Direct JNDI lookup warnings

January 27th, 2007

I was browsing through the fix list for Version 6.1 of the Application Server and was interested to note that APAR PK32169 is removing the J2CA0294W warning messaging (unless you have debug trace turned on) in Fix Pack 5. This is the warning that you see when performing a direct JNDI lookup of a connection factory i.e. you go straight to the global namespace rather than using a resource-reference and the application’s local namespace (java:comp/env). This message has always been rather contentious as it asserted that direct JNDI lookups were being deprecated yet various parts of the product still continued to use them. There was even a technote describing how to suppress the warnings as, in some cases, they were causing significant performance degradation.

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Another WordPress upgrade complete

January 26th, 2007

I’ve now moved this blog and Christine’s up to WordPress 2.1. I’m still waiting for the WPG2 patch which resolves an issue with g2image and TinyMCE but as I rarely post via the web then this isn’t too much of a problem. More problematic was that WordPress now appears to add an extra paragraph tag in around the images which broke the style applied to the Gallery one-image class. Having moved that to the ImageFrame_none class everything appears to be functioning again.

One slightly annoying side-effect of the fact that categories are now shared between links and posts, when combined with my earlier fix, is that the empty Blogroll category now appears in my sidebar. Maybe one day I’ll implement the fix properly and hide entries that don’t have any posts in themselves or their sub-categories! In the meantime I just have to sit back and enjoy the new 2.1 features.

Update 28/01/07: Looks like wp_list_cats has now been fixed so that the hierarchical view does show empty categories with posts in sub-categories (indeed, the post count includes these) so I can remove my earlier fix.

Impressionist image

January 21st, 2007

252As the sun was still shining this afternoon we went for a stroll through the local woods around Knightwood Park. I took this shot of Christine as she was walking away from me. The exposure was far too long though and I was just dropping the camera to look at the display when the shutter finally clicked. I quite like the impressionist effect and all without the aid of Photoshop!

Cross-Country spectating

January 21st, 2007

250We took Christine’s Mum along to the CC6 race at Ampfield Woods this morning. This league is the winter equivalent of the RR10 series but sadly it has a restriction on who can run. Men with times under six minute miles and women under six thirty aren’t permitted to compete which rules out Christine and myself. This is a pity as the races are in much nicer locations than the larger Hants League events. Still, it meant I had a chance to take a few photos before helping on the finish.

Radnor Trail

January 20th, 2007

248Christine’s parents are down for the weekend and we headed out to the New Forest today to meet up with a friend of theirs from University who is over from New Zealand with his family. We walked the short Radnor Trail at Bolderwood. Sadly the deer weren’t in evidence but then they don’t get fed here again until Easter and the crowds enjoying the sunshine probably aren’t all that conducive. Last week’s storms had obviously felled a few trees. (Fortunately those self same storms had the decency to take out the fence panels in our garden that are the responsibility of our neighbours!)

More WebSphere ESB content on developerWorks

January 20th, 2007

I’m catching up on my developerWorks reading and there are a couple more articles on WebSphere ESB that are worth mentioning. The first is What’s new in WebSphere Enterprise Service V6. Note that the title actually refers to V6 not V6.0.2 so in fact this article provides a good overview of all of the product’s capabilities (although those new in V6.0.2 are highlighted). There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in the article which I’ve alerted the author to so hopefully those will get corrected.

One of the new features in 6.0.2 is the WebSphere MQ binding support which certainly seems to be getting a lot interest from my colleagues. Phil Norton from the WebSphere ESB development team has provided a tutorial that covers invoking a mediation module from an MQ Java client. In particular, it shows how to use a custom data binding to map from the MQ message to a data object. In the tutorial the service being invoked is represented as a Java component in the mediation module. This is by way of example and should not be considered best practice.

WordPress upgrade and widget fix

January 16th, 2007

I’m glad I didn’t get round to moving up to WordPress 2.0.6 as, 10 days later, 2.0.7 is out. The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly. I’ve also fixed the categories widget in my sidebar. By default it doesn’t show categories without any postings but, in a hierarchical view, it doesn’t take in to account that sub-categories may have postings. Having selected Sidebar Widgets in the plugin editor, I located the widget_categories function in question. In the call to wp_list_cats I added &hide_empty=0 to the end of the parameter. You should now be able to see my People category (empty) but also its Family and Friends sub-categories (with postings).

Privacy over price

January 15th, 2007

To complete my new set of shoes I was looking to buy a pair of Adidas Swoop II fell shoes. The cheapest I could find them online by a long margin was at “the official UK adidas shop“. Unfortunately, reading the smallprint, they appear to be part of Littlewoods Shop Direct Home Shopping Limited whom I would have had to write to (yes, with pen and paper) in order not to receive mailings and telephone calls. In the end I paid the extra £10 to get them elsewhere.