After 3 years of sticking with Novell, I recently switched away from openSUSE to Debian. There are a few reasons why, but I won't bore you with them. So far I'm liking it. There are a few things to set up before I settle in, and one is slow DNS lookup.
My blog is really in need of some love. One of the reasons I'm not posting very frequently (apart from just not having much to say or making time to say it) is that it is such a pain to write posts in WordPress' built in editor. I briefly considered editing in a text editor and then cut/pasting, but usually there's a mess to clean up anyway, so it's not much fun either.
I recently noticed a bug when you start GNU Emacs win32 after starting Windows Magnifier: Emacs' cursor becomes a single-pixel "caret" instead of the box cursor. This makes the cursor very hard to find.
Well, after 5 years and the setting of the Sun, Java SE 1.7 (originally code-named "dolphin") has finally been released. Joyous celebrations from the land of Duke.
There is a bug in the integration between Emacs' EasyPG and the "new" GnuPG2 that causes Emacs to not load .gpg files when running in a text terminal. It's being worked on, apparently, but in the mean-time, here is how to fix it.
Lately I've been noticing significant DNS latency when visiting certain sites. This is most obvious when my browser spends ages with "Looking up some.web.server.com..." in it's status bar. It's particularly bad at sites like wordpress.com where many pages make reference to sub-domains of wordpress.com and typically also to google.com for analytics or ads.
While my ISP's DNS infrastructure is pretty good, there are a couple of things I can do to improve DNS look-up, which makes page loads a lot quicker.