Jeff's LiveJournal

In case you haven't heard yet, the grid.org distributed computing projects will be ending this week:

http://www.grid.org/home.htm

With seven years and five projects under its belt, Grid.org has successfully completed its mission: To evangelize the benefits (and demonstrate the viability and security) of large-scale Internet-based grid computing. Therefore, it is with great pride for all the accomplishments of this pioneering resource, and above all with the utmost gratitude to each of our members around the globe, that we announce Grid.org will be retiring on Friday, April 27, 2007.

It's certainly been exciting, but changes in business marketplace caused United Devices to re-consider what was important to focus its corporate resources and personnel on. Regardless, the work that had been completed by the grid.org users has already begun to produce some interesting and useful research results. A few of the identified drug compounds are already beginning to go through overseas laboratory testing for more real-world verification of the interactions.

Here's some press coverage about the shutdown:

• theinquirer.net - Grid.org shut
  
• hardocp.com - Grid.org Mission Complete
  
• the register - Reg readers total 3,238 years against cancer
  
• gridtoday - Grid From the Bottom Up
  

In other news, distributed.net has recently had its 10-year anniversary. If you're looking for a distributed computing project to move some of your computers to, we're always looking for more participants! Mathematical and crypto projects may not necessarily be as flashy as some of the other projects available, but they can still be pretty exciting.

The chaos surrounding the Daylight Savings Time change was the event that forced me to finally get my Sony T60 DirecTiVo back on the network. Ever since I moved into the new cowhouse (about two years ago), my Tivo had been with a satellite connection but without a phone or Ethernet connection. Every day my Tivo reminded me of this fact with another message ("The Recorder has not made a successful daily call for the past 720 days").

With the recent legislation to change DST, my TiVo would now begin recording my manually scheduled programs at the wrong times unless I allowed it to update itself over the network. Since I don't have a physical telephone line, and my previous attempts to use a IAXy VoIP device against Asterisk had failed, I needed to dig out my long abandoned TivoNet adapter. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get the TivoNet adapter to fit nicely inside of the DirecTiVo case so I have just left it sitting exposed on the outside of the case.

I had already started to search for boot disks in order to hack in the network drivers, but conveniently Moose reminded me that modern Tivo software now had the drivers and only needed a dialing prefix to activate the network support. After a few attempts and a replaced Ethernet cable, my Tivo is now updated for DST!

Although the lack of the DST update would only have affected a couple manual recordings (since I mostly use standard wishlists and season passes), I think the exercise was still worth it. Maybe I'll hack in the rest of the TivoWeb functionality again.

(pasketti also realized the need to update his Tivo, but unfortunately his Tivo experienced some data loss—my condolences to his Teletubbies.)

I thought it was finally time for a reorganization and cleanup of my website, so I've started migrating content over to a new URL at http://jeff.bovine.net/

(This new hostname allows me to eliminate the "www" and my username from the path, without giving up the ability to separate my content from that of friends I host.)

The new site is running MediaWiki, so it will be much more convenient to edit and maintain content. I'm hoping this will give me fewer excuses to avoid updating it.

I also updated to Gallery 2.1, which definitely seems to offer a lot of new functionality and improvements, despite the warnings against it that I've heard. I definitely like the ability to officially add links to other albums or external pages. It's also nice that I can now rename the auto-generated camera filenames (like "IMG_0248.JPG") after uploading, rather than having to do that before. I haven't yet decided whether I like having 2 more text fields for each photo (now there are Filename, Title, Summary, Description).

I'm also now trying out Dreamhost for some of my web hosting, rather than serving everything over my DSL. I definitely don't have any plans to move my email hosting to Dreamhost because I just don't want to lose any of the flexibility I have over filtering and delivery rules. Unfortunately, Dreamhost does seem to have pretty poor PHP execution speeds sometimes due to the shared hosting nature of their system.

By using lots of Apache "RedirectMatch permanent" expressions, I'm expecting my existing URLs and Google hits to transition over properly. I know nugget recently went through a similar transition and said that Google updated his existing hits and rankings pretty seamlessly.

Texas Republican congressman Lamar Smith (of the 21st district of Texas, which includes parts of Austin), introduced a bill, which he dubbed the Safety Act, to the US House of Representatives.

