Vegas birthday conference

May 6th, 2006

Spent the past week in Las Vegas for the IBM WebSphere Services Technical Conference. Had a direct flight from Gatwick with Virgin Atlantic which was infinitely preferable to having to spend an extra couple of hours in some random US airport. We were based in the Rio for the week both for accommodation and the conference itself. Much more pleasant being off the Strip (in fact, I only made it to the Strip once and that was for an early morning run) although it did mean it was possible to spend the entire day inside a dry air-conditioned box. Sadly, by the time the presentations were over for each day the sun had dropped behind the buildings meaning that the hotel’s pool and beach weren’t as enticing as they might have been.

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Peugeot embarrasment

April 27th, 2006

79Work took me to Wolfsburg this week, home of the German car giant Volkswagen. In a town full of VWs and Audis, Hertz therefore seemed to think that it would be amusing to give me a Peugeot. But not just any Peugeot – a Peugeot 107. This car is unbelievably small. It’s hard to see how they’ve managed to fit two doors down each side and lifting the fifth (actually just the rear windshield) revealed a hole that wasn’t even large enough to fit my carry-on suitcase! To make matters worse, as is the German fashion, it was a diesel and consequently roared like a tank whenever I attempted to accelerate. Perhaps the only benefit of its minute size is that, as I was getting blown about on the autobahn, there was still plenty of space on either side of the lane!

Welsh charm

April 23rd, 2006

67Spent a very nice weekend at the University of Wales’ Gregynog conference centre relaxing whilst Christine participated in a statistics conference. Not a part of Wales I’ve been to before but the green rolling pastures are very aesthetic. Just a shame that the rights of way on the map don’t seem to have any corresponding presence on the ground!

Service Integration Bus Explorer

April 20th, 2006

The browser based WebSphere Application Server (WAS) administration console is not an ideal interface for displaying runtime status. In addition, when working with the Service Integration Bus in WAS V6, the resources associated with a bus are spread over numerous panels. For a while now, those of use in IBM have had the pleasure of using an SWT application written by a colleague in development (Gareth Matthews) that provides a single viewpoint of the bus resources defined across multiple cells and their current runtime state. The legal niceties having being resolved, this fantastic tool is now available for all on alphaWorks.

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J2SE JMS client

April 20th, 2006

I’m often asked by customers, both during engagements and more informally, about the support for connecting to the default messaging provider in WebSphere Application Server V6 from a client environment. Until now, the official line has been that either the client container or thin client from the WebSphere Application Client installation should be used. However, installing a 100Mb from a CD isn’t usually what most folks have in mind when talking about a thin client (at which point they start copying files from a server installation). Fortunately, a much more palatable option is now available from alphaWorks in the shape of the “Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server”.

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RR10 season starts

April 19th, 2006

The RR10 season kicked off again tonight with the first race being held at Royal Victoria Country Park as has become traditional. This is usually a good race to get a high position: one of the larger clubs is organising, the London Marathon has just happened or, as this year, is about to happen, people are still on Easter hols and other just haven’t realised that it’s that time of year again already. I was still, however, slightly unnerved not to recognise anyone at the front of the line-up.

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French ports of call

April 18th, 2006

76We stopped off in La Rochelle last night, partly because it is nicely en-route from Bordeaux to St Malo and partly because, having been the subject of our French text books (not to mention the home of my French teacher) it was somewhere we felt we had to see. We didn’t have long to look round but the area around the Vieux Port is certainly very picturesque – whether it would remain so in the height of the tourist season is another question. If nothing else though, the locals were happy to let Christine try out her French on them without immediately resorting to English.

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Victory in France

April 17th, 2006

64Today saw the exciting climax of our Easter holiday orienteering with the third and final day of the 3 jours du Sud-Ouest taking place on the coastal dunes west of Bordeaux. Going into the chase I was lying in second place on H21A by 1:49 having won the second day with an (almost) clean run. In third place was Matthias Mahr over whom I had a five-minute lead.

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