post past :: james murty

I have been using Google Apps – Google’s set of hosted email and collaboration tools that are available from your own domain name – for some time now. The service works very well but it has one annoying drawback: many of Google’s other services and tools do not recognise your Google Apps identity. To log [...]

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When you work on a Java project with many library dependencies it can be difficult to know which Jar files contain which classes. Hunting down a particular class in a tangled mess of Jar files can be painful, especially if you need to do so on a server over a shell connection.
Here is a handy [...]

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A number of Amazon’s AWS services suffered a massive outage earlier today. For some customers, the S3 data storage service was unavailable for hours.
The forum thread where this drama played out makes for some interesting reading. Most notable is the ongoing clamour of users for information from Amazon staff about the issue, and the sparsity [...]

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A friend recently asked me how to go about writing code to access a SOAP API to perform a one-off task.
Below is the bare-bones step-by-step summary I sent him. I feel sorry for anyone encountering this travesty for the first time…

Find a good free SOAP library (eg Apache Axis)
Obtain the WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) [...]

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Amazon have announced a new API version (2008-01-01) for the Simple Queue Service. The new API promises much cheaper usage fees for the service, but the API update includes a number of major changes that are not compatible with prior API versions.
For those already familiar with SQS, you can find a detailed list of changes [...]

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I am pleased to announce the release of JetS3t version 0.6.0, available now from the JetS3t web site.
This release has been a long time coming (over a year since 0.5.0) and it includes numerous bug fixes and enhancements.

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