Steve Mactaggart's Blog

As I’m in Sydney at the moment, working on some BestBets development I thought that I should update on what i’m doing.  I’m working on doing some SOAP/Web service integration between an existing Java Application and a new .NET module.

Being a Java man, delving into the Microsoft world is a bit foreign to me, but still and interesting challenge.  So the research begins..  The plan is to not learn the entire .NET system, but just enough to get connectivity between the two systems.

So far a really cool resource in learning Web services in .NET is Creating Web Services with .Net and Visual Studio which was obviously provided by google.

Posted by at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m off to Sydney for some BestBets work on Thursday, and as Rach is not working at the moment she will be joining me for a few days.

Posted by at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just finished watching all of the footage that Brettly and Dave took of the Wedding.

Super effort by Brett to edit and mix down all of the content into 1 DVD movie.

He has kindly supplied me all of the raw footage, and I think that there will have to be a special Matty Video created, with all the jug drinking, head banging and all round party action.

There are some super shots and sections in the video that will bring back memories for years to come, so thats heaps again Brettly for all of your effort on the day and beyond to do all of this it completes a perfect wedding.

Posted by at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With getting my new laptop, I have been able to do things not possible for a few years… Play modern games. At the moment the only thing i’ve really looked at is The Sims 2..  I tried it on the old one, but at even the lowest detail it ran like a dog, now at full resolution with all the options on it flys.

What has this to do with Poker I hear you ask? Well thats another thing that I have seriously gotten into, not because of the new laptop, but just because I found a cool online place to play it.

I’ve been playing @ Party Poker . net for the last few days, and with WWdN posting about playing in a Poker tournament I got the urge to get in and dirty..  I got stuck playing till about 3:30 last night, on a couple of tournament tables, predominantly playing NL Holdem, but making an effort to try most forms of the game.

I’d still consider myself a serious amature, only just starting to work out some stragegy and such, but it has been heaps of fun..  We used to play poker in the real world, but it didn’t work that well, we were playing 5 card stud, or so I think, but I find hold’em is a much more strategic game.  Might have to get back into it.  On that point I did some research into getting some actual chips.. This site has some real casino grade chips, but are a US company.. want to try and find a local supplier.

Historically we have played with all different things, 1/2cent pieces, silver coins, event M&M’s.. But real chips would be so much better.

Now what does this have to do with The Sims 2 I hear you ask… I know, i’m getting there.

Wouldn’t it be cool to combine the 2. Have simulated poker partys, buy a poker table, cards and chips and be able to invite people over to play.. But not play the way the sims do now, actually play with other people, much like Party Poker . net works, but within the Sims game…

Would allow me to use the full rendering power of my new machine, while still having the fun of playing poker.

Ok, so its a tenious link, but I wanted to write about them both and that seemed like the best way to link them.

Anywho, off to fix Albert the to watch the Pies smash the Bombers…  Go the Pies.

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Headed out to play golf with Kev this arvo. We teed of about 2:00 @ Wattle Park playing with just the two of us we hoped to get around in a fairly rapid time, and given that the 1st and 2nd seemed clear when we started it looked like it might be a nice fast game.

But by the end of the 2nd we had caught the group ahead, and they were waiting on the group ahead of them..  So it seems it WAS going to be a slow day.. That caused us to change our play game, we decided to play a 2–ball, best ball game which slowed us down a bit, but let us get a bit more practice in.

In the end, I had a couple pars, and ended up with 45..  Not too bad, but given we were playing the 2 ball game, I would have been upset if it was much worse.

Its been a couple of weeks since the last hit with kev, so happy with the touch.. This years aim is to start hitting sub 40 consistantly.

Posted by at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Off to Sharkeys this morning for a ride, got there bout 10, but didn’t leave till around 11, the trip was off to Jells Park again, but this time we had supplies..  The Shark was organised and had packed some sausages and bread to have a little snack when we arrived.

I had hurt my knee at Soccer on Thursday night and was not sure how it would hold up, did a little test run around Wingate Ave to see how it felt, and it seemed that the action of riding didn’t use that part of leg as there was no pain at all, the decision was to head off and see what happens.

So off we choofed, pretty un-eventful ride, they have re-surfaced part of the track close to Sharkeys house, but apart from that, pretty standard.

Got to Jells Park, headed a bit further on to get to the BBQ’s, cooked the snags and headed home.

