Norfolk Chamber of Commerce MPs Event 2016

One of the goals for Naked Element in 2016 is to make more of their Norfolk Chamber of Commerce membership. We’re doing well so far, it’s early February and we’ve already attended our second event. Both events have yielded interesting new contacts with plenty of potential for both Naked Element and Norfolk Developers.

The venue for this year’s annual Norfolk Chamber MPs event was a marquee in the grounds of the Marriott hotel. Unfortunately they were experiencing a few technical problems with a crackly PA, although this didn’t really impede the event at all. To add insult to injury, during the address by sponsors Abellio Greater Anglia, their speaker narrowly missed colliding with a falling projector screen. Despite gasps from the audience, he was fine and it generated plenty of amusement.

Following an introduction by chamber CEO Caroline Williams, Emma Hutchinson, Political Correspondent at ITV Anglia, took over introducing the MPs and chairing the event. The format was differing groups of MPs discussing issues such as linking Norfolk nationally and globally, economic growth and young people and skills. After the discussions, led by Emma, questions were invited from the audience.

The questions and discussions were wide ranging and incorporated the state of the A47 (described as a third world road as you leave Great Yarmouth), rural broadband, lack of housing, spending while interest rates are low and, as you would expect, the potential Europe exit. I was also interested to learn that offshore wind is a growing industry in North Norfolk and that the NHS still sends and receives a lot of faxes.

Much to my surprise I was very Impressed with the light-hearted approach and attitude of the MPs and the number of questions which actually got straight answers. There was plenty of conviction and not much sitting on the fence.

My overall impression was that it was an exceptionally good event and I’ll be back next year. Hopefully the technical issue will be overcome, it won’t be a Friday afternoon and Clive Lewis will be available too.

Comments

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

RESTful Behaviour Guide

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog