Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Casio AWG100 review

Monday, April 16th, 2012

1022Yes – I can be bought! For the price of a watch, WatchCo.com have bought themselves a scattering of links in this review. I was given a budget of $200 which still left me with a huge selection of watches to choose from on their website. My main criteria for a watch is that it tells the time, and the right time at that. Consequently, I found myself looking at what the site calls automatic watches (solar or kinetic powered) and atomic watches (radio controlled – not nuclear powered!). The overlap between those two categories is unfortunately rather small (particularly once you’ve taken out the watches that are incorrectly labelled as atomic). I eventually settled on the G-Shock AWG100 from the range of Casio watches. Sadly well under my budget at $130!

Of course, you may need to factor in customs fees when buying from overseas sites like US based WatchCo.com. It cost £25.23 to retrieve the small package from the sorting office: £17.23 in VAT and £8 in Royal Mail international handling fee. Thankfully, in my case that was refunded as part of writing this review. Having unboxed the watch, I was generally pleased with the look of the watch. I have pretty slim wrists and some watches just look far too big and bulky. This one doesn’t although, as you can see from the second photo, the end of the strap does stick out a bit as I’m nearly on the smallest setting. The strap is consequently something I might look at replacing.

1019The watch very nearly met my main criteria: it was showing the correct time… for NYC. Seemingly you have to manually tell the watch your location, at which point the hands chugged their way round to the right time. By default the watch only adjusts the time from the radio signal once a day at one of six preset times throughout the night but you can force it to perform an update which I duly did. One of the small digital ‘dials’ on the front of the watch tells you which transmitter it is receiving a signal from which seems rather a waste of screen real-estate. Bizarrely, it seems the signal from Germany is stronger here than that from the UK! The manual gives detailed instructions on how to position your watch on the window sill to receive a signal which seemed a bit of a faff. The watch does tell you when it performed the last update and I was therefore glad to see that it seems to manage to do so from the comfort of my bedside table.

Only time will tell how the solar charging works out. The manual cautions you against keeping your watch out of sight under your jacket. Not a problem for me as I’m almost always have my sleeves rolled up! The only real evidence of this aspect of the watch (beyond the patterning on the dial) is that, after a period in the dark, the digital part of the display is turned off to conserve power until it sees the light again or you press a button.

The other two digital parts to the display generally show the seconds (the watch has no second hand) and the time or day/date. The dials are also used for viewing the battery charge, world times, countdown timer (not less than a minute), stopwatch (one lap time), alarm (only beeps 10 times so not one I’d want to rely on after a heavy night) and, if necessary, manually setting the time. Unavoidably for this design of watch, the hands can sometimes make the display hard to read. It also isn’t possible to read them in the dark as the LED light just illuminates the hands.

All-in-all, a reasonable looking watch which does its main function of telling the time accurately competently. I’m not sure I’d fork out £80 for the watch (not counting the import costs) but I’m generally a cheapskate when it comes to watches. It will, therefore, probably be replacing my previous timepiece that came free with a running book! Thanks WatchCo.com!

WebSphere ESB 7.5 available

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

WebSphere ESB 7.5 is generally available from Passport Advantage as of today (as are WSRR 7.5, WebSphere ESB Registry Edition 7.5 and the 7.5 BPM stack) and the InfoCenter is also live. Having been the Development Lead and then Release Architect, I feel a certain sense of parental pride in this delivery but, as always, the credit goes to the wider team. It shall also be my last as I am parting company with the WebSphere ESB development team and moving on to pastures new. I can’t say more at the moment but all will be revealed sometime this month.

WebSphere ESB 7.5 Preview

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

As announced about a month ago, WebSphere ESB 7.5 is due to be available at the end of this week. Having presented on the subject at Impact, I felt I should provide a little more background to some of the new features described in the announce letter. Time permitting, I’ll cover some of the topics in further details once the product has been released.

Back online

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Shortly after moving my blog to an EC2 instance I received an ominous email stating:

We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.

The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you launch replacement instances and start migrating to them.

