As looking out the window doesn’t appear to be as reliable an indicator of the temperature here in Oslo as it is in the UK (probably just because there is a greater range and variation from day to day) I bought one of those all-singing all-dancing electronic weather stations last week. (OK – it wasn’t the super-duper model with rain gauge and anemometer but you have to draw the line somewhere.) I no longer need to experience that “oops I should have put more clothes on” feeling when I step out of the door.
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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Stealing warmth
Monday, April 7th, 2008Web messaging lack of service
Monday, March 31st, 2008Last week I spent a not entirely constructive hour or two with a customer trying to get them started with the web messaging service. This is a component of the Feature Pack for Web 2.0 which provides a bridge between the default messaging provider’s publish/subscribe capabilities and an Ajax (Comet) client. The InfoCenter contains a great quick start guide but it was missing one vital piece of information.
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I’ve got the power
Monday, March 10th, 2008I picked up two new batteries for my Thinkpad this morning. The originals now barely last for an hour so it’s great to have over six hour’s battery life once again. If nothing else it means I won’t have to spend ages wandering around airports trying to find a seat somewhere in the vicinity of a power socket!
Console under control
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008For a long time, I’ve found it intensely irritating that the console view in Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer jumps to the front every time there are new entries in the server logs, even if it has been closed. This is particularly annoying in customer demos where it usually appears at the most inopportune moment to show a raft of red stacktrace scrolling past! Needless to say there is a simple fix. Under Run/Debug > Console in the preferences, just uncheck the boxes entitled “Show when program writes to standard error” and/or “Show when program writes to standard out”. You can also change the text colour for standard error if you find all that red a bit disconcerting!
Ripping time
Sunday, February 17th, 2008As part of our preparations for travelling overseas I thought it was time we joined the 21st century and ripped our (small) CD collection. Minimal research led me to use Exact Audio Copy with REACT to generate FLAC images for archival purposes (I’m no great audiophile) and MP3s for general listening. The final stats were: 97 CDs with 1405 tracks taking up 31GB for the images and 5GB for the MP3s. Only on one occasion did I have to drop down to burst mode to rip a particularly worn CD. (I won’t say which to avoid any embarrassment!) freedb came up trumps with a track listing for every CD including Emma’s and even those for learning Norwegian!!
Forerunner 3
Friday, February 15th, 2008I eventually did decide to return my Garmin (again) due to the lack of sound. Three days after I dropped it off at their office in Totton (I’m not sure what the security guard thought of me as I was wearing running kit at the time!) a package arrived back. Sadly this time it just contained a watch, not a whole replacement box. The wrapper stated “Newly Overhauled” but the watch has a new serial number so I’m not sure what to make out of that. I can, however, do intervals once again without having to look at my watch the whole time!
OpenID support
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.
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Immersive slideshows
Thursday, February 7th, 2008If you spend a lot of time looking at large numbers of photos on the web then take a look at the PicLens browser plugins. It builds a 3D wall of photos from a page and allows you to zoom around them and view each one full screen. In my case, particularly useful for browsing photos on Flickr.
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