We emailed Tuning Letter 2016 No. 2 to our subscribers on August 6. This issue covered IBM’s recent Continuous Delivery strategy, provided an introduction to Blockchain, introduced IBM’s Doc Buddy app for iPhone and Android that lets you look up most z/OS messages even if you don’t have access to the Internet, together with Brocade’s David Lytle we shed light on the dark magic of FICON Buffer Credits and explained why this topic will become more important in the future, plus all our regular columns (User Experiences, new PTFs, IBM WSC documents, interesting blogs, and new and updated Redbooks) – 94 pages in all. You can find the table of contents at http://watsonwalker.com/publications/tuningletter/table-of-contents/.

If you have not had a chance to review it yet, we urge you to at least look at the Continuous Delivery article – that is a topic that is important to all z/OS customers, large and small.  Also, take a minute to read Ed Jaffe’s User Experience.  We received an email from a reader saying that they hit the precise problem that Ed described, just days before we published the Tuning Letter. Make sure to address that issue before you add yourself to the list of sites that suffer from this less-than-ideal default value.

One other tip while we are here.  Some of you might have noticed that the IBM web site that hosts the z/OS library was down over the weekend.  Murphy’s Law – these things are always seem to be unavailable when you need them most.  Fortunately, a kind IBMer (Susan Shumway) provided the following information (on IBMMAIN):

In the meantime, use the publibfp.dhe.ibm.com server to access PDFs. For example, for the Intro and Release Guide, go to http://publibfp.dhe.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/e0z3a113.pdf instead of http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/e0z3a113.pdf.

So, there is a handy URL to bookmark, just in case this happens again.

If you are an active subscriber and you didn’t receive your issue, please send an email to admin@watsonwalker.com. If you particularly liked some article, please let us know – our job is to provide you with the most helpful information possible. And the best way to help us do that is to send us your feedback about what you like or don’t like.

That’s all for now.  Stay Tuned for more mainframe news and views.