Stu ‘n’ Sonias Weblog

Abbey had her 3rd birthday last Saturday, she’s a lot more aware of the whole process this time around and made it very clear what she wanted! Pink is back in vogue…

Thanks to everyone for the presents and cards

More pics here

Comedy gold… cracks me up every time!

A busy Christmas this year with travelling to Yorkshire and days out, the girls had a great time at Grandma Walkers

For all the non believers….. Santa did bring Abbey her “pink yo-yo” as requested as well as 101 other toys and games we now have no room for!

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2010

Abbey had her first proper “trick or treat” outing this year along with Thomas, Toby, Keely, Erin and Piper….

Lots of Sugar and a spooky disco wiped out most of the kids but I think we still have enough sweets left over to fuel them all for the rest of the year!

Not had too much to update recently. We had a nice week off in early September and enjoyed a couple of nights camping in Southwold, plenty of DIY and trips to the park to make the most of what remains of the summer. Abbey has been shocking us almost daily with her cheeky and sometimes downright naughty behavior, all par for the course as a 2yr old I’m sure! Only yesterday Abbey told me sternly that I had to turn my music down as her baby was asleep. The same evening when told “Grandma is coming later while mummy and daddy go to the pub” she replied, in the finest cockney accent I’ve ever heard “going to the pub…… in Laaaaandan town?”

The picture was taken at Bewilderwood in Norfolk, I’d recommend it to anyone with young kids. Abbey was perhaps too little for a lot of the park but for older kids it is great.

I recently added a couple of PHP WebServices to my site so that I can use them for testing at work and for educational purposes. If you don’t know what a WebService is then you probably don’t need to know, if you are interested then there is a good definition here on wikipedia.

The WebServices are pretty simple at the moment, one echo’s back a name and the other does simple addition, there are flavours of the Services for RPC Encoded, Document Literal, RPC Literal and Document Encoded. I will be adding some more interesting examples over the coming months, perhaps even integrating into my gallery to serve up images in a similar way to Flickr.

The WebService page is here http://www.discostu.co.uk/stunsonia/?page_id=97 and you can either use the basic webforms I built or you can download the WSDL’s and use them in a client of your choice. The NuSOAP libraries I’ve used seem to be fairly good in that they are interoperable but it only supports SOAP and WSDL 1.1 at the moment.

Drop me a line if you have any idea’s for a more interesting WebService or if you are having problems consuming the services.

I’ve been busy building a new virtual machine today to use as a TIBCO Active Matrix instance and had around 3GB of software installation files to copy across from my local host machine running Windows7 onto my Windows 2000 VM running in VMware Workstation 6.5.

Copying a single 50MB file across the windows administration share onto my host machine was expected to take around 40 minutes :0 so moving 3GB worth would have been a nightmare.

Figuring I couldn’t be the only person with this problem and a few google searches later I deduced that this slowdown is caused by a property of the network adapter TCP/IP configuration. Specifically on Windows it is the NIC driver option for “Large Send Offload v2 (IPv4)” which when disabled increased the file transfer speed for large files.

Hope this helps anyone else suffering from slow transfer speeds onto a VM – I’m surprised I had not hit upon it before using Windows XP… maybe it wasn’t a problem in XP?

Progress update – of sorts!

I’ve decided not to run the Loch Ness Marathon in October even though I have my race number and really want to do it. I had been running on schedule (got up to 8.5 miles) to be ready a month before the race but about 6 weeks ago I started feeling unwell and have not run since!

I’m determined not to give up on the marathon and am on the lookout for another location sometime next year once I’m feeling better – anyone want to join me or have a suggestion for location?

Sare and Stew managed to find some last minute tickets to V festival last Saturday which Sonia and I graciously snapped up!

Highlights of the day for me were Dizzee Rascall, Pendulum and The Killers – a great day’s entertainment!

More pics here

Jasmine and Linda came down to stay with us for a week and in the process added a stone to our waist with all the home cooking and helped to potty train Abbey.

We spent last Sunday boating in Dedham which was nice and peaceful… at least it was until we let Jasmine take the oars!!!