things are pertty quiet at the moment which makes a pleasant change. i am
taking the opportunity to catch up on various bits of reading, research, rest
and recollections.
a year ago i was still on my world tour and i really wish i was still there now! the weather here
has not been nearly so nice as my february and march 2003.
my new website will be published soon which should be interesting to maintain,
updates will appear here as and when they are needed.
simon and fiona have been down for the weekend. last night there was a family
meal which got rowdier by the minute as various people from the village turned
up. excellent evening all round and great to see people that i don’t catch up
with all that often.
today has just been a very lazy day with a late start and then just odd jobs on
the computer. i just needed a weekend like this as work is pretty busy and i
don’t have any time off scheduled for quite some time.
apologies if you have had trouble getting here in the last few days, i have had
some dns issues with my domain name hosting organisation. they should all be
resolved now although it might take another day or two for all of the dns
servers to catch up.
i signed up for an internet dvd rental
service at the weekend. the way it works is that i go to their website and
select the dvds i want to watch, they post them out to me three at a time along
with a return envelope. after watching each movie i put it in the post and they
send the next of my choices out to me. it is an unlimited service for a monthly
fee and should help to pass some time on the train when there are delays.
this has led me on to an idea for a new website on which there will be more to
come over the next few weeks.
i have made a few good purchases recently…
on the music side of things we have:
and for reading material:
all are worth a look if you are into good music or programming respectively but
i would especially recommend franz ferdinand and the little black book.
i have been having a long running argument with our dba about the best way to
design a new sql server / .net application which will serve up “reference data”
(e.g. client lists etc) to various other applications which might be .net,
domino, websphere or anything else you can think of. to me it seems an obvious
candidate for web
services. our dba doesn’t agree as he has a religious issue with xml, so i
have been trying to find good articles which might persuade, i think i have
finally succeeded.
jake raises a http://www.totalpda.co.uk/product4288_37.aspx”>pen/pda stylus
combo earilier in the week from
i have been doing some work with java to .net web service interoperability this
week. web services have the potential to be hugely powerful if they are used
correctly but if you want to do something simple between java and .net and you
want to use the “proper” tools (i.e. the apache axis class library or something
similar) the whole task takes on an entirely more difficult air.
i have ended up writing my own wrapper classes to submit the soap request and
parse the response because trying to write the deserialisation for even a
moderately complicated data type and still have the ability to run in domino is
well nigh impossible.
because this is the first time in a while that i have had the chance to write
some “serious” code i have taken full advantage and ended up doing two late
nights completely over-engineering the classes. luckily the work has already
paid off as someone overheard me moaning about the problems and they were
having exactly the same issue so they now have a brand spanking new set of
classes that do exactly what they were after as well.
while i was away at lotusphere it seems much more serious things were happening in
my road at home.
