Author Archive

Cuckoo Run

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Yesterday’s run from Canadian War Memorial largely stayed in the Inclosures which resulted in a bit more track running than usual. This in turn meant that we ended up crossing over ourselves a couple of times. I heard my first cuckoo of the year whilst we were out running; the less welcome wildlife were the midges waiting for us back at the car park. Driving home I experienced another truly English experience: Lyndhurst high street appeared to be closed due to Morris Dancing!

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Amateur IT support

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Christine’s laptop has been slowly grinding to a halt over the past few weeks and, as the university support services were proposing to take it away, I thought I’d take a look. I was initially sidetracked by an issue with a SQL Server 2005 Express update which Windows Update was repeatedly trying to install. In the end, it turned out she had the same issue with the IDE Channel transfer mode that I’ve experienced before. The Windows Update was just one of the many disk intensive operations where things got really bad. Just for good measure I uninstalled some apps I’d put on her machine and ran CCleaner and JKDefrag. Hopefully Christine will come home from work in a better mood tomorrow!

Service Integration Bus Destination Handler

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

I’ve previously plugged the Service Integration Bus Explorer and IBM Client Application for JMS as useful tools to have in your WebSphere messaging kitbag. Thanks go once again to Dave Screen, this time for bringing the Service Integration Bus Destination Handler to my attention. This provides a very configurable mechansim for carrying out actions on a set of messages either on a one-off basis (via client or web application) or on a scheduled basis. Particularly useful operations include dumping messages, moving messages from one destination to another, and resurrecting messages from the exception destination. The readme file available in the download provides lots of detailed instructions and examples.

Sharing libraries at runtime

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Thanks to my colleague Dave Screen for highlighting a useful technote relating to sharing library modules in WebSphere ESB and Process Server. The WebSphere Integration Developer concept of a library is typically only used for development time sharing of artifacts i.e. when you deploy a module that depends on that library, a copy of the JAR file is included in the enterprise application that is deployed. The technote describes how to deploy the library as a WebSphere shared library and have multiple modules depend on the same instance at runtime. This has the potential to reduce memory usage (the library is on a shared classloader) and ease managability. It does, however, mean that you need to be more careful about versioning of the library and breaking other dependent modules. If you’re not on 6.2 then note the list of APARs at the bottom of the document.

Other two underpasses (backwards)

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

With a different pair of shoes on I decided that my blister from the weekend could cope with an outing to the Forest. This month our start (and finish) point moved to the Canadian War Memorial, north of Emery Down. This week’s designated run was the “other two underpasses (backwards)”. Backwards meant anti-clockwise and for some reason no-one could remember ever having run the route that way before. One side effect was that we usually add a bit of a loop on to the end to kill some time – we tried to compensate for this by adding a bit of a loop on the start but failed to take long enough and therefore had to add another loop on at the other end (with some adding a bigger loop than others). Afterwards we repaired to the New Forest Inn to hear Stuart’s tails of daring do at the Marathon des Sables.

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Double O Severn

Monday, May 4th, 2009

744We spent the bank holiday weekend with Christine’s parents (and assorted other orienteering members of the family) notionally to attend the Triple O Severn event in the Forest of Dean. The assembly area for every day was Speech House which seemed to work well. Saturday was a regional event on the area that they had chosen to call Mallards Pike (south-east of assembly). The Black course was fairly sparcely populated as anyone running the Elite classes the following day had to do a special middle distance course as the colour-coded courses used part of the area they would compete on.

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Yet more ponds

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

After an enforced couple of weeks I made it back to Fritham for the last run of the month. Thankfully the afternoon rain cleared and we had a pleasant enough tour around the six ponds (clockwise this time). Canadian War Memorial next month…

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Epping VM

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

742This year’s Oxford-Cambridge Orienteering Varsity Match took place this weekend, a little later than originally scheduled. We went along to the individual event on Saturday held at Epping Forest North West. I had a run on the Mens A course and Christine took Emma round most of the Womens B in the running buggy. I was over 10 minutes slower than the winner, Mark Bown. I’ll put some of it down to helping Christine with the buggy on the way to number one and number two being in the wrong place. As a result of which, the splits show that I was already five minutes down on Mark when I left the second control.

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