Google Wave gets a notifier add-on for Firefox

That was fast! Google Wave's barely been available for a week, and there's already a Google Wave Notifier extension for Firefox. The notifier sits in your status bar and shows the number of waves with unread messages in your inbox (not the total number of unread messages, mind you). It's small, unobtrusive, and checks for messages at an adjustable interval.

Of course, you can also manually refresh the notifier. Double-clicking it will take you to Wave, so you can deal with those unread messages. It's a pretty basic extension, but it's the first one out of the gate, and Google hasn't released anything official with similar functionality.

Speedup Browser Speed

When you connect to a web site your computer sends information back and forth. Some of this information deals with resolving the site name to an IP address, the stuff that TCP/IP really deals with, not words. This is DNS information and is used so that you will not need to ask for the site location each and every time you visit the site. Although Windows XP and Windows XP have a pretty efficient DNS cache, you can increase its overall performance by increasing its size. You can do this with the registry entries below:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters]
"CacheHashTableBucketSize"=dword:00000001
"CacheHashTableSize"=dword:00000180
"MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000fa00
"MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000012d

Make a new text file and rename it to dnscache.reg. Then copy and paste the above into it and save it. Merge it into the registry.