As you can see, my connection works great tonight. About 579Kbyte/sec, and that is next to the downloads from Astraweb that are racing in…
Aug 272004
Aug 262004
I ordered 3 sets, and they all come in a nice handy pouch. I’ll do some tests with the Transcend 45x later.
Aug 262004
Perry blogs about Remobjects’ DataAbstract. I can’t decide whether DA is a good thing or not. Back in the old days, BDE was a good thing and so was ODBC. But we soon realized that you could not use native database-calls, only standardized ones. And it was slower than native calls, because an extra in-between layer was introduced. From what I read about it, DA is no different. It makes a programmers job easier, that’s good about it. But I can’t figure out if DA is another BDE/ODBC or if this is really a good product. I know their RemObjects SDK is.
Aug 252004
If you need more storage, and can’t cram another harddisk into your PC, a fileserver (mini-NAS), or a NAS is the solution. But that requires some IT knowledge. You have to setup the OS, think about authorization and what more. How about plugging a disk into the USB port? Wait, wait, now your PC must be powered on for your co-worker to access the disk.
Why not plug the disk right into the network? Wow! NDAS by Ximeta makes it possible. They’ve build a little box around a harddisk, that plugs right into your network. Everybody on the network sees the disk as if it was a local disk on their system. How cool is that? They also have more enterprise-like solutions, like disks with a built-in network-switch, but the principle stays the same.
Aug 252004
I use Mailwasher Pro (from Firetrust) as an anti-spam tool. After the trial, I decided to buy it, since it tagged the proper messages as spam, and left the rest untouched.
Nick Bolton sends an email message to you, whenever there is news from Firetrust. I don’t get spam that much, but everytime Nick announces something, I also get a lot of scam/spam messages. What is that? Is this guy selling his client-list to spammers?
I’m thinking of switching to an all-in-one solution: Norton Internet Security 2005. It is anti-virus, anti-spam, and firewall in one product. And it integrates with Microsoft Outlook (instead of running it after the checks are done).
Aug 252004
Yesterday it rained so hard at the time I was supposed to leave work, that I waited about 40 minutes for the weather to clear up. Unfortunately that meant that I was not in time to pick up my Transcend-card: the postoffice closes at 17:30, and by the time I got home to pick up the receipt to collect it, it was already 17:41. Better luck this evening.
Aug 242004
Last Friday I ordered an 1GB Transcend 45x Compact Flash card and 3 sets of 2100mAh batteries from Salland Automatisering. From the shop survey of Tweakers, I already knew they are good, but on Monday morning TPG already tried to deliver the goods (I wasn’t there, so I can collect the package this evening).
I’ll try to do some write tests with the card (using the USB interface on the S2 Pro), so I can compare that to my trusty old IBM microdrive (also 1GByte). Another MD costs about 200 euro, the Transcend card is only 99! And a real CF card is less battery-hungry than a spinning disk.
Aug 232004
I think life is not all about dreams. Of course they are very important and everybody should have dreams and try to make them come true.
But life is about expectations too. Today I had a business conversation/interview that I thought would change where my life is heading. In a very positive way, naturally. Being full of expectations, the interview could only bring down those expectations. Every rational thing that was said felt like critique, every question felt like a sting, and after the conversation I could not help feeling disappointed, angry, powerless, frustrated and what more can a person feel at the same time.
It is a couple of hours later, I talked about the interview with some people. With my girlfriend. With family. With friends. And looking back at the interview, things went really well. They were interested in what I had to say, and they asked further instead of taking what I said for granted. Meaning that they saw me as an equal business partner, not as somebody telling what his dream is.
Looking at it that way, I am very proud of myself. I made them listen. My expectations were wrong, so they were not met, but the final outcome of the interview was good or perhaps very good. I like to look at it that way. Being proud is better then being disappointed, angry, powerless and frustrated, isn’t it?
Aug 172004
If you need to testdrive Oracle 10g on Linux, you can now download installation-kits that install VMWare 4.5, Red Hat Linux or SuSE Linux and Oracle 10g and you are ready to go. You can read more about it on this page.
I think this initiative makes it very easy to testdrive Oracle on Linux, since VMWare allows you to run Linux without repartitioning your harddrive. I use it to have several installations, one for each client I have, so I don’t have to worry about policies from one interfering with policies from another client.
Aug 162004
The Windows installer I mentioned works perfectly. And the result is a working PostgreSQL 8.0 (beta 1) installation. This is how installations should be done. Well done people.