BOINC x GRC in Malaysia

Despite mainly just running BOINC on my laptop, I'm still in the top 100 BOINCers in Malaysia, which - honestly - is a bit surprising. I've been running BOINC off and on since basically its inception, but my current World ranking is nothing special.

So what I find really curious is that there are a decent number of GRC nodes identified in Malaysia. It fluctuates, of course, as nodes switch from offline to online all the time, but just two days ago there were 19 Gridcoin nodes online in Malaysia.

And the reason I find this curious is, are these nodes actively mining? Or just investors? Cos I don't think there's much value proposition in being just a GRC investor (and I say this as a GRC supporter). And yet, I don't see that many active BOINCers above me in the top 100.

Curious.

BOINC-ing on my own again

I'm back to running BOINC on my own account again, since the GRC pool is shutting down at the end of the year and I've just made the switch to solo-mining GRC. Got the wallet all configured, beacon sent, waiting for Mag to show up on the network. I'll have to use MRC to claim my GRC from now on. Will have to see how often I do that. Maybe once a month?

Checking in on BOINC

Start of a new year seems like a good time to set a milepost for BOINC progress. I'll compare my progress later in the year, although I don't expect significant progress, since I'm mainly crunching on a GRC pool. Still, I may add or switch around projects. The strangest thing is I still haven't been knocked off the top 100 list for the country.

Can’t get an IP address from the router

An odd thing to happen. All of a sudden, the PC only managed a limited connection. The PC is connected to the wifi router via Cat5 cable, while a laptop connects wirelessly. All connections are assigned a dynamic IP by the router via DHCP. Router was connected to the internet, and the laptop received an IP and working connection. The PC, however, was assigned IP address 169.254.154.171 (could be a different last number; I can’t remember, but it’s not important), with subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 (this is why the exact IP isn’t important).

The IP address on the network connection on the PC showed that it could not obtain a valid IP address, so it was assigned that IP by Windows.

Restarting the router and PC didn’t do anything. Assigning an appropriate IP to the PC resulted in it showing it was fully connected, but it could not ping anything. Not even the router itself.

I thought it could be a faulty NIC, or maybe there was something wrong with the cable. Could not find any other advice to solve the problem, so it was decided to have the PC taken to a shop to be looked at.

Their advice? After some fiddling around (not sure what they did), they advised my dad that it had to be reformatted. So they backed up the files in My Documents (and only those files; no program settings or anything else) and reformatted the hard drive. *sigh* At least the PC can connect to the router now, and there was no need to replace the NIC or network cable. But couldn’t there have been a better solution?

GeoCities Thrives, Yahoo! Buys, Yahoo! GeoCities Dies (finally)

A bit of news has been getting a fair amount of mention lately. Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities. I remember signing up in my uni days, and putting up a personal page. I even remember scouring the GeoCities neighbourhoods looking for a nice address. By the time Yahoo! bought it though, I had already lost interest in staking out a position on the net.

And now, after being left behind in relative obscurity due to the meteoric rise of social networking sites and their ilk, the once popular free web-hosting site is being put down. Yahoo!’s not sharing much in the way of details right now, instead telling customers to “wait until the summer”.

The only details really of any interest right now are how to save a copy of your website, or how to migrate it to their paid hosting service. There are no further details to be had. GeoCities is shutting down. For good. They’ve already stopped accepting new registrations. By the end of this year there won’t be any more sites at geocities.com. Interestingly though, if you have a geocities.com email address, that will survive the closure.

I’ve already deleted my (woefully neglected, embarrassingly amateurish) GeoCities site. Now it only exists (partly) in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Colgate haram Google search

Odd.

So I wrote earlier about my blog post on the halal status of Colgate toothpaste showing up (kinda) high in Google search results. At least, I thought so. I mean, that’s what I got when I did a Google search with the same search terms as my intrepid visitor.

When I related the story to someone else though, their results varied. Not sure whether that’s because of a localized version (I’m currently defaulted to www.google.com.my), or some other customization due to IP address location or something else. I’ve never really paused to ponder how Google throws its search results together. They’ve served me well enough over the years.

It’s just odd that a search for the same terms, at the same time, gives different results, with my blog post showing up in one, but not another. And just so no one thinks it was some vainglorious self-promoting ego-trip, I snapped a pic of my search results.



If the above looks suspicious, just keep in mind it’s a crop from a pdf print of the search results page.

Ah well. Someone else managed to find my blog post via Google, so it doesn’t matter how that happened. Just hope it helped someone.

Gordon Freeman to be put in charge of security at LHC

Life imitates art, or, how games have made a huge impact on popular culture/the modern psyche.

