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The Heinlein Society

Building a new PC for my home "data center consolidation" effort. Here’s the equipment list (so far):

• Motherboard: MSI 975X Platinum PowerUP v2 775
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (4mb cache)
• Video: Gigabyte nVidia 7600GS 256MB Silent Pipe PCI-E 16x (GV-NX76G256D-RH)
• 2GB CORSAIR VS2GBKIT667D2 DDR2 RAM
• NEC DL-DVD Writer
• Motherboard has 7.1 DTS audio, GigE NIC, 2xFirewire, 4xUSB 2.0, 5xSATA2, 3xPIDE, RAID 0, 1, 10 onboard.
• Antec NeoHE 550W Power Supply (Fry’s had an unbelievable sale!)
  Still needed:
• External Array – local copy of Cooldrives.com article. I saw a 4 drive bay SATA array at Fry’s for $120. Very interesting….

Intent was originally to use SuSE 10.1 as the VMWare Host OS and drop WinXP, Ubuntu, Fedora, NAS, router/firewall distro and MythTV has Client OS installs. Unfortunately, the drivers for the motherboard, RAID, nVidia and audio are all Win32, so if I want to use any of the high end capabilities, then WinXP needs to be the host OS. I occasionally play games – it isn’t mandatory, but I will not purchase another copy of WinXP for this new box. OTOH, I won’t run an illegal installation on my current Windows PC either. What should I do?

Ok, everyone seems to be really confused about Mars and how close it is to earth this year, 2006. In 2003, Mars came as close to earth as it will be almost 60,000 years. For some reason, it has been making the internet spam rounds this year. Heck, even my Mother forwarded it to me.

See this article for info on the 2003 viewing. Mars to Get Closer than Ever in Recorded History in 2003

/. article – which spam filter is best?

Fast forward to 39:42 into the movie to see his rankings.

Here’s what I saw (YMMV):

1) bogofilter

2) ijsSPAM2

3) spamprobe

4) spamasas-b (learning only)

5) crmSPAM3 (1:40 ham eaten)

Of course, he immediately showed other views of the data and had different rankings. Basically, you need to decide how much real email you are willing to lose to fight any spam getting in.

GRC has been working on dynamic web content without JavaScript. Check this out

New Gizmo and router forwarding settings!

Ok, I logged into the Gizmo to make these settings: according to it (the gizmo) the following ports are reserved: 68, 16384-16403, 5060. Better than what Linksys support is suggesting. I’ll forward these from my router. VoIP quality should be perfect once this is done.

The Gizmo also has configuration settings for bandwidth management – but they aren’t clear whether they have anything to do with VoIP quality or if they help when the LAN traffic doesn’t flow thru the Gizmo.

I’ve been listening and subscribing to Podcasts recently. My favorites are:

• The Value Guys – Value Line Observer
• Security Now! – a technology podcast related to computer and network security
• PerlCast – the best hacker language
• a number of books on tape from my local library system

I’m currently listening to Red Mars and plan to listen to Green Mars and Blue Mars immediately following. Hugo Winners are almost always a good read. Heinlein is my favorite author and has won the greatest number of Hugo awards.

Today I learned about a completely legal javascript hack that scans your internal network. It isn’t a hack and doesn’t take advantage of any javascript errors. This is scary. I tried this with firefox and IE and neither worked correctly. IE always reported open with a web server. Firefox always reported closed or no server on the IP, but I run with fairly secure settings, so perhaps that is why? Who knows, but it isn’t worth it, IMO.

Basically, it isn’t safe to surf without javascript disabled. This breaks most of the web sites, but a good webmaster will allow "some" level of browsing without javascript enabled. Clearly I suck as a webmaster – on my top level page at least.

Ok, to that end, this site will be redone using CSS-only as soon as I can make it happen cleanly. Removing javascript is no small task since this is a wiki too.

Intersted in ETFs? That is ‘Exchange Traded Funds":http://www.schwabiis.com/fundfocus.html. Here’s an article titled //Five Myths of Exchange-Traded Funds//.

The ’Ultimate Buy and Hold Strategy":http://www.fundadvice.com/FEhtml/BHStrategies/0108/0108a.html is an interesting read.

Ellis Traub wrote a great book called Take Stock which describes the NAIC – Better Investing Method to investing. Highly Recommended.

A note from my sister who lives in rural Iowa …
Just to let you know, in spite of all the terrorist news, oil pipeline news, etc. the Des Moines Register’s front page reported that a 1,199 pound Hampshire-Duroc hog won first place in the Iowa State Fair’s big boar contest…..

I searched for that article, but couldn’t find it online. However, … this is almost as good! ‘Butter cow’ family stunned after cattle booted from fair

It appears to be a dead link already.