Christine’s laptop has been creaking under the weight of our photos so some more storage was long overdue. I was tempted by a cheapo LaCie USB hard drive but the reviews reported a few too many disk failures for my liking. Instead went for a Western Digital My Book 250GB Essential. Plugged it in and it worked. Reformatted it as NTFS and it still works. Only time will tell how reliable it is.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Sunday, October 1st, 2006Beware transaction completion order
Thursday, September 28th, 2006I should know better having once worked in the WebSphere Application Server transactions development team but it is easy to assume that JTA maintains consistency throughout the lifetime of a transaction. In reality though, for a distributed transaction it is impossible to ensure that all resource managers commit at precisely the same moment. The result is that, between the first and last commit, the state of the different resources is inconsistent. This can be a particular problem if one of the changes taking place under the transaction is used to trigger further processing.
Windows Live Everything
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006Whilst investigating Windows Live Writer I was shocked to discover just how many other applications under the “Windows Live” banner either already exist or are in beta. Spaces is probably the best known, aimed at the blogging/photo sharing market. The Toolbar adds some of the forthcoming IE7 functionality, such as tabbed browsing and feed reading via Onfolio, to IE6 providing Firefox like capabilities. Messenger looks to be targeting Skye with calls to phones and an advert for integration with a Philips cordless phone. The Search site does a good impression of Google with options for images and news.
Blogging clients
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006Having used w.bloggar as my blogging client for a while, I’d become frustrated with the apparent lack of continuing development (not to mention the American dictionary). I gave the Windows Live Writer beta a quick spin along with the Firefox based Flock. Although both have very slick user interfaces they were missing two features that I use extensively: support for excerpts and the ability to back-date posts. So, these posts now come to you courtesy of BlogDesk (complete with UK spellings).
Meeting and greeting in Second Life
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006As promised, I went along to the IBM meeting in Second Life (SL) yesterday evening. I was first struck by how closely the experience imitated real life. I turned up at the last minute having rushed away from dinner with a customer and was quickly ushered in to an auditorium. It seems that there is a limit to the number of people who can fit on any one island so the 130 attendees were distributed across four venues. Unfortunately the ‘projector’ was broken in our room, leaving us with just the live soundtrack for the presentation.
Upgrade time
Saturday, September 9th, 2006Though it was about time I upgraded the various technologies running this blog. After a few heartstopping moments where nothing worked, I’m now successfully running Gallery 2.1 and WordPress 2.0.4 with WPG2 2.0 tying the two together along with the newest WordPress Gallery theme. There’s probably not much to see for the viewer but WPG2 was certainly easier to setup this time and the TinyMCE plugin now lets you add wpg2id tags which is bonus.
I’ve also added the remote module to Gallery so that I can now used Gallery Remote to ease the process of uploading photos.
Starting a Second Life
Saturday, September 9th, 2006I finally succumbed and signed up for Second Life this evening. I have resisted to-date on the basis that I have more than enough to do in this life without trying to run a second one in parallel. However, I’m interested in whether such virtual worlds can enhance collaborative working in a distributed team. So, if you bump in to Tom Wright at the IBM meeting next Tuesday, say hello!
PlusNet lose database connectivity
Thursday, September 7th, 2006Anyone trying to access this site yesterday will have just received an error message about lack of database connectivity. Fortunately, some twelve hours later, PlusNet have managed to restore database access and, on this occasion, without losing any data. Memo to self: backup tonight and increase urgency of search for new host.
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