Planes, trains and blogging

October 3rd, 2006

With my usual luck, I received notification from SAS yesterday that I have reached the next tier in their EuroBonus scheme just as I embark on a month long engagement in London. That said, given that I rarely use a check-in desk, the benefits of silver level will be mostly lost on me.

Instead of flying high, I’m joining the rat race for the hour long commute each day from Southampton to Waterloo. This morning we had the pleasure of the company of South-West Trains management. For some reason they didn’t linger long in the buffet car where I was shoe-horned in. It might have had something to do with the passengers forced to sit on the floor.

When I do have space to get out a laptop (and particularly on the odd occasions on the route when my 3G card is working) then I’m actually getting some useful work done. Oh, and writing the occasional blog entry!

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Running the Clarendon Way

October 2nd, 2006

203Went to Winchester yesterday to start my third Clarendon Way Marathon. This is a mainly off-road race from Winchester to Salisbury following the Clarendon Way footpath. Having finished in just under three hours (and second place) last year it was going to be interesting to see how I faired 12 months on.

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More space

October 1st, 2006

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.

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Beware transaction completion order

September 28th, 2006

I 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.

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Windows Live Everything

September 27th, 2006

Whilst 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.

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Blogging clients

September 26th, 2006

Having 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).

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Uncle Tom Cobley and All

September 25th, 2006

200Headed south in to Dartmoor this morning as we were due to visit relatives on the coast for lunch. Only had time for a quick walk up Rippon Tor and along to Hay Tor via Saddle Tor. I can never convince myself that Dartmoor would be a good place for long walks anyway. It is too open and flat and you must be able to see the entire day’s route from the off. Having never made it there before, persuaded Christine that we should quickly nip in to Widecombe-in-the-Moor. I think “twee” summed it up pretty well. Difficult to beat 10p for half an hour’s parking though!

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In search of King Arthur

September 24th, 2006

194Bade farewell to Porthtowan today and set off north up the coast. First stop was Bedruthan Steps which descend the cliff face to a picturesque beach. The tide was on the way out and I have to confess to a certain childish delight in being the first to clamber over the rocks and make footsteps in the pristine sand of the next bay. Sadly the nearby National Trust tea shop only takes cash so we had to wait until Padstow for lunch.

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