I’ve had a nice shiny T60 on loan for the past couple of months for a project I’ve been working on. Unfortunately the time came to return it, at which point I thought I’d try out the free version of VMware Converter. This enables you to take a physical machine and convert it to a VMware image. The idea was that I would create an image of the laptop before giving it back in case there was something on it I still needed.
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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
VMware Converter
Monday, July 16th, 2007Changing servers
Friday, July 13th, 2007So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.
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IBM Resource Adapter for JMS with WebSphere Application Server
Thursday, July 5th, 2007I’ve mentioned the IBM Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server on a couple of occasions. As the name suggests, this provides you with a couple of JAR files that allow a standalone J2SE application to act as a JMS client to the WebSphere Application Server default messaging provider. What it isn’t good for, is acting as a client from another, third-party, application server. Yes it may work but you don’t get all those good things that an application server provides, like XA transaction coordination and parallel message consumption using MDBs. Enter the IBM Resource Adapter for Java Message Service with WebSphere Application Server which allows you to do just these things. Note that it’s currently only tested on Apache Geronimo V1.2 and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V1.1 but it’s a JCA 1.5 compliant resource adapter so should work with any J2EE 1.4 application server. Also note that, as with the original client, this download is initially only available with an early access license. If you are interested in using it in production though, drop a note to the e-mail address in the technical support section.
Rails Overview: Controller
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007In the previous entry of this series I covered the model part of the MVC support in Rails. The view and controller support is very tightly linked (more so than in, say, Struts) but I’ll start with the controller just to be contrary.
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WebSphere Technical Conference
Monday, July 2nd, 2007I’ve just submitted my abstracts for the WebSphere Technical Conference to be held in Vienna at the beginner of November. If you’re a European WebSphere customer then I’d highly recommend attending. Sign up before 5 August and get a 100 Euro discount. Hope to see you there!
Project Zero
Saturday, June 30th, 2007I was ever so slightly nervous about posting this given the lack of fanfare on any IBM website but Andy has at least saved me from being the first to stick my head above the parapet. As Andy says, one of the items that was creating a buzz at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference that we couldn’t talk about was something named Project Zero. Project Zero aims to provide a simple framework for developing Web 2.0 style applications through the creation of RESTful services, rich user interfaces and mashups. A scripting based approach is used with Groovy for the Java developers but also a subset of PHP. I shan’t go in to lots of technical details, you can read all about those on the Project Zero website.
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Google Apps
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Just to show that I do listen to you dear reader, I’ve followed up on Oliver’s suggestion and moved our e-mail over to Google Apps. The process was pretty painless: sign up for an admin account, verify ownership of the domains, setup users, modify the MX records and then configure our e-mail clients. A day or so delay whilst the DNS records replicate and everything is now working smoothly. POP3 and SMTP access is via SSL which is a bonus and means I no longer need to rely on my FastMail account to send when away from home. The spam filtering is excellent – I’ve even got a 12 year old e-mail address (a spam trap if ever there were one) coming back in to my main inbox again. Other than that, the only noticeable effect is that my incoming messages are no longer tarnished by a “Virus checked by PlusNet” footer. Oh, and of course there is the GMail web interface should I ever feel the urge…
Wedding list mayhem
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007A school friend who now lives out in the US is getting married next month and on Sunday we were attempting to buy a couple of gifts from their online Macy’s wedding list. When it came to paying we tried a few different credit cards but each came back with an error message so we gave up and decided we would phone them later in the week. As we left the site I noticed that the items we had been trying to buy were now marked as taken which I thought was a little annoying. Then, in my inbox, I discovered three separate order confirmations, all for the same items!
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