Infernus

Astute observers may notice that this site has been left bereft of content for some months now. The reasons for this are legion, but essentially summed up in that I didn’t have anything I wanted to write about. And once I did, I was too lazy to write about it: a fine example for all [...]

For various reasons I’m currently not filled with the enthusiasm to write anything here. Nevertheless, something has finally warmed my blood up enough for me to put a little effort in. And that’s the Bank of England, and the whining banking industry. The best thing Labour ever did was giving the Bank of England independence. [...]

Another distraction has been Facebook. Very popular in London, it does draw a rather neat feed of all your friends activities. It also has a nice API that allows you to pull in external content, such as Twitter or Flickr. However, there’s no way they’re letting you pull content out easily. A good example is [...]

I’ve been distracted from writing opinionated and ill-informed articles for a little while now. Why? The implosion of my last job through a lack of work. The discovery and joining of a new place of work. World of Warcraft. Mostly the latter. Unfortunately my work at JR dried up, thanks to a customer who ran [...]

We all love our stereotypes. Especially about crazy Americans who eat nothing but doughnuts, drive hummers and believe in bombing the rest of the world until it stops whining about the completely appropriate Guantamano.  Then someone goes and demonstrates there are people who actually believe such things.  There are mad people everywhere, but some are [...]

The magic of hypertext was the ability to suddenly make a glorious, if somewhat unstructured, whole from a mountain of disconnected data. And so we end up with the web, and the ability to lose hours bouncing in to Wikipedia and ending up God knows where. This is a much nicer approach than the old [...]

About the only thing I did this weekend was attend my brother-in-law’s birthday party. His boyfriend is Swedish, and so we were introduced to something new, exciting and Swedish: Smörgåstårta. Yes, sandwich cake. It’s really rather delicious. Given the Swedish had already won a place in my heart for a chocolate bar that shares the [...]

The last two days have been spent on one problem. A web service deployed on Axis 2 as an AAR module worked fine with Weblogic. It broke horribly on JBoss. The solution turned out to be sticking the JAXB2, Activation and JMS libraries in the JBoss endorsed library directory. This is really, really bad. It’s [...]

I’m playing World of Warcraft again. I thought I had broken this rather nasty habit, until they released a ten day trial for the Burning Crusade, and I found that the two new starting areas are leagues ahead of the original ones. Also, with the high-level migration to the Outland my old server, Nordrassil, is [...]

There are two big problems with online applications. One is a limited UI – you do not have the rich controls and interoperability that you do with desktop applications. The other is connectivity – you need an internet connection, and given there’s no connectivity on the Tube or most flights this can make many applications [...]