Category Archives: General

All things general

Several cool Black Cab Sessions …

19 Friday Sep 2008

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Brian Wilson…

 

Badly Drawn Boy …

Martha Wainwright …

FabChannel – Quality Streaming Live Concerts

12 Friday Sep 2008

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I’ve come across a rather interesting resource called FabChannel.com.  FabChannel are providing quality video streams of whole concerts from legitimate sources, either licensed concert recordings from music companies such as Universal and V2 or professional recorded performances from Dutch based venues.  The video quality is good enough that it could be expanded to watch full screen with only a small amount of graininess on a 1600x1200monitor with streaming through a Flash player. FabChannel’s performances cover a wide range of well known artists such as The View and Martha Wainwright, and they claim to have got over 900 performances available already.

 Martha Wainright on FabChannel

The site also has integration with last.fm and can also provide useful artist bios etc. To generate income to pay for the service there are some adverts on the site, but they’re not annoying popup’s etc.

 

Hi-Q acquired

08 Monday Sep 2008

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I’ve just heard some interesting news – it would appear that my former employer Hi-Q systems has just been acquired by BMT Group. Its good to hear that they’re doing well and developed a strong position in their specialisation of architectural frameworks such as MODAF and DODAF.

Press Release – 27 August 2008

After the disco madness, domestic Bliss – Sister Bliss

22 Friday Aug 2008

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The Daily Telegraph have written any interesting article about Faithless’ Sister Bliss who recently released a solo effort called Nightmoves.

The article can be found at : Telegraph – Sister Bliss.  The Nightmoves album is available here.

 

In a Galaxy not so far far away

22 Friday Aug 2008

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It looks like the Imperium has arrived at the planet earth, or at least San Francisco, checkout this video footage …

The footage is very clever.

 

Fuel Prices

21 Thursday Aug 2008

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This month carries good news on fuel prices – they’re dropping!  Although the drop is being pushed by a price war between the supermarkets more than the drop in the barrel price.  This does make the price drops a lot more variable and this is reflected in the latest figures having the highest regional variation since I’ve started doing the measurements.  It is also worth pointing out, that the drop so far has only taken fuel prices back by a couple months rather than to last year’s price plus annual inflation.

 

avgfuelprice

Source figures courtesy of the AA.

How portable is Java?

23 Wednesday Jul 2008

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The title is a bit of a trick question – if the JVM meets all the tests to qualify being called Java then it is portable.  However the website  JavaSpecialists  has a series of brilliant  articles about some of the depths of Java, with a rather interesting article called ‘Law of Cretan Driving’ which looks at the way 64 bit value are handled (such as long) within the JVM.  The article points out that it is not mandatory for the JVM to ensure that the bytes that are used to represent a long can not be manipulated by separate threads at anyone time. That is to say that any 64bit primitive such as a long is not guaranteed to be thread safe.  However problem is that primitive data types are generally considered by developers to be atomically safe – which isn’t necessarily the case. So we can find that a java application which is theoretically portable may actually not port.

Java Standard – http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#17876

 

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SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM

17 Thursday Jul 2008

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  SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM is the latest evolution in the integration between jBPM which forms a crucial element in the orchestration of JBoss’ SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) stack.  We’ve produced some video clips complete with commentary together that show the core parts of the SeWhy for JBoss jBPM along with looking at SeeWhy in the broader context of BI (Business Intelligence) and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). The SeeWhy page here has both low res streaming versions of the videos and downloadable high res versions.

If you’re interested in work flow and how you can monitor and measure its activity both in terms of IT operational performance and in the business context then the three clips will be ten minutes well spent.

 

Useful links …

 

FixMyStreet – neat map relate service

04 Friday Jul 2008

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I came across this rather cool little service – FixMyStreet.  It allows you to mark onto maps problems from potholes to fly tipping. The website will then submit the problem to the appropriate authorities. To can also see what other problems have been reported.  a lot easier than tying to work out which council and which department to report a problem to.

 

Fuel Prices Update

03 Thursday Jul 2008

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With more haulier protests in London yesterday over fuel prices and the rate of price inflation.  Here is a new monthly graph of fuel prices based on the AA figures:

 

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The critical values are that diesel has gone up 9.1% from last month and unleaded has increased by 6.3% since last month.  Diesel is now averaging 13p per litre more expensive than unleaded.

 

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