Project Zero

June 30th, 2007

I was ever so slightly nervous about posting this given the lack of fanfare on any IBM website but Andy has at least saved me from being the first to stick my head above the parapet. As Andy says, one of the items that was creating a buzz at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference that we couldn’t talk about was something named Project Zero. Project Zero aims to provide a simple framework for developing Web 2.0 style applications through the creation of RESTful services, rich user interfaces and mashups. A scripting based approach is used with Groovy for the Java developers but also a subset of PHP. I shan’t go in to lots of technical details, you can read all about those on the Project Zero website.
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Google Apps

June 28th, 2007

Just to show that I do listen to you dear reader, I’ve followed up on Oliver’s suggestion and moved our e-mail over to Google Apps. The process was pretty painless: sign up for an admin account, verify ownership of the domains, setup users, modify the MX records and then configure our e-mail clients. A day or so delay whilst the DNS records replicate and everything is now working smoothly. POP3 and SMTP access is via SSL which is a bonus and means I no longer need to rely on my FastMail account to send when away from home. The spam filtering is excellent – I’ve even got a 12 year old e-mail address (a spam trap if ever there were one) coming back in to my main inbox again. Other than that, the only noticeable effect is that my incoming messages are no longer tarnished by a “Virus checked by PlusNet” footer. Oh, and of course there is the GMail web interface should I ever feel the urge…

Wedding list mayhem

June 27th, 2007

A school friend who now lives out in the US is getting married next month and on Sunday we were attempting to buy a couple of gifts from their online Macy’s wedding list. When it came to paying we tried a few different credit cards but each came back with an error message so we gave up and decided we would phone them later in the week. As we left the site I noticed that the items we had been trying to buy were now marked as taken which I thought was a little annoying. Then, in my inbox, I discovered three separate order confirmations, all for the same items!
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Corridors at Longmoor Camp

June 27th, 2007

Making the most of being off work we went over to the Army Summer Series event at Longmoor Camp this afternoon. There was a great selection of courses on offer: blue and brown only map, corridor exercise, map without paths, compass and pacing exercise and a novice course. Nice to see no “normal” course as many folks wouldn’t look at the other choices if there were. I opted for the corridor exercise to start with thinking I might move on to the blue and brown next.
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Garmin customer service

June 26th, 2007

Previously I haven’t been particularly impressed with Garmin‘s customer service having never received any reply to questions I have submitted via their website however, on this latest occasion I have cause to be very pleased with them. I leant my Forerunner 305 to my brother in-law for the South Downs Marathon last weekend. Everything was fine for the first 23 miles but then the watch just reverted to the Garmin splash screen. On getting home, I was unable to download the watch and before long it was totally unresponsive unless connected to the power. Even then, it was hit and miss as to whether any of the buttons actually functioned.
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RHS Wisley

June 23rd, 2007

372We had a family outing yesterday, joining Sarah Rollins and young Thomas at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley. The rain generously ceased shortly after we arrived and didn’t restart until we were sat in our third restaurant/cafe of the day and almost ready to depart. We started by exploring the new fabulous new Glasshouse, due to be opened by the Queen next week. After a very nice (if expensive) sandwich we then wandered around the grounds, Christine and Sarah discussing motherhood whilst I snapped away the camera (photos on Flickr). I could easily have spent a few more hours there but we caught the start of the M25 rush-hour(s) as it was.

Spring certified on WebSphere Application Server

June 22nd, 2007

As reported over on the WebSphere Community Blog, Interface21 has announced certification of the Spring framework with WebSphere Application Server. The article on developerWorks describing using Spring and Hibernate with WebSphere Application Server has also been just updated to cover Spring Framework 2.1.

Rails Overview: Model

June 21st, 2007

This overview of Rails has become a little more sporadic than I had anticipated but hopefully I’ll be able to get some momentum going again now! In my introductory post I covered the basics of what Rails is and how easy it was to set up a development environment. The Rails programming model is built around the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern and in this post I’ll cover the first of those aspects: the model.
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