It's all been said before...

"..and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life - and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all."

Part IV, Chapter: Howard Roark, The Fountain-Head ( Ayn Rand 1947 )

Some more stuffing....

Anyway, if you need an answer go to Answers.com http://www.answers.com/ or perhaps desire some fun techy news about flying wind farms, then go to Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/ magazine.

I like Blade Servers http://www.answers.com/blade%20server but also would recommend Google's http://news.com.com/Googles+secret+of+success+Dealing+with+failure/2100-1032_3-5596811.html approach; especially what I like to call the 3-way data rule... if you could call it that?

Rackable http://www.rackable.com/ are well worth a read about too.....

Another thing I am keeping an eye on is how to establish the ultimately flexible home entertainment system. There are many, many things to consider - not limited to, but including protocols, ports and of course cost. A good audit trail has been started over at PVRBLOG http://www.pvrblog.com/

Relationships...

Well I am back to an actual solid and easily used OS. I have played with, used and worked on Windows, Linux*BSD's - and then last week I bought an Apple MAC Mini http://www.apple.com/macmini/ running Darwin , otherwise known as OSX http://www.apple.com/macosx/ ( Panther 10.3.8 )

All I can say is it's shiny and I get a BSD underlying framework and bash style shell when I need it.... here is a screenshot of my desktop with some Konfabulator http://www.konfabulator.com/ widgets ( which incidentally you can get for WindowsXP http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.mspx
also! )

Small Medium Large

Note: The MAC OSX framework is still hugely more developed for all users than that of the original FreeBSD 4.4 on which it was based as it features some pretty cool stuff for users and developers alike; Cocoa, Quartz, Aqua and a Mach kernel etc.

Have a look over here for more information http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/

I also spent some time getting Shinobi playable on MacMAME and some other games on Snes9x, threw in the Cisco VPN client and Citrix client for work.. while simultaneously making sure I had Xcode installed and subsequently DarwinPorts + Fink.... oh yeah don't forget Desktop Switcher, Onyx, Azureus [BitTorrent], MacTheRipper, VLC, Mplayer OSX, FireFox, Audacity, HenWen and CyberDuck and I'm sure I forgot some other stuff I threw on... any comments, suggestions are welcome.... Panther; maybe pay for DiskWarrior, Konfabulator, LiteSwitchX, KeyCue, Alarm Clock Pro...

SIP slowly but surely....

With the proliferation of VOIP http://www.answers.com/voice%20over%20ip and the growing popularity of Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ as a cheap, reliable alternative to ye big olde' PBX's http://www.answers.com/pbx/ I thought I'd mention some fun stuff like:

• Asterisk@Home http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ and the
  
• IAX http://www.answers.com/topic/iax-1&method=6/ protocol; as soon *very* cheap call rates may be achievable from your SIP http://www.answers.com/session%20initiation%20protocol enabled softphone http://www.answers.com/softphone !
• While perusing the oul' Interweb I found a company called.. Blueface http://www.blueface.ie/ just starting out in Dublin, Ireland ( though there are a few more here in Sydney, Australia offering IAX trunks as this listing shows.. ) I will keep my eyes peeled...

Note: of course we must not forget that end-to-end QOS http://www.answers.com/qos/ is still not viable between most Telco's http://www.answers.com/telcos/

( similar to the interconnectivity problems with MPLS http://www.answers.com/mpls/ in heterogenous networks... although I guess GMPLS is a start http://www.mplsrc.com/faq3.shtml#GMPLS )

On Safari...

I have a fair few books, many from O'Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/ and Cisco Press http://www.ciscopress.com/ and they are a pain to lug around and access on a regular basis, so now I try to do two a few smarter things with my library when possible:

• Get CD based technical books such that you can dump them on your web server in work/home and hopefully they are also searchable as per the following two via a java applet search engine that runs on most browsers e.g. Perl CD Bookshelf http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlcdbs4/index.html Unix CD Bookshelf http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/unixcdbs2/index.html
• Join Safari Bookshelf http://safari.oreilly.com/ and maintain a bookshelf that allows you to swap in and out books on demand with quite a large and growing libarary of books ( not all O'Reilly produced! )
• Keep an eye on so called e-books from free resources like Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/

Centralised Social Bookmarks

Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/is a site on the oul' Interweb http://www.answers.com/interweb . It's a centralised way to manage your bookmarks and socially share them via members statistics and access via RSS http://www.answers.com/rss .. pretty neat as I was using Gmail http://www.gmail.com/ as a sorta' deposit/resource for these kind of bookmarks...

So why not?

Well I guess the reason I'm starting this is for some kind of record of the next while...
Tired of complexity and stupidity... this will be my quest to find the shortest distance between two points, have others help me to find it - and in the process try and 'pass-it-on' as it were...