Leonard's Reflections 4/8

This is Day 2 of the IBM Technical Software Conference. I attended more lectures about Tivoli : Deploying a Service Desk Quickly and Network Configuration and Change Management and Compliance Management.

I learned about topics like Quick Deployment, ITIL Processes, Tivoli Service Request Memory (TSRM), Tivoli Foundations Software Appliances (TFSM), Policy Based Compliance Management (PBCM) and Tivoli Netcool Configuration Manager (TNCM) during the lectures.

After trying out the lectures, I became confident and decided to try out one of my attempts at the IBM certification. I chose to attempt the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) test, the passing mark was 66% and there were 54 questions in the paper. Even though I only scored 25 questions right in the test, it has inspired me to work harder in the future lectures to pass my second attempt at the test.

My final lecture for the day was Birds of Feather with Architects. It was a free asking session about Websphere Application Server (WAS) with five IBM experts and the audience at the lecture asked many useful questions and the experts responded with very enlightening information. Personally, I feel that I have learned more from this session than from some of the lectures. One of the questions the audience asked was an Infinite Thread problem where he wanted to terminate his program without restarting his WAS. The source of the problem was found to be a Hung Thread, since the enquirer’s WAS was standalone, he could not avoid restarting his WAS. Only if the WAS was in a cluster then he could terminate the program without restarting the WAS as other nodes will be able to run the thread. The lecturer even made a joke about the “Ostrich method” as a way to solve the problem : Bury your head in the ground and pretend nothing happened.

That is the end of day 2 and another interesting day of learning. Tomorrow will be the last day of the conference before the return to Singapore!