Martin Notes » Web

VirtualBox 2.1 has been released

Martin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:34:40 +0000

VirtualBox 2.1 has been released. Apparently it is a major update from the 2.0.6 release. Check this installation guide to update or install.

Enterprise performance

Martin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:02:01 +0000

I’ve been working with a lot of enterprise software during my whole career and it keep surprising me that almost no enterprise tool has any consideration for performance. I understand that the pricing is usually per CPU, which makes performance a less interesting feature for sales. But it goes too far.

How is it possible that you are advised to run 1 Oracle WebLogic Portal instance on 1 CPU? I know portal is not comparable to PHP, but a factor 1:1000 is a bit to much for my liking. And Oracle is not alone in this: IBM, SAP, all of these are slow and slower. And it’s weird since we (the IT boys and girls) have fixed this a long time ago.

There is a beautiful concept called HTML caching. Yes, I know: that’s not nice, architectural incorrect, not flexible enough. Indeed, heavily personalised pages might not be the primary candidates for full page caching, but most of the websites out there still use a fairly static homepage. Cache that page!

At Componence we’ve (finally) delivered a standard caching solution to put in front of Oracle WebLogic Portal (or BEA Weblogic Portal and the result is shocking. The performance improvement is upwards of 1:20. Give it a try: http://www.wk-vet.fr. Yes, that’s portal, and it’s dynamic.

Dear enterprise architects, please stop being such principle asses and apply the most common fixes to your performance problems.

Adobe Air

Martin — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:30:52 +0000

I’m not up to date with what Adobe wants with it’s Air. But what I’ve seens from the demo’s it’s pretty cool. Whatever it really is, they’ve released it for Linux now:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

I’ve installed it and I’m looking for stuff to play with….

CSS stylesheets are more intelligent then I thought

Martin — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:20:34 +0000

Who would have guessed that you could do this with a stylesheet:

a[href $='.pdf'] {
 padding-right: 18px;
 background: transparent url(icon_pdf.gif) no-repeat center right;
}