Donating Spare CPU Cycles to Fold@Home
If, like me, you have various computers or servers which need to be online 24/7 but aren't always using their full CPU power then consider donating your spare CPU power to a collaborative computing project for the greater good of mankind, such as Folding@Home.
Folding@home is a distributed-computing project run by a team at Stanford University who are exploring how proteins fold and unfold in order to carry out their functions within the body. When these proteins fold or unfold incorrectly abnormalities and diseases, such as cancer, may occur. By simulating the folding of various proteins in billions of different ways researchers hope to learn more about such problems and how to rectify them.
The Folding@home client is available for both Windows and Linux, currently supporting single cores with the beta and next version out supporting multiple processing cores. I actually like the single core support as it means that I can have the fold@home process only maxing out one core and the other core left untouched for use by other server processes.
The picture below shows the usage on two different servers, the first being a dual core 3ghz server and the other being a single core 400mhz server. Note that as the process only utilizes IDLE cpu time, it won't battle with other processes for CPU time, it will only use as much CPU power that is not currently needed.
Sign up on the site to create your own username and/or team. The idea being that teams can compete against each other in providing the most cpu work time and users can compete within their teams. If you would like, feel free to join my team 95202.
You will need to judge for yourself but in my opinion it is probably not worth leaving a machine on solely for this purpose as the environmental impact would probably outweigh the benefits. This is of course a great thing to do if you already have servers that need to be online 24/7 but don't make full use of their cpu power.
Rambo Movie Trailer
Obviously there isn't too much of a plot to this movie, but you wouldn't expect one right? Just some serious ass kicking by an obviously super human Rambo. Rambo hits the cinemas on Jan 25th 2008.
Security and Privacy for IM
Below is a video of Ian Goldberg discussing privacy and encryption methods for IM and other forms of online communication.
"Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly popular mode of communication on the Internet. Although it is used for personal and private conversations, it is not at all a private medium. Not only are all of the messages unencrypted and unauthenticated, but they are all routedthrough a central server, forming a convenient interception point for an attacker. Users would benefit from being able to have truly private conversations over IM, combining the features of encryption, authentication, deniability, and forward secrecy, while working within their existing IM infrastructure.
In this talk, I will discuss "Off-the-Record Messaging" (OTR), a widely used software tool for secure and private instant messaging. I will outline the properties of Useful Security and Privacy Technologies that motivated OTR's design, compare it to other IM security mechanisms, and talk about its ongoing development directions."
Call of Duty 4 Online XP and Weapon Selection
If you're not a veteran of the Call of Duty series, like me, the online play can be a bit frustrating at first when you can't figure out how to select other weapons such as the sniper rifle.
The single player mode is loaded with various scope enabled weapons, fully automatic rifles, etc. To access these in multiplayer you need to "level up" or gain "XP" points, which is achieved by gaining kills in the online game.
Once you've got a few kills under your belt the "sniper class" will be unlocked (press ESC in game to choose your class). After a few more kills, and resulting XP points, the "create class" will be unlocked which will allow you to create your own class with any of the weapons that you have unlocked. Gain more XP points to unlock more weapons.
Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard Guided Tour Video
Leopard is the new OSX 10.5 operating system for Mac. Recently released, although much delayed due to the iPhone launch, and now distributed with all new Macs. I don't own a Mac but would be interested in testing Leopard out for video editing.
Here is a video tour of the new Leopard operating system:
CentOS 5 Single CD Install
When installing CentOS 5 it may prompt you that all five CDs are required to complete the install. To avoid this, for a server install, simply make sure that you select the "Customize Now" on the software packages selection page and uncheck all of the items under each menu.
Once you have installed the basic OS run "yum update" and then you can then use yum to install your needed applications such as VIM, WGET, etc.
To install Apache (httpd), PHP, MySQL (server and client), and the component that allows php to talk to mysql run the following command:
yum -y install httpd php mysql mysql-server php-mysql
Call of Duty 4 Game Play Video & Review
higher quality 330mb WMV download link
The above video is game play footage from the Call of Duty 4 PC demo, which I downloaded today from GamersHell. I've not played any of the previous Call of Duty games so I can't compare it with any of the prequels. The only similar game that I have played is Ghost Recon 2 on the XBOX 360 and it has to be said that Call of Duty 4 blows Ghost Recon 2 out of the water.
You play as a single person, not having to worry about commanding your squad (which I found tedious in Ghost Recon). The squad and enemy AI is great, with no stupid enemies running right at you shooting 10ft above your head. Rather, they make full use of available cover and the large array of weapons.
The graphics were beautiful with realistic smoke, explosion, and gun fire effects. The game also loaded quickly, with no noticeable lag at any time.
Highly recommended, check it out for yourself, I'll be purchasing the full PC version (£10 cheaper than the XBOX 360 version) from the local shop tomorrow.
Test system specs:
Dell Dimension 9200, quad core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, 768mb gfx, raid 0 hdd array
1900*1200 resolution on a 24" wide monitor