Perhaps I should hang out a shingle as a freindly neighborhood computer technician?

I work mostly on Macs, and these days much on OSX, but I've had to touch Windows to make it behave on occasion too. Now isn't that an opening for a "religious" debate.

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Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

I help in a tech shop for PCs, maybe I can help, too.

By way of introduction....

The very fact that you can read this means you have a computer. For "free" you can use that capacity to contribute to some projects which seek to use some "spare time" on your computer to crunch away for things that either can't get enough money together to by time on superhighspeed computers or are problems so large that they can't be run long enough on such large computers to get meaningful solutions. Examples include the search for signals from ET and predicting how proteins form in response to genetics (and thus to medicines that will relate to the forms) and details of climate change.

The basic idea is to use a screensaver-like form to run stuff in the background or when your computer isn't busy. A few million people, forming one of the largest "computer"s in history pooled their time to run the first Seti@Home project. It had certain failings and limitations but was generally a very successful project as far as coorperative computing goes. It was so successful indeed that various similar projects have each begun their own "thing" so to speak. IBM and Apple both have metaprojects that people can submit projects to be run through. The original project Seti@Home has evolved into BOINC - based out of Berkeley University in California. Seti@Home was just that - while BOINC is a more open framework which can run specific projects, such as those mentioned above. Seti@Home remains the dominant project of BOINC. Indeed many who ran the original project are begining to go to the new form and this is written largely from that perspective. For those who just want to start out new, you can just read along and when going to links just use the alternates that state this is your first time or you want to start a new account....

I'm writing this as a contribution for the minority of us running Macs - and to encourage people to go beyond the safest way for the much faster and seemingly pretty safe way.

For those seeking to use their OSX Macintosh computers for Seti@Home still/again (or other similar projects involved with proteins), you may well be aware that they've been migrating to running in BOINC form for some time and now the news is that the transition between BOINC and Classic Seti@Home is almost finished. Dec 15th is the cut off date but they've reached a new level of warning. Every time you finish a packet, you are no doubt aware, they put up a warning that you have to migrate over. BOINC stands for "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing" and one of it's big innovations is the ability to run projects other than Seti@Home - the other is to check info returned from packets for validity. I'll let the curious investigate other projects. There are two general steps with lots of details.

Of course what you should do is stop the old client from running - but don't trash the old data folder until you are done migrating - you can use some of it to help migrate if you need to. The places to look for parts to get rid of when you are ready are:

/Applications/SETI@home_Docs/
/Applications/SETI@home_OSX (the actual program)
/Library/Application\ Support/SETI@home_Data
/Library/StartupItems/(look for something with seti in the name - it's the background service that kicks in if you use it as a screensaver.)


The first place you go is http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

And even though they suggest installing the software first I suggest you do the special instructions if you are migrating from their older client and THEN install the new software. Otherwise you don't have anything to join and you will loose your old progress count.

The first big step is to activate the new account. If you wait for Dec 15th they will apparently migrate anyone still "active" but it may do some good to do it when you are ready rather than just on their schedule. Plan some time for the process. It can be quick and easy but it could also be a bit tortuous. I won't go through the whole thing but I will comment on some not so obvious parts to the process. Basically it comes down to two things - first is your email address the same as registered with Seti@Home or is it different? Second - do you know your account password?

If you have both "right" then changing over to BOINC is fast and easy. If you at least recall the email address you had and have current packet run from one of the last versions of the Classic software (not OS9 necessarily, they are using this word for their older software is all.) You should be able to get them to give you your new password while you tell them your new email address. Here's one of the gotcha's/bugs. On the form to fill out your new email address it's a bit funky - the first section says something about your current address as if seti knew it - and works that way if it's right. The second section is for your old address if you have to use that function to migrate. What is confusing is that you still have to fill out the new address section - in other words you fill out the current email section AND the old email section. I've filled out many online forms like this but never run into one that worked like this (usually the current email info comes on up after submit or is explicitly prompted for in that section.) During the process they send you an email to confirm your registration with an account activation key/code. Keep that email even after you've registered - it's a handy backdoor back into your account if something goes wrong.

