Frosty starts and caterpillars

February 4th, 2007

261We headed out to the New Forest again yesterday morning for the SOC junior training session. Whilst the trainee coaches were busy setting up I had a chance to wander around taking some photos of the local wildlife. In particular, a group of ponies who were very obligingly standing motionless as the bright sunshine burnt off the morning frost. As well as being a lovely colour, this one seemed to have a cheeky grin!

264After lunch, Christine had planned a novel caterpillar relay. Once again, I was just a bystander so could enjoy watching the chaos unfold! Had to collect a few more controls at the end of the day which was a great excuse to wander in the peaceful woods (and take a few more shots).

More from developerWorks

February 2nd, 2007

I’ve been catching up on some of the developerWorks articles published in the past week and here are a selection of the best. First up is an up-date to the top Java EE best practices. As the article states, it’s amazing how many customers still aren’t following these simple steps. On the WebSphere ESB front we have the third part in Rachel and Andre’s series on Building an Enterprise Service Bus using WebSphere ESB. This looks at using SOAP/HTTP bindings, property promotion and administrative modification of endpoint addresses. Greg Flurry goes one step further in his article, covering the new dynamic endpoint capability in WebSphere ESB V6.0.2 including the use of the endpoint lookup primitive in combination with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. This leads me on nicely to a new series which looks at the use of generic objects in Service Registry to group related documents.

Dibden Street-O

February 1st, 2007

Always a glutton for punishment, I followed up my lunchtime orienteering yesterday with the SOC street event in the evening. This time it was down in Dibden courtesy of Jon Forster. Jon’s innovation (as a maths professor) was that the difference between each lamppost number and the control number on the map was always a multiple of five. This meant you knew when you were in the right (or even the wrong) place.

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Lunchtime run

February 1st, 2007

I’m on a course at work this week but stole out yesterday lunchtime to go to the BAOC event up at Farley Mount. I took 52 minutes for the 8.6km A course. Only one big mistake: at number twelve where I lost sight of the control coming off the path and headed towards the edge of the unmapped open assuming it was where the fence lay. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and there wasn’t much left of the fence other than the odd post to guide me back to the control.

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Service Integration Bus Performance

January 29th, 2007

Another great tool for those working with the Service Integration Bus is now available on alphaWorks. The Service Integration Bus Performance tool (written by David Granshaw who leads the Service Integration Bus Performance team in Hursley) provides an SWT front-end to all of the WebSphere Application Server PMI statistics that are relevant to messaging performance. When you start the tool and point it at a server and messaging engine, it selects a useful set of default statistics. You can then use the configuration menu to select additional statistics with an indication given of the level of performance impact of doing so. Best of all (at least for someone as forgetful as me) is that when you close the tool it turns off the PMI stats before shutting down.

Return to Hawley and Hornley

January 28th, 2007

Today we returned to the scene of last year’s British Night Champs (Hawley and Hornley) for the BKO Concorde Chase. I had a bit of a head cold so wasn’t running at 100% speed which is a shame as the area is generally very runnable. I suspect it was affecting my concentration as well: at number six I started heading north-west as if going from seven to eight. The paths fitted (sort of) and I wasted some time running around the unmapped thickets until I realised what I’d done.

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Winchester Photo Challenge

January 28th, 2007

Yesterday afternoon the Hursley Photo Club hit Winchester for a two hour photo challenge. I made the mistake of starting up at the Great Hall but quickly realised that it was far too dark inside to be shooting without a tripod. Unfortunately it was also pretty grey outside with the blue skies from the morning having clouded over. I wandered down towards the Cathedral where many of the others had congregated. There were some great shots to be had of the Light Division buglers having a fag break outside. Sadly, I wasn’t sufficiently bold to take them (or at least don’t have a sufficiently long lens!).

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My first WebSphere ESB cluster

January 27th, 2007

The second instalment of the WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB deployment patterns series is now available. This describes in considerable detail the steps required to configure a simple Process Server cluster. By removing the parts that are plainly not applicable, you are left with a set of good instructions for creating a simple WebSphere ESB cluster. You should, however, refer back to the first article to review when using this simple topology is valid. In particular, you should note that co-locating the SCA modules and messaging engines is generally only possible when you are not using asynchronous SCA i.e. the module imports are not using JMS. If you do use asynchronous SCA then the partitioning of destinations on the SCA.SYSTEM bus that occurs as a result of clustering the messaging engines can become a problem, with responses no longer guaranteed to get back to a partition that is accessible by the instance of the module waiting for it.