I have tried several tools to read blogs and to publish on mine, I wanted to have one that combines all.

In the last blog I was talking about the end of two weeks of hell (End of two weeks of hell). I thought it was the end but it starts again this week :-(

I tried to install a new Windows 2003 Standard Server. The installation works ok. Then I use Windows Update to apply the 14 needed critical updates. Then the bad things starts. It can install 4 patches but 10 failed. Then it ask me to restart the server. And at reboot I get an error message:

As reported by Didier here. We had the chance last thursday evening to meet Mr Gordon Simpson, deputy CTO of BEA Systems.<br/><br/>

We discussed very intensively different themes, as:

• the mid-term vision and positioning of IBM Web Sphere, BEA Web Logic and the Microsoft .NET solutions
• the current standardization processes (J2EE, Java, etc.) in comparison with other ones, not so successful (CORBA specs)
• the future of SUN (HW, Java)
• the strategy of BEA concerning Linux
• UDDI: hype or market standard?
• offline solution and caching
• SOA on IBM mainframes

It is the end!!! And a good end :-) After two weeks of hard and long work, we have one of our applications in production. That’s was not without difficulties. And another part that was really important is that we have a second productive Windows 2003 Server. Our backend applications running on Windows 2003 Server are now load balanced between the two servers. And it works great with a good abstraction layer that handles discovery, call and failover of the services.

The other important part of the week is that Olympique de Marseille, my favorite French soccer team is in UEFA cup final. The match was great and it seems really to have a team spirit like in a non professional team. I like that and I think that Pascal Belaud will not say something different.