Their directions for getting your password if you don't recall it worked well for me - turns out the user_info file has a unique ID which they can trace back to your account user name and password.

The last detail of migrating is they prompt you for various settings - default, home, work, school, etc locations are possible. They assume they can fill your hard drive which I do not recommend. I cut down how much space they are allowed to use to small proportions (they have three or four ways to figure it out.)

Being registered might mean one thing to you but it means something else to them. You do NOT have a BOINC account ( here http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/login_form.php ) but you do have a Seti@Home account- (here http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/login_form.php .) Second, registering means that your Seti@Home account info has been migrated so you keep your history. If you don't want it then use the other prompts from the Seti@Home website.

I don't know about you but I gave up running Seti as a screensaver a while back. I had gotten used to running it as a program when I wanted it to. You can still do that - the screensaver function doesn't work. But running it as if it were a program takes alittle more work.

There are two ways to make the program work but they both begin by downloading the client and installing it. After that the key difference is whether you want to see the graphics or not. Another issue is whether you want to run the straight released client or not. You might recall Seti@Home had some problems with people altering their software - at least some people did so just to get their counts up and some did so out of an honest attempt to make the software run faster and accidently made it inaccurate. They way Seti@Home has resolved the issue is to embrace people making alterations while also checking processed packets. On the one hand they've released the source code for the programs (BOINC and Seti@Home itself) while on the other you may not get credit for the work if they feel the packet wasn't processed right.

Here's where to get the main GUI form of the program (all on one line)
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.p...mac_a dvanced

If you stick to their program it will always be accepted (at least until they run into a bug they have to fix) and you can see the graphics. They are prettier and more dynamic. They just don't run from the screensaver (there is one to pick but all it says is it doesn't work yet.) You click on the unit currently working and there is a graphics button. And this software is alittle faster than the old client. But the optimized versions people have come out with are several (like 5 to 10 times) faster but they so far drop the graphics option entirely at least so far.

So download, install, place the seti@home url into the project prompt (wish they would list some url's in the program - I always have to go to the internet and get the URL each time I upgrade a machine running Seti@Home.) You will need the email address and password you migrated with above. If you are going for the optimized client (read below) then quit as soon as you've made it through the setup.

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

Continuing:


In terms of how to run the BOINC software (with the Seti@Home project you've just registered with) what I do is set the "run always" and "always connected" settings manually when I'm ready to run it instead of the "by preference settings" that you filled out above. It can hesitate some minutes when getting data packets and I've seen it hesitate until I prompted it to try again (happened even before I tried the optimized clients.) You can pause a work unit but note the BOINC software will download and start running on another packet while you've paused the processing on that packet (at least upto the space you've allowed on the hd.) If you really want it to stop what you do is pause a unit and quit the BOINC software. As soon as you run it again it may well update and download a packet while every packet you had was paused.

One additional detail - if you run your computer in different places or have more than one your account online will reference more than one known machine. If you are running the software on one machine in multiple places you can ask the online account to merge the results. Each entry will appear only once actually used from that place. Note I had two computers with much different space available and as I set my default prefs for one machine the other wouldn't start because it already had too little space available according to the rules I setup in the default prefs.

Another additional detail - I noticed various options in the setup prefs on the website about how much ram to use and when to write to disk. Seems those numbers really matter - it will grab as much ram as it can given what is available and what your pref settings are and run in ram (data and program and temp work.) Obviously the more ram you have the better but if you over commit your ram it'll force the system to swap out ram alot. Don't commit a lot of ram unless you have a ton even if you are going to only run the program when you want to. I'ld suggest something smaller than their 75% default - perhaps 25%. I think their assumptions are based on either Windows or Linux rules - while my laptop kept on trucking I noticed it's virtual memory usage jumped very high.

