Small Computers and the Blog Migration
CharlieStross, author of the excellent "Lobsters" novella (and apparent PeterJackson clone), writes about the usefulness of small computers. I heartily agree ...
"And the next thing: at a very specific level, mini-ITX motherboards and cases are The Way To Go. Tiny, cheap, fanless PCs with trailing-edge processors -- only 1GHz -- are nevertheless a really amazingly cool idea, especially when you start thinking in terms of turning them into personal video recorders (running things like FreeVo) or in-car GPS navigation systems. Or Beowulf clusters. Marketing hype has obsessed most punters with clock speed, so that the owner of a 2.4GHz processor sneers at their neighbour with the 2.1GHz clock -- but if both machines have the same bus frequency, memory, and disk architecture, all the extra CPU speed means is that the faster machine will spend more time in cache stalls. "Slower" computers (we're still talking faster than a Cray XMP here) that don't sound like an air conditioning system, that can run off a trickle of current and live in a case the size of a paperback book, and that are tailored to a specific task, are really useful. Me, I'm off to build a household music server to hold the contents of the 600-odd CD's cluttering up the place -- and if that works, I'm going to add a set-top box for the cable TV decoder. See you later!"
... on a totally unrelated note I'm poking around BlogSoftware again and am considering moving my blog to one of the"Blosxom's", probably PyBlosxom. I really like Blosxom's use of the file system for hierarchy, it allows very simple managment and all sorts of symlink fun for multipath taxonomies. Another nice feature is it's use of MoinMoin for formatting rules meaning I can re-use content from the spack.org wiki. The hard part is deciding where to draw the line between wiki and blog content. I have a suspicion that if PyBlosxom actually works the way I think it does I'll end up migrating more and more data that way.