Advogato blog for dangermaus

7 Nov 2004

Sun, 7 Nov 2004 13:31:56 GMT

I sent a patch to the Trilinos team for the broken Solve() upper triangular routine in Epetra_CrsMatrix.cpp. This is my first patch accepted and consolidated into a public release. Cool :-)

In the middle of this page, there is some info on how to get damn small linux distro onto your LAKS clock. By booting from the USB clock, it is possible to mount and read NTFS partitions without knowing the Windows password.

Hubble is now compiled for Windows (with Cygwin's help) and has a new core developer.

Rene Tegel (nanobit) fixed severe issues into the GPU code involving multithreading. He added support for SMP computers as well. Finally, he got Terragen, a landscape generator into the framework. Videos of artificial landscapes generated by the GPU Team can be downloaded here. The GPU cluster has now some simple statistics online.

8 Aug 2004

Sun, 8 Aug 2004 20:52:44 GMT

Some update: I found a job at university, but only for six months. I have to work on some Trilinos code. I am sympathetic with people looking for jobs these days. It has been a hard time. In the meanwhile, I could give lectures even in "Quantitative methods of Business Analysis". I still have to ask my student if he passed the exams. No wonder if not with such a teacher.

A P2P Search Engine

The GPU project features now a plugin/frontend couple written by nanobit, that extends GPU with crawlers that index the web, in a similar manner as Google does. It is possible to query the network on this web interface or by downloading GPU (link here). Best is that it is possible to run GPU under wine, or under VMWare. This is good news, cause the port under Linux using Kylix is still ages away from being useable. Several improvements were done, in particular network connectivity should be better now, although not all problems are solved as usual. Spartacus keeps running since April as network node.

13 Apr 2004

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 12:36:05 GMT

Ouff, my thesis in computer science is finally out of the pipe and is here, written in latex and published with html2latex and pdflatex. When I begun the study, I never thought I could reach such spiritual height :-|

Spartacus strikes back

Spartacus is finally running with both Suse Linux 9 and XP. Nigia did an impressive job, he changed motherboard and processor (now an Intel Pentium IV), built by himself a power switch for the old chassis and painted it white.

Spartacus is used as meeting point for the GPU project during the day, but I have to shut it down during the night because with that noise it is impossible to sleep. During the night, another host, an Internet Access Point in Poschiavo, acts as meeting point.

22 Feb 2004

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 14:02:49 GMT

Nigia found that CPU and RAM of Spartacus are okay. But the Shuttle AK39N is dead. Now, he ordered a MSI board. Let's hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, as usual.

A tip to check for weak encryption

This is a short empiric tip from my experience, while I worked for a security company: if you have an encrypted file, and you are able to compress it at 75% of its initial size, you probably have an XOR crypted file, with a short key. If you read on literature how to crack a Vigenere, you will be able to crack a XOR, too; because they are the same. The fact that you can compress indicates that there is still much redundancy. Ciphertext generated by good ciphers never compress!

Little trouble with OpenOffice and Excel

OpenOffice 1.1 has a very powerful export function to create PDF. A bug I found in both OpenOffice and Excel is that they cannot create 3D graphs, if the numbers you are using are below 1. This happens if you want to plot probabilities for example. OpenOffice and Excel, they simply trunc the decimal part while plotting the graph!

News for GPU: Welcome to Iran, Brasil, Malaysia

14 Feb 2004

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 16:29:19 GMT

Interesting news pointed out by Slashdot: Interplanetary Internet is coming...

21 grams

Not a film worth the money. Life is enough hard without it. Gratuit violence.

GPU project

GPU was quoted in a paper by Jim McKeeth. Link is here. The paper was presented at BorCon 2003, the Borland Conference in California.

All recent news for the project:

31 Jan 2004

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 09:39:54 GMT

Globetrotter!

The GPU project has now a new strange sort of guestbook: it is a globe map where everyone can add his/her/its node. Many thanks to the Globetrotters for turning phantasy into reality.

spartacus, spartacus

Three heavy days of hacking with Nigia to bring spartacus back in life. On Wednesday, we installed the AK39N with the Athlon XP 2400 and 512 Mega RAM on board, substituing the old AMD 400 MHz. After plugging in CD-ROM and motherboard, we tried to install SuSE Linux 9. SuSE refused to install, probably because of the old Matrox Millenium 4MB graphic card. Windows 98 refused to recognize the old CD-ROM (we did not have the original floppy disk). Fortunately, SuSE Linux 7.3 Server Edition recognized everything and installed: spartacus was then very very fast, a rocket in the sky, a hunting-leopard in a turtle competition. The only problem was the cooler: we could not hear each other while working on the monster. It was like being in the bowel of a huge ship with Diesel engines.

