7 November 2005 in .Net & Tools | Comments (0)

A couple of weekends back I got a chance to play with Cuyahoga. I spotted a reference to it on Nic’s blog.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, Cuyahoga is an open source content management system (CMS). I get involved with CMS products from time to time at work (EPiServer and Microsoft Content Management Server) so I like to look at other products in that space. One thing that really impressed me about Cuyahoga was the ability to manage several sites from the one central administration area. I like it when I see some of these enterprise features available in smaller products.

While doing some reading about Cuyahoga I stumbled across an interesting site that might be useful for other people that touch on the CMS space: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/. CMS Matrix provides a comparison tool for comparing features, price etc of heaps of different CMS.

Overall I liked the experience but some of the more basic (expected?) features seemed to be lacking just a bit. I’m looking forward to playing with some of the future versions – it looks like it would be great to leverage for some personal projects. Now, if I could just work out how to pronounce Cuyahoga…

– JD

3 January 2005 in Code & Tools | Comments (0)

I’ve just been reading an interesting article about BitTorrent. Personally I’ve only every used it once – when it was first came out – and I wasn’t overly impressed. While I cast doubt over the suggested figure that BitTorrect accounts of a third of all Internet traffic it does seem to be gaining a lot of popularity.

The article involves an interview with the creator of BitTorrent but discusses more how P2P and the availability of more and more bandwidth will turn current media distribution on its head.

• Article: Click Here

Well worth the read.

- JD

2 January 2005 in Tools | Comments (1)

I’ve been playing around with Firefox for a while now (I remember trying it when it first came out because mozilla felt bloated) and this morning discovered online a really great tweak to speed it up for broadband users.

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

I’ve noticed that pages seem considerably more responsive now. Also, the text on the status bar at the bottom goes nuts (changes often) which always makes me feel like my browser is being more responsive.

• Original article: Click Here

- JD

12 December 2004 in .Net & Tools | Comments (0)

One thing that has bugged me for a while (and I have been giving some answers but wasn’t overly satisfied) is that there doesn’t appear to be any good small standalone database engines that you can integrate into a .net application.

Today I was browsing a website and came across and advert that lead me here (http://sourceforge.net/cloudscape_download.php). It’s a 2MB database system that includes OLAP support, is open source and integrates directly into Java applications (I didn’t find too much information above what was on that page, so if I’m wrong, let me know).

Where is the .net alternative? I’m pretty sick of hearing that our choice is MSDE (or the future Express edition of SQL) as that’s considerably larger than the 2MB touted here.

What is even more sad is that not only does Java have this CloudScape product but they have an array of others including the likes of the Berkeley database (which in the last few years was ported to Java).

If anyone knows more than I do in this area (which should be just about any .net developer!) feel free to chuck a comment.

- JD