BluWiki's on the up & up!

Its not much, but BluWiki's traffic has nearly doubled in the last month. The site is finally getting some use. I'm excited!

The recent spike in traffic is mainly due to three new wikis: DVRMSToolbox User Guide, BGS video, and the The Red Reporter. I'd love to see more large sites using BluWiki - it seems to be a great way to attract traffic. Nothing more rewarding than to see the site growing :)

I can only wonder what the traffic would have been like if I hadn't let the site go offline for over a week in May. Oh well - I don't think it'll happen again, I have a backup server standing by 24/7.

Added features to BluWiki

I'm kicking myself for not putting more time into BluWiki, my free wiki web host. I started BluWiki almost 2 years ago, but only now am I realizing how much demand there is out there for wiki hosting sites.



Hopefully, its not too late. I've been putting a lot of work into the site recently, including redesigning its look. The new skin is much more lightweight, which should be great for my users. Pages hosted on BluWiki will now take up the entire page, since I took out the menus on the top and the left.

My next goal is to support BluWiki sub-domains and allow users to create an entire wiki - instead of just pages on the main wiki.

Well the 2 Gb of ram has arrived

In my previous post, I was complaining about how my MacBook seemed so slooow. Well 2GB of Ram has definitely helped. In intel-native applications, the system is much faster than my powerbook. However the MS Office suite is still annoyingly slow. Thankfully, now when I'm running a non-native app, at least it doesn't slow down the rest of the computer.

However, based on my experience - if you're doing a lot of work in Word / Excel / Powerpoint - stick with a PowerBook, at least until the new office suite comes out.

Below is my ram usage when multitasking:


I haven't yet been able to use the full 2GB - the system almost allways has 512MB or more free. This is good, since it means there aren't any "page outs" - the system doesn't have to wait to load memory from the hard drive.

It also means the system would probably improve significantly with just a 1GB upgrade, since my MacBook doens't often make much use of the second GB, even though its available.

Disappointed with my new macbook...

Update: I've upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, which has helped. Click here for more.

So I just dropped $1,500 on a MacBook, less than a year after I bought a PowerBook. Based on all the benchmarks - I expected the MacBook to be considerably faster than the machine it was replacing. This is good, since I felt the Powerbook struggled when I attached it to Apple's 23" screen.

Well, so far I've been seriously disappointed. I usually multitask, and when I have several applications open, the MacBook doesn't seem any faster than my PowerBook. Granted, the MacBook only has 512MB of Ram (verses the PowerBook's 1.25 GB) - but I would still think the Core Duo would make it feel faster.

The Macbook seems fast enough when I just have 1 application running. However, when I'm running 3-5 apps (like iPhoto, iTunes, Mail.app, iChat, and Safari), the Macbook is painfully slow. It can take 5-20 seconds for the Mac to respond to mouse clicks.

However, its REALLY bad with non-universal apps. It seems these apps (which haven't been redesigned for the intel processor) slow the entire system down. The entire system can often take 30 secs - 2 minutes to respond.

Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client are some of the applications that cause the problem. As I'm writing this, I'm trying to open these apps to test them, and they won't even start! UGH! I never thought I would be going back to my PB to edit a freggin' word document.

I'll let you know what happens when I upgrade the RAM to 2GB, but I suspect it won't be much...