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Category Apple
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Over the last few days the Bluetooth on my laptop has become progressively less reliable, to the point where, this morning the keyboard and mouse would work for two minutes before needing to be reset. So I got an appointment at the "Genius" bar at the Apple Store at lunchtime and had my worst fears confirmed. It's a hardware failure so they kept hold of it to replace the radio and the antenna.

I've not had the best of luck with the reliability of my main laptop with the last one needing to be repaired twice before I replaced it. Maybe I just use them too much but it does annoy me slightly that what is meant to be premium kit is quite so flakey.

Anyway, I have learned from previous experience and have a backup machine to use so it's not the end of the world. Things just take a little longer to do now. Roll on Friday when I can (hopefully) pick up the fixed computer.

Posted by Matt White At 14:25:17 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category UKLUG2008
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Warren has just blogged that the agenda for UKLUG has been published. There's only a month to go until the event now and it's all beginning to come together nicely. There are still a few speaking slots to be announced but hopefully, if you haven't already signed up, then the quality of the speakers on offer will be enough to persuade you.

If not then have a look at the list of sponsors, there are now 22 of them which is pretty amazing for a user group event, so if you work with any Lotus technologies then you'll almost certainly meet someone interesting in the sponsors area, a session or of course the bar. And it's all free!

Registration spaces are beginning to run out now so have a word with your boss and get yourself booked in.

Posted by Matt White At 11:32:14 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category My Life
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A group of friends and myself spent the weekend in Bruges, Belgium mainly to catch up with each other and just chill out with a few Belgian beers. Luckily the weather was just great on Saturday which allowed us to hire a couple of bikes and a tandem to arse around on for the day. So we cycled round the town, stopping every few hundred metres to sample a new beer, I can highly recommend this as a good way to spend your Saturday, although I do need to apologise for the various tourists that we left scattered in our wake as we barrelled down the main shopping street at Mach 1!

The Eurostar worked faultlessly and overall we had a great time. Now I really need to get some sleep before a hectic week of work for multiple different clients.

Posted by Matt White At 20:28:59 Location London | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Notes and Domino
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I know you're not meant to apologise for going quiet on a blog, but things have definitely been quiet around here recently. It's only good news from my point of view, work has really taken off over the last few weeks.

For the last week I have been mostly designing and implementing some pretty complex WS-I compliant web services to be hosted on a 7.0.2 Domino server. This is harder (and surprisingly more fun) than it sounds as Domino's web services implementation in 7 is pretty outdated these days. Basically there are a few things I would point you at to get you started...

Julian's article about web services is a great starting point for complex web services, but because it's a couple of years old now it only takes you so far.

Then you need to have a look at this article about web services in Domino 8 which offers quite a lot of ND 7 specific content, especially about manually editing WSDL files to make them WS-I compliant. To be honest I found this to be a case of trial and error, there are a *lot* of obscure rules which have to be complied with, especially if you're passing arrays or Base64 encoded data (both of which, of course, I am doing).

The actual writing of the services is pretty simple, they're basically just agents, but then next challenge is doing some load testing. Enter Soap UI a free tool which provides some great tools. It allows you to consume your new service very easily which is cool for testing. But then the really useful tool is a load testing implementation which allows you to really stress test your service to see what happens when you're running 500 requests a second against it. Believe me it's not pretty! So now I have to spend some time making the services really bullet proof in terms of error handling and performance.

I may be a little odd, but I really enjoy doing this sort of work. And luckily, for the moment, I'm able to spend almost all of my time writing code. Long may it last!

Posted by Matt White At 16:35:58 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Domino Community
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Don't forget that a few of us are meeting up for beers tomorrow evening at the Market Porter in London. I'll be getting there at about 5.30 and a few of the usual suspects will be there so feel free to join us while we make the most of the British Summer.

Posted by Matt White At 15:45:59 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category LinkJam
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We realised this afternoon that we hadn't told you how to embed the LinkJam blog widget (off to the right there) into your blog. So go to the Elguji blog for all the details.

Posted by Matt White At 16:41:02 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Domino Community
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Well it's been a month or so since we did a meetup in London, no Keynote Drinker this time, but at Kerr's behest, how about a few beers on Thursday 31st July at the usual venue?

Posted by Matt White At 10:01:01 Location London | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Site Information
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My name is incredibly common, there are even websites and Facebook groups set up for all of the Matt White's of the world. And the poor old Matt White Band has to compete with all of us to get internet traffic! Anyway as my name is so common I thought it would be sensible to get a hold of mattwhite.me before anyone else does. So until I can think of anything better to do with it, my new domain points back here for the moment. Have you got yours yet?

Posted by Matt White At 13:10:21 Location London | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Apple
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I got a call from a contact at the Carphone Warehouse today saying that they had a batch of phones in so I dashed up to Oxford Street to pick up one while they were still there. The process of the upgrade is still pretty slow, a huge form which takes (if my experience is anything to go by) over 15 minutes to get approved. No wonder there were serious queues last week. Anyway it all went through fine and I got my nice and shiny new iPhone.

The software of course is old news now that I've been using it for a week but the GPS and 3g speeds really make it come alive even more. I'm not sure how much this is rose tinted glasses but the new phone also seems slightly faster to respond for me as well.

I also picked up a set of the BodyGuardz protective film to go over the case of the phone. It works really well to protect what looks like a fairly easily scratched plastic backing to the phone, well worth the 30 minutes effort to get it stuck on neatly and without bubbles.

I already knew that the new phone didn't come with a dock unlike the first gen version, but I had assumed that the old dock would work with the new phone, not so, and I really used my dock a lot so I picked up a new version of that as well, which is a tad annoying. But so far that is the only annoyance, I'll be able to test the battery life over the next few days, but I don't anticipate that being a problem as I plugged in the phone every night anyway to pick up new podcasts for the next day.

Oh, and for all of the people who asked, the old phone has already been reserved by a friend so no hand me downs available here sorry!

Posted by Matt White At 19:04:29 Location London | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Community
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Yancy set me up on the PlanetLotus superfeed beta last night so I could test it out from NetNewsWire on the Mac and the iPhone (still first gen unfortunately but we are hopeful for the end of the week!). The feed is brilliant, I no longer need to try and keep up with all of the Lotus blogs in my own RSS reader, and I can also cut down on the number of trips to the PL website as all of the posts come to my feed reader direct. Excellent stuff as ever Yancy, thanks!

Posted by Matt White At 13:40:06 Location London | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)