Author Archive

Snow arrives

Friday, December 18th, 2009

809For those out of the country, snow arrived in England last night. We didn’t have as much here as, say, my parents did in Hertfordshire but there was enough of a covering to get Emma excited in the morning. I had to go in to work (fortunately not cycling as I had to pick up a mountain bike for the event tomorrow) but Christine took Emma out in the snow. Unfortunately they timed it just as another flurry of snow arrived and Emma wasn’t particularly amused. Luckily Christine persuaded her to go out in the garden later in the day and they had great fun making footprints in the snow.

Nursery Sing-Song

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I took a couple of hours out of work this afternoon to go along to Emma’s nursery for their Christmas performance. I picked up Christine, Emma and Duncan from a friend of Emma’s birthday party and we drove to the nursery. Christine stayed outside feeding Duncan so, having handed Emma over to the nursery assistants, I had the pleasure of joining the audience of parents on my own.

The children were led in at the front of the room and all obediently sat on their coloured spots on the floor. Their subsequent rendition of various Xmas themed songs wasn’t as bad as you might imagine from a bunch of under-3s. One boy was in particularly fine voice much to the amusement of the audience. Emma was partly obscured from my view by one of the assistants but I could see that, despite having told us most of the words to the songs they were going to sing, she didn’t sing a word. She just had this look on her face as if to say “what are all these children doing?”.

After the singing was over the children were released to their parents and we filed out past Father Christmas. True to her word, Emma wasn’t scared of him this time. She wouldn’t say anything to him though and just stared at him intently. Having been told that he would park his reindeer outside she was a little disappointed to discover that they weren’t there when we left!

Second to Sam

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

On Sunday we were up early for the SOC event at Queen Elizabeth Country Park. Sufficiently early that by 9 o’clock Emma wanted to go home! It was, to be fair, bitterly cold and the orienteering parking was on the opposite side of the A3 to all the Christmas tree and playground action at the Visitors’ Centre. Perhaps more importantly for a recently potty (but not yet bush) trained child, the toilets were also quite a long way away!

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Scared of Santa

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

On Saturday we took Emma to see Santa in the clubhouse at work (obviously where he hangs out at weekends). There was a bit of a queue but the guys had done a good job of providing entertainment once you made it in to Santa’s grotto: snowing Christmas trees, dancing Santas – that sort of thing. Emma’s favourites were the toy trains. Unfortunately, when the moment came to meet the big man Emma’s nerves kicked in and she just cowered behind me.

I was suitably impressed by the monetary value of the presents that Santa was doling out although, given Emma’s present was aimed at 12 months – 3 years, you can imagine that it might not keep the attention of a bright 2.5 year old for a long time. Emma also wasn’t too impressed by the magician whose voice was blaring out of the speakers in the sports hall. They were also out of mince pies so we just retreated to the playground outside. Once we were safely at home Emma declared that she wouldn’t be so scared of Santa next time. We’ll find out on Wednesday as I believe he’s due to be visiting nursery then…

WebSphere ESB V7 available

Friday, December 11th, 2009

WebSphere ESB (and Process Server) Version 7.0 is generally available as of today which, amongst other things, means that I’m free to blog at will about the product content. As is traditional, I’ll start with an overview of what’s new in this release of the product (and the associated WebSphere Integration Developer tooling). Over the coming weeks I hope to cover each of these areas in more detail.

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Flying Field

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was Hants Cross Country on Saturday and, after a bit of indecision caused by my cold and Christine’s gentle return to running, we decided to make the most of Christine’s parents being around to child mind and run. Christine didn’t get much of a warm-up as she was needed to assist me with the removal of poo from all the way up Duncan’s back, Christine’s parent having conveniently taken Emma off to look at the planes (the event being held at Popham Airfield near Micheldever Station). She had a respectable run though and was no-where near the back of the field which is where she would have had you believe that she would be.

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DynaCache and WebSphere ESB/Process Server

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Building WebSphere ESB and Process Server on WebSphere Application Server means that they benefit from the scalability, reliability, transactionality and security of the underlying platform. Another advantage is that you, as a developer, have access to all of the underlying capabilities of the application server. In a recent article, Alan Hopkins (Dr Alan to you apparently!) demonstrated the use of the object cache to provide a shared variable between two modules. On a similar vein, another UK ISSW consultant Gabriel Telerman has just published a detailed tutorial describing how to use DynaCache from an SCA Java component to improve performance in a WebSphere ESB or Process Server environment. Now Gaby, can I have that pint now for the plug?

Circular start to Sainsburys

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Being the first Tuesday of the month, it had to be a trip to Sainsburys, but we were missing Peter and Neil for Tuesday’s run (who would normally provide direction). Andy and myself were at the front as we crossed the Avenue and, for some reason, I let Andy turn us left and was then happy to take the next right. This meant we got to do an extra circuit (and hill) before rejoining the normal route at the sports centre. No harm done though. Towards the end, Stuart made the fatal statement “it’s actually not a bad night for running” at which point it started raining.
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