08 May 2007
I’ve recently moved and just happened across the Provincial Governments Change of Address Service.
In the fall of 2000 the Government of British Columbia started a project to develop a new service that would allow BC residents to provide their change of address information to one point of contact with the provincial government and have the information forwarded to multiple programs on their behalf.
It claims to be able to update ICBC and the Provincial Medical Services Plan so I gave it a shot. I should learn in 4 or 5 weeks time if everything was successful.
Reading down the page a bit further it states that ICBC and MSP came on as part of Phase 1… in 2001. It was expected that other Crown corporations and public services would be brought on in subsequent phases. Having worked in government contracting in the past, it’s not really a suprise to see it still stagnant at phase 1 but funny nonetheless. Our tax dollars at work.
If it works I’ll be happy.
05 May 2007
Interested post over on the Terracotta blog (actual pdf available here) concerning performance between Terracotta’s caching mechanism and the JBoss TreeCache.
If you’re in a situation where scalability (and reliability) are a chief concern, you should definitely check the open source Terracotta offering out.
Even if you don’t necessarily live in a high-throughput environment, the paper does present an interesting argument towards moving clustering from the application to the JVM.
One of the problems we commonly face at work (w/ a thick client/j2ee server application) involves the synchronization of different client states and data (ClientA changes data, ClientB, ClientC, ClientD may need to know about it). I’ve yet to really work on a project that has required scalability to the extent that Terracotta (or even JBoss TreeCache) would provide but I have come to realize the significant performance problems associated with shipping (and responding to) high-volume synchronization messages across the wire.
Might just have to play a bit more with Terracotta during our next Hack Day.
If you’re attending JavaOne this year, there’s a couple Terracotta clustering clinics planned.
05 May 2007
This just in. First National Bank of Omaha is now issuing World of Warcraft-branded Visa cards.
Accrue World of Warcraft gametime at the rate of 1% of every dollar in qualifying purchases. The World of Warcraft Rewards Visa is the only card that pays you to play.
Pretty funny if you ask me. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I live in Canada so likely won’t be seeing too many of these cards around.