I kind of want to build a new x86 computer, however, I’m not seeing the motherboard that I want. I kind of have a reputation for having some excessive, but relatively low cost boxes among my collection. The machine that this box runs on was built from a $50 motherboard that I bought on Ebay housing a 2600+ Athlon XP ($99) and 1536 MB of PC133 memory that I got from mwave.com for $150. So, it’s a pretty kickin’ machine for $300 worth of parts.

I’ve been thinking about getting some kind of Opteron system as a pure workstation-type machine. The only board that I can find that really interests me is the MSI Master3. It’s a swanky dual-Socket940 board with twelve DIMM slots. Unfortunately, it doesn’t AGP or a PCI-E x16 slot to run some kind of pimp video card. Word on the street is that Nvidia is going to make a killer chipset that supports dual PCI-E x16 slots for their new SLI cards. I’m looking for something similar to this MSI board with dual Socket940 support and lots o’ DIMMs with PCI-E or an AGP slot.

Involution.com has had some connectivity problems since moving onto the new server. I’ve never been able to quite figure out what they were though. Fortunately, Wilmer van der Gaast managed to help me solve them. He had a machine that could faithfully reproduce the timeout error. So, I tweaked some firewall settings, and we managed to work around the issue. Thanks again Wilmer.

I’ve had this big honkin’ Winamp playlist for some time that I’ve wanted to use with XMMS, but I could never figure out how to really do it since the Windows drive naming methodology was

R:\mp3\bah.mp3

. So, I thought about it a little while and since my mp3s are on a Linux RAID array on another machine samba mounted in Windows, I should be able to NFS mount the same partition and relabel the locations for the files. Here’s the perl I used to convert my Windows/Winamp playlist to Linux/XMMS:

perl -p -i -e 's,[Rr]:\jperrie\mp3s\,/raid/jperrie/mp3s/,; \
s,[Dd]:\mp3s\,/raid/jperrie/mp3s/,; s,(\w)[\](\w),$1/$2,g’ b2.m3u

My original playlist had some mp3s referenced from the D: and R: drives on my Windows machine. The D drive was a normal NTFS drive where I used to keep my files, and now it’s essentially a backup. The directory tree was the same as the R: drive and the RAID array (/raid).

That’s right, some crazy people with access to LN2 and a 156-Watt TEC managed to get a P4 up to over 6 GHz. You can read about it here.
With a 6 GHz computer, Doom III is almost playable at 1280×1024.

There’s lots of neat hurricane images here to look at:

• http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/hurseas2004

I have been an Microsoft Internet Explorer hold-out for a long time now. I tried various forms of Mozilla browsers, but the Netscape source code that it was based on was fairly wonky from the start of the whole Mozilla effort. I tried Phoenix, Firebird, and then Firefox on Linux and Windows in most of their iterations, however, it wasn’t until Firefox PR-1 that I started using it regularly. I switched not because of improved percieved security, but because of the features. I really like Tabbed Browsing, Active Bookmarking, and more general control over what happens when I view a web page.

As for security, I don’t suppose for one millisecond the Firefox is _actually_ more secure than MSIE, but it most likely effectively more secure. I think hackers are way less likely to turn all the door knobs on Firefox/Mozilla because people who run it are savvy enough to know about it, and less people use it overall. Also, there’s probably less prestige involved in finding a Firefox bug than an MSIE one because of the typical crowd. I can see security becoming an increasing concern for people using MSIE though. This month alone, I have spent over 8 hours fixing various problems caused by vulnerabilities in MSIE.

The newest
JPEG-vulnerability has just been exploited and released, and MS has just announced that they will stop supporting IE patches on Windows 2000. So, I think this will likely prompt business customers (and savvy home users who don’t run XP) to switch over to something that _is_ “supported” ™.

Is this the beginning of the Browser Wars v2.0? I don’t know, but my log files have been increasingly going towards the “Not-IE” column. I have seen MSIE go from 80% in 2002 to 70% in 2002 and now down to 66% of requests for all page hits this month. MSIE is still “faster” in most respects than Firefox, but probably only because all of its composite libraries are loaded when the OS boots, and other unknown special advantages.

Oh, and by the way, I still run Proximitron
even with firefox. It gets rid of 99.99999% of all nasty html and java that has the potential to exploit your browser. I highly recommend it, but it does require a nontrivial amount of configuration to work with your typically visited sites. It by default distrusts all web sites, you have to add sites that you trust to the list. I think Proximitron needs to be compiled into firefox personally, but who am I to complain?

You may be wondering why all these changes are taking place around here. The answer is that I’m about to open up the source code for involution.com right soon. I’d like to get a couple of more “features” working as well as some kind of coherent way to install the codebase. I managed to modularize everything pretty well back in July. So, with a few tweaks, this code could run pretty much any web site. Back in 2000, I actually started trying to use PHPNuke and a couple of other upstart CMS packages, but none of them really did what I wanted. So, I cobbled together a minimal mysql and php framework that I understood, and created the main database tables and php interface. Over the past four years, this code has been continually tweaked and updated to do different things, and various people have expressed interest in running it. So, I’ll likely GPL the whole system sometime this year.

I moved my web page back-over to the original format, but with the new back-end code. I was thinking that the new format was kind of hard to read. At any rate, I like involution.com the way it is. I doubt I’ll venture into hacking css for the fun of it again.