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.

SETI@Home is far behind with only 16k.

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

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.

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

References

• Maps Ohloh project
• Semantic Maps Ohloh project

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.