The subjective time between fortnights is decreasing, I swear.


Thanks to all who have helped with previous ones, which I posted on:

• March, 2005: Sat 05 Mar 2005, Sun 27 Mar 2005


• April, 2005: Sat 16 Apr 2005, Sat 29 Apr 2005


• May, 2005: Sun 15 May 2005, Sat 28 May 2005


• June, 2005: Sat 11 Jun 2005, Sat 25 Jun 2005


• July, 2005: Sat 09 Jul 2005


• August, 2005: Sat 13 Aug 2005, Sat 20 Aug 2005


• September, 2005: Sat 03 Sep 2005, Sat 17 Sep 2005


• October, 2005: Mon 03 Oct 2005, Sat 15 Oct 2005, Sat 29 Oct 2005

I actually just got the 29 Oct 2005 problems edited in!
Thanks to crypthanatopsis and finabair for informative replies to the "Do-Not-Call" remark from last time.

Here's my fortnightly update:

• 1. iPAQ Blues - Declining Battery Life: Sting is still languishing. Is there any way I can condition it, or am I just stuck


• 2. Really slow forms in Firefox: Whatever it was, installing Firefox 1.5 seemed to get rid of it. Anyone know what it might have been, though?


• 3. Broken Acrobat Pro 7.0x in Firefox: I'm torn among reinstalling Acrobat, reinstalling WinXP Pro SP2, getting myself a Windows Vista release candidate, and burning the whole ensemble in a van, down by the river.

Now for the new questions:

Towards a faster 64-bit SMP desktop

The time has come for me to start thinking about the Uber-System. My budget is approximately $4000 ($6000 minus the $1500 cost of some peripherals including some docking hardware, and $500 safety margin). What do you recommend in a:

• Processor, dual core: Athlon FX? Intel IA64 with Hyper-Threading?


• Graphics cards: Yes, I said "cards", plural. I need dual-head at least and some multimedia co-processing, plus as fat a rendering pipeline as possible, for massforge-related, Maya 7ish, and Blendery goodness. PCI Express? Something else?


• RAM: Speed? Size? I'm ready to max it out, "whatever IT is", as the eBay commercial says.


• HDs: I'm thinking 400Gb SATA IDE and 72Gb SCSI, what do you think? Brands?


• Case: I have no idea. tmehlinger and thekuffs keep wibbling about 20-foot long cases.

The model system I have in mind is the Maximum PC 2004 "Multimedia Production Workstation" Dream PC.

To Tiki or not to Tiki, that is the question: Better CMS Security

OK, the time has come for me to add 3 new CMSes to anaire.user.cis.ksu.edu, to augment:

• GECKIES, a dormant geckies_blog Tiki


• RoboSim, an apparently-dormant Wiki for the still-active KSU Robotics Environment Simulator


• BNJ, a dormant Tiki for bayesnets that is about to become (very) active again


• LEAP-KMC, an active Tiki for the Learning-Enhanced Adaptive Parallel Kinetic Monte Carlo project (an NSF ITR project)

In addition to these, we need one each for

• EGAD (Ecological Genomics of Arabidopsis Development), an NSF FIBR project


• comptranslation


• The KSU KDD Lab - our main repository for papers, codes, and seminars

The massforge one will run off-campus for now, possibly to displace the KDD Tiki over to the new Ringil.

My questions: since everyone I've ever talked to about Tiki security has said "it isn't", what CMSes do you know of, if any, that are hardened in any verified way?
What are the pros and cons, and would you recommend them for deployment in a capacity such as the above?
Does it matter, since I have 4 other Tikis already running? What if I ran it alone on Ringil (a Windows Small Business Server 2003 system tricked out with ASP .NET) or the new Fingolfin (a Gentoo 2005.3 system)?

Notebook computer hard drives - cheaper HDs and fast cloning

I'm thinking about getting a 100Gb drive for Hirilonde, which is only 6 months old but is starting to bloat with my plutonium Banaslugs of giant .bz2 files.

a) Is there any place besides Slickdeals.net and Dell's Higher Ed page where you'd recommend I go to find ultra-cheap internal HDs?
b) What's the best setup for cloning HDs if you are lazy, jinxed (yes, very yes), and have several ThinkPads and an Inspiron? External USB adapters, PCI ribbon cables and such, etc. are all fine with me.


Thanks very much in advance!

--
Banazir