In Excel – Sorted With AppleScript I mentioned I might have a go at transposing rows and columns in an Excel spreadsheet with AppleScript. I said there were two things I could try – each with a different use case: Transposing Rows And Columns In A Spreadsheet Transposing Rows And Columns In A Graph I – after quite a bit of effort – achieved both. Again, in the spirit of saving others time, I’m posting them here. Transposing Rows And Columns In A Spreadsheet The following code transposes the selected cells into cell A1 of a new work sheet. I’m using a new worksheet as it saves worrying about ..read more

They say necessity is the mother of invention. But so, I’d say, are impatience and frustration. I find the sorting dialog in Excel on Mac a source of both of these. So I wrote some AppleScript to remove some of the friction. I’m sharing this because, yet again, I found nothing on the Web to help me. And some of the pieces might be what other people need for other automations. The Trouble With Excel Sort It’s easy to invoke the sort dialog from the keyboard – which I’d’ve fixed if I had to. (It’s Cmd+Shift+R.) But after that it gets a bit tedious: I have to explicitly click to get a drop down ..read more

In Automating Microsoft Excel I wrote about some basic manipulation of graphs in Excel for Mac OS, using AppleScript. I’m writing about it again because of the paucity of examples on the web. Here is an example that shows how to do a number of things in that vein. tell application "Microsoft Excel" set c to active chart tell c set xAxis to (get axis c axis type category axis) tell xAxis set has title to true end tell set tx to axis title of xAxis set axis title text of tx to "Drawer / DCM / Chip" set font size of (font obje ..read more

In Drawers And More I mentioned Parking with the words One day I’ll be able to colour VL’s according to whether they are parked or not – or rather fractions of the interval they’re parked. That’s a not very difficult fix for the python code. Well, that proved as simple as I thought. So, along the way I built on the Parked Time numbers to get a Core-Level view of parking. The point of this post is to tell you how to do it – using SMF 70 Subtype 1. There are two challenges – but they’re not big ones: Relating threads to cores Calculating core level parking and unparking Relating Cores To Threa ..read more

Late last year I wrote a blog post: Drawers, Of Course. I’ll admit I’d half forgotten about it. Now that a few months have passed it’s time to write about at least part of it again. So why write about it again now? I’ve so much more experience with the instrumentation I described in that post. My tooling has come on in leaps and bounds. You’d think the two were related, and I suppose they are. But these two points give me the structure for this post. Experience Here I’m primarily concerned with learning how the data behaves – and what it shows us about machines’ behaviour. My customer set ha ..read more

This post is about processor drawers and how the topic might influence your LPAR design. Introduction Once upon a time drawers and books were very simple. If you wanted a certain number of processors – whether GCP, zIIP, zAAP, IFL, or ICF – that determined the number of drawers you had. (I’m still hearing people refer to them as books, even though that went out when we went from vertical orientation to horizontal.1) Now it’s got more complex. I think this might really have taken off with z15 – but it’s certainly a feature of z16 as well. And I expect it to remain a feature – though I’m not say ..read more

We started planning this one quite a while ago. Thankfully our topics tend to be evergreen – in that they’re still topical for quite a while. In that vein I know we are gaining new listeners and they aren’t all starting with the latest episode. Anyway, our schedules have been their usual hectic selves – but in a good way. Actually, recording happened over quite a short timespan – when we got to it. So, enjoy! Episode 34 “Homeward Bound” long show notes. This episode is about our Performance Topic. Since our last episode, Martin was in Istanbul twice, Copenhagan, and Nottingham. Martin and Marn ..read more

(This is not a post about plumbing.) It’s been a while since I last wrote about personal automation. And in Stickiness I talked about what makes automations stick for me. This post is about experiments with RFID detection and automation. These actually turned into something I use daily when I’m at home. Hobbyist Digital Electronics Let me digress a little. When I was young I learnt all about Kirchoff’s Laws and other aspects of analogue electr(on)ics. But my real love was for digital electronics. I messed around with Zilog Z80 microprocessors and the various support chips. Indeed these were t ..read more

In Bursty Batch I talked about how some customers have large amounts of batch work coming in all at once, and how a new WLM function in z/OS 3.1 might be handy in catering for it. And it subsequently occurred to me there is a cheap-to-collect and therefore almost universal method of assessing how bursty batch is. This post is about that method. One section in SMF 70-1 is the ASID Data Area Section. It has system-level statistics for such things as the number of Started Tasks or TSO userids. To take a relevant example, you can calculate the average number of batch address spaces by dividing fie ..read more

This post is about Coupling Facility sizing – particularly when you don’t have one to start with. And particularly CPU. (Memory is reasonably catered for with CFSizer – whether over the web or now in z/OSMF for z/OS 3.1.) And the reason I’m writing about this is because I was recently asked to help size in just such a set of circumstances. Narrowing The Doubt Coupling Facility CPU usage is so variable that one is tempted to say “I’ve no idea” – but that isn’t a very satisfactory answer. So let’s see if we can do better. This is what I call “narrowing the doubt”. When I was young the Country ..read more