Anyone daring to call themselves a gamer knows about Half-Life, arguably one of the most influential games of the modern era. Even if you've never played it (putting you in the minority of gamers), you've heard of it. Even if you're not a gamer, I'd hazard a guess that you've heard of it.

Heck, even the scientists at theLarge Hadron Collider, which is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, have heard of it. Of course, being geeks, it's really no surprise that they have. (Seriously, people: Scientists -> Geeks -> Gamers. We're talking almost totally inclusive sets, although the reciprocal isn't true.)

For evidence of the above phenomenon, take the jump (below) to see the new security training regimen at the LHC, which has scientists practicing with a crowbar. Serious stuff people. Could save the world, and what-not.

Video calls come to GMail

Google has introduced video calling to their chat application - but only in the GMail client. They haven't rolled this out to their GTalk app yet. One wonders if that's in the pipeline.

This lets them join the ranks of the other IM apps that offer video calls. The ones that I've used are YM, MSN, and Skype. For some time now though, YM hasn't offered good connections, although they're still the only option for group vid-chat, afaik. MSN quality is on and off, and Skype is mostly spot on for quality.

If the GMail vid-chat app doesn't support Opera, I'm not going to bother even trying it. If it makes it to the GTalk app, I'll probably give it a try, though the quality on GTalk's voice-chat isn't the best.

Browser share stats

Well, it seems there's controversies over how to properly count browser stats. My earlier post still stands; Chrome is making inroads in the browser market. For more detailed stats, tho, have a search. A good jumping-off point is at Wikipedia's entry for usage share of web browsers. And that's where I'm leaving it.

Chrome makes an appearance

I was just browsing my site stats, and have noticed my first visit from a Chrome user. Said user came over for a short visit just before midnight on 31 Oct 2008, attracted by my mention of NaNoWriMo.

The Chrome browser was just recently released, but already it's made quite an impact on the browser market. Says something about the influence of Google, doesn't it?

BTW, I use StatCounter for site stats, and Opera as my browser. StatCounter is free, and quite detailed. Opera is just cool.

So, anyway, welcome to the game, Chrome! :-)

Election 2008 – and The Age of Holograms!

My sis called me up this morning at around quarter past eight, and told me to switch on the TV and turn it to CNN. I was wondering whether it was a surprise election result. Maybe a swing state went to the Republicans, or maybe a traditional red state went over to the Democrats. But no, she wanted me to check out the hologram they were using! They had one of their correspondents ‘beamed’ over to the studio as a 3-dimensional hologram. I’m not talking get-out-your-3D-glasses kind; I’m talking Princess-Leia’s-message-to-Obi-wan-via-R2D2 kind! Definitely cool.

They used 35 cameras to capture views of the correspondent so they get an all-around view. But I’m more intrigued about the projection system. Still pondering…

Incidently, we’re getting close to an official win for the Democrats.

Sneaky cybersquatting (of sorts)

In my earlier post on Azafia's art, I had mistakenly identified the website of the organizer. I had gotten this, instead of the real Expat website. Kinda sneaky.

Dell recalls laptop batteries

Heard this bit on the news this morning on my drive to work. They mentioned the largest safety recall in the history of consumer electronics, for Dell batteries manufactured by Sony.

I remember coming across some articles about spontaneously combusting Dell laptops. This was after I purchased one myself of course.

Then while getting my daily dose of Slate I found their Hot Document on the issue. I am a bit surprised that Dell tried to keep it on the quiet. Still, can't blame them. Wouldn't want to scare off potential customers with a huge warning plastered on their front page, would they?

Anyway, for anyone else with a (recently bought) Dell laptop, check out Dell's battery replacement page for info on whether you're affected.

Just for the record, the serial numbers affected are:


Luckily, we're not affected.

Troubleshooting the "Local policy on this machine does not permit you to logon interactively" error

This one was a pickle, and even after solving it we don't know what caused it in the first place. One moment we were fine, logged in as admin, fiddling with the firewall. Then after a restart we get the logon error message. Can't logon to domain, can't logon to local account.

Go all around and finally found three articles of use.

1. Microsoft KB276590 article
   
   This one was the first to point in the right direction.


2. Microsoft KB279664 article
   
   This one gave info on syntax for NTRights.


Unfortunately, I was getting an Open Policy error when I tried to use NTRights.

3. Forum posting on the subject
   
   This one gave a hint to what was keeping the above from working. Tried to establish a link to the pc, but kept getting "Network path not found". Finally clued in and booted up in Safe Mode to disable the firewall, and voila! NTRights works and we can log in again! What a relief!

So, finally got it stable, but now have to get all the components working again. Hope to be up and operational by end of day tomorrow.

And all this with little to no experience as any kind of admin (sys or network), and with zilch training. Damn Comp Sci degree! Everyone thinks I'm supposed to know all about computers... ;-)