for when you network shares are slow... lmhosts

LMHosts has existed in Windows for ever. Well I know it has since Windows ME anyhow. It's a file thats actually very rarely used by Windows. Infact most people don't even have one. So why am I talking about a mythical file that no one uses... Well that's because sometimes it is needed and useful. Here at home I have a nice Linksys NSLU-2 or SLUG as its known. This is running the very nice UnSlung firmware and as well as providing Samba shares it has an FTP server, twonkymedia and some other bits and pieces on it. Overall it's very good and keeps me very happy. However one thing really frustrates me about it. Accessing the Samba file shares are really slow in XP and Vista. Especially slow in XP. I thought that my poor slug may have been being over worked and even that the HDD attached to it could be experiencing some issues. Luckily I decided to do some research before doing anything drastic and I stumbled on a really interesting find. I cant find the forum thread I was reading, it was on the Linksys ones, but a user had suggested that Window Networking can struggle with the device and a way to speed it up is to create / append to the lmhosts file an entry for your device. This means that your box needs to be on a static IP address, but let's be honest this isn't a bad thing. So I went to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and created myself a new lmhosts file. Then by consulting our good friend wikipedia added the following line...

192.168.2.3    mjjamesSlug           #PRE             #SLUG

So i have my ip adress for my slug, the network alias, #pre so it caches it as i use this drive alot and then a nice comment at the end saying what this is for. I wasnt sure if I expected this to improve the speed of my shares but it did amazingly. Straight away everything loaded faster, explorer wouldnt have a good long think everytime i changed folders, my slug was usable again. So now I am going to add this change to all the comps on our home network and reap the benefits. Now the question is will normal windows file shares behave better if each comp has an entry in each other comps lmhosts file, I'm unsure of this but I may give it a go, it wont be that hard to set up 3 comps on static ip's .... Anyhow if you are experiencing slow network shares, especially on a nas or similar device then why not try lmhosts. You may even love it ;)

@Media Ajax London

So Today kicked off @Media's first Ajax conference here in London. I came down yesterday with a few guys from New Mind Derek and I took the train from Liverpool and after a speedy 5.5 hr journey we got into London Euston around 9pm. Today kicked off with Dion and Ben giving us an overview on the "state of ajax". This for me at least really covered the current state of play with Ajax, touched on all the main JS libraries and gave us an insight on what is around the corner. Before lunch Derek Featherstone gave us a great session on "Real World Accessibility for Ajax-enhanced Web Apps". I must say I really enjoyed this session and found Derek to be very witty. Its also good to hear that your not the only one who thinks in terms of semantic HTML. After lunch I also thought that Christian Heilmann's "Planning JavaScript and Ajax for larger teams". This for me opened my eyes to alot of things that at present we don't do in my place of work. I'm not commenting on whether or not this is a bad thing but I am hoping that some of the things Christian highlighted is at least given a go in our work place. In particular I like the idea of having Code Reviews where your code is moderated. This isn't to keep tabs but to help you as a developer to improve your coding ability but also to ensure that good parts of your code are shared and that knowledge shared! I also took note of the YUI team's Build Process, this process consists of validating code, minifying, consolidating and then tagging as Live. If we can streamline our build process code that is put into production should be cleaner and in theory more reliable. I also personally took to heart Christian's comments on our "inner hacker". I know that I often have a habbit of letting my "inner hacker" take over during certain projects and can let this happen during development time. What Christian suggesed is to contain this for more appropiate times. I.e coding in my own time and when I have some downtime in work, which may be rare ;) By doing this I will be able to deliver projects in theory within time better but also have better code. This did strike me hard and I know it's because truth hurts, hopefully I can devote more of my inner hacker to my main site and various side projects, who knows i may even get to blog about them :D That's it for tonight, just to say after Day 1 we all ended up for a few drinks on @Media at the abbey which was cool and after that Derek, Sunny and I headed over to the Hard Rock Cafe London. Well busy but well worth the trek :D --- I will be posting all my pictures from today on my Flickr