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The NHS gets a lot of flack from all sorts of sources, and the media tend to delight in hi-lighting the terrible experiences people have had with the NHS, including horror stories about people being left in trolleys in A&E, people not being able to get access to Doctors out of hours Over Christmas, my 15 month old daughter caught a nasty virus/cold that knocked her for six, and we ended up calling our local surgery out-of-hours.

More unmissible stuff from @stephenfry Stephen Fry in America (BBC Micro Site) Episode 1: New World Episode 2: Deep South Episode 3: Misssissippi Episode 4: Mountains and Plains Episode 5: True West Episode 6: ?

I had an interesting challenge in work recently, we have 3 data centres running our applications, currently the RR DNS system does what it’s supposed to, spreads the data round each of the 3 DCs evenly. This works fine when all of your data centres have a similar capacity. But ours don’t. This causes problem when your load/traffic gets to the point where one of the DCs can’t cope. Now, there are many expensive and complicated solutions to this, this how ever isn’t one of them, it’s quite simple, has it’s weaknesses, but as you’ll see it’s also quite elegant.

slides here for those interested Rapid Web Service Integration in Rails

Well, I’ve just gone & thrown my hat in the ring to speak at BarCampBelfast, if anybody actually wants to here my proposed talk, it’ll be 5 slides I prepared for the first Mobile Monday Belfast, I prepared two sets, one business & one techie, Mobile Monday got the business slides 🙂

Today I resigned my post as Head of Technology for SLA Mobile and signed a contract with atg where I’ll be workin the eStara team.

Some pithy but true rules for technology consulting.

Friday 6th June 2008 was the first jBPM Community Day, held in the Guinness Store House in Dublin, this is practically on my doorstep, and as we’ve been looking at jBPM for some pilots recently, I couldn’t not go. The speakers on the day were Tom Baeyens, Joram Barrez, Paul Browne and Koen Aers. It was great to hear that jBPM is being used in all sort of environments, in some very large projects and most of all the direction of the project from the project leaders.

There’s a flaw in ssh-vulnkey, it doesn’t always show you the name of the file with an offending blacklisted key in it. Here’s a couple of ways round this: For a small machine, inspect the files by hand: strace ssh-vulnkey -a 2>&1 | grep ^stat64| grep -v NOENT| cut -d” -f 2| sort | uniq | xargs vi Or, a little longer, using ssh-vulnkey to find all relevant keys & reprocess them displaying the filename & then the result of the ssh-vulnkey for the individual file:

I wrote this some time ago, Thunderbird has moved on quite a bit since then (I’m now running 2.0.0.12 on my XP laptop), so here’s a quick roundup on the Add-ons/Extensions installed: British English Dictionary Hey, colour has a u in it. GMailUI mostly just so that I can use j/k to navigate around Lightening Quickly check my published calendars (also see this: exchange to ics).