On Thursday, we decided to buy a new cooler: 15$ housed in my pocket lost their home. I bought a timer and a new power rack for 40$ as well, so that spartacus would power on and off by itself. We were excited: we could understand Dr. Frankenstein while he was blowing life into Frankenstein junior.

While giving power to the mainboard for short times, we saw the new cooler running only for two-three seconds. Nigia could solve the problem by building inside IT another old power supply (without 3.3V output), which dedicated its power to the new cooler. The monster was now featuring two power supplies, one motherboard, three CD-ROMS, two Ethernet cards and one 15 GB hard disk... Nonetheless, the speakers were playing an acheronting sirene. The TCP/IP Oracle gave us two possible answers for that problem: wrong voltage or overheating.

But the motherboard was still refusing to run normally. Yesterday, we went to another computer shop. The Indian keymaker showed us a box filled with overheated AMD Athlons: they feature a black spot below the processor. It seems that while Pentiums can run half an hour without cooler, Athlons break after one minute. We then went back home to check if our Athlon was having this "feature", but it was not. Currently, we are investigating what could be broken...

26 Jan 2004

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:20:29 GMT

Open GL, Delphi and GPU

Amazing how fast one can develop OpenGL applications in Delphi, mainly thanks to the Delphi3D people. GPU has now a 3D mapping tool to see how the network looks like at some point in time. A screenshot is here. Delphi OpenGL port and flare effect is by Tom Nuydens, ArcBall with quaternions is by Chris Rorden. Thanks to that OS code, it took only three days to get the Network Mapper programmed.

How it works? To gather information of the network, a "gpustatus" request is sent throught the P2P network, all GPUs with a version number higher than 0.826 answer with load information and their connection list. Out of this, the 3D graph is computed (2D would have been enough, but distributed computing projects need some show :-)

btw it is now easier to stay up-to-date on the GPU project thanks to the new autoupdate feature that downloads the latest binaries of the project, including frontends.

I saw an interesting P2P protocol proposal for distributed computing here.

Latest news for the GPU project:

15 Jan 2004

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 15:42:23 GMT

Startdust met comet Wild, Spirit landed safely on Mars and Beagle is lost. At least, Mars Express is around Mars...

NSIS Install System

I used NSIS to provide a Windows installer to GPU. Very easy to use and fast! Additionally, it is under a sort of BSD-license, so that even commercial applications can use it. All recent news for the GPU project:

1 Jan 2004

Thu, 1 Jan 2004 01:14:06 GMT

Ouuuf. Happy New Year! New Year, new Release.

Network rise and fall

A big fix to the Gnutella component of Kamil: now GPUs can register to the GWebCache system and finally meet each other. But, of course, someone should run it :-( In fact, I am using my laptop as server since two days; in these two days nobody tried out GPU, or else I would have a trace in the logfile because all GPUs connect first to Andromeda, my laptop in Switzerland. Try it out here! Thank you for your clemency :-#

Austronautics

Statistics of Sourceforge are down, but I assume Hubble will stay in a bottle for a while. Btw, this is an exciting week for austronautics; will we find the missing Beagle? Will StarDust meet the comet? Will the rover safely land on Mars?

24 Dec 2003

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 18:13:05 GMT

Brave GNU World has an article on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that was held in Geneva. Modestly, I protected one antenna from dogs and old men from 3 to 6 in the morning and in the afternoon. That antenna was hearing terrorists and other dangerous individuals :-)

0.809 is released and fixes the OS shutdown bug. A new bug replaces the old one on some XP machines, if you check the "Always on Top" checkbox. Delphi 6 and 7 feature forms with transparency!

Guantanamo

Last weekend, I spoke with an inspector that went to Guantanamo: from what I heard it is a bad place for human rights, prisoners are treated far away of Geneva conventions. A shame for the U.S. tradition in international relations, in my humble opinion.