Friday, September 30, 2011

RAMDisk options for Windows

IBM Rational Application Developer can be real hard on the disk, especially when debugging in the test environment for Websphere 6. In lieu of convincing my employer that every developer should get a speedy SSD or RAM-based disk to minimize wait times between WAS6 restarts, I have been investigating the available options and have been looking at software based RAMDisks. These could even be faster than most SSD disks, in theory.
I was pleasantly surprised to find these options below are available for Windows 7:
For now, I need to test these out and see if there really is a benefit for some of the IBM RAD slowness I see on a daily basis. I will post my findings here at a later date.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Graywater Heat Reclaimation

Just some links/notes on a topic I became interested recently. Why do I find graywater heat reclaimation interesting?
  • cost saving: reduced energy bill
  • cost saving: extends the life of the water heater
  • cost avoidance: average water heater recovery times are markedly improved
  • environmental goodness
  • low/no risk: passive system with no moving parts
See

Seems like the price is around $750 for a bit of copper pipe that is supposed to last about 50 years.

Javascript: An easy to make day-of-week calculation bug