I eventually did decide to return my Garmin (again) due to the lack of sound. Three days after I dropped it off at their office in Totton (I’m not sure what the security guard thought of me as I was wearing running kit at the time!) a package arrived back. Sadly this time it just contained a watch, not a whole replacement box. The wrapper stated “Newly Overhauled” but the watch has a new serial number so I’m not sure what to make out of that. I can, however, do intervals once again without having to look at my watch the whole time!
Forerunner 3
February 15th, 2008OpenID support
February 13th, 2008The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.
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Norway bound
February 12th, 2008Most of my friends and colleagues will by now be heartily sick of hearing the phrase “it depends… we may be in Norway by then” (but probably not as sick as I am of saying it!). For those who don’t know, I have, for the past year or so, been trying to arrange an assignment with IBM to the Nordics. Having settled on Norway about five months ago we (myself and the local management teams on either side) have been battling against the numerous internal processes involved. I’m therefore relieved to say that, as of yesterday, we finally have approval to proceed. Lest they change their mind, the current plan is that I head out to Oslo next week, with Christine and Emma following along once accommodation is sorted. We’ll then be out there until sometime around August, returning to the UK in time for Christine to restart lecturing for the new University year. Now there’s just the small matter of getting packed. Oh, and I should probably dust off those “Teach yourself Norwegian” books we bought months ago!!
Emma in pictures
February 7th, 2008Whilst on the subject of Flickr, I’m making the most of being off work this week and catching up on a few overdue jobs. One of those is to add some more pictures of Emma to her collection to fill the gap over the past six months. If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to go back and look at those cute newborn photos and see how much she has changed over recent months!
Immersive slideshows
February 7th, 2008If you spend a lot of time looking at large numbers of photos on the web then take a look at the PicLens browser plugins. It builds a 3D wall of photos from a page and allows you to zoom around them and view each one full screen. In my case, particularly useful for browsing photos on Flickr.
SportTracks and Garmin
February 4th, 2008Version 2.0 of the SportTracks GPS exercise logbook now looks ready for prime time. Having used it for a few days now I have yet to discover any killer new features but neither have I spotted anything that is missing which, at one point, seemed to be likely to be the case. I’m also contemplating returning my Forerunner 305 to Garmin again as the sound has gone which was the first thing to stop working last time. Whilst looking around the Garmin site I spotted the Forerunner 405 which was announced at CES and is due to ship in March. Shockingly it a) looks like a watch and b) can be used to tell the time when not in GPS mode! With such a small screen it is perhaps not surprising that you lose the ability to view routes and the current track but still very tempting all the same.
Customer service: the good and the bad
January 31st, 2008With a stack of watch type batteries needing replacement I headed over to the first online purveyor that Google threw up: Battery Force. (Yes – I know they paid Google to be at the top of the list but that doesn’t make them bad people – just good at marketing!) As promised the batteries were dispatched by four o’clock on the next working day and duly arrived in the post the next morning. The packet may have been small (it fitted through the letter box which is always a bonus) but they managed to squeeze in a discount voucher for my next purchase and a Belgian chocolate!
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Performance tuning WebSphere ESB 6.1
January 28th, 2008There is a Redpaper which provides some excellent advice when it comes to tuning WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 for performance. However, you’ll have to wait a little bit for the Version 6.1 update. In the meantime, whilst all of the current best practice still stands, I thought I would post a couple of additional tips that are specific to the latest release.
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