Huffman Coding

Mom, you can skip this post… It is all geek talk.

It is only a matter of time before I hand my four year old computer down to my kids. Their nine year old computer doesn’t run the games they want to play. Chris and I seem to get along just fine with the new laptop, so we may not need to replace the oldest computer when it dies. (Although it is less likely to spontaneously die because they rarely use it anymore.)

Right now we have all our files on the desktop machine and share them over the network, but I am getting the willies trusting my Quicken data to my 7-year-old system administrators when they take over the machine.

The current object of my affection: Netgear’s Storage Center. Plop in some [mirrored!] IDE drives and my data is not subject to the vicissitudes of first graders.

As far as I can tell the network drive does not implement NFS, SMB or any other standard network mount protocol. It appears to use a proprietary UDP-based protocol from Zetera. UDP probably makes the drive pretty fast for streaming data, but it also means it requires special drivers on the client machines. Zetera says drivers are coming for Linux. We’ll see.