Thursday, October 26, 2006

a local personal DNS server

If you've ever played with DNS servers (like me) you'd like to know there's a free for personal use DNS server called TreeWalk

This usually makes DNS lookups faster (if used as a cache server) so your machine will appear to load web pages faster (specially if your provider's DNS servers are slow).

And is fun.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Domino Designer speed up notes.ini variable

If you're working remotely with the Lotus Designer, you might find annoying the relatively low speed of opening design elements (dbs,forms,agents,views and so on).
Of course this depends heavily of the speed connection, but this is not the point.

I came up today on a notes.ini variable which I've tested on my Domino Designer
disable_note_cache=3

Guess what, at least for me, I noticed an approx. 30% improvement in speed of opening design elements from the remote network. The only drawback I noticed is that icons of dbs do not show up in the left hand Designer navigation, which is not very bad.

So, I'm keeping it. I think this setting is supposed to stop the Lotus Client doing local cashes of design elements. Guess what, it did a lot more for me, since I can more rapidly check design elements I want.

new stepping stone

A couple of days ago I met with a friend of mine who managed to install on his laptop the xGL technology on top a Fedora RedHat distribution. Boy this is awesome !
I know Vista is having the same sort of stuff and improvements, but *nix distributions really will have something to say (if they don't already) into the desktop market. To see it in action, with my own eyes, was something cool.

Check out this video which I think was the first presentation from Novell - it's 11 minutes, be patient, won't regret it :)

Can Vista do this ?

Monday, October 16, 2006

Little experiment ...

I've been testing for couple of weeks now the Google Reader. This has been recently revamped, and I am stuck with it. My last feed reader was BlogBridge (google for it).
I do recommend the Google Reader for RSS/Atom feeds as you get same feeds on different computers with net access. From time to time it will throw errors, but hey, it's a beta :)

Additionally, I was thinking of adding my blogroll to this site, but I was to lazy to do it. You know what they say, good things happens to those who wait. And I've got my good thing now, that is I made my google reader domino blogroll public and I've linked it in this site (on the right-hand, Blogroll news).

How cool is that :)

something caught my attention . 32K limit again ?!

I stumbled upon this article via Lotus RSS Feed.

If basically say that the annoying 32K limit with the @DBLookup is still there, though it has been raised to 64K with Domino 6.x
On the other hand, I see the Domino version to which is applied is 7.0, not 7.0.1 or 7.0.2.

I have some bad memories of this limit, this is why I wrote this article.

On the other hand, I seem to gain more wisdom when upgrading environments. At least for Domino as web/application server, the best policy is to wait a few sub-releases (like Domino 7.5, or Domino 7.6). Then, test, test, test your apps on a safe environment to make sure no issues occurs. This way you'll be on the safe side. Do not assume that if 7.0.2 is out, your apps will work, even if you have 7.0.1 running.

This is because sometimes 'regressions' are included in newer releases. These are bugs which were once fixed, but appear in newer releases. Why these things happen I cannot know or explain, except that Domino is some 'code monster' for those guys coding C at IBM labs.

I wonder if the 32K regression is out there on 7.0.2 ....

Thursday, October 05, 2006

dvd player

I was using the well known BSPlayer for playing all sorts of video content. That is, until I noticed that BSPlayer comes with shitty aditional ads software. Then I start searching for alternative. And I found one, very comfy, as in free: AVS DVD Player. The site provides this player for free, and they also offer a bunch of video related tools, which might be just great to try/evaluate/buy. As I am not a video addicted junkie, I only need their player, which is great !