After a bit of searching around it seemed that, as my instance is EBS backed, I should just need to stop it and restart it and, in all likelihood, it would move to another host. Sounded simple enough but the stop seemed to be taking forever. After downloading the command line tools I tried to force the stop but still no luck – except when I logged in again the following night it was finally showing as stopped. Unfortunately, when I tried to start it I received the following error: “Server.InternalError: Internal error on launch”.

I posted a question on the EC2 forum and, as you can see, was told that the root volume was in an “abnormal attachment state”. You’ll also see that my attempts to force a detach via the AWS Management Console appeared to fail or at least, the console thought the volume was still attached and therefore wouldn’t let me reattach it. Reverting to the command line utilities again allowed me to successfully detach and reattach the volume and then start the instance. Another delay whilst the DNS refresh took effect (perhaps I should try out an Elastic IP) and, about three days after I first hit stop, the site is finally back online. I’m putting it down as a learning experience!

Server hacked

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

When attempting to post the image for my last blog entry, it failed to be resized. When I logged in to the server to see what was up with ImageMagick, I didn’t appear to have permission to execute ls. Or ps. Or netstat… A quick Google suggested that these were the hallmarks of a rootkit attack. Unfortunately the files had been modified prior to the oldest Slicehost backup that I had. At this point I realised the server was still running Intrepid, limiting my chances of picking up packages to detect and remove rootkits. After a reboot of the server I discovered that I had lost all connectivity. Booting up a Slicehost rescue image I was able to retrieve all of the data I needed. Now to get things up and running again. Earlier in the year I had been playing around with a free micro-instance on EC2 and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to switch across. The instance is running Apache rather than nginx as on my Slicehost image. This needed a bit of tuning down to prevent segmentation faults. Everything seems to be running smoothly now. I just need to switch the DNS records away from Slicehost and then I’m done.

WebSphere Technical Conference

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

A quick post to highlight that I’m in Düsseldorf this week as a last minute stand-in for my colleague Simon Holdsworth at the WebSphere Technical Conference. I’ll be giving his Introduction to WebSphere ESB and WebSphere ESB Best Practices and Performance Recommendations on Tuesday afternoon, What’s New in WebSphere ESB V7.0 on Wednesday and then running the WebSphere ESB Birds of a Feather session that follows. I’ll also be at the Connectivity Panel Q&A on Monday afternoon which is probably the best place to catch me if you’d like to meet up at some point for a chat about the product or just to say Hi!

WebSphere ESB 7.0.0.3

Monday, September 6th, 2010

On Friday, we released Fix Pack 7.0.0.3 for the BPM stack including WebSphere ESB. This was what we call a “development led” fix pack which generally means that, in addition to the usual round-up of fixes, there is some additional new function. In this case, we have been working hard on the new business object lazy parsing mode that first surfaced as a technology preview at the end of last year. Previously, although we had various performance enhancements to avoid parsing the message body if it was never touched by a mediation flow, as soon as you did touch it, we parsed the whole message in to a Service Data Object. With the new mode, we only parse as much of the message as is required to evaluate each expression. As you might imagine, this is largely done in the name of performance and the improvement is particularly significant with partial access to large messages. Sadly, were not quite done with this work and all over the update notes you’ll see a statement indicating that lazy mode is now out of tech preview but only for modules that do not contain mediation flows.

One of the other significant points about this fix pack is the move to WebSphere Application Server 7.0.0.11 and, in particular, the fact that this finally has an Installation Manger based install process. This means that you can finally install both the Application Server, ESB and fixes for both, all using the same install technology. Unfortunately you will have to use the old Update Installer to remove any ifixes that you have already installed.

New WESB/WPS book

Friday, July 16th, 2010

I’ve just been asked to review a new book entitled “Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7“. I can certainly vouch for the credentials of one of the two IBM authors having worked with Salil Ahuja. As part of the AIM Early Programs team he’s in a perfect position to have both a breadth of knowledge across the products and a good understanding of what customers need and want to know. The sample chapter online (which happens to cover mediation module development) looks promising so I look forward to receiving my review copy.