Author Archive

WordPress upgrade

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I’ve finally had a chance to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. It’s relatively painless since I’ve switched to updating via Subversion. The only problem I hit was with text widgets. I was seeing an error along the lines of “Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 1044” which, if you Google it, currently appears at the top of a whole host of other people’s blogs. Deleting all (three) of my text widgets and recreating them seemed to fix the problem. It’s good to see that threaded comments have finally made it in to the base product. I’ve previously experimented with a couple of plugins but never turned them live for users as I’ve never been entirely happy with the way they’ve been implemented. (As a consequence though you’ll see that some historical posts already have threaded responses from me.) I have to say that, right now I’m not a big fan of the revamped admin pages but that may be just lack of familiarity…

New Year Score

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

704Happy New Year! We’re over with Christine’s family at the moment and today took the opportunity of some more local orienteering by attending NGOC’s score event at Parkend. When Christine, her Dad and I set off from home I still wasn’t quite sure whether I was going to run as my cough/cold is still lingering but, as we drove through the frost covered forest, I decided that it was simply too cold not to (the car thermometer was showing -2°C)!
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Post-Xmas Orienteering

Monday, December 29th, 2008

We spent Christmas at my parents’ this year and had a relaxing few days. The excitement of Christmas was slow to grow on Emma and she had to be enticed in to opening presents. She started to warm to it a bit after that. Thankfully our Fisher Price heliport and lift and load depot off eBay went down well (they just don’t make them like that any more) and The Tickle Book and The Bedtime Bear are now regulars on the reading list. Yesterday we headed back down to Southampton via the Southern Navigators’ event at Long Valley.
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Run Some Pubs

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

702On Saturday, the annual “Run the Pubs” took place where we run between all of the pubs that have been visited as part of the Tuesday night runs during the preceeding summer. I was still feeling a bit under the weather so was happy enough when Christine suggested that we run it as a relay. Unfortunately my leg was considerably longer than her’s: The High Corner Inn to Bank (via the Royal Oak, Sir Walter Tyrell and New Forest Inn) versus Bank to Beaulieu Road Station. I survived though to enjoy the post-run meal at the final pub. (Note: Darren did make it to the finish this year, just not in time for the photo!)
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Dibden Street-O

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Thanks to Jon Forster for organising the first SOC street-O of the year at Dibden. Jon had promised that this year it would be ‘doable’ to get all the controls (lamposts). With the tail end of a cold and the occasional wrong turn it wasn’t going to be (and it would have been tough even on a good day). I made all but two and was just under a minute late (although I’ll claim that back from number 16 being out by one lampost).
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WebSphere ESB 6.2

Friday, December 12th, 2008

One of the disadvantages of being back in development is that much of my work is confidential. As the quantity of technical posts on here recently demonstrates – this is not conducive to blogging. Thankfully Version 6.2 of the entire BPM stack became generally available today so the flood gates have opened. developerWorks already has articles covering the new functionality in WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server so, rather than just relisting the features, I’m going to provide a slightly more personal view, focussing on the new content in WebSphere ESB.

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Tall Trees

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

700The original plan for today was to head out in to the New Forest on our bikes for a family outing to celebrate Christine’s birthday. This didn’t seem like such a hot idea given the temperature was just above freezing. Instead, we bundled Emma up in as many clothes as we could find and had a walk around the Tall Trees Trail on Rhinefield Ornamental Drive and the Blackwater Arboretum. Hard to get too excited about the trees but it was a pleasant enough walk and Emma eventually dozed off in the buggy despite the cold. We stopped off in one of the many Lyndhurst tea shops for lunch on the way home. Given that, after about an hour and a half this evening, I still hadn’t finished fixing our new roof rack and cycle racks to the car, it’s probably just as well we didn’t go for the bike option anyway!

Chalk Hill

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

A small but hardy crew braved the bitterley cold weather tonight for a run up Chalk Hill (which forms the Eastern edge of the route shown below).
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