Version 2.0 of the SportTracks GPS exercise logbook now looks ready for prime time. Having used it for a few days now I have yet to discover any killer new features but neither have I spotted anything that is missing which, at one point, seemed to be likely to be the case. I’m also contemplating returning my Forerunner 305 to Garmin again as the sound has gone which was the first thing to stop working last time. Whilst looking around the Garmin site I spotted the Forerunner 405 which was announced at CES and is due to ship in March. Shockingly it a) looks like a watch and b) can be used to tell the time when not in GPS mode! With such a small screen it is perhaps not surprising that you lose the ability to view routes and the current track but still very tempting all the same.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
SportTracks and Garmin
Monday, February 4th, 2008Performance tuning WebSphere ESB 6.1
Monday, January 28th, 2008There is a Redpaper which provides some excellent advice when it comes to tuning WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 for performance. However, you’ll have to wait a little bit for the Version 6.1 update. In the meantime, whilst all of the current best practice still stands, I thought I would post a couple of additional tips that are specific to the latest release.
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Jython scripting
Monday, January 28th, 2008I’ve had the pleasure of working with my UKISA colleague Andrew Simms on a number of occasions. Some may have been luck enough to see his “Monty Jython’s Scripting Circus” presentation on the conference circuit recently. If not, fear not, as he now has a developerWorks article to set you on the path to being a Jython pro!
WebSphere ESB Version 6.1 installation
Thursday, January 24th, 2008I thought I’d post a few notes based on some experiences installing a network deployment environment of WebSphere ESB Version 6.1.
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Lack of connectivity
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008I’m staying in the Melia Galgos in Madrid this week. One of the reasons I selected it from the IBM approved list was because it promised internet connectivity. Sadly this hasn’t really proved to be the case. The wired connection in my room stays up just about long enough for me to accept the terms and conditions and what, at the time, seemed to be a very reasonable rate of 8€ for 24 hours. Unfortunately it then proceeds to go up and down randomly every minute or so before eventually giving up completely. The hotel sent someone up from “technical services” who proceeded to restart my browser and then my machine to no good effect. He then pulled the plug on the router which fixed things but only long enough for him to get out of the room. I then tried the wireless access available in the lobby which worked fine until I tried this evening when it failed to give me an IP address. I’ve now had to resort to using my 3G card. 🙁
Piecing together the fragments
Friday, January 18th, 2008I’ve had my work T42p laptop for over three years now but, even for an extra gig of RAM, I’m still reluctant to hand it over for a shiny new Lenovo T61p quite yet. However, it’s been heading towards unusable over the past few months with the hard disk thrashing continuously. Repeated attempts to defragment have met with limited success as the 100Gb drive is bursting at the seams and PageDefrag could only reduce the number of fragments for my 4Gb page file from 170+ to around 110!
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Upgrade weekend
Sunday, January 13th, 2008Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.
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WebSphere MQ Java in J2EE
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008Thanks once again to Paul Titheridge, this time for pointing me to this technote covering the use of the WebSphere MQ Java APIs in a J2EE/JEE environment. It seems that IBM does now support the use of the WebSphere MQ Java interfaces in a WebSphere Application Server environment (check the supported software for your release) but this technote provides you with lots of reasons why you shouldn’t! The Java interfaces do have functionality that isn’t currently available in the JMS API (for example message segmentation and important parts of message grouping) but that needs to be weighed carefully against the drawbacks. JMS should always be the default option unless you have a very good reason not to use it.
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