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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!
Tenth again
Sunday, February 1st, 2009A slightly belated report on the BKO Concorde Chase last Sunday. Unlike the previous night’s event, this was an all out running race. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a reasonable amount of terrain running – just that the controls themselves were never hugely technical. I was tenth again but out of a larger field and a more respectable 10 minutes behind the winner. I was pretty happy with my run and you can see my route round the Black course over on RouteGadget.
Top 10 in British Night Champs
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009OK – when I say “Top 10” I mean I was 10th… and there were only 15 finishers… and I would have been 11th if Mikko hadn’t subsequently been declared non-competitive… but anyway, that’s mere detail! Saturday night was the British Night Orienteering Championships held at Mytchett. There was a clear sky and frost on the ground as I got ready beforehand but it was warm enough once you started moving. Matthias was back from his run just as I was about to start. He thought his 87 minutes was slow and wasn’t sure where the time went. I managed to take five minutes longer so here’s where I think I lost it (you can follow along on RouteGadget – just select Course 1 and my GPS track) …
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