Random Things

I've been tagged enough times on Facebook with this latest fad so thought I'd do my response here and make it a bit more accessible. So without further ado, 25 random things about me.

1. I spent my first 15 years growing up on the Isle of Wight, this explains a lot about me.
2. I'd never been on a plane till I was 23.
3. Both times I have been to the United States it has been for business.
4. I get addicted to TV series very easily, so much so that I now avoid certain new programs to avoid adding to the list.
5. If I had the time and the talent I would have loved to be a full time musician.
6. I'd love to own a 2-seater coupe, but am worried I wouldn't fit in it, or it wouldn't be big enough to carry all the stuff I need.
7. I'm qualified to work as a door supervisor at a pub or club.
8. I have never been stopped by the police whilst driving.
9. Over the years I've played concerts at Canterbury Cathedral, Birmingham NIA and Royal Festival Hall.
10. I've worked for IBM for nearly 5 and a half years
11. A good night in will generally involve: pizza, beer or wine and a movie
12. I have never seen Titanic. I can't see the point when I know the end.
13. I never read the end of a book first.
14. I can't grow a proper beard anymore otherwise the gray hairs show.
15. When Go-Karting I have more fun going round corners sideways than driving the track "properly".
16. I get very annoyed by people who pull out in front of me and then proceed to drive slowly causing me to brake.
17. I'd like to cook more, but find it difficult when it's just for me and at the end of a long day.
18. Sometimes it scares me when I can work out how to fix a problem in code without actually looking at the code.
19. After one disastrous night drinking cider it would be 9 years before I drank it again.
20. Bad computing references in films may cause me to shout at the screen (but never in the cinema).
21. I would love to visit Canada at some point or drive down the east coast of America.
22. I don't make the most of living on the edge of the New Forest.
23. Very silly jokes will nearly always make me laugh, especially the one about the bee in the cake shop.
24. This blog post has taken me three days to write.
25. I've never enjoyed dance clubs and would much prefer a decent pint in a quiet pub.

So there we go, 25 random things about me.

New Blog

After the tech related post that I put up yesterday it was commented that some of the usual readers may not actually be as interested as me in that sort of thing.

This is very understandable so I've setup a new blog which will be the new home for any of the tech related stuff I decide to post out on t'interweb.

I will now return you to your randomly scheduled updates.

Running JBoss5 with Eclipse3.4

This is the first of the techy type stuff I mentioned in a previous blog post, and details the steps I went through to get the latest Eclipse download working with the latest JBoss download.

1. Download the JEE development version of Eclipse and unzip to a local directory.
2. Download the latest version of JBoss and unzip to a local directory. Ensure there are no spaces in the path to this directory.
3. Download and install the latest maintenance build for the Web Tools Project (WTP). This is required for support with JBoss5 otherwise you may hit errors later on.
4. Start the Eclipse workbench
5. Open the JEE perspective (if not already open)
6. In the servers tab, right click and select New->Server
7. Choose JBoss5 from the list
   
8. Click 'Next >' and on the next panel enter the location of the JBoss installation you unzipped in step 2. If you get an error saying that mail.jar can't be found then the latest version of WTP hasn't been installed correctly.
   
   
9. Click 'Finish' and the server will appear in the Servers tab.

From here you can start the server which will launch it and send the output to the console. If you get Exceptions being thrown then the first thing to check is whether the JBoss location contains spaces in the path.

If the start takes longer than the configured time allowed then double clicking on the server will open the configuration page which will allow you to increase the startup timeout to a value which allows the server to start within that time.

From here everything should be setup ready to develop applications and deploy them to the server.

Have fun.

Playing with Tech

One of the things I always liked about being at University was the opportunity to play with new technologies. Whether it was programming languages, operating systems or seeing what was coming up on the horizon.

Once I started working full time, there was still some of that with learning a new product and the technologies it employed. However as time has moved on there's been less of this kind of learning required and I've been working on other things that haven't required quite so much technical knowledge.

This year I'm hoping to get back to some more technical stuff. To that end I've picked up a new PC and am currently learning some C#, which may seem strange for a Linux/Mac/Java fan, but professional considerations need to be taken along with personal feelings about business practices.

We shall see what comes out of all this, I already have a design for one application I want to write so I may use this blog as a place to write up anything I find or to rant about things that don't go so well.

Alongside this I've started using a Twitter account I created ages ago and never got round to using. The more followers the merrier, just be prepared for the random outpourings.

Feeling very sleepy

The weekend, a time to relax and chill out after a week in the office.

Well that should be the plan, however when you're holding the call out phone (or at least have it diverted to you) there's always that risk that you'll need to look at some kind of customer problem. Well that happened last night :(

Having decided to not stay up watching TV and be good about getting some sleep the phone went off. Two hours later I got to bed, but it's tricky to sleep when there's a chance you'll have to get up again. At 6am I did need to get up again but fortunately not for as long.

Fortunately it doesn't look like this one is going to reoccur this weekend and I'm really hoping that nothing else comes up.

Everything just be cool OK!