Jeroens blog

That’s right, I’m going on holiday, for no less then 10 days!

This is the first time I’m going on such a long holiday in 3 years, which is longer ago then my first ever blog post. This is also the first holiday during this period in which I won’t have internet access, making it very distinct from events such as the Chaos Communications Congress. I do hope the workaholic in me doesn’t go to insane in those 10 days Out of precaution I did copy 3 audiobooks and a bunch of physics lectures onto my MP3 player and got an extra batter pack. I’m hopeless – I know

I’m going hiking in Scotland; the real deal, with backpack and tent. I’ve actually done this many times before, once for a full month, but took a 3 year break due to several reasons. Definitely looking forward to it now though.

As I will not have internet access, I won’t be able to do any support related to the software I maintain. For Semantic MediaWiki you can of course just post on the mailing lists or ask on the IRC, where I’m sure one of the other developers or users will help you out. For the other MediaWiki extensions you can simply post on their talk pages. Or email me… I’m so going to die when I see my inbox when I get back

I’ll most likely do another blog post about this trip after I have returned.

My blog has been down for a bit over a day since I moved it to another server and didn’t update the DNS stuff correctly. I moved since my blog was being rather sluggish on my server and because I don’t have ssh access to it. This server, which is owned by a friend of me, should be faster, and I got ssh access now – lot’s of thnx for the hosting Everything seems to be working, but if you find something that broke, definitely poke me.

As I wrote a post when I reached 10k credits for the BOINC projects I’m following, and another one for the 20k threshold, here is a third one, as I now passed 30k

SETI@Home is far behind with only 16k.

About 10 months ago I moved to Gent (see blog post), and stayed at facilities provided by the university. Now that the school year is over, and I’m not a student any more, I have to move again. I’m getting my own studio in the Zebrastraat, which is where my mom currently lives. i’m staying at her place for about 2 weeks until my studio’s contract starts. Read as: free food and no dishes -> more programming time

Some pictures of me moving, taken with my new HTC desire <3:

My old setup, stripped down already for moving.

My printer, which I was hoping might just appear at it’s destination due to uncertainty, but no such luck.

My new, temporary, setup @ my moms place.

Obviously, my final setup at my own studio will be over 9000 times more awesome :d

Never guess how many credits I got on SETI@Home. Syrysly, it’s over 9000!

Meanwhile I passed the 20k line with Milkyway@home and am going to soon with Einstein@home.

Don’t know what this is all about? Check out the Wikipedia article about BOINC and my previous blog post.

I’ve been thinking about switching to GMail for a long while now, but didn’t do this since there apparently was no way to forward emails from yahoo! mail to GMail without paying for it. I got so annoyed today though, I did some Google searching, and found a rather hacky, but working, solution.

Since I won’t use my Yahoo! address any more now, I’m also importing all my emails to GMail. Considering I have over 28k (which is over 3x >9000!), staring in may 2004, this is going to take a while though

I created 2 brand new Ohloh projects for Maps and Semantic Maps. This is really cool since I can now analyse my own commit behaviour for those extensions better, as well as see contributions by other people in a more graphical way. It’s also sort of a win that I got the project named ‘maps’ there. Now time for some eye candy widgets of these 2 projects

References

• Maps Ohloh project
• Semantic Maps Ohloh project

This diff, which I seriously made without realizing how epic it was at first, is definitely worth a blog post.

Since last week I have 1 BOINC project with over 10k credits – yay. This project is Einstein@Home, which is a distributed computing project hosted by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and running on the BOINC software platform. It searches through data from the LIGO experiment for evidence of gravitational waves from continuous wave sources, which may include pulsars. Like the other projects I’m participating in, which are Milyway@home and SETI@home, I’ve been a participant for about 2 and a half months now.

What is Boinc? The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.

In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU and GPU cycles on a computer to do scientific computing—what one individual doesn’t use of his/her computer, BOINC uses. In late 2008, BOINC’s official website[6] announced that NVIDIA (a leading GPU manufacturer) had developed a system called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA’s assistance, some BOINC-based projects (e.g., SETI@home, Milkyway@home) now have applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. Beginning in October 2009, BOINC added support for the ATI/AMD family of GPUs also. These applications run from 2X to 10X faster than the former CPU-only versions.

(Above text comes from the English Wikipedia.)

I’m participating in these programs cause I refuse to be part of the “let’s waste ~80% of our CPU time” attitude most people sadly enough have.

I did a thorough overhaul of my wiki. I cleaned out the mess, put in some nice demo data, installed the latest version of Semantic Bundle, upgraded to MediaWiki 1.16alpha, put in a new logo and switched to the new (and awesome) vector skin. I also finally created decent templates and semantic data structures for my events and Semantic Maps demo’s.