Well, I did make it to the Tuesday night run yesterday and I did remember my GPS but I didn’t remember the route! Consequently, what started out as the standard Telegraph Hill run deteriorated into who knows what. There’s a stand of trees over towards Deadman Hill that I always think we should run to but isn’t actually on any of our runs. Well, last night three of us did get to visit it and get slightly damp in the nearby Black Gutter Bottom trying to get back. We did eventually catch the others again but only just before getting back to Fritham. As a result I’m not attaching the GPX file this week. Still, I’m sure Ian appreciated the extra distance for his last minute London Marathon training!
Telegraph Hill (almost)
April 11th, 2007Transactional simplicity
April 10th, 2007It’s good to read articles like this once in a while to remind oneself how much simpler J2EE made transactions.
WebSphere Application Server trace
April 10th, 2007Daniel Julin is also co-author of another developerWorks article looking at WebSphere Application Server trace. The article describes what trace is, how to turn it on (including the appropriate wsadmin incantations) and how to interpret it. Note that, as the article demonstrates, trace can be very useful in diagnosing some issues, it is really intended for use by IBM service personnel who also have access to the corresponding source code, so don’t expect the trace messages always to be self explanatory. The article also has a plug for Trace Analyzer for WebSphere Application Server, a great tool for viewing and analyzing trace logs (and large ones at that) written by two of my one-time colleagues in the transactions team.
Co-locating applications
April 10th, 2007There was a time when customers would only ever have a single application running on any given application server instance. In the drive to cut costs, this level of application isolation isn’t one that many customers can still afford. Daniel Julin and Stacy Joines have written a developerWorks article that covers some best practices and techniques for troubleshooting co-located applications.
Forest of Dean revisited
April 9th, 2007
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Lack of lenses
April 5th, 2007Warning: the following tail of woe involves some serious spleen venting!
Having finally made up my mind up that I would go for the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, I placed an order with Warehouse Express on Tuesday evening hoping that, with next day delivery, I would have it in time for the Easter weekend. I also added the appropriate lens hood and threw in the Canon 50mm f1.8 whilst I was at it as there seems to be a general consensus that this is well worth the little money that you have to pay for it. It then wasn’t until late Wednesday afternoon that I checked my e-mail and discovered a message saying that part of the order wasn’t in stock. I phoned Warehouse Express and was told that the lenses were currently on order from Canon. When I asked when were expecting a delivery I was told: “Err, maybe sometime in May?”. Why oh why don’t online retailers advertise stock levels on their sites? Is it incompetence or is it because they would lose business that way? Somehow I’d taken the fact that the “We’re having trouble getting hold of this lens” message had disappeared might mean they actually had them.
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Edinburgh hills
April 4th, 2007Service interface design
April 2nd, 2007My ISSW colleague Mikhail Genkin has just started what promises to be an interesting developerWorks series on Best practices for service interface design in SOA. In the first article, Mikhail begins by recommending a top-down or meet in the middle-approach to WSDL creation, rather then relying on generation from generation from existing Java interfaces. He the continues by considering what operations should be grouped on a single interface and what shape those operations should take. In future articles, Mikhail is promising to cover best practices for structuring WSDL documents and fault handling.
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