Monthly Archives: August 2008

>BOINC Meeting

Posted by on August 30, 2008 2 comments

>BOINC lets you donate your idle computer power to noble scientific causes that you choose

I just attended the first ever east coast BOINC meeting at the very nice University of Delaware. A couple thoughts (and parallels) I got from the meeting I want to share with the Ubuntu community.

  • They want more people to start using BOINC (increase market share)
    Part of a talk was on getting the support of a major OS vendor or PC manufacturer and having BOINC bundled with it. I was thinking could this ever be included in Ubuntu by default? The following issues I feel would be difficult to address: Security, one more question for the user at install time, and it would take up space (both ram and disk, even if user didn’t want it). Your thoughts?

  • They want more women to get involved in donating computing resources
    A recent survey they conducted of about 1300 volunteers showed 49 women. Does anyone have any suggestions for them?

Oh, and if you’re computers are currently idling, help them solve their first issue. There are packages in Ubuntu, boinc-client, (does the actual work) and boinc-manager (because you might want a gui). Learn more about it at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and attach to a project you like.

>Converting Dad to Ubuntu – Investing Site

Posted by on August 26, 2008 2 comments

>My longest standing issue for converting my Dad to Ubuntu was one investing website that uses an ActiveX control. They do have a way for Firefox users though, but it doesn’t work on Linux or with wine.

I eventually started trying to get IE4Linux (which uses wine) to get it to work. And it worked fine, except for the flash ads, which make the page unbearable to look at (the entire page flickers when any movement is registered in any flash window).

Now I couldn’t just get rid of flash, because they used flash for videos on the site. And I don’t have any interest in learning to block things in IE.

The eventual solution: IE4Linux with Moblock (Peerguardian for Linux) to block the IP addresses of Ad servers, so no more annoying flash ads.

>Watch the olypics in 1080i

Posted by on August 19, 2008 No comments

>with your HDTV and not paying a dime to a cable or phone company.
It is available in 1080i on digital broadcast TV. My family has actually gone back to broadcast to get it.

What channels can you get (in Cherry Hill, with a really bad antenna)?
Note: Channels 6.* came back to not being flaky and some of the higher numbers are flaky again.

Oh, and Hello Planet Ubuntu!