Building a firewall
Apr0
Yesterday I spent a few hours building a mini pc to run a popular firewall product by Astaro. Their security gateway is a lot more than just a firewall as it can handle almost any networking task you throw at it. It does everything from load balancing to virus scanning your traffic. I found the level of control to be quite amazing with a fairly minimal impact on traffic speeds in general.
The hardware specifications I used for this are right here:
Motherboard: Intel BOXD945GCLF2 (includes dual core atom processor)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE 80GB SATA 7200RPM
Additional Network Card: D-LINK DFE-538TX
My conclusion of testing this product has been that overall it is the best linux based gateway security product I’ve ever seen. After running into issues with running my torrents and streaming media I decided not to use this product directly in front of all my home PCs because it is too much an inconvenience for myself. I really can’t stand having any slow downs or extra hassle setting up network rules to allow my programs to communicate outside my home network. The one thing that almost made me keep it was all the detailed reports on who is using bandwidth and where they are using it and over what port etc. To sum things up, this product was designed with an office in mind and not suited to my home use. When I’m bashing some zombies in Left 4 Dead or fragging some n00bs in Counter Strike I can’t have any lag and well this product just isn’t for me. I’m going to keep the security gateway installed on my mini pc so I can do some more testing and learn all of the features of this product but it simply does too good of a job blocking everything by default. I was able to get torrents and remote desktop to work from outside the network but I more so saw it as too much effort for the amount of time I want to spend configuring and maintaining my home network.
Summation time
Apr0
The time has come for bike trips and driving with the windows down and that just makes me happy inside. I’m looking forward to a Summer full of good times and for the first time in a long time my evenings and weekends will be free like the warm Summer breeze. I am finally done school as of this April and its time to let loose. 
Zune-tastic
Apr0
I’ve had a 120gb Zune for just under a year now and its one of those kinda devices that I just couldn’t live without. I take my Zune everywhere with me, I use it when I’m walking, I hook it up to my car stereo. I’ve had an iPod before and it was alright, it got the job done but it didn’t give me any reason to love it.
As far as the Zune vs iPod argument goes the key component to it for me was the software that connects the Zune to my media collection. Where iTunes feels slow and bloated to me, the multi-threaded beauty of the Zune software shines through. It feels very automatic, and in a good way. Once you set things how you like there is pretty much no maintenance. No frequent panicked patches that make you restart your system and no software constantly running in the background searching for such patches. Oh and get this, it looks better than iTunes! Have you seen the album cover wall?
It creates a dynamic background of album covers from your music collection. When available it also will download photos and album art style images and fade between those while intermittently displaying bits of information about the song.
Overall there isn’t much I could ask for from Microsoft when it comes to a media player. I don’t really use the Wifi features all that much as there isn’t all that much you can do with it but wirelessly sync your Zune and trade songs with other zune owners. I think that part needs a bit more streamlining.
But if you are in the market for a new media device this is the one.