I have 37.6km on the Speedo so it was not much futher than a standard Jells Park trip. That brings my odomometer up to 417.7km, which is much less than I have ridden, but have had to reset the spedo a few times and lost those k’s.

Next week will probably be a ride into Vic Park to watch my brother play footy.

Update: Noticed that Sharkey is actually using dead circus, and has posted a summary of our ride too.

Posted by at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sharkey has pulled his finger out and actually posted somthing to dead circus, not sure if we’ll c much from him.. but you never know.. I just might be amazed

Posted by at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For this weeks quiz I decided to dive into the world of Java Acronyms..  We live with them daily, and some of them have even evolved to be a word of their own and not an acronym (SOAP).  So enough of the chatting, lets get quizzing.

Here are 10 Java based acronyms, name the complete extension:

1. JMS
2. JDBC
3. JCP
4. JSP
5. JTA
6. UDDI
7. JSWDK
8. BMP
9. JAXP
10. JAF

So there they are, not to hard, answers in 2 days… wanna really test yourself, check out a list of 100 Java Acronyms  Acronym Anarchy: Java Evolutions

Posted by at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever since Matty got his new D70 camera I’ve been green with envy..  We were going to get one, but decided to spend the money on the wedding/honeymoon instead.

And now I hear that Nikon have released an upgraded and downgraded version of them. Below are a few links to so reviews and previews of the new cameras…

The new Nikon D50    Nikon D50 DSLR Lets Go Digital has a preview of the Nikon D50 DP Review also previews the Nikon D50 DSLR

The new Nikon D70s    Nikon D70s Lets Go Digital previews the Nikon D70s

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting post on bute force cracking MD5 hashed passwords, not how it was done, but in the comments a discussion of salting and identifying the complexity of passwords to be hashed.

Cracking MySQL's MD5() function ... within seconds (alan.blog-city.com)

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A cool idea of wearing a cell phone flasher that notifies you of your phone ringing.

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2005/04/bling_bling_cel.html

Posted by at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How cool is this, a bike with a split rear wheel that comes together when moving then splits apart at rest…  Makes learning to ride a whole new fun process.

The Shift morphing tricycle bicycle 

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Found this interesting article PHP on Tomcat that talks about configuring tomcat to serve PHP files, which got me thinking,  I guess someone has written a servlet or a wrapper for most technologies.

I wonder if this approach makes PHP more or less secure? I havn’t tried this myself or read much of the PHP background to how this works, but it looks like it delegates to the local machines dll, which I guess bypasses all the JVM’s security manager.

Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got passed this link from Matt Collins, how cool would one of these be?

Scientific Computing

Tech Watch: Cruise Around…Jetson’s Style! 

Posted by at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick note to say that my indoor cricket system is now open to the public, if there are any Indoor Cricket teams out there that would like to use crickscore, then email me, or leave a comment and I can arrange to create access for your team.

My indoor cricket team uses crickscore to manage its fixtures, team status, results and statistics. Check out our site at Cooltools Indoor Cricket.

Update 19/4: Got a query as to why this is included in my Java category. The reason is that the technology behind the development of Crickscore is entirly java..  I posted it to this category to show what can be done with Java technology.

Posted by at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that i’m home, I have taken some photos of the new toy..  The cool thing that I have found is that it also has an SD card reader built into it, so no more having to plug in the USB card reader to copy the image from the camera…

Posted by at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After taking 3 weeks off to get married and have a honeymoon, it was back to work.  Not too bad seeing as I returned to a brand new laptop..

Been waiting for this for months now, and its finally here.  When I get home I’ll take some photos and post them up here, but in the meantime just be happy knowing that its a Dell Inspiron 6000, P4M 1.86Ghz, 15.4” (1680x1050) screen, 100Gb disk, 1024Mb Ram 802.11g and Bluetooth enabled with all the trimmings.

Yay..

And the best part, is that so far it’s heaps faster..  Will test it out over the next few days and report back on how it goes.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Had a question about the details about where we went for our honeymoon.

We were in Hamilton Island, in the Whitsundays.. Off the coast of Queensland in Australia.

We stayed at the Reef View Hotel.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry, again, to the JavaBlogs world, it seems that I was not actually removed and all my non java related posts were still heading there..  I have unsubscribed that feed from JavaBlogs now so there should only be the Java related items.

