GeekForce

Well,

Ian and I went to Lacede Computer Trading on Saturday. That place is great. For a cluster nodes, or just cheap spare parts, it’s the place to go.

The were selling SGI Indigo workstations for $10.00 - they were barebones - no disks, no cd, etc. but there they were.

I found an old RAID for about $300, armed with a bunch of 9GB drives.

I’m think about something neat these days:

Here’s my latest concept:

Monster Garage for geeks:

We buy an old PC - a pentium class box, which must be converted in to a monster PC.

What are the rules of Monster Garage?

1) provide some extra unexpected functionality, that is either incongruous or somehow useful to a standard vehicle.

2) This vehicle must appear to be stock.

To translate this:

1) Provide unexpected extra functionality to an existing install of a system.
2) the machine itslef must appear to be stock.

So things like Yoshi’s mods on tech-tv dont apply - while he does a good job of providing stock systems, the case mods are too radical.

Here’s what I’m thinking right now:

Active Directory integration, and subsumption by a greedy, and smart OpenLDAP server. Imagine a monster directory, that when hooked up to any network, discovers and subsumes the function of all existing direcotyry services. All this in a stock Compaq Deskpro box…

An iBook WLAN hacking, discovery, and management monster. This would require the porting of only a little software. Since the kisMac application is so great. What we’d have to do is get the pigtail for the external antenna out of the box, that would be a bit of a challenge…