Italy

Went to Italy last week to see my parent's new house. It is really nice. It took a bit of getting used to as it hasn't been lived in for 20 years and there was plenty of hard work to be done but the area is really unspoilt and fun. I didn't realise that Italians eat pizza every meal of the day. I love pizza and enjoyed it a lot but I am sure you could get sick of pizza after a while!

eXist

eXist is the absolute dogs nads

Finished

Haven't written for a while, but I feel much better. I finished off both the server replacements and then went to scotland for a few days to relax. It was quite nice weather and we walked about a bit in Aviemore. Still haven't figured out a satisfactory way to run shared folders with courier, but never mind...

Courier-imap shared folder

I am in the process of setting up a courier-imap virtual shared folder and must say that I am finding it a bit confusing at the moment. The documentation (README.sharedfolders) seems complete, but rambles and seems to miss the key points, like HOW DO YOU SET UP A VIRTUAL SHARED FOLDER????

Depressed

I have been a bit depressed lately. I think it is because I have bitten off more than I can chew with work. I have been working solidly for the past couple of weeks without a break and I keep getting phone calls all the time. I need to get the new webserver up and running but I just can't be bothered at the moment. Also Romford's PCs are getting a bit rusty and I really need to order some more but I just can't face going down there at the moment!

xsl templates

Had trouble with character encoding from xsl templates which I couldn't get to the bottom of. The thing was that it worked fine with later versions of Tomcat (5+) but not with the 4.1.x series. Finally figured out that all I needed was an at the top of the stylesheet just below the xsl:stylesheet declaration. Worked it out because some stylesheets were rendering ok and some weren't. The ones that were must have been from examples I nicked that already had that line...

Profiler

Managed to get a profiler working with eclipse and tomcat. It is called Yourkit and it seems to work pretty well - I just need to figure out HOW it works now! It shows all the objects that have not been garbage collected over a period of time and how big they are etc. (so you can prioritise cleaning up the biggies). It just doesn't seem very easy to trace these objects back to the relevant part of the code. Maybe I am not running it long enough. I would run it on a production server but it might have a significant performance hit. Also I have read that JRockit might be better jdk under high load and similarly Resin for servlet container.

Fasthosts server

Just got a new web server with fasthosts. It is really cool. It as postfix, spamassassin, sendmail and all that jazz preinstalled (don't know about ldap address book though) and seems really secure. It has no command line web access so all the transfers have to be via sftp.

Conveyancing

Used a great firm of Solicitors for my Conveyancing called NBM Solcitors

Clam antivirus

I have been trying to set up Clam antivirus again and I must say I find milters a little bit confusing. I did previously have clam working on a milter and moved to Panda as work had Panda and it included a Linux version. This set up without a hitch, however they have now stopped their Panda licences so I am moving back to Clam. I installed all the Clam kit from the Dag repositories (clamd, clam-db, clam-milter etc.) and installed. I can get the Clam daemon (clamd) working fine, and I am well used to setting up milters using sendmail M4 but the miter itself is the problem. I cannot start the clamav-milter program, at least it doesn't show in ps -aux.

Blogger

Just had to change my Blogger password. I don't usually trust emails with links asking about account information but it seemed to be bonafied in this case as the link went to blogger.com.

Server crashes

The Chelmsford server has been crashing randomly, about every 3-4 days, from the first day it was installed (2-3 years now). I have tried lots of different things but it seems quite random. I tried Memtest86 which is used to check the RAM. The instructions say that if the test itself crashes the problem must be more serious (motherboard or processor related). The test did indeed crash in my case at 57% hence the need to get a new server. The worst problem is keeping confidence in data security from the staff.

BT

BT are useless. Under instructions from BT I got a migration code from Easynet as I wanted to migrate my account to BT. I phoned up BT several times trying to give them the migration code and they kept saying someone would phone me back. In the end I was given a number for my "Account manager" who would, of course, phone me back. After a week I phoned this number only to find out it did not work. Now the Migration code has expired and I have ordered another. I am inclined not to use BT because of the terrible service. This is what happens when companies make so much money they can't be bothered to service their customers any more.

First post from Mac

Well I am using the swishy DashBlog blog entry poster widget and I must say it is damn sexy! I love my Mac already but it is taking a while to get used to all the little differences. At first I thought not having a right button on the mouse would be bad but it has turned out not to be a problem at all, in fact right clicks seem a bit stupid now. Worse though is not having a scroll button for reading down text in the browser. Although now I couldn't do without my wireless mouse so I won't migrate to the mighty mouse until they make it wireless. All my Open Source stuff works like a charm on here which is great. Now to post and see if it posts entries properly (unlike the linux blog thing which messed the title of blog entries up)

apple mac g5

got my new computer now, but haven't got a blog applet for it yet so have not been writing up my blog enough lately. at the moment i am trying to solve how to precompile jsp pages for a war file. the strange thing is that i can build a war from my project and upload this. i can extract all the files from the war using untar or some extractor (can't remember which) and the resulting directory installs fine as a web application but if i try to autodeploy the war it fails. it seems so dumb to me. well i am off to look for a decent os x blogger thing. maybe a widget...

mac

waiting for my g5 to be delivered. it is exciting. i hope it comes before christmas though

Conveyancing

This may appear a s a shameless plug for a company but here is a link to a website I made which I am quite proud of NBM Solicitors

3

oh yeah and i had to pay over £100 for a "cancellation fee"

3

I have finally cancelled my 3 contract. It turned out they hadn't even set it up as a business account! When I joined them I phoned their business sales line and kept reminding them that I wanted it to be a business account! They are the worst pile of shit

g5

i really want to buy the new g5 as it is so sexy but need to make sure it does all the things i can do on linux eg ssh, word processing, spreadsheet, eclipse, tomcat, eXist, email, web browsing, bzflag.