I’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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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Piecing together the fragments
Friday, January 18th, 2008Upgrade 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.
Generous Garmin
Sunday, December 9th, 2007Having previously replaced my broken Garmin Forerunner with a new one, my brother sent back his black and white eTrex Legend (which he bought cheap as it contained lead in the solder) as the screen would intermittently display stripes, only to be sent a much more up-to-date colour eTrex Legend HCx. Can’t complain but does make you wonder whether Garmin are capable of fixing anything!
Cleaning up dumps
Saturday, December 1st, 2007No – this has nothing to do with nappy changing! I’ve spent the past two weeks as part of the support team for a customer’s WebSphere Application Server environment. Although I know all the theory (I’m an IBM Certified System Administrator for Versions 5.0, 6.0 and 6.1) it’s not very often I spend long enough at any one customer to get my hands dirty. My Korn shell scripting, Jython and vi skills certainly improved rapidly during the time I was there!
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New JMS benchmark
Thursday, October 25th, 2007The SPECjms2007 benchmark was announced today. The benchmark has two performance metrics covering horizontal and vertical scalability with the tests consisting of a mix of publish/subscribe and point-to-point, durable and non-durable, persistent and non-persistent, and transactional and non-transactional messages. Given the contributing organisations (Technische Universität Darmstadt, IBM, Sun, Oracle, BEA, Sybase and Apache) it will be interesting to watch as results are published.
Flat file custom data bindings
Monday, October 22nd, 2007Having written a very similar exercise for the Connecting Enterprise Application to WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus ITSO Workshop, it was interesting to read Rich Johnson’s article on creating custom data bindings for the WebSphere Flat File adapter. In particular, the step required to actually add the custom data binding so that it shows up in the Enterprise Service Discovery wizard is not exactly obvious.
Best Practices for Large WebSphere Topologies
Monday, October 22nd, 2007If you’re looking to scale out your WebSphere solution then this paper on developerWorks is one you must read. It provides guidelines on cell sizes and discusses when you should consider multiple core groups and how to bridge them, as well as other important considerations. Go read it!
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