Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.
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Upgrade weekend
January 13th, 2008Running with a buggy
January 6th, 2008One of the many kind donations we received when Emma was born was a second-hand running buggy – the sort with three massive bicycle-style wheels. Christine has been out with it a couple of times but today was my first run. Despite its size the buggy is very light and manoeuvrable and on a smooth tarmac surface has surprisingly little rolling resistance. I believe the recommended technique is to give the buggy a push and then run after it. Unfortunately I need to try and work out why ours veers to the left slightly. As a consequence I had to run with one hand on the buggy most of the time which doesn’t do your running style much good! My running speed was down a little but the additional effort certainly kept my heart rate up. On even the slightest incline you find yourself up on your toes pushing so you get a good workout.
Emma slept for 55 minutes of the hour we were out!
Burley Revisited
January 5th, 2008
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WebSphere MQ Java in J2EE
January 2nd, 2008Thanks once again to Paul Titheridge, this time for pointing me to this technote covering the use of the WebSphere MQ Java APIs in a J2EE/JEE environment. It seems that IBM does now support the use of the WebSphere MQ Java interfaces in a WebSphere Application Server environment (check the supported software for your release) but this technote provides you with lots of reasons why you shouldn’t! The Java interfaces do have functionality that isn’t currently available in the JMS API (for example message segmentation and important parts of message grouping) but that needs to be weighed carefully against the drawbacks. JMS should always be the default option unless you have a very good reason not to use it.
Party pooper
January 1st, 2008Happy New Year (or not as the case may be)! Being parents took its toll and neither of us managed to stay up until midnight last night. To make matters worse, I was up shortly after midnight when Emma made her presence felt. It wasn’t particularly surprising that she was awake though as there was a continual barrage of fireworks banging away for the next half an hour or so. I can’t imagine they were very good to watch as there appeared to be a heavy mist. Didn’t we use to have fireworks just once a year? I blame the millennium!
Last orienteering of the year
December 31st, 2007On the way back from visiting my folks we had planned to go to the Southern Navigators event at Ash Ranges. We managed to squeeze everything in to the car and get away from Harpenden within five minutes of our scheduled departure time. An empty M25 proved too good to be true and we spent half an hour crawling towards Junction 3 of the M3 where the motorway had been closed due to a burst water pipe. Consequently, we arrived at the event just after Christine was due to start.
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Festive Frolics
December 30th, 2007
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Generous Garmin
December 9th, 2007Having previously replaced my broken Garmin Forerunner with a new one, my brother sent back his black and white eTrex Legend (which he bought cheap as it contained lead in the solder) as the screen would intermittently display stripes, only to be sent a much more up-to-date colour eTrex Legend HCx. Can’t complain but does make you wonder whether Garmin are capable of fixing anything!
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