My You’ve Got Grid tutorial - which provides a remote execution service via email through a suite of Java scripts.

If you still haven’t checked out the tutorial and the principles in it is worth a try.

The first part of a new series of tutorials on building a grid application based on standardized web services like WSRM (Reliable Messaging) and WS-Security. The first part is an overview of the grid application (a movie storage system) and looks at the standards and how they will be used within the grid.

The tutorial is currently top pick on the IBM devWorks site:

This is a joint venture between myself and Tyler Anderson who has written a few of the other tutorials and articles I’ve written for IBM. Tyler has provided the code, based on my design guidelines and thoughts for the grid, but all the words are mine.

You can read the first part of the tutorial through this link.

Best wishes of all the season to all my readers, visitors, associates, friends and family.

Over the years many of you will have heard me mention things like Foodware, Cheffy and Foodies. All names for essentially the same thing, a recipe site that does more than just provide you with a simple way of finding recipes.

Today, 18th December, we went live and we (Suna and myself) would like you to be among the first to visit and try out the site.

The basics of the site are simple; you can search by ingredients, diet, nutrition, a whole range of keywords and you can combine all of this to pick out exactly the recipes you want. When you find the recipe you want, the recipe is fully scalable, up and down, and you can view in any of the available measurements to suit your preferences.

All recipes include full nutritional information, calories, and even the glycemic load and index for each and every recipe.

At the moment we also provide customized viewing preferences (sort order, measurements and quantities), your own cookbook and shopping list functionality.

The site is still officially in beta, but consider the bulk of the site and functionality (as advertised) to be complete and working. We do, of course, appreciate feedback and bug reports on anything that you find that doesn’t look right.

Waiting in the wings, there’s a meal planner, recipe ratings, comments and the ability to add your own recipes - all with full nutrition and searching capabilities from the moment you add it to the database.

Please visit the site: http://cheffy.com

We also have a blog where we are asking for comments in input at http://blog.cheffy.com.

Please feel free to contact me or use the contact form on the sites to convey your views.

And meanwhile, spread the word!

Robi Sen, friend and fellow IBM developerWorks author, has written a great piece on using SQL databases from within Eclipse.

He’s done a great job on what was originally my idea and outline but which I just didn’t have the time to carry forward when the proposal was approved by IBM.

The tutorial covers the use of SQLExplorer (my favourite interface) and Clay (which I admit I’ve probably never extracted the best from because I don’t have time to devote to it at the moment). From Robi’s own intro:

Learn how to use Eclipse and the SQLExplorer plug-in to connect to any database that supports a JDBC driver. These tools allow you to view database schemas, view table data, add and edit table data, and write, edit, and execute SQL. You will also learn how to use Azzurri Clay to create Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), reverse-engineer databases, add tables, edit tables, delete tables, edit relationships, add indexes, and change your underlying data model into different SQL dialects.

If you do any sort of database development using Eclipse you should at least check out the article and better still, add the plug-ins to your environment.

It can be quite a surprise to see your name in a magazine when you didn’t expect it…

There I am, reading the latest issue of Linux Journal (January 2006), and there I am, quoted in their ‘They Said It’ section at the front.

They chose to quote my mega Solaris/Linux/Distributions post. Just the first couple of sentences:

If there’s one aspect of Linux that has lead to its popularity it is the ability of a suitably enthused individual to produce their own distribution. It has spawned thousands of different solutions and, in turn, has lead to the creation of numerous tools and products that we all find useful.

Apache 2.2.0 is out and ServerWatch asked me to do a quick write up of the main features and some thoughts on whether you should upgrade to the latest version.

I’ll leave my recommendations for the article, but if you use Apache 2.2.0 for serving websites, and even more importantly if you develop Apache modules and components, then you should check out the article to find out the realy differences between the previous stable release and the new one.