Base10's Technological Quandry

A confluence of technological events is surrounding Base10.

First, he just got a new and very fast computer at work. Aside from windows, he ran the Knoppix live CD from it and it was incredible, even running from the CD. Not the hyperthreaded Pentium, but pretty darn fast nonetheless.

Second, Base10 still wants to buy the MacMini. Base10 hates to admit that he would buy a computer based on design--hey that's what a girl would do--but Base10 has made this mistake before. He was an early adopter of the Tablet PC. A Fujitsu model. It really is great. That's why Base10 rarely uses it. Unfortunately. it gathers a lot of ooh's and ah's but it is not really as useful as a regular laptop. It's still a great machine, and I'll find some use for it at some point.

Third, Base10 is running Knoppix linux on his home server, but it has somewhat quirky features. For example, I cannot connect to MySQL remotely and I have tried many things. But Base10 just picked up the O'Reilly book "Knoppix Hacks" and it really helped in the tweaking department. For example, Base10 just set up his cell phone for mobile access on his every day laptop also running a hard disk install of Knoppix linux. Not an easy feat, by any measure.

Fourth, the book lists some really cool variations on Knoppix. Jeez, you could build a supercomputer with a few PC's and the Knoppix cluster distro. Base10 is even toying with the idea of turning the office network into a supercomputer for the weekend to help out some worthy computing cause. Hey, it could result in some good press too.

Fifth, the thing really holding back home hosting is not the hardware. Base10 feels confident that he could set up hosting on either a windows or linux platform rather easily. The basic learning curve is over. (Learning Perl and PHP is something else again). The problem is that Verizon is just not suited to this. Base10 is still thinking of going the AceDSL.
- posted by Base10 @ 10:28 PM