Depending on how tech-savvy you are, you may have heard about the DNS vulnerability that many DNS providers are working hard to fix. For more information about what DNS is, check out the Wikipedia page on it. Long story short, a hacker can attack an unpatched DNS server, forcing it to show you “bad” pages when you try to view something as simple as Google.com. Chances are, if you’re a typical home internet user, your DNS requests are handled by your internet service provider. Some ISPs haven’t fixed their DNS servers yet, making them still vulnerable to this kind of attack.

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So… everyone on the net has been ranting and raving about the new P45 chipset from Intel. Sure - it’s a great chipset. Low power, ICH10R, support for 45nm CPUs, blah blah blah. I’ve always been a fan of ASUS. I’ve been buying them pretty much exclusively for the past two or three years. For the most part, their board layouts are adequate, if not very good, and they’ve got pretty good support, dispite being located across the Pacific.

Then came the P5Q series. Honestly ASUS - you guys screwed this one up royally.

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I picked up a Vantec3 enclosure for one of my spare WD5000AAKS drives (see My Computers for updates), and made sure that it was one of the versions that included eSATA support. I’ve dealt with USB enclosures for a long time, and the transfer speeds are just painful. I took a couple of benchmarks using HDTach - one with the drive connected via eSATA (on the left), the other using USB (on the right).

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You may have noticed a new icon on the sidebar of this site linking to the No-www.org site. It’s something I was recently told about by a friend (the admin for the Lunarsoft website and forums) and once you think about it, makes perfect sense. The WWW mindframe came about back when the web was growing, and becoming more familiar to all of us, but actually represents a subdomain of your main domain (in my case, zxian.org). This subdomain look up requires more work by the servers that send you the website you’re seeing now. This added work means that the site lookups are not only slower for you, but for all the other people accessing that server.

Go ahead and remove that www from your websites. You can do this with a simple .htaccess rewrite rule as described on the No-www website.

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This is actually something I’ve been having my computers do for a while now, but I’ve only decided to post about it now. If you’re like me, and you leave your computer(s) on all the time, why not let them do something useful while they’re just sitting there. You can help various research projects by crunching some data for them. All it takes is a little bit of setup on your part and your computer.

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