My wife and I are traveling with her parents to the Philippines and Singapore for a few weeks. Ricky had to stay, so he's going to be making new friends at a Puppy Hotel/Resort. Needless to say he wasn't exactly a happy camper yesterday (and neither were we), but we'll all be home again in no time.

I'll definitely be taking lots of photos while I'm there, so look for them on the Photo site. I'll also be checking out the Electronic Gadget's scene in Singapore. I wonder what goodies I can find that I can't find in the US. I'm also going to be stopping by the CNBC offices in Asia to visit some old coworkers and check the studios out.

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Tags: seti, rickycam, vacation, philippines, singapore, cnbc, travel, exotic, holiday, resort

I've been setting my Seti@Home boxen lately to grab the Seti Enhanced workunits (5.12 and now 5.13)... and now that Crunch3r has optimized versions for Linux and Windows, I've been regaining a few (but not all) the credits/day that I used to have in the previous version of Seti. Unfortunately Alex and Rick from the Team MacNN forums haven't compiled an optimized Seti Enhanced worker for the Mac yet and that has resulted in my heaviest hitter (a quad G5 PowerMac) dropping quickly from the Top Computers list on Seti@Home's website. At its height with the last client before the transition, I was #2 out of countless thousands of computers out there and approaching #1. Unfortunately the lack of an optimized version of Seti Enhanced that supports Altivec has seriously crippled it's credit/day performance. Oh well... I'll have to just wait until the optimized versions are ready. Of course regular users of BOINC and Seti@Home won't have to worry about this since the transition from 4.18 (or 4.02 in the case of Linux) to 5.13 will be automatic. It's only when you use an optimized version of the worker files with an associated app_info.xml (this file allows you to force use of a third-party worker or one you compiled yourself) that you have to manually upgrade the Seti Workers.

Along those same lines, UC Berkeley has released the latest Boinc client 5.4.9 with a lot of improvements (some geared towards interaction with 5.12 and 5.13 Seti Enhanced). So I've also started transitioning systems over to the official 5.4.9 from TruXoft's calibrating client 5.2.13tx37. This may result in lowered claimed credits for any remaining old Seti units, but soon that won't be a problem as there will only be a few weeks left before those units will no longer be offered. Boinc upgrades are of course manual for all Seti users (unlike "regular" seti worker updates).

Just like the previous post, if you have no clue what I'm talking about, check it out here.



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Tags: S@H, seti, seti@home, distributed computing, team Macnn, boinc

Sorry, I know it's been awhile since I've updated the site (a month actually). Things have been really hectic at work with some major projects coming to fruition. I'm finally able to merge some of my Multimedia, Flash, Video, Broadcast and Broadband tech skills and knowledge at my job, but it has taken a large portion of my free-time these days. Of course I'd rather have a lot of work to do than no work.



Seti@Home Enhanced
In the meantime I've been following the release of SetiEnhanced lately and reading the message boards. Crunch3r's new Enhanced Optimized clients are out as of yesterday and I've tried them on two of my main crunchers. I've had to actually remove the app_info.xml file because that threw up some problems (no new app file was included in Crunch3r's package this time). Oddly enough, the existing Crunch3r Optimized version of the old boinc seti client still worked ( I'd expect it to download the non-optimized client like it used to, but that didn't happen this time). We'll see how this shakes out in the transition from Boinc Seti I to Boinc Seti Enhanced. BTW- I'm using the Truxoft Boinc Calibrating client 5.3.12.tx37 on most of my crunchers. The Seti Enhanced work units should ignore any of the calibration settings due to the credit algorithm change, so no need to change my current Boinc settings. Right now I'm riding high as #6 on my team (TeamMacNN) and one of my boxes is #2 in the Top Computers list at SETI@Home's site.

And for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about.... explanation here.

Work Related:
For now, I've gotta get some sleep... I just came off an over 27 work hour shift trying to get our latest project ready for Monday's internal beta launch... *YaWN*.... my developer and qa colleagues were very VERY tired when I left, and our primary developer looked ready to collapse, but she kept on coding away, not wanting to see this project fail. I work with some pretty dedicated people... I just hope we're all rewarded for the time/blood/sweat spent.

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Tags: S@H, seti, seti@home, distributed computing, work, nbc, team Macnn, boinc