Author Archive

User Group Presentation

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Yesterday I headed down to Bedfont with a  car load of IBMers to present at the WebSphere User Group meeting. I was presenting an update covering new function in WebSphere ESB and Process Server 6.2. After days of pulling together slides from all the various product architects I ditched my pitch in favour of a few minor modifications to an excellent presentation from one of the worldwide tech sales team. Obviously I know the WebSphere ESB material well enough but this was a good opportunity to brush up my knowledge of the new function in Process Server. I also went to a couple of interesting presentations on OSGI, JAX-RS and JPA as well as my colleague Brian Hulse’s detailed presentation on the Service Gateway and Policy support in 6.2. With attendance down on usual, I felt the large number of parallel tracks led to smaller than desirable audiences for many of the presentations. It was also a horrendous drive back home along the M3 through torrential rain.

New Forest hosts British Champs

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

718Last weekend saw the British Orienteering Champs come to the New Forest. Things didn’t get off to a good start for us – Emma started to develop spots on Friday which by Saturday morning looked very like chicken pox. In the end Emma did come to Hampton Ridge (where there were at least two other children in a similar predicament!) but Christine had missed her run by this point. I may as well have missed mine. I was off as first starter on M21L but certainly wasn’t the first to find number one on my course! You can read the gory details in my comments on RouteGadget (Course 8). Mercifully our shift helping didn’t prove too onerous (although we have been jointly responsible for creating all of the information material for the event).

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For Sale

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

After much indecision and procrastination we finally put our house on the market this week. Currently the plan is simply to make the most of the current downturn and upsize locally. That relies on us finding somewhere we want to move to though! At the moment I’m paranoid about getting a decent offer on our current place and being nowhere near finding somewhere we like. Our main problem is that we don’t need a massive house but we would like a decent sized garden. These days, if a property had some space around it, someone has invariably built an ugly extension on it! (Having viewed a few properties now we’ve seen a couple of those!) Anyway, if you’d like to buy a three bedroom house in Chandler’s Ford with a great outlook (or would just like a nose at where we live now!) then you can find the details on rightmove.

Burnham Blunders

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I’ve now uploaded my route for Sunday’s National Event at Burnham Beeches. I think my winning of M21L can only be attributed to the fact that nearly everyone else was running the Elite course (I baulked at running 15km).  Due to the low numbers, M21L was on the same course as M18E, M20E, M35L and M40L and I had the pleasure of being soundly beaten by the winners on all of those courses.

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Lightroom import finally fixed

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Having obtained Lightroom about 2 months ago our usage has been severly limited by the fact that an import of our existing Photoshop Elements 5 catalog only brought in about two-thirds of the images. You can read the gory details on one of the many forums I posted trying to find an answer. It then dawned on me that, having paid good money for the product, we might actually be entitled to some proper support from Adobe! Sadly their promised 24 hour response time turned out to be more like 2 weeks and the first set of suggestions (relinking photos, deleting cache files and a recover) didn’t work. They then suggested using the File > Move option in Elements to relocate all of our photos from the USB hard disk to the local disk. This seemed to do the trick (although I suspect moving them anywhere may have been sufficient) and we finally have all of our photos reunited in one product. Now I just need to find the time to get to the end of the Lightroom book that my brother bought me for Xmas!

Watford Chasing Sprint

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

715Christine sadly had to attend a family funeral today so I took my brother along to the JOK Chasing Sprint at Whippendell Woods on the outskirts of Watford. The weather forecast was for a dull start clearing late but in reality we were treated to glorious sunshine all day. The assembly area was based on one of the Lees Wood scout huts and the grassy area outside provided the ideal location for competitors to soak up some sun before and after their runs. I decided not to run with control hanging, car parking and start duties being enough for me in one day. It must be over 10 years since I’ve last been to Whippendell but from the area of the woods I did see, it seems much improved from what I remember. The open forest must have made for some great opportunities to make up places in the chase.

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Entries close

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Entries 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.

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Over the river

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Remarkably 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.

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