I’ll post another non-java test to make sure that they don’t show up any more.

Posted by at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Headed out this morning with Sharkey for a trip to Jells park, nice blue skys and not too much of a wind. Was more of a tail wind on the way there, and a slight head wind a few times on the way back..

Jells park is about a 36km round trip, so was a nice ride. Didn’t pull up sore or anything, even after the copious amount of cougar that i drank last night.

Still have indoor to play tonight.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

He brought an entire 1.125l bottle of cougar… and expected us to only drink a part of it….  see what happened…

As I said… a 1.125lt bottle…

And for complete sake… the front of the bottle…

p.s.this was full at about 8:00 this evening…

Posted by at 1:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

and still drunk…. drunk most of at 1.25l bottle of cougar with kev.. been though 2lt of coke tonight and basically the entire bottle of cougar…

girls are still yacking…. yack yack yack….

truely time to sleep now… c u all later.

Posted by at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

its nearly midnight and its nearly the new day….. I have to go riding in the morning with sharkey and i’m still up and drinking with kev…

Its time for drunk steve to get to bed and actually sleep…

night all…. c u in the morning.

Posted by at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of weeks ago we launched a new JSP/Servlet based application for Best Bets. This new site uses all of the Whitesquare technologies, (DCAF WAF)

Check out the new site Best Bets Sporting Guide.

Posted by at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A while ago I posted some trivia questions on the Simpsons, and naming the complete names of specific characters.

1. Grandpa Simpson
2. Sideshow Bob
3. Apu
4. Police Chief Wiggam
5. Moe
6. Mr. Smithers
7. Lennie
8. Millhouse
9. Carl
10. Dr. Hibbert

Read more for the answers:

And now for the answers

1. Abraham Simpson


2. Robert Terwilliger


3. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon


4. Clancy Wiggam


5. Moe Szyslak


6. Waylon Smithers


7. Lennie Leonard


8. Millhouse Van Houten


9. Carl Carlson


10. Julius Hibbert

Posted by at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm hoping to get my blog back onto JavaBlogs over the next few days.  I was removed due to the lack of posts in relation to Java. 

I totally agree with the issue I was causing, but it couldnt be fixed using SnipSnap, so with the move to MT I hope that a caregory for java will allow me to keep only java related posts from showing up on JavaBlogs.

This should hopefully be the first item to appear there.

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Played the back nine of Ringwood with dad, seeing as I haven’t played the back nine before I was happy with my game… There are a fair bends left, which doesn’t work well with my slice, but found that it was better to go with a 3I up the middle, then another long iron to the green.

It took a while to get settled, seeing as its been 3 weeks since the last hit, but shot 52 which I’m pretty happy with..  Dad (playing more regularly and better) shot 42.

My short irons were super today, with the SW chipping on and near abouts with all efforts.. The putter seemd to have a good time early, even tho they had cored the greens recently.

In the latter holes the greens get more challanging, requireing better chip placemement, so there were a couple there that challenged the putting.

All in all a great round, and will be back to Ringwood soon..

Posted by at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m now pretty happy with MT and BlogJet, enough to migrate to MT to be my main blog.  I have posted my last item to SnipSnap, but will watch its development and see if it progresses any.

I’ll be working over the next few weeks to work out how some of the plugins are configured, but the main thing I like here is the ability to use categories.

I’m also happy that I can now post images and files right from the laptop, directly to the blog.

So here is a few more photos from the honeymoon to keep you happy.

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brettly is working on the wedding DVD and wanted to know the music that we had, so here it is.

Ceremony Music
Kenny G - The Moment.mp3 (6648 KB)
Jamie Cullum - These Are The Days.mp3 (7870 KB)
Natasha Bedingfield - I Love You.mp3 (5069 KB)

Reception Music
Wet Wet Wet – Love is all around
Lonestar - Amazed.mp3 (3767 KB)
Jet – Are you gonna be my girl

These links are provided as a sample of the music, please make sure you purchase the albums if you enjoy the music.

Posted by at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day I posted up some images from the honeymoon. See our honeymoon photos here.

Posted by at 9:13 PM | Permalink

This is the first post from our honeymoon, and its just a quick note to test MT with this new BlogJet thing to see how it goes.

This is an image from the balcony of our room.

Posted by at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Posted by at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)