All posts by kobaan

Site redesign – expect more soon

As you can see I’m currently redesigning my whole website. Lots of category changes, but I try to maintain most of the permanent links. The main goal is to get a more dynamic front page which is to reflect all content changes in all of the subcategories.
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Meanwhile a huge bunch of blog entries is waiting to be, once “cleanly rewritten and illustrated”, published. I’ll also feature on site news aggregation for different interesting news channels. And I’m planning to have an interest-tree-like news structure on the site as well.

You may also want to add my new RSS feed on my private diary entries, as I have already moved them to their own sub page (permalinks maintained).

Be curious…

Distributed computing – teraflop/s statistics august 2007

What have I done…
…besides being busy again at work…

Meanwhile I’ve set up an almost automatic teraflop/s data-collector for distributed projects computing power.

The old dinosaur of distributed computing distributed.net has recently been available via Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in the yoyo@home project.
Yoyo@home wraps the real last distributed.net project the OGR-25 challenge to BOINC clients, since RSA has cancelled the pricemoney for the RC-72 challenge (has the RSA algorithm been fallen ?).
Worldcommunity-Grid, also counts into BOINC for some longer time, with their projects to find cure for: Aids, Malaria, Dengue, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer, Parkinson, …

And finally a not yet integrated into BOINC project, but even bigger in calculation power: Folding@home (FAH)
FAH has once almost reached 1 petaflop/s as the first non-commercial distributed project in may this year, when GPU’s and the PS3 were added as folding clients.
But then came the hot/wet summer, earthquakes and power-outages, …
At least the summer is almost over, and as you can see in the graph FAH is getting faster again, ready to break the petaflop mark.

Using Mac OS X grapher tool, it produces some nice graphics like this one:
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On the other side, this years supercomputing conference predicted the first commercial installation to reach more than 1 petaflop in october this year.

So, fire up your engines… let the race begin…
😉 Kobaan.

NBC reporter almost tarred and feathered at DEFCON

It appears that there are always some people which need to learn it the hard way.

This was the case for NBC dateline reporter Michelle Madigan trying to undercover filming the DEFCON 15 conference in Las Vegas without permission, and without a press badge. When she was told (by staff/also undercover hackers) that she would need a press badge and is not allowed to enter certain areas for “hidden” filming she just ignored the warning, thus getting more attention than she could have wanted. Suddenly a conference speaker introduced the game “Find the undercover reporter”, which lead to big bawl and an escort to her car, with lots of embarrassing comments.
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Meanwhile her MySpace account is removed as it was flooded with angry comments.

See Michelle, such stupid things can ruin your cyber social life.

Kobaan on vacation, holiday on Malta

Don’t expect any blog updates for the next two weeks.

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Chief not in tipi, out in the woods elk stalking.

Online video becoming more and more mainstream

More and more video streaming/clip viewing portals have arisen in the last few years.

One of the biggest is YouTube (which will convert its contents to a higher quality h.264 MPEG4