little hiccup causes gridlocked chaos. one large financial company operates this way even today, batching up its over night updates to transfer from each region to head-office. it has a window of, say, 6 hours to transport all these batch updates so that come the morning all the head-office systems are synchronized and up-to-date. the batch takes 4. a hiccup (on the network for example) that can’t be detected and resolved less than 2 hrs into the batch transfer is not going to finish in time and will cause major headaches when the next day begins. [incidentally, the process for detecting a problem in this case involves an application whose algorithm for sensing a fault is dubious and inconclusive and that is intended to alert the night security personnel(!) hardly a bullet-proof solution].

but the main issue i want to focus on here isn’t the reliability – it’s the scheduling. businesses need to get away from the batch mindset. it’s synchronising things for maximum fragility and minimum efficiency. “overnight” doesn’t exist in most industries anymore. doing things in little batches – micro batches if you will – rather than in one big job, must be the way to go. spread the tasks across the day and night. stream updates continuously. turn the tidal wave into a swell. the flood into the flow. the tsumani into the constant trickle. take that big batch job – and in the words of MC Hammer – “break it down”.

infact, even this blog entry is another example of micro-batches yielding greater efficiencies. if i’d sat down to write this in one go, i would have had to carve out a lump of interruption free time. but i’ve discovered that never happens. instead i write my entries in micro-batches. a few lines at a time. so this entry really made no major hole in my week, just snatches and snippets here and there. just a thought, if you’re struggling to find enough time to craft entries, just as i did when i began to blog from my desk in hursley.

Shirtless caps of actors Taye Diggs and Paul Adelstein in the 3rd episode of the 3rd season of ABC’s medical drama “Private Practice”

Taye Diggs:

Paul Adelstein:

John Cho and Gabrielle Union in bed together in the 3rd episode of new TV series “FlashForward”

Mechquest is an online game where you play a mecha pilot in a world at war.  As a mech pilot, you have your choice of many diffrent mecha’s, large robotic warriors, to fight with.  And you can arm these mechs with hundreds of diffrent weapons, to fight hundreds of diffrent enemy mechs.  You can join three diffrent house groups; Wolfblade the warriors, Runehawk the studiers, and Mystraven the unique people.  Each one has their own unique mechs and styles. 

When you first create a character you get to choose how you want that character to look, and you can even give them diffrent costumes later in the game. 

Additionally, you can upgrade your account to a Star Captain, giving you access to more areas, mechs, styles, and your own space ship!

Mechquest sprouted off of Adventurequest, and is actually the past of Adventurequest, so it is just as well made as AQ is.

If you are intereseted in trying MechQuest out, click here: http://www.mechquest.com/mq-landing.asp?referral=5889756

Until relatively recently the research into project management has focused on the skills, knowledge and procedures of project management in the context of an “iron triangle” of time, cost and quality (or scope) constraints. Even now if you take a look at some of the key project handbooks by the likes of Turner, Simister, Morris & Pinto, or industry standards such as the PMI’s Project Managers Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) you’ll see what I mean.

However, just because you’ve got the qualification doesn’t mean you will be a successful project manager. The same applies in the agile world.

Experience has a large role to play, but perhaps more importantly is the leadership style of the project manager. Any successful project manager will tell you that in order to get things done they have to adopt their style depending on the organisational context, whether it is being autocratic with a team or consensual with stakeholders. Its how you engage with others and the relationships you build that ultimately determines how successful you are.

Clearly success doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but if you follow the prescribed process and have the ability to adapt your style to get things done then the likelihood of success will be higher, at least in the eyes of your sponsor and stakeholders.

This is where it gets interesting, because there is no clear definition of what project success is, nor how to measure it. What constitutes project success remains a contentious issue within the project management world, and it will differ between organisations, teams, stakeholders and academics. But that’s for another post.

When it comes to leadership the ‘traditional’ project manager clearly differs from their agile equivalent. Recent empirical research has indicated that successful traditional project managers appear to exhibit a greater reliance upon managerial (MQ) and intellectual competencies (IQ) (Geoghegan & Dulewicz, 2006; Muller & Turner, 2007), whereas their successful agile counterparts tend to exhibit a greater dependency upon emotional competencies (Porthouse & Dulewicz, 2007).

Emotional competencies are another way of saying emotional intelligence (EQ) and this has been defined as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing our emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships” (Goleman, 1998).

I’m not saying that traditional project managers don’t rely upon EQ when managing their teams, far from it. However, when I reflect on how I managed traditional projects in the past I usually defaulted to a transactional leadership style, more concerned with meeting milestones on a schedule, and telling teams what they must do, and when by, rather than what they could do.

Although this is an anecdotal example, and an oversimplification, it does imply that this is typical behaviour for a traditional project manager, especially where the research is concerned.  More time and energy is spent on the process and the mechanisms of control (the MQ and IQ), rather than focusing on coaching and empowering the team (the EQ) to take on a self-organising character and affording them full authority to do whatever it needs to do to achieve their goals.

In the next post in this series I’ll present a framework that can be used to determine the types of competencies required for a successful agile project manager, and how these relate to a standard definition of MQ, IQ and EQ dimensions. It won’t be a guarantee for success, but rather it will help individuals or organisations to tailor learning and development initiatives and begin to think about the types of skills and competencies required to deliver agile projects and initiatives.

REFERENCES

Geoghegan, L. and Dulewicz, V. (2006) Project managers’ leadership competencies and project success. Henley Working Paper HWP 0607. Henley-on-Thames, Henley Management College.

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. London, Bloomsbury.

Muller, R. and Turner, J. R. (2007) “Matching the project manager’s leadership style to project type/” International Journal of Project Management 25(1): 21-32.

Porthouse, M. S. and Dulewicz, V. (2007) Agile Project Managers Leadership Competecies. Henley Working Paper HWP 0714. Henley-on-Thames, Henley Managemet College.