Friday 26 October 2012

Interesting question regarding building interfaces to legacy systems

Here is a very interesting question regarding building of interfaces to legacy systems; http://qr.ae/8Q3PT

What are the best ways to construct interfaces to legacy FTP systems to and from an Enterprise Java EE Websphere transactional application? 
The legacy systems only have FTP interfaces, and FTP is the only means of transferring data to and from those applications, the files are column positioned flat files and not in XML format. The FTP part of the interface is set and is not going to be changed for the foreseeable future. What are the best solutions for performing extracts of the input files, cleansing the data applying any required transforming and loading into the Enterprise application’s transactional database? Is the concept ETL in terms of BI systems applicable in this type of domain? What technologies are out there to do this? Can it be done in Java / is that advisable, are there better ways to do this than in Oracle Stored Procedures with staging tables? What mechanisms / patterns perform well and are scalable?

Backup disk not available - Apple Time machine


After migrating from one Apple MacBook Pro to the next, Time Machine / Time Machine then complained that "Backup disk not available". What follows is details of how I was able to resolve the issue;

1) Turned off Time Machine on and off again to no avail
2) Can access time capsule via finder
3) In time machine options/preferences chose "select disk" and from the available disk I selected my computer "data"
4) It then said "inherit backup history" previous computer will no longer be able to backup - say yes
5) Then there is a long wait whilst time machine is "looking for backup disk"
6) Then it said "the backup disk ***sparsebundle is already in use and cannot backup
7) So I logged on previous MBP and went to Finder and opened the time capsule folder and clicked "Disconnect" at the top
8) I then tried selecting the disk again, error again that it is in use
Checked the log/console by filtering on "backupd" and it showed the sparse bundle was already mounted and it couldn't unmount it
9) So I went to finder on my new MBP and clicked the circular eject button next to it (The Time capsule drive)
10) I retried selecting the disk in time machine preferences and it asked me if I wanted to inherit again
11) This time the log looked better, and the time capsule went into "preparing mode"
Warning, it remained in "preparing mode" for a very long time before it started generating any further logs and doing anything
12) It disconnected part way through over night, I started it again, and it failed without an error message, I kicked it off again this time it started but it wanted to back up 200+GB, so I cancelled it, then I read that it will delete old backups when it runs out of space - so I have restarted the backup again, fingers crossed.
13) The backup is now working and it is logging its progress (occasionally) as it writes the backups

Sunday 21 October 2012

Safari iPad bookmarks disappeared

On iOS 6 Safari iPad 2, the bookmarks suddenly disappeared. All it took was a reboot and they came back! Phew. Source here https://discussions.apple.com/message/20080755#20080755


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Maps Fail

Search for "South America" in Apple maps;



And searching for "South America" in Google maps!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad