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| Troubles in paradise(Boinc) written by bigbee on 16:03:09 10/06/2009 |
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| Due to technical issues at home (a HD crash) the boinc.be teamstats will only be back available, starting from 20-21 June. Thx for your patience bb |
| Last edited by bigbee on 16:03:42 10/06/2009 |
| Le eeePC est arrivé(Linux) written by bigbee on 17:57:21 16/07/2008 |
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| I have failed... For months I have fought the temptation to buy an eeePC, a low cost (+-300€) ultralaptop by Asus with linux (!) installed as it primary OS. The unavailability in Belgium also helped stretching the time untill my purchase, but since a few days I'm looking at a tiny and shiny white machine, the result of my defeat, with my favorite OS installed on it. 900Mhz of raw CPU, a solid state hard disk of 4GB, 512 MB of RAM are hidden under its hood and still it weighs less than a kilogram (920 grammes), including the battery. "Eeeepc" stands for Easy learning, Easy working, Easy playing, and that's what it does, nothing more, nothing less. Don't expect to perform cpu/gpu intensive tasks like gaming or 3D design, but it's suited for writing mails, watch pictures and video's, typing documents, spreadsheets, surfing and all the other stuff you can do on the internet these days. So it would fullfill about 90% of the needs of people that use a computer for their professional or personal life. The small formfactor (7" screen and the size of a pocket book) can be a problem but attach an external screen and keyboard/mouse to it, and you have an office/laptop solution with a minimal carbon footprint as energy consumption is rather low. The success of the eeepc has grown out of proportion due to its rather low cost and the internet is filling up with blogs, how-to's, ... about this little gem. A hype is born... Other hardware manufacturers are pushing their design department for a quick release of a similar product. The standard OS can be Windows or Linux, with the standard install for Linux being an adapted version of debian-based Xandros, including all the major desktop applications like Firefox, Open-office.org, Skype... I replaced it by Debian Lenny to get a more personalised system but it's a relief to see all the hardware working straight out of the box and the desktop performing smoothly. At each beginning of a new year, a lot of people on the linux-side of IT-industry proclaim it's going to be the year of the linux desktop because of the better hardware support, cooler desktops, better applications... This year, thanks to the success of the eeepc, completely unexpected, that prediction might become reality... |
| Visit to Cern Geneva Switzeland (5/4/08-6/4/08)(General) written by bigbee on 22:13:57 07/04/2008 |
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| Did you know you probably have your own particle accelerator at home? In the back of your television or CRT computer screen an electron gun shoots electrons. Guided by magnetic fields they are accelerated towards your screen where they hit an array of phosphoric junctions, emittins nice green, blue or red rays of light and so creating a nice moving pictures. Now imagine this at a much larger scale and instead of creating images on your screen, you want to create collisions of these particles to see what happens... At CERN (European center for nucleair research) in Geneva Switzerland, they have over a half century of expertise in building particle accelerators and doing research on the most fundamental building blocks of the laws of physics. This year their latest giant construction will be commisioned: the large hadron collider or LHC. In a 27km long, circular tunnel at a depth of 100m that was build for a former experiment (the large elektron proton collider or LEP), the people of CERN have build the largest particle accelerator of the world. About 500 engineers and 2000 scientists have joined their efforts to give protons an energy of 7-8 TeV and let them collide, hoping to create particles and phenomena that will give us a greater understanding of our universe, matter, ... The discovery of the Higgs-boson and supersymmetric particles will confirm the work of theoretical physicists and help to create a grand unified theory, the theory that explains all... Grab yourself 2 27km circular tubes, located 100m below the surface, create a high vacuum within them, create a high magnetic field around them with superconducting magnet coils, cooled to -269°C, put some 12500 ton sensors where the particles will collide, build an accelertor center to put the particles into orbit, build a spot where you can put in some extra juice into them and finish with a large piece of materials to shoot everything into, in case there might go something wrong... and you have yourself the biggest accelerator in the world. You will be able to spin protons around at about 99.9% of lightspeed and let the collide, creating conditions close to a few ms after the big bang and so hoping to discover particles that only existed at that moment or in high energetic cosmic rays... Last weekend CERN and the LHC experiments opended their doors for cern staff and interested people to have a final look at this amazing achievement before it's been put to operation for a year of 10 to come. Thanks to my gf I had the opportunity to pay a visit, discover this frontline of science and meet some of the staff @ Cern. What I discovered is one of the greatest research environments in the world. I was especially touched by the passion of the staff of Cern, the way they talk about their specialty, the mutual respect and knowledge that the success will be depending on the results of a lot of different people and the weak presence of budgetary problems (or so it seemed) is an excellent ground to grow and foster the most brilliant and extraordinay ideas. From the point of view of a mechanical/electrical engineer, Cern can be considered as being at the top of innovative engineering. New productions methods with never reached precision (welding, bending...), design of construction and assembling equipment, solutions for though engineering problems, the distribution of 1GW of power to its equipment,... Cern proves on my fronts it is worldclass on many engineering disciplines. As a computer enthusiast I was obviously interested by the cern datacenter. The lhc experiment will create about 1DVD of data each 4 seconds and therefor they need a speedy internet connection. They developed a parallel internet (the original one was also developed at cern) called "the grid" with unbelievable bandwiths connecting a lt of scientific center super computers with each other to serve for academic purposes. If you consider that every time the beams of 5 billion protons cross each other 100 protons may collide and that they do this about 11k times/sec you can imagine this creates a vaste amount of data to analyse. Intelligent software and electronics filter out the most "interesting" collisions, but still a lot of cpu power and storage capacity. The grid and their gigantic data center will certainly help in processing all this data but it will still take a long time to finish. Certainly if you consider the odds for having a "special collision" are not that high, it feels like searching a needle in a big digital haystack... I also had the chance to have a word with B. Segal, one of the developers of the boinc infrastructure @ cern known from lhcathome and malariacontrol.net. It was the first time I have met someone in real life who shares the same passion and enthusiasm on linux and the boinc platform. It would probably take a few months to tell about every detail of my visit at cern, but as I realise your time is limited to read all this, my short word on Cern has to end here. To conclude it was an amazing experience to meet and discover the experiment and the ppl behind it, that has the potential to reveal the most elementary parts of physics and to give new insights at our life... |
| Breaking the silence(General) written by bigbee on 12:39:18 10/12/2007 |
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| *WAM* *BAM* *CRASH* After one year of extreme silence (posts/day = 1/356) finally some time to write a short post. Although it seems to be very calm on my site, many things have changed the last year to improve performance and functionality. I have a lot of cached pages (because of all the hammering on my news database :) ) improved signatures, stats exports... so mainly the boinc stats part has received the attention it deserved. If I think hard I may find some excuse for not posting: working 12-14h/day (of which at least 3h of driving my car) to keep the lights on in Belgium, maintaining and expanding boincstats, maintaining 3 Lvl 70 chars @ wow, keeping linux skills up to date, having too much hardware to play with at home, trying to spend the remainings of free time with family and friends... I really consider to divide myself in 2(my weight would allow it) but than I would be confronted with the filosofical question who will get which part? :) Nevertheless I still have a zillion plans to do with this site. Maybe I should start blogging (in these days of political comedy show I can think of some subjects) and I can think of some applications I could use in the background (a dashboard with my site summary would be easy to monitor the activity, now they are divided on different pages/subsections)... So plans by the dozen in these busy times... Cheerz bigbee/buzzybee |
| Last edited by bigbee on 17:04:00 07/01/2008 |