Better the devil you know?

As a professional software developer I sometimes find myself having to defend decisions made, when the inevitable unexpected problems arise.

A few months ago I was pleased when the decision was made to move away from the JBoss portal server implementation, to a more open platform which would run directly on Tomcat 6. Leaving the office on Christmas eve with two known potential show-stoppers was not my ideal way to start a holiday.

This week has supposedly knocked one of those out but will still involve change and the uncertainty of another upgrade.

The less important issue of the combination of multiple JSF-backed forms in separate portlets on a single page still needs to be dealt with.

It seems like every second day a different person has queried the team about why we moved away from something that worked. I'm trying to stay positive and optimistic that we will have fewer issues with configuring aspects such as load balancing, but a part of me is hoping that someone else gets the task of configuring the clustering.

The benefits of health insurance?

I've been feeling a bit under the weather recently, so thought I should check out the health insurance paperwork that my employer recently gave me.

Imagine my surprise at reading the period covered finished yesterday - just a few weeks after it started!

It turns out that the policy is being renewed to include an updated list of hospitals etc., but I can't help but feel that I am technically not covered.

I have a client visiting work for some training over the next few days, so being absent is not really an option anyway.

Tomcat configuration

Sorry for the lack of content in this post, but I sometimes use this blog as a bookmark/reminder for myself.

Here are a couple of blog posts from one of the maintainers of Tomcat.

http://blog.springsource.com/2008/08/08/optimising-and-tuning-apache-tomcat/

http://blog.springsource.com/2008/10/14/optimising-and-tuning-apache-tomcat-part-2/

I found it reassuring to see the load testing tools that Mark uses matched up with what I had been using a few months back.

Google finally cracking down on scammers

Several months back I was disappointed to see Facebook allowing adverts for something that looked vary much like a scam, using Google's name for credibility.

While I haven't seen those ads for a while, I was pleased to see an article indicating that Google is suing:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3144491/Google-sues-work-from-home-scammers

Phone upgrade time

I've decided it is time to move on from my cheap and primitive Nokia.

Last week I ordered myself a shiney new T-Mobile Pulse.

Apparently it is the first Android phone to be offered as a Pay As You Go deal.

I would have preferred the Hero but it is just too much hassle to get onto a contract deal, given that I have not been living in the UK for 3 years, and possibly won't be here for another 24 months.

Today I noticed an email informing me that due to popular demand it could take 5 working days instead of 2 for the package to arrive.