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.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Friday, February 20th, 2009Security 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.
Current Cost
Friday, January 16th, 2009I decided to make a belated entry to the Current Cost meter craze (in Hursley) when some were being sold off at half price before Christmas. (For those not in the know, the device measure electricity usage for the entire home with the important addition of a serial output port.) I started off with Dale Lane’s GUI app at which point I was disappointed to realise that the historical data held by the device was only averaged.
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WordPress upgrade
Friday, January 9th, 2009I’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…
WebSphere ESB 6.2
Friday, December 12th, 2008One 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.
10 years on
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Being presented with my “10 year pen” at a departmental meeting on Monday seems like a good excuse for a bit of a retrospective on my career with IBM…
No danger of CrackBerry addiction
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008As part of IBM UK’s transition from O2 to Vodafone we’re all being issued with new mobiles. I’m a bit behind the curve as most people were moved over whilst I was in Norway. Today, the SIM card for my new BlackBerry Pearl has finally been activated. Sadly, like most employees, IBM hasn’t given me a data service. This is considered a “personal option” and I could get it for £16pm (providing my department agreed to match that approximately to cover the server-side costs and support which is highly unlikely in the current climate). I largely understand that decision – I already have a data card for my laptop if I need to read e-mails on the move. What I don’t understand is the decision to give me a BlackBerry. It even says on the box “Vodafone Email Solutions”!
It’s also a shame that it’s only a Pearl 8100. If it had Wi-Fi support then at least I’d have some form of connectivity on the phone. As it is, I can’t even work out how I’m going to sync contacts from Thunderbird, Plaxo or Google Apps via the USB cable. No danger of me becoming a CrackBerry addict then…
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