Archive for August, 2005

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Blog Day 2005

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005



I found out through Atomic Bombshell that apparently today (August 31st) is a special day for bloggers. It is called Blog Day. It is up to us bloggers to find 5 new blogs that are not so much like our own blog, and present them to our viewers. This in turns helps get the blogosphere connected even tighter and introduces people to new blogs.

I’m not too sure about the “new” part, but here are 5 blogs regardless. They are not so much like my own, so have some fun and check them out. Just remember to come back after you’re done.

  1. Advent Game
  2. Hecho en Mexico
  3. A Family Guy
  4. Unspoken-Life
  5. Seriously Trippy Art

One thing that I thought was interesting was the logo “Blog”. It is actually the number 3108 wich in turn is the 31st day of the of 8th month. This reminds me of hacker/gamer text known as leet speak.

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Grid Computing

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005


Aerial view of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico
Well, I pretty much have all of my computers setup with the new BOINC client and connected to the Seti@Home project. Seti is used to search for alien communication from space with data gathered from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. My Mac G3 can’t support it with the version of Mac OS X that I have installed on it. On top of that, the Mac is giving me a few problems by loading up firefox instead of showing my system. (What gives?)

Anyhow, most of the seti services services appears to have just come online today (specifically the scheduler) after a week of downtime. My clients were finally able to connect and identify themselves on the project. Oddly enough, each computer that I have shows up with duplicate entries.

Due to the large amount of traffic, I am having trouble downloading anything from seti with boinc. The statistics on the seti@home project were pretty high today as many overdue work units from other clients were returned for credits.


Aerial view of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory
In the mean time, I have joined up with the Einstein@Home project. I figure that I’ll at least have my computers do something with there idle time. Einstein looks for spinning neutron stars. Data is collected from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) here in the states. Data is also collected from the GEO 600 Gravitational wave Observatory over in Germany. As with the seti project, I found that the Einstein project also had a team called “Computer Sciences Corporation“. I joined the team but I will not show up as an active member until my pending credits are granted. You take a look at my einstein@home profile for some information about my participation.

I tried a project called climateprediction.net that downloaded a large amount of files. It is used to predict weather conditions. The work unit was so large, that my boinc client estimated that it would be completed within 60 days. Most of the einstein@home work units take 5 hours on my machine. I stopped the climateprediction.net project and deleted it.

There are many other boinc projects too, but so far Einstein is the most accessable for me. Hopefully seti will work itself out soon. Two other well known project appear to be
LHC@Home and Predictor@Home.

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Posted in Hobbies, Life | 2 Comments »

Every link is relative

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005


I ran into some problems when QA sent back a bug regarding links that only had “http”, “http:”, “http:/” and “http://” entered. Odd results would come back. After some researching, I found the following.

http – attempts to goto a directory within the current page location. (same as “http://domain.com/http” if you are looking at “http://domain.com/page.htm”)
http: – goes to the current page that you are looking at. (same as “.”)
http:/ – goes to the root domain you are linked to (same as “/”)
http:// – theoretically goes to the root of the internet – but since a website is not located for the root of the internet, the browser does nothing.

All links are relative to the internet, yes? It was just interesting to see how it worked out. The classic problem came up where users enter “www.google.com”, but the webserver just returned a message that said the page wasn’t found. Of course, they forgot to enter the protocol, so the browser would interpret it as “http://mydomain.com/www.google.com”.

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Google Talks. So what?

Monday, August 29th, 2005



So now Google has released its own IM software. This isn’t anything big as we have had services from AOL, ICQ, Microsoft, Yahoo and Skype for many years now. The media seems to be making a big deal out of Googles ability to talk to people over the internet with a microphone. I don’t see why this is big. It’s not as if Google is the first one to do this. Everyone has been doing this. The only big thing is that Google is joining everyone else.

Skype would probably be the best program for internet telephony, as it also provides the option to have a phone number so people can call you from a regular phone. Anyone can leave you voice mail if you pay for the service, and you can also dial out to regular phone numbers.

So what exactly is different with Google Talk? What is it that is cutting edge here?

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Posted in Communications, Entertainment, Hobbies | 2 Comments »

SETI@Home Boinc Upgrade

Monday, August 29th, 2005

My Seti Classic statistics show that I have completed 9,066 work units. I am comming very close to achieving the 10,000 work unit milestone. I have a few boxes that have worked long and hard on this. I am starting to fear that it is all for nothing.

I decided to give in and start looking at this “BOINC” client that the SETI@Home website has been advertising. BOINC is an accronym for Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. I logged in and found that I only have 6,209 SETI Classic work units credited to my account as of March 15, 2005. Ouch! I was under the impression that they wouldn’t move the work units over until I actually created a BOINC account.

Well, I just spent some time removing all the sofware and services running on each computer such as the Seti@Home Service and Seti Queue. I also went ahead and saved a map of the locations of each work unit that I processed from the Seti Queue web interface. I think it only remembers the last 500 units.

I setup BOINC on each machine. One of the machines is running Windows 98 and will not run BOINC as a background service. I have to be logged in in order for it to work. The other machine has Mac OS X 10.2.8, but the BOINC client requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. I would like to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4, but I don’t have enough memory for it. Such a head ache.

On top of this, I am also finding out that there service is having problems this past week and will not come back online until after this weekend. It looks like I picked the wrong time to upgrade.

Anyway, here is a link to my new SETI@Home profile. I’m glad they switched to a white background. It is hard on the eyes to read a dark web page with bright text.

