Big PST file

 No Responses »
Mar 242005
 

I use Outlook (came with my iPaq) and I’m not the cleaning kind. Recently I checked the size of my PST file, and saw that its size is over 800MBytes. Since the disk it’s on also houses my “internet cache”, this disk is … well … let’s say fragmented. I think there is no file on that disk that resides in one contiguous part.

Since the recent disk-switch, I have a partition with over 30GByte of diskspace, so I closed Outlook, moved the PST file to the other disk (from a SCSI-Wide disk to a IDE Ultra/100 disk) and started defrag to be able to copy the PST file back, but less fragmented.

So I thought, what would happen if I start Outlook now? Will it ask for the new location of the PST file? To my surprise it did. After pointing to it, Outlook gives a message about not being able to open “…blabla personal folder bla bla…” and then quits. When I started Outlook again, everything was there, as expected. With one exception: there was no rattling of the disk, and the startup is almost instantly. Wow. Accessing a file of over 800MBytes, and still maintaining an “instant-on” feeling really impressed me. I know Outlook isn’t the best tool around (I must use it to be able to synchronize the iPaq), but this kind of performance is superb.

 Posted by at 00:36

How do I like Mantis?

 No Responses »
Mar 222005
 

I promised you to come back and tell you about my milage with Mantis. Although I don’t think it’s the best looking issuetracker there is, it certainly is very easy to use. Things you need are there where you look. It has all the relevant features for me to keep track of my issues.

At the moment I am not working on a “real” project, so I use Mantis as a very sophisticated to-do-list/project-management-tool. I defined the projects I’m working on, and also the thoughts I have that could lead to a real program are defined as projects. Each project has it’s own issue-categories, some of them they all have in common (categories GUI, Error handling, Program logic, Installation, Configuration). Within these categories I define issues that are either bugs, feature requests, tweaks. Because each issue can be stored with a version of your project, it’s easy to define future features.

So far, it has helped me to organize my thoughts and the things I wanted to start, but remained thoughts in my head. I already have 6 projects defined, one of it actually being a project that’s “real” but is waiting for customer input on what to do next (move on to a new and improved version, or declare this version as the-end-of-it).

Thanks Scott, for pointing me in the right direction!

 Posted by at 22:50

Novell Open Enterprise Server – eval

 No Responses »
Mar 222005
 

I just installed the evaluation version of Novell Open Enterprise Server, in their included SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, under VMWare Workstation. Apart from the fact that the installation of the VMWare-tools is not as smooth as it should be (missing GCC and Linux-sources in the installation) the thing runs fine. I even have sound that works.

What I was shocked about, is Konqueror. I thought that was a decent browser, but most of the sites I checked did not render properly. My blog even looks like ordinary text, how uncool is that?

Another one for FireFox…

 Posted by at 01:23

Unix on a date?

 2 Responses »
Mar 192005
 

Thanks Mike, for blogging this one:

guru@linux:~> who | grep -i redhead | talk; cd ~; wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep;

 Posted by at 01:50

Inno Setup for OMO

 No Responses »
Mar 192005
 

Because I need to “deploy” O.M.O. to the laptop, and the program includes a data-directory with the NexusDB database, I thought: why not give Inno Setup a try?
I downloaded version 5.0.8, installed and ran it. Opening example1 made me wonder: it can’t be that simple? I changed some of the text to represent my application name etc, and press the “run” button. It worked. In about 5 minutes, including the time to download (well, that was about 3 seconds) the program itself and the source (yep, Inno Setup is Open Source). Thanks, Jordan!

 Posted by at 01:38

Clocklink

 No Responses »
Mar 192005
 

Reading the MSDN-blogs, I ran into ClockLink, a free analog-clock-in-flash provider. I included it in the navigation bar on the right. Hope you like it. It’s the local time on my server, so you know what time it is here (Enschede, The Netherlands).

 Posted by at 00:05

Project O.M.O. – working

 No Responses »
Mar 172005
 

My little project to create a program to practice conversions is done. Well, it generates random conversions, does the checking, gives you a new conversion when your answer was correct. What is still left to do:

  • Stop after maximum number of questions (user specifies number)
  • Create a timed mode, where you play against the clock
  • Redo the GUI (too much space now)
  • Maintain some “score”
  • Record the scores, with a username
  • Conversions are “from” -> “to”, but create logic for the other way around (less records in database).

The conversions are stored in a NexusDB V2 database (beta 7) and that works like a charm. I hadn’t worked with NexusDB properly yet, but V2 is clean and straightforward. Definitely worth checking out if you need a small database that can grow to a real C/S solution.

 Posted by at 23:06

Avalon and Indigo for MSDN subscribers

 No Responses »
Mar 172005
 

Microsoft has released Avalon and Indigo to MSDN subscribers. It’s part of the March 2005 CTP. You can find more details on the Longhorn Developer Center on MSDN. The big news is that both will work on Windows XP/2003, so you don’t have to use Longhorn.

 Posted by at 11:56
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