Oracle 11gR2 on Solaris

Oracle just ran some benchmarks on their new integrated enterprise platform. Since Oracle bought Sun, they now own some of the best hardware around.

According to this article the new Oracle Solaris (RIP Sun Solaris) together with Oracle 11g R2 is lightning fast. Oracle Benchmark

3g Watchdog

The new HTC smart phone is brilliant but it is really heavy on the data side. I install this great little application that keeps track of the amount of data I use.

The QR code is available if you also want to use this amazing application.

Artmoney

I found a new way of cheating in my games. Some games are just so boring or mundane that cheating is the only way to enhance the experience. Low level cheating of course, just that little extra to take the boring out of it. This usually boils down to cheating with money. I found this nice tool to help. It is called Artmoney and works well.

Spb Software

I have been using my new Palm Treo 750v for a while now and I bought a few applications already. I will not be able to use my Treo without these applications anymore.

Most of my applications were developed by Spb Software but I did buy a simple list manager from PDA House. My current list of must have software is

• Spb Diary
• Spb GPRS Monitor
• Spb Mobile Shell
• My Checklist

I am investigating Spb Phone Suite but my Palm Treo 750v has most of the functionality it offers so $20 just for the profile management is a bit steep. I mailed Spb Software to find out if they could re-package Spb Phone Suite into a Spb Phone Suite Lite version for $10.

Why I like VMPlayer

I am using VMWare's VMPlayer extensively now and a feature I only recently discovered is that the VMPlayer will dynamically change the resolution of the guest OS when I resize the VMPlayer window, thus it is possible to have unlikely resolutions of 433x900 etc.

To me this is great, I can now run my VM alongside my other applications and it looks like just another application actually. I have a screenshot available just to give some background to why I am so impressed, just be warned it is a 1920x1200 PNG image.

VMware Player vs. Workstation

I am currently using VMware Workstation 5.5 to do my Windows development on my Ubuntu laptop, the problem is I need to buy VMware Workstation to keep on using it and I do not really have $189 to spent on it, especially since I am only using it run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

I considered using the VMware Player instead but could not find any meaningful benchmarks or comparisons so I decided to download SiSoft Sandra 2005 and do some tests myself and I am very impressed with the Player's speed.

I am not allowed to publish any benchmarks but suffice to say that I will be using the free VMware player to do my development on from now on and not the VMware workstation anymore.

Mozilla Thunderbird

I really like Mozilla Firefox so I decided to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Unfortunately Mozilla Thunderbird seems unable to communicate with my companies Exchange Server, something Evolution has no problem doing.

This is really sad because Evolution's interface is not as catchy as Thunderbird's but until Thunderbird fixes the Exchange incompatiblity I will be forced to use Evolution.

Why I like Firefox

I could never really quantify why I preferred Firefox over Opera or Internet Explorer, maybe it was because Opera isn't free or maybe because I just got tired of Internet Explorer.

Opera is "free" if you are willing to live with the adware in the browser.

I recently discovered the plugin side of Firefox. Admittandly it has been there for quite sometime but I for some reason never looked at it. Now with the new plugins of Firefox I can really quantify why I use Firefox. I haven't even started really exploring the plugin pages but my Firefox is now customized to such an extend that I actually removed some applications because I do not need them anymore.

I am very impressed with Firefox.