Author: Tommy

This is my newest toy. It arrived this afternoon. Its quite impressive. Very fast for what it is, and the silence is quite nifty.
Its a fully-functional motherboard made by VIA. It sports a heat-sink for the CPU and chipset (no "loud" fans needed!), on-board video, PC133 memory access, one PCI slot, onboard network and onboard sound - all in 6.75" x 6.75"!!!

So what am I going to do with it? When I go off to school in the next week or so, I want to take Neodux with me, but I don't want to hear it. Enter the solid state reincarnation of neodux! I'm going to use the EPIA P5000 motherboard, my IDE-to-Compact Flash adapter (to boot off a CF card instead of those loud hard drives) and run from 512Mb of PC133 (later 1Gb). So, no moving parts!

update : Talk about quiet! Its almost eerie to not hear this thing in action. I found an awesome distro called SmoothWall. I am completely blown away. It works right from the get-go, quite secure, installs from a 21Mb ISO on CD, and fits nicely onto my 256Mb CF with room left over. Best part is, its all configurable from a web-interface. Really an amazing distro. I can't believe there hasn't been more buzz around it.
for more info on other miniITX projects, visit mini-itx.com.

I've been learning Regular Expressions lately. I must say, they are very nifty. Knowing them will save you alot of time if you're trying to match a word or string of characters from an outside source. I found this page that seems to be pretty easy to understand and geared towards those that are learning regex's.
If you are learning, try using them in vi or awk.

And now for something for all the speed-geeks. This was a post I had on the old neodux site, here is the link again. It's good reading for any geeks out there. (Probably completely useless to anyone else.)
In short, it's a how-to for creating a linux swap partition using your left-over video memory.

And, for those of you wishing to just boot from a non-volatile RAM-disk, go buy a CompactFlash disk and get a CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter. (There's nothing particular special about that one, its just the first of many) CF has very low seek times even compared against the fastest SCSI drives.

I'm sure most of you know what a book worm I've become. Some kind of computer book junkie. Well, I buy quite a bit from Amazon.com and I typically find what I'm after in their Used Books section. I'm also a big fan of Halfprice Books. I also check out are the sales tables at book stores and stuff. For some good deals, not just on books, check out Overstock.com. Anyways, without listing too many more sites, I found most of them linked from ISBN.nu. What you do, is find the book you're after, give it to isbn.nu and it will search all of the best online book retailers and give you the breakdown of the pricing. (kinda a searchable-salescircular.com for books)
FYI: PHP Cookbook is freaking awesome!

I just found this article from ONLamp, a member of the O'Reilly network, to be quite helpful in understanding Sessions and Cookies in PHP.
I hope to incorporate this setup into Neodux shortly, to allow users to post their own stories, instead of just myself and the other admin-level users.
The biggest holdup has been my summer classes, which will be over soon enough, and about time!

I also hope to finish up this calendar widget-thingy to the left, within the week.