Author Archive

Run the Pubs (and Car Parks)

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

As regular readers may remember, around Xmas each year the Tuesday night runners do a run that takes in all of the pubs that we have visited during the year. This, it seems, was not enough of a challenge for Neil and he proposed that we should run not only all of the pubs, but also all of the car parks that we visit. This is particularly significant when it comes to our runs from Wilverley where we usual drink at Bank afterwards. As if this still wasn’t enough, Neil wanted to make it a round trip rather than the usual linear route. And, although to be fair he wouldn’t have known this at the time, he wanted to do it on a day when the temperature was in the mid 20s.

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Scripting modification of HTTP bindings

Friday, June 26th, 2009

If you find yourself needed to make use of the modifySCAImportHttpBinding command make sure read the documentation in the InfoCenter carefully. Even if you are modifying a property at the import level it isn’t sufficient simply to specify the import parameter. The property that you are modifying must also be enclosed in a tag with the name of the import binding. So the example given is:

$AdminTask modifySCAImportHttpBinding -moduleName MyMod -import Import1 -connectionRetries <Import1>3</Import1>

Thankfully the InfoCenter has been recently updated as a result of APAR JR31724 as previously you just had to guess at the syntax! Perhaps I should now try and get them to fix the description of the command which I see states “The modifySCAImportHttpBinding command changes the JNDI name of one or more of the resources associated with an HTTP import binding.”! One suspects someone may have been a little generous on the old cut and paste…

Uphill race at Manor Farm

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

This evening’s RR10 took place at Manor Farm Country Park. My legs felt tired from the off and, after a slow start, things never really got going. It may have been my imagination but there did seem to be rather a lot of uphil in the race. Despite looking at the map beforehand, I was also slightly thrown by looping north back in to the open toward the end rather than continuing own southwards in the woods. After some encouragement from Andy Morgan-Lee I put on a spurt in the last mile but only succeeded in overtaking two other Southampton runners, dying again before I could overtake the New Forest runner in the closing straight. I finished 24th which, whilst a slight improvement on last time, still leaves a lot of room for improvement.

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Jon’s run

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Jon made possibly his second appearance of the year to lead us on tonight’s run from Beaulieu Road. It was a nice new loop with a mixture of open and woodland. We were once again treated to bright sunshine although there was no breeze this evening which made things a little unpleasant. I’m afraid I wimped out and didn’t do the extra loop down to the south-east at the end. With touch rugby at lunchtime I thought I should be saving myself for tomorrow’s RR10.

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Let’s go fly a kite

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

768This afternoon we headed over to Lordshill Sports Ground for the Southampton Kite Festival for no particular reason other than it’s free and was something to do. The displays of kite flying were a little lack lustre despite the best efforts of the commentator but they were at the mercy of a pretty poor breeze. Emma enjoyed the colourful collection of flags and pendants that were up for sale. We successfully managed to steer her clear of the fairground rides but did pay the £1.50 to make and decorate our own small kite. We’ll have to give this a proper try when the wind is a bit more cooperative!

Free WebSphere Application Server

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

This one’s doing the rounds of various IBM related blogs but I think it’s sufficiently momentous for me to give it a mention in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere. WebSphere Application Server for Developers provides a free development runtime environment using the full WebSphere Application Server V7 product. What you don’t get is support but feel free to ask questions on the developerWorks forum.

New Southampton Orienteering Course

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

We went along to Southampton Common this morning for the opening of the orienteering club’s latest permanent orienteering course. The map comes with three course suggestions which I duly ignored and instead went to see how fast I could get all 26 controls visiting them in any order. It took me 29’11 over 6.1km but, given the size of the red and white markers (about 1.5″ square) and the propensity for them to be hidden on the back of something in the general vicinity of the feature, it easily could have been under 25 minutes if I hadn’t had to do so much hunting around. This is at least partly because the club was not allowed to create any new fixtures on the common. Thankfully there was no temptation to dive off down the tiny tracks through the undergrowth as we weren’t allowed to map these either! It certainly took me to corners of the common I’ve never been to in our fleeting trips across the area on Tuesday nights in the winter. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, maps can be purchased from the Hawthorns Wildlife Centre down in the south-east corner of the common (which proved a pleasant enough location for a simple lunch).

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Out of Touch

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I made it out to Beaulieu Road again this evening and we had another sunny run, this time doing a anti-clockwise loop out towards Deerleap. I was grateful for the opportunity to vote for the short route on a couple of occasions as I was aching in all sorts of strange places having played touch rugby at lunchtime. (I’m glad to say that we won the rugby but I wouldn’t claim much of the credit.)

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