Month: November 2006

FOLLOW-UP: BOINC Manager Skin Specifications posted

What about PNG alpha channel on skin elements? For example, transparent elements on the “workunit background” should let the main GUI background seen through.

We need to investigate what is going on their. I’ll let you all know as soon as we find something out.

I would like to modify an existing manager skin like the wcg. I would only like to change some of the background graphics to brand for my BOINC team “Team ACC – Arthur C Clarke” I don’t want to change any of the buttons, tabs, etc.
How can I get a complete skin including the graphic files? With that I could replace only the couple of pieces I need.

This actually turns out to be easier than it sounds.

First off the skin manager attempts to load whatever was defined in the skin.xml file, if it can’t find the file it defaults to the BOINC default image for whatever it was looking for. So that means for your skin.xml file all you would need to define is the background image tag like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<skin>
  <en>
    <simple>
      <background_image>
        <!-- Background Image for the Simple GUI-->
        <!-- 410x540 -->
        <image>
          <imagesrc>graphic/simplegui_bg.png</imagesrc>
          <background_color>133:181:178</background_color>
        </image>
      </background_image>
    </simple>
  </en>
</skin>

So you could have a directory layout that looked like this:

+ BOINC
|
+----+ Skins
     |
     +----+ Team ACC
          |
          + skin.xml
          |
          + graphic
          |
          +---- simplegui_bg.png

World Community Grid’s skin files can be found here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/boinc/clientgui/skins/World%20Community%20Grid/

BOINC’s default skin template files can be found here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/boinc/clientgui/res/templates/skins/

I hope this helps.

—– Rom

FOLLOW-UP: Comment Submission/DNS Problems

Well I installed a newer version of dasBlog which has better error handling when using the Akismet spam blocking service.

As of right now things seem to be working with them again, I sent them a network sniff of a failure last night.

I still haven’t been able to reproduce or fix the Firefox 2.x problem. For now the solution seems to be use a different browser, I don’t like the solution but it is the only one I have at present.

—– Rom

FOLLOW-UP: Duration Correction Factor

JM7 posted a nugget of information I missed about how DCF is used in this S@H post.

Actually, ROM missed a little. A score less than 1 means that your computer finishes work faster than expected for its benchmarks. A score that is higher indicates that it finishes slower than expected for its benchmarks. It is calculated as a safety for the CPU scheduler (finish on time) and work fetch (not too much), therefore under estimates are corrected very quickly (single step) and over estimates are corrected much more cautiously.

Thanks John.

—– Rom

Comment Submission/DNS Problems

I’ve had several people tell me comments were not working the last couple of days.

It turns out two problems were happening at the same time.

My ISP’s DNS servers are freaking out about something and not fulfilling requests, and my blog could not successfully find Akismet to verify comments with.

OzzFan originally reported the problem but I had forgotten I was already logged into my blogging software and so it doesn’t run my comments through the spam filter.

I have switched my machines over to using OpenDNSDNS Servers, Akismet is still giving me a problem though so I have it disabled for right now.

Sorry about the problems everybody, I wasn’t intentionally blocking anybody from posting anything good or bad about me or BOINC.

—– Rom

ROMWNET Changes

In preparation for my move I’ve had to make a bunch of changes.

The only effect the outside world should notice is all my certificates have changed, long story short is I made my domain controller and certificate server have been converted to a virtual machine. My goal is to be able to take my whole network infrastructure with me on the plane. I should just be able to plug it in when I arrive and go.

It turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated. For some reason dcpromo croaked when I attempted to demote my original domain controller.

Apparently something was messed up and I had to use ntdsutil to forcibly remove the old domain controller and promote the new DC. What I didn’t know about was the notion of a root domain controller, apparently their are a few settings that point directly to the root domain controller and are not exposed via and of the active directory management tools.

—– Rom

Reference Articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/332199
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504/

Move Day Approaching

At the end of this month I’ll be moving to Florida. During my transition period my email and web services will be off which means my blog too.

While my email server and web server are hosted within VM’s, I do not know if I’ll have enough computer equipment available to me to have both up and running at the same time. So don’t be to concerned when my site goes down.

I’ll bring everything back up as quickly as possible, lord knows I cannot live without email anymore. 🙂

—– Rom