It all started with the wedding invites. Elise and I thought since we were both into games that it would be fun to make 8-bit themed invitations. So with the aid of draw.io we set out and and created the save the date invites (which we emailed out!)

In the next few months some other ideas around the theme developed and we realised that since we started with the 8-bit game theme, we had to carry it through now. For the physical invites, we decided to go a little further. Everyone who RSVPd got a "guest pack" which consisted of a glossy printed invite, venue details and a "whacky wedding word search".


That felt a little empty, so I had the idea that we should make fridge magnets of our "pixel people" using hama beads. We ended up using over 15 thousand beads, each placed by hand, for all of the magnets. Initially I didn't think it would be a big effort, but then it took us over 3 weeks to make them all. We also added heart shaped candy to fill out each of the guest packs. After all the guest packs were mailed out we found out that the glue on the magnets wasn't strong enough, causing them to fall off after a few days, doh! Nobody complained though.


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I've not done a whole lot of woodwork lately but recently my hand has been forced when our outdoor glass table shattered and left a nasty mess of glass all over the balcony. Not wanting to throw the whole thing out, I decided the situation can be salvaged with, which I thought at the time, would be a temporary cover made out of plywood. However, after getting started on the project I realised that it can be made into something nice and more permanent.

Here's the before and after photo...


I did use OpenSCAD to model the table and the new design for the top before getting into it. It looked quite good, it's definitely worth making a 3D model of something before building it for real since that allows you to visualise the final result.

The first task was collecting all of the shattered glass and cleaning out the table frame. There were quite a few pieces embedded inside the frame but all of these were easily removed. All in all there was something like 3kg of glass. Weeks later I'm still finding the odd piece here and there!


I used weather treated pine to construct a frame that would sit inside the frame of the table and would act as a support for the top. The intention was to secure this frame to the metal frame of the table, but that was not necessary in the end.


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WebLogic has an excellent administration console that lets you monitor threads but that is limited to real-time monitoring. Unless you have additional software like OEM, you have to do a little extra work to get historical performance data out of WebLogic.

Recently I had a need to check on the usage of the WebLogic thread pool and given some of the constraints I've been working with, the easiest way to do that was to go look into the WebLogic managed server logs. These were found in $DOMAIN_HOME/servers/<managed_server>/logs.

The managed server log has INFO level log entries like this...


With a few commands this can be filtered down to something more usable like a CSV file...


This gives us output that looks like the sample below (note the output of thread pool statistics are in reverse order vs what is written into the log file). The CSV file columns are thread counts for "standby, running, idle".


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I've reviewed other Metal Earth Legends kits like Groot previously and I've grown to like this series so much I had to look at more kits in the lineup. Today I decided to do something different and build two kits - Starscream and Gollum. Of all transformers, Starscream has to be my favourite and Gollum...well he is just precious!


Lets start with Starscream. This is a one and a half sheet model and fits in the medium difficulty scale for a Metal Earth kit. There is only one page worth of instructions, so it really doesn't take too long to build.


The arms were built first. They're just mirror images of one another. After the arms, the front section of the torso was next. This section of the model was made mostly of a single part which was bent and folded like origami into the front section of Starscream.


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