All sounds pretty simple one way or the other at least if you've had some experience dealing with online forms and installing software and setting preferences. However it is fortunate that they've timed all this pretty close to when they released a reasonable working updated client. From what I've read they've had lot's of troubles. Even though their BOINC software has reached 5.2.8 for the Mac it remains plenty quasi-functional. You can get an idea from looking at the URL above for the current GUI version and the recent things they've fixed. If that's all you want you are done and don't have to read any more. If you want to process packets fastest just don't run the graphics often. If you want to process many more packets and don't mind giving up the graphics then read on.

If you are comfortable with the command line (CLI) client then your probably just reading this for info and I'll get to that and I'ld be interested in anything you have to offer. What I do is run the GUI client and then added the optimized Seti@Home part. Much faster, yet easy to manage - there are third party apps to work with the packets and stats but that just adds complication to my point of view. I do use one third party part but just to keep up with stats - see way at the bottom.

Now about the optimization. All choices in optimization depend on knowing two details about your machine - the OS version you are running, and the kind of CPU. You should be able to get both kinds of info from the "About this Mac" under the blue apple in the top left corner. If you've followed optimization issues in other areas (like in versions of Firefox) you know they've subdivided G4 CPUs into two groups. Apparently that doesn't matter with BOINC/Seti@Home at least most of the time.

As for work optimizing Mac software for BOINC and Seti@Home I have only found one place - TeamNN has some programmers and they've the only work I've been able to find. They don't force you to join their team to use their software though! The two key people are Alex and Rick. Alex does more of the programming management and Rick does more of the documentation and presentation of information for readers.

First let me state there are infact two levels of optimization. The first in chronological order is of the BOINC client itself - as in the one you can install above. That part of the software has some work it does as packets of data are received and sent and it can indeed be optimized. As they've fixed the most grievous errors of that software I've let that go. If you want the fastest thing you might go to the TeamNN website for their versions which while older are indeed faster.

The place to look for info about optimized BOINC software is http://members.dslextreme.com/~reade...eam/boinc.html

The second place for optimization is the Seti@Home software itself and this is the far more important part - almost all the overall time processed happens here.

The place to look for the info on the optimized Seti@Home software is http://writhe.org.uk/seti@home/ However see below.

In terms of software development there are a few stages for the consumer to note - alpha, beta, release candidate and stable/released form. Alpha means it's probably buggy and shouldn't be touched by the average user. Beta and release candidate are gray zones where things probably work but some issues may remain. Stable/Released version means that most things work most of the time. Curiously TeamNN has only alpha software but it seems a bit different from this scale of generally used terminology. I think they are doing this for two reasons - first they are still finding ways to optimize the client, and second, the "in" group is largely programmers and programmers tend to feel they are always in a alpha state (partially a joke there - note the sleep reference?) because people who really care about what they are doing always see where they are going next. In any case TeamNN's software is pretty well developed I think. I've had no problems running it for some days. Another thing to keep in mind is they are setting a high goal for themselves - 100% acceptance of packets worked on (recall the comment above) compared to some other work I've seen where the goal is 90%+. And it seems to me from what I've read that TeamNN is running in the 99% range right now.

The released software for the Seti@Home part is Alpha 5. The above website, maintained by Rick, lists only Alpha 4. Rick's away for thanksgiving so to get alpha 5 you have to go to Alex's website - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~alexkan/seti/ (look for G4-a5 or G5-a5) near the bottom and ignore the rest.) Rick will probably update the website this coming week.

There is an Alpha 6 already in the works but it's not posted anywhere yet and probably is truely alpha software whereas the released Alpha software is probably more a near released candidate version except they keep coming up with new optimizations (the same notice about the a5 version being posted mentioned the a6 version coming soon.)

