Rom Walton's view of the world
Well my stuff arrived yesterday, I’m a pretty happy fellow right now. I got my main development machine hooked up yesterday and it booted without a problem the first try.
It feels really good to be using a desktop machine with an actual office chair. Those hard wood chairs people use for dinner table chairs hurt after an hour or so.
I would be dancing right now, if I really knew how to dance. 🙂
—– Rom
Comcast doesn’t have the same type of High-Speed Internet access across the country.
Granted Adelphia was just acquired by Comcast, and so I’m dealing with a bunch of different people who either call themselves Comcast reps or Adelphia reps depending on if that department has converted yet.
In order to get my web services back online, I had to upgrade to a commercial account.
My stuff is supposed to arrive tomorrow.
Things are looking up.
—– Rom
Well, I made it to Florida and my Internet connection was finally turned on today.
Hip… Hip… Hurray…
On Monday, I need to contact the moving company to find out what is going on with the rest of my stuff, but for now I’m tickled to death.
—– Rom
Sometime in the next few days the movers are coming to pick-up my stuff, I fly out on Thursday to Florida.
So from the time that the movers arrive until my stuff is dropped of I’ll be notebook bound.
I’m hoping things go smoothly.
—– Rom
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:
|
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
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
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
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
Undoubtedly there will be changes and these are still very rough drafts but here they are:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/manager_skin.php
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/project_skin.php
I’ll take whatever feedback I can get.
—– Rom