Author Archive
Watford Chasing Sprint
Saturday, February 21st, 2009Entries close
Friday, February 20th, 2009Entries for the JOK Chasing Sprint closed this evening which was a great relief. This was to have been the year of the Web 2.0 entry system but, in reality, other commitments meant that my annual rewrite of the system only got as far as a stateless interface. This should stand me in good stead for next year though… Rails still continues to be a pleasure to use and the more I learn (I splashed out on the PDF version of the soon to be released Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition) the better it gets. New improvements to the development process this year were Git for version control and Capistrano for deployment. These certainly gave me more a lot more confidence in making updates to the live system.
Over the river
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Remarkably I made it out again on Tuesday night this week. It was decided that it was time to cross to the other side of the Itchen and, after much badgering from Darren, we agreed on Chalk Hill.
Orienteering at Millyford Bridge
Saturday, February 14th, 2009Back running
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009After nearly a month off Tuesday night runs for one reason or another I finally made it out again last night. Nobody had been out the previous week due to the snow so we got to do the (Lords Hill) Sainsburys run which is normally reserved for the first Tuesday of the month.
Security Bulletin for WebSphere Application Server
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009I now try to avoid just re-posting material from developerWorks and other IBM sources but this one is worth highlighting. IBM is now publishing a list of risk assessed security vunerabilities for WebSphere Application Server.
WebSphere MQ non-ASF in WAS
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Application Server Facilities (ASF) are the part of the JMS specification originally designed, amongst other things, to allow application server’s to retrieve messages for delivery to message-driven beans. Now WebSphere MQ’s ASF implementation had one significant flaw when it comes to multiple consumers pulling messages from the same queue. Each consumer was effectively browsing the queue looking for suitable messages and, when they found one, they then attempted to take a lock in order to consume the message. Unfortunately, inbetween the browse and the lock there’s a good chance that another consumer would have nipped in and stolen the message. This inefficient behaviour meant that you were unlikely to see linear scalability when adding multiple MDB consumers to a deep queue. As a result, some customers have switched their WebSphere Application Server listener port service to use non-ASF mode (the custom properties required for this can be found in the InfoCenter). This use a standard message consumer to poll the queue for messages – the downside being that you need a separate thread for each consumer.
Frozen forest
Monday, February 2nd, 2009Orienteering again this weekend just gone. This time it was Guildford’s regional event at Ambersham Commons and Hoyle Plantation. Whilst Christine was out, Emma and I sheltered in the woods, firstly on the string course (not last this time) and then at the finish, in order to avoid the freezing cold wind blowing across the exposed car park. When I eventually got to the start Mark Saunders was just lining up to go. I gave him a three minute head start which also gave me the opportunity to do enough of a warm-up that I could feel my fingers again!
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