http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci14745580.html

Click on the image below to sign up to play Deathend.

The feature set of Facebook is hugely impressive and I do admit I’ve long wanted to sign up and share my pictures, status updates and more with family and friends – but only family and friends.

While reading about alternatives to Facebook I came across Diaspora. This is the first piece of software I’ve been genuinely excited about in years. The idea is that you host the open-source server running your social profile. That means you have complete comtrol over what you share. I even have a computer waiting for the task.

I’ve pledged $10.00 to support Diaspora and I can’t wait to see the final product.

You can make your own contribution to Diaspora using the Kickstarter widget in my sidebar.

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 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.

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.

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: 111,066
• RAC: 106.37
• Classic workunits: 7,453
• Classic CPU time: 81,802 hours
• S@H Status:

  online

• As of 2 Sep 2010 16:03:06 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.

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.

German biologists have discovered a new species of ant they believe is the oldest on the planet.

If it’s the oldest species on the planet then it isn’t new is it?!

New Golden Gray is based on William Pramana’s Golden Grey theme. Golden Gray was originally written for Alex King’s 2005 WordPress theme competition. In the last few years WordPress has undergone many changes and the coding requirements for themes has also changed. New Golden Gray is a rewrite of Golden Grey to meet those requirements and to exploit the new functionality of today’s WordPress, version 2.6, while preserving the aesthetic quality of the original theme.

Features
New Golden Gray has been written to include:

• Support for widgets!
• Accessibility features: access keys and friendly text browser support.
• A 404 page.
• An archive page.
• Support for GaMerZ’ WP-Print plugin.
• Gravatars.

Screen shot

Download
Download New Golden Gray 1.8 (81K).
Download William Pramana’s original Golden Grey (29K).

Support
Use the comments section for all requests for support or to recommend improvements to NGG.

What’s Next

• Improved navigation bar.
• Improved support for mobile devices.

Known Issues

• If your blog contains more than about eight page links, they will not all fit in the navigation bar and they page layout will distort.
• Some CSS3 code is used in the style sheet which won’t validate against W3C’s current CSS validation.