If it goes through, the bill would require ISPs to record all users' surfing activity, IM conversations, and email traffic and would impose fines and a prison term of one year on ISPs which failed to keep full records. As well, owners of sexually explicit websites would be forced to include warning labels on their web pages, or face jail. Finally, a 20-year "jail tariff" would be standard for anyone ordering child pornography that crosses state borders, with a $150,000 fine for the ISP that allowed the transaction to take place.

Source: vnunet.com - Republican calls for email and IM monitoring, ynot.com - Lamar Smith Revives SAFETY Act, Includes New Data Retention Provisions Aimed at ISPs

If you disagree, you can contact him directly and send him your thoughts.

For the last few months I'd been considering buying a rackmount chassis/frame to help organize the networking hardware and couple of servers that I keep at cowhouse. Even though I don't really have that much equipment, I still decided to try and get one just for the geekiness factor. I found a used Dell 24U frame for sale on Craigslist, and after several emails with some guy named "Mike" in south Austin we had arranged a meeting time for me to come and pick it up. This was only the second time I had used Craigslist to buy something (the first time being just earlier this week too).

So I go to the Public Storage he had designated and it turns out to be a familiar face--it was Fuzzy from Nuclear Taco Night! He and I both had not known the real first/last names of the other and so we were both equally surprised. :)

In any case, I now have a basic rack frame, without and sides or doors. Fuzzy had originally indicated that he had the front and rear doors, but he ended up being unable to find them so he just threw in an old Dell 1U server instead. I'm not quite sure if I have a need for another server yet.

Anyone needing to find a new home for some extra rack shelves, or an empty 4U ATX rackmount case? (I have one other system I could potentially refit into a rackmount case.)

So a few interesting things happened during the last few weeks...
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I got my replacement motherboard back from Tyan Computer Thursday, after sending it in almost a month ago because of non-functional PS2 keyboard/mouse ports. Everything works again, and I even installed some removal harddrive bays for when I want to boot to a different OS (multibooting on a single drive is always so difficult since every OS wants to overwrite the MBR with its own boot loader).

But the funny thing was that I discovered an unused, unpartitioned 80 GB hard disk that I had installed long ago and forgotten about. :)

I also participated in the Texas early voting today! Definitely better than waiting for election day, figuring out which single voting location you're supposed to go to, and then getting stuck waiting in lines. But I guess Williamson county still was not doing fancy electronic touchscreen voting, even though Travis county has already been using them for awhile.

My primary computer at home is currently disassembled, because I had to have its motherboard replaced by the manufacturer. I've had that Tyan S2880 (dual AMD Opteron watercooled) system for just sligtly over 12 months, which meant that it was out of warranty--but it appears that they're going to fix it for me anyways. The PS2 keyboard/mouse ports on it have basically been non-functional for a few months, but I've been working around it by using a USB keyboard and mouse. Although that works great for Windows XP, Windows 2003, and even FreeBSD, there are apparently problems with multiple Linux distros and USB keyboards. Because I got this system with the intention of multi-booting into different 64-bit OSes and doing porting and development, this had been a hinderance for Linux work. (And I don't yet have an AMD64 version of VMWare, if it is even publicly released yet.)

The AMD64 versions of RHES 3, Fedora core 2 and 3, SuSE 8 and 9.2 all seemed to fail in a similar way--USB keyboard support was ok at the LILO/GRUB boot loader because it was being provided by the BIOS, but not after it tried to boot the install-time Kernel and the Linux USB subsystem had partially initialized. As a result, I could not interact with the first installer UI prompt right after booting the kernel. This is apparently a commonly reported problem, and most of the forum messages I found regarding it suggested: just using a real PS2 keyboard (not an option for me), typing kernel boot options to disable the USB loading, or to re-plug USB devices just after the kernel load, but none of those helped fully. Although those installers all supported some form of remote network install by VNC that could be initiated via kernel boot options, the actual network access didn't begin without until after a few more local UI prompts that required a keyboard. So I guess I still have to wait for a couple weeks for my replaced motherboard to return. Fortunately, I still have two laptops and an older AMD Athlon XP system still at home. :)

Yesterday, Gallery v1.4.4 Release Candidate 1 became publicly available and added a number of new features, but notably it added an RSS feed of albums that have been recently modified.

Although I've been waiting for a feature like that for awhile, it didn't quite do what I needed so I rewrote it to produces an RSS feed of individual photos (not albums), sorted by upload date (not last-modified). You can view the XML output and the PHP source code for my new version.

Then I created another PHP page that used XSL source code to transform the RSS output into a human-readable web page summarizing photo additions by date.