In any case, to go from the detault Seti@Home client to the optimized one is pretty easy and their instructions work fine - just find the old engine in /Library/Applications Support/BOINC Data/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and move out the setiathome_4.18_powerpc-apple-darwin file there and replace it with the two other files from the unzipped optimized client download. Ignore any other files- they are data packets and or partially processed results. If you have gotten some time on a packet , after swapping the engine parts launch the BOINC Manager and abort that packet - it'll be rejected anyway as it'll know it's been processed differently between the two parts. No biggy that you've aborted a packet. They note it in your record but I've not seen any issues from doing so.

Happy packet chewing!

For the Windows and Linux folks I'm sure there are optimizations out there - I read some second hand comments about some of them.

With this combination of the 5.2.8 mainstream gui BOINC manager and the optimined G4-a5 Seti@Home client (for version 4.18) I process 1 data packet in less than 3 hrs, sometimes less than 2, on a 1.25Ghz laptop. Much much better than the 8-12 hrs I was running before!

For the folks running Tiger (10.4) after running all your system updates I recommend getting the Widget called SetiStats - it's a lot easier to get your counts that way than logging in over the internet. You get the info it needs about finding your stats when you log into the seti@home website for your account info - it'll list your "Account number" which is different from your login ID (which is now your email address) and your activation code (which is the most fundamental part of being a registered user.)

Cheers!

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

A few months ago I repeated an experiemnt I last tried about 6 years ago: I reformatted my hard disk on one of my computers and installed Linux.

Linux has greatly improved over the intervening years. No longer an operating system for "propeller heads," it is a viable alternative OS to Windows. That's as far as I'll go: I don't have enough recent experience with MacOS to venture an opinion in that regard.

If anyone has any questions about Linux, including which distribution I went with and why, email me. I'll even explain why I reformatted my disk once more and reinstalled Windows--a decision that had little to do with Linux and everything to do with my avocation.

__________________
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

They're still making computers that aren't Macs?

Wow! I thought that was so...last millenium.

Hi bahai-sojourner,

I'm actually in the middle of installing Gentoo Linux 2005.1 for the first time. I've also installed a Linux in the past and I suppose progress has been made but it's still not for the average user....

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

Hi Joshuway, Well we are talking about Macs being less than 12% of what's out there and Linux is about the same percentage. I don't think Windows is about to disappear too soon....

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

I agree. I went with Ubuntu Linux. Well, ok: Kubuntu. Ubuntu is the distro with GNOME, while Kubuntu uses KDE.

I love everything about the OS, but am hampered by the lack (as yet) of a decent, comprehensive, well-documented graphics program. Photography is my avocation; at one time, I managed to almost earn a halfway decent living doing it professionally. I need a decent graphics program a la Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, etc. While there are one or two candidates in Linux, they're still long on promise and potential, but short on delivery.

Maybe in another year or two....

__________________
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

As for the poll, I had to select earlier than 5.0 DOS...it was actually a TRS-80, and the programming was BASIC. When they came out with DOS finally, it wasn't a whole lot different than BASIC, so it wasn't too hard to learn.

My expertise is the opposite of SMK's...I recieved training for both Mac and PC, but with the number of people using both, most of my training was Windows, from Win 3.1 on. I became a technical engineer just before Win ME came out, and a senior engineer with the advent of XP. The funny thing is that I do not like Win 2000, NT 4, or NT 3, but I do like XP fairly well (except that it is a memory hog). Go figure...XP is NT 5.1, and Win 2000 is NT 5.0, so there isn't a heck of a lot of difference, so I couldn't tell you why I like XP so much more.

Anyway, I haven't had any Mac training since OS 9.0, and a MCSE doesn't do a whittle of good for Macs. And before anyone asks me which I prefer, I'll say right now that it all depends on what you are doing. My opinion is that a PC is superior when it comes to word processing and number crunching, lists, and so forth, but can't hold a candle to a Mac when it comes to graphics, music, and that sort of thing. (Some day I may buy a Mac, just for my music compositions. I tried recording using my PC, and it was a dismal failure! That is, unless you like the sound of 2 cats fighting on a chalk board...'nuff said. LOL Of *course*, I blame the computer. )