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If you’re as addicted to SETI@home as I am you probably look for every chance to install the BOINC client on any computer possible. The default installation of the BOINC client requires administrative rights on Windows computers. If you’re working on a shared, supported or corporate computer you may not have administrative rights. Here’s the easy way around that.

1. Download the BOINC client. (Version 6.6.36)
2. Open a DOS box and change directory to the location of the BOINC client.
3. Launch the BOINC client using the “/a” flag as in “boinc_6.6.36_windows_intelx86.exe /a”
4. You will be prompted for a location to install the server portion of the application. Pick something.
5. That’s it! Launch the client using “[install path]\program files\BOINC\boincmgr.exe”

There are other flags available for the install file. Use “/?” to see them all. For help with installing earlier versions of the BOINC client read this.

I watched the movie twice this weekend. I really enjoyed it. It had a well-written story to go along with the CGI which is becoming rare in today’s action movies. It was good to see the face of Arnold once again. My only regret was that it was so short lived. I guess they spent as much money as the CGI budget allowed to keep Arnold’s face in the movie as long as possible.

I have noticed that this is the second movie in recent memory in which Christian Bale has been upstaged by a supporting actor. The last movie was Dark Knight in which Heath Ledger stole the show. Here, Sam Worthington, though not as overwhelming as Ledger, delivered a solid performance whereas Bale was just a lot of brooding and a gruff voice.

The closing to the movie sets the stage for more to come. I’m looking forward to it and I hope to see some of the new faces in Salvation reappear in the following sequels.

I have been using either Red Hat or Fedora for years on a server I ran at home. I just made the switch to Ubuntu after giving up on RH as a WAP. The problems started with my Prism 2 wireless card requiring firmware be loaded at boot-up. The firmware didn’t always “take” with Fedora sometimes causing multiple reboots before the card would work. On a whim I tried Ubuntu and everything worked right out of the box. I followed the instructions given at Ubuntu’s wiki site and had my card up and running in no time without having to boot over and over.

Ubuntu has been running flawlessly on my old Dell Dimension 4400 doing duty as a file share, data backup, and WAP, and firewall.

Goodbye, Fedora. It was just barely OK while it lasted.

Back in 2000 I was working for Intel. I worked in a lab that had a lot of client computers powered up but doing nothing. Some coworkers turned me on to SETI@Home and we started a little game of running it on as many otherwise jobless computers as were running in our lab. At one point I had a line-up of six headless desktop computers each running an Intel P2 and Linux just to run the SETI@Home task. They were tucked under a desk and one of them served as a router for the other five to provide Internet access. I liked to jokingly think of that as my own personal “supercomputer”.

My interest in SETI@Home never waned. In the last eight years I’ve had several computers pass through my hands and I always installed SETI@Home sooner or later. My last laptop was a Dell P3 running Windows XP. Windows XP absolutely killed the performance of the laptop so I long delayed installing SETI@Home. Recently I began taking an online MS course at Colorado State University. That provided the impetus to buy a new laptop. I bought an HP Pavilion with an AMD Turion 64. Now that I’ve got a new laptop my interest in SETI@Home has flared up once again. I’ve installed SETI@Home on the new laptop and it is fast. I’ve also relegated the old Dell P3 to doing nothing but running the SETI@Home task in a quite corner of the house where the constant whirring of the CPU fan won’t drive my wife crazy.

Not stopping there, I began scouring the Internet for a Wordpress plugin to display my SETI@Home participation on my blog. In past searches I had found Jason Irwin’s SETI Stats plugin. It was an effective plugin except that it used a mobile device URL for the stats data source. That data source didn’t provide the depth of stats that I wanted to display on my blog. Using Jason’s plugin, I rewrote the source code to use a more robust data source and I included a sidebar widget. The rewritten plugin is now hosted at Wordpress.org.

After all that introduction, here are my SETI@Home stats:

• tiogaplanet
• Member since 26 May 2000
• Country: United States
• URL: http://www.trassare.com
• Total credit: 69,938
• RAC: 227.57
• Classic workunits: 7,453
• Classic CPU time: 81,802 hours
• S@H Status:

  online

• As of 8 Feb 2010 19:04:01 UTC

Supporting SETI@Home is an endless task and there are many other distributed processing projects out there. I encourage anyone with CPU time to spare to get involved in any of them. For those interested in combating disease there’s Folding@home which I’ve heard some folks argue is a much more “practical” project to spend CPU cycles on compared to SETI. Another distributed computing project that searches space is the Einstein@Home project. Unlike SETI, E@H is looking for spinning neutron stars also known as pulsars.

Obviously, my favorite is SETI@Home hosted by University of California, Berkeley. If you leave at least one computer constantly running with little to do I recommend installing any one of the above tasks to put your computer to good use on a distributed computing project that suits your interest.

First, I’d like to thank Jason Irwin for his original SETI Stats plugin.

This rewritten Wordpress plugin displays user stats compiled from the SETI@Home project site. You can display your stats with a widget or with a snippet of PHP code.

• Member name
• Join date
• URL (if applicable)
• Total credit
• Recent average credit
• SETI@Home Classic workunits
• SETI@Home Classic CPU time
• Team membership (if applicable)
• SETI@Home site status
• Time of last update

Download
You can download this plugin from Wordpress.org.

Installation
After unzipping the download file, upload the folder “setihome-stats” into your “wp-content/plugins” directory.

Login to the Wordpress Administration area, choose “Plugins” from the dashboard, find “SETI@Home Stats”, and click “Activate”.

Choose “Settings->SETI Options” from the main menu and enter your SETI@Home Account number and an interval period for refreshing locally cached stats.

You can also activate the SETI@Home Stats Widget using the sequence described above.

Usage
SETI@Home Stats uses a widget to display your stats on the sidebar.

You can display your stats anywhere on your blog using

get_seti_stats();


You can see the plugin at work on the sidebar of this blog.

Bugs
None that I know of. If you find any please let me know.