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Telecommuting Dreams

Sunday, August 28th, 2005


One day, I would like to travel around the country in an RV and telecommute to work. The road calls to me to go and see the sites around me. A trip to niagra falls would be great. To walk near by and feel the mist comming off of the falls would be breathtaking. I’d love to go to see the grand canyon, yellowstone park, a few cival war memorials, parks, dams, and the like. There is just so much out there.

Until then, I can only dream. Of course, I try to keep my dreams within reason. You can’t have everything.



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Posted in Employment, Life | 1 Comment »

Lewies new doo

Sunday, August 28th, 2005


Lewies new doo
I need to interview a few people this week to help assist me with some of the programming and database work that I do. My hair has been pretty long. It has been a while since my last hair cut. It was a good reason as any to get it cut. Actually, it has been on my list of 43 things to do for a while now.

I went to the mall and walked into the Bubbles salon. Usually I have to wait a while before someone is ready. Today a woman was ready rite away.

I should have noticed the little things rite away. The woman soaped my hair three times before she was ready. Usually the staff does it once. Sometimes twice if they also use conditioner.

The trimming started to feel like it was taking much longer then usual. I started to realize that this woman wasn’t going to use an electric shaver at all. Everything was done with scissors and something that looked like a half of a scissor set.

At the end, she used a hair dryer (wow electricity!), and blew away the hair. It must have been a fairly new technology because she started to burn my head with it when she started talking with her coworkers.

Anyways, I walked away with a doo that just wasn’t too pleasing. I can at least say that I don’t have a large amount of hair on my head anymore. It should help cut back on the amount of shampoo that I use to wash it.

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Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

Lewis

Saturday, August 27th, 2005


So I was starting to wonder about my own name, Lewis. What is the meaning behind the name of Lewis? The mystery of names is sometimes so powerful that you can not stop wondering about it. There was only one thing to cure this curiosity that I had about my name.

A common dictionary will state the following:

Lewis: A dovetailed iron tenon made of several parts and designed to fit into a dovetail mortise in a large stone so that it can be lifted by a hoisting apparatus. Also called lewisson.

I am not a thing, but it is a little funny to see Lewis in a dictionary. I was really happy to see that there wasn’t some foul picture next to the term, as children often tease about. I did a little searching on the internet and found many different meanings for the name Lewis. Most meanings were of a famouse fighter or warrior.

  1. Famouse or renowned fighter
  2. (Teutonic) “famous war.” Another form is Louie. Lewis is also an English adaptation of the Celtic Llewellyn. Heroic, self-sacrificing. He is inclined to be headstrong but has an unimpeachable sense of honour.
  3. (German) Famous in Battle; famous warrior
  4. (Old English) Famous Warrior
  5. (Old German, French) renowned fighter.
  6. (German) Famous Warrior
  7. lonely, sad git, bit of a tosser

All seemed reasonable meanings for Lewis except the last one. It looked like a list of funny definitions of common names.

I also came accross a few links showing how to write my name in other languages. I found the Mayan and Elvish languages to be attractive and tried my hand at writing “Lewis” with them. I think I got a little carried away with the Mayan one.


Myan Glyph Lewis
Elvish Glyphs Lewis

Here are som links to the different languages that you can try out on your own.

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Posted in Friends and Family | 1 Comment »

Altered vision of pizza

Saturday, August 27th, 2005


I got to watch last nights Sci-Fi channels Friday Night Lineup of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica. Everything was fine. No problems at all. Today I turned on the television and all I get are weird colors. Each corner has an altered blue hue from the rest of the screen. People appear to be wearing pink shirts when they should be white. Even pizza isn’t the same as it ever was. I miss pizza.

Altered Colored Pizza

The television is only 5 years old. This isn’t something that was gradually happening, as I was able to watch a clear picture last night. I thought that it may have been due to my sound system, but the system isn’t close enough. If it was, the altered hues should have only been near the sound systems magnetic field rather then the four corners. At least I still got the sound.

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Posted in Entertainment, Life | 4 Comments »

The top 50 keywords

Saturday, August 27th, 2005


Here is a list of the top 50 keywords people use to come to my blog. I’ve categorized most.

Italian Chandelier – 140

  • italian chandelier 91
  • Italian Chandelier position 28
  • italian chandelier sex position 13
  • “Italian Chandelier” 8

Warcraft – 222

  • world of warcraft add ons 79
  • World of Warcraft addons 63
  • World of Warcraft addiction 20
  • world of warcraft add-ons 17
  • World of Warcraft Add on 15
  • wow add ons 10
  • warcraft add ons 10
  • world of warcraft installation 8

DVD – 96

  • DVD-r vs DVD+r 58
  • dvd-r vs dvd+r 14
  • dvd-r vs. dvd+r 14
  • DVD+R vs DVD-R 10

Health – 59

  • stopped up ear 25
  • ear stopped up 14
  • super ventricular tachycardia 12
  • weight loss blogs 8

iPod – 97

  • griffin roadtrip review 24
  • iPod Flea Video 16
  • ipod car mount 14
  • ipod car mounts 13
  • ipod products 12
  • ipod car accessories 9
  • Ipod flea parody 9

Programming – 31

  • ExpandableObjectConverter 11
  • redim c# 10
  • redim in C# 10

Quizes – 66

  • hogwarts house quiz 17
  • napoleon dynamite quiz 13
  • white trash quiz 10
  • sorting quiz 9
  • hogwarts sorting quiz 9
  • iq 129 8

flash gear 52
snoop dog shizzolator 20
liquid ass 17
words men use 14
fisher wood stove 14
lego mini figures 12
great rack 11
cheap hdtv 9
jpgutils.dll 9
legend of earth sea 8
Skeet launcher 7
evil clown generator 7
jpgutils.dll 7
face generator 7

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