James Strachan's Weblog

My blog is moving...

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:02:25 GMT

My blog is now moving here to macstrac.blogspot.com or you can subscribe to the Atom feed.

I've not blogged in the longest time, its quite embarrasing. Not being able to easily blog while on the road doesn't help; so I'm switching to a new hosted blog which will hopefully help me to blog more often. Fingers crossed!

Am liking the spell checking in Firefox 2.0!

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:51:55 GMT

Crikey long time no blog! Am still alive, just crazy busy but I really will try and blog a bit more often. (I've a stack of posts I should write if I get time).

I just wanted to say I totally love the new spell checking in Firefox 2.0. This along with the excellent delicious plugin make it the best browser around. Am liking the cute safari-ness of Firefox 2.0 :)

London Java Meetup on Wed 5th @ 5pm

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 06:49:50 GMT

Thanks to Jez for arranging this we now have a place and location for Wednesday's geeky curry and beer night...

Jason van Zyl, lead developer for Maven, Plexus, Continuum and Modello and also founder of Velocity is in town this week.

This wednesday, after his free lunchtime seminar with JSIG at the Sun offices, why not join Jason van Zyl, James Strachan, and myself for a few beers and a great meal out...

We will be in the pub from about 5pm onwards, and when we get hungry we'll move towards food, so if we are not in the pub, try the restauraunt, if you still can't find us email my blackberry on jeremy.rayner at interactivedata.com and I'll direct you.

Sounds like a fantastic evening, I'll see you there,

Background
'Jason van Zyl' -> http://tinyurl.com/kh97k
'JSIG seminar' -> http://tinyurl.com/ehdn6

Evening
'Pub: The Puzzle' -> http://tinyurl.com/gcgo5
'Food: The Gulshan' -> http://tinyurl.com/fjw7x

See you all there! :)

London Java Meetup 6 days early on Wed 5th?

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:10:24 GMT

Jason van Zyl (Mr Maven) is over in blighty for almost 2 whole days so figured it'd only be fair to drink beer and go for a curry. I wondered if folks fancied a rapidly arranged early session of the London Java Meetup - or having an Xtc a day late :). Both Jason and I are up for beer, geeking out and eating curry in any order....

Ruby and Rails messaging with ActiveMessaging

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:31:14 GMT

I love ActiveMessaging. It brings the power and elegance of messaging to the world of Ruby and Rails..

class HelloWorldProcessor < ActiveMessaging::Processor
  
  subscribes_to :hello_world
  
  def on_message(message)
    puts "received: " + message
  end
  
end

It supports transactions, queues & publish subscribe, load balancing, failover, clustering, optional persistence, browsing of queues and a full management front end. Its based on the Ruby Stomp client which works great with Apache ActiveMQ and its Stomp support. Great work guys!

Glad to see AMQP released!

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:34:50 GMT

I wasn't totally sure if this would ever happen but I'm glad to see that AMQP has been released with some interesting chat over on InfoQ and brian's blog. Am also looking forward to TSSJS Barcelona; time to get on that plane...

Apache ActiveMQ Performance Tuning Guide available

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:26:27 GMT

A common question I hear from customers and users is how fast can Apache ActiveMQ go and how to get the most out of it. It generally depends on a lot of factors but to help folks get the most out of it we've compiled an Apache ActiveMQ Performance Tuning Guide