I found this nifty search site called www.findsounds.com which allows you to find all sorts of sounds from all over the net. Just like Google’s Image Search
I also saw www.xara.com/products/webstyle which looks like it might be handy for helping to create buttons and stuff.
Today I played my last game of netball.It has been a fantastic 6-7 years, with three runners-up trophies in that time, including tonight where we were beaten by a better team on the night.
I’m going to feel a little strange on Sunday nights for a while, and I’ll miss the fitness aspect, but I’m not going to miss the odd injuries I picked up here and there along the way.
It’s time for the world to know…
Bernie & I are expecting our first child, due end Jan / start Feb 2003.
Does this mean I have an excuse to sit up all night and write stuff, or that all this mindless drivel gets replaced with baby photos and stories? We will see.
We all need a little cash put aside at the end of our lives so that we dont have to work till the day we die, and the pension is not the answer, or so the government bean counters say, and superannuation is not the answer, coz they look like taxing most of mine away to pay for the immediate problems. It would be great if we were all independently wealthy and didn’t have to rely on anyone else at all, but I can’t see that happening either. (For you always have the poor with you. Jn 12:8)
Is part of the problem an obsession with leaving a legacy to your kids (or someone else)? So you retire at 65 with $100,000 in the bank, why not sell that $300,000 home that most people seem to have and buy a place that is a bit smaller and easier to manage. You now have $400,000 to live on and a loan for the new house. Why bother to pay the new loan off? I’m sure at the end of your life the proceeds from the sale of that house will pay back the bank with enough left over to cover any funeral expenses. Why not take the money you have earned throughout your life and use it to enjoy the years that you have when you aren’t working.
I even went so far at one stage to think that we should all be loaned a few hundred thousand when we are younger so they we can enjoy our lives when we are younger and fitter and then spend the rest of our lives paying back and finish life with a clean slate. Of course, it doesn’t take too long to realise that not everyone is as honest as me and lots of them would spend the rest of their lives cruising around and doing nothing, and never pay anything back. Of course, that already happens now anyway.
I’m not taking into account the really poor here, someone really does need to help them out and also possibly give them a helping hand to help themselves, but I have a feeling that was better done by the church than by the government.
I’m not really sure where all these thoughts are leading, are you?
Today I found the html tag <::abbr title=Full Name”>::Abbreviation<::/abbr>:: which is used to expand on abbreviations. For example, I live in the state of VIC, which displays VIC, but when you hold the cursor over it in a html 4.01 compliant browser, it displays Victoria. In order to write this page, I also had to relearn howto display html using & lt:: and & gt:: to display < and >. All rather neat.
In talking to Steve over lunch, we began to wonder if your brain is firewalled, and your conscious mind is the DMZ, the demilitirized zone that contains the information that your subconscious (the trusted zone) will let you have. The outside world is still the outside.
So what we really need is tools to puch holes in the firewall to get faster access to the things in our subconscius.
I spent some time to get things upgraded and life has improved.
I upgraded to RedHat 7.2, which gave me improved versions of Mozilla, Koffice and Kde, which have fixed most of my problems. I’ve also moved over to Mozilla for both Mail and Web, which is tighter. I can now open Excel docs in kspread, and copy and paste between all apps.
The LDAP problem is better, in that it is now looking for names, but lastname first, which is not my preferred method. I still havent looked into mounting netware volumes. Other problems include not being able to print.
I’m barely using the VMWare app at all.
While we were testing the 2.4GHz P4, this little number from VIA arrived, and given it features the VIA Apollo P4X266A chipset, arguably a direct competitor to the Intel 845 chipset, we felt it would be interesting to compare it to the D845BG.
Admittedly the VIA motherboard has a couple of extra features, notably the integrated Promise IDE RAID controller but to be fair we did not include this in the performance tests. Obviously to kit the VIA up with multiple RAID drives would grant it a marked advantage in the hard drive performance stakes.
Other than being slightly deeper the P4XB is around the same footprint as the Intel and displays comparable care in design and workmanship. All internal connectors are sensibly located and the board boasts three DIMM slots, one more than the Intel, AGP 4x slot, five PCI slots, one less than the Intel, and a CNR connector of which the Intel has none. The P4BX’s memory ceiling is claimed to be 3GB while Intel’s is 2GB, both feature ATA 100 and USB 1.1 although Intel does have versions of its D845 motherboard with the much faster USB 2.0.
Where the P4BX does have an enormous advantage of the Intel D845BG is in BIOS tweaking. Intel do not really want you playing around and overclocking the CPU and memory, but as far as VIA are concerned it is all threre to be tinkered with.
Ok the P4XB’s advantages of RAID and overclocking aside how does the vanilla system perform when compared to the identically configured D845BG. The quick answer is pretty much on par. Overall performance in Winstone for example is within 2% with the P4XB 98% of the Intel’s score in Content Creation Winstone. In 3Dmark 2001 it’s a photo finish with the P4XB just 0.2% behind the D845BG. As far as compatibility is concerned we did not experience any problems but then given this was not an exhaustive comparison the compatibility testing carried out was rather limited.
It would however be fair to say that the VIA P4BX motherboard would be a viable alternative to the plethora of I845 boards on the market for your corporate workstation.
![](http://www.geekzone.com.au/reviews/images/motherboards/VIA-P4X266-IntelD845BG-3DM.gif")
Product: VIA P4BX-RA
Price: $320
Distributor: VIA Technologies Inc
Phone: 03 9766 8566
WEB: www.via.com.tw/jsp/en/australia/Default.jsp
Steven Turvey RMIT IT Test Lab
Now that I have a copy of VMWare, I’ve taken the liberty of moving myself off into the Linux world and trying to wean myself of Windows. The transition has not been painless, but growing never is.
I’m using Mozilla 0.7 for Web, Netscape 4.77 for mail (with Groupwise available in the VMWare window). All of this is sitting on top of a RedHat 7.1 system.
There are several things I’m concerned about:
Since my server was hacked I’m creating a spot where I can put all the links I’ve found to Security (and Linux Security in particular) so that I can find them when I want them.
netfilter.samba.org
www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/security/iptables_basics.html
securityportal.com/cover/coverstory20010122.html
www.linux-sec.net/Hacking/
www.auscert.org.au/Information/Auscert_info/papers.html
www.bastille-linux.org/
www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/
www.chkrootkit.org
www.lucidic.net/whitepapers/sholcroft-4.1-2002.html
Security Focus
www.networkintrusion.co.uk/
I’m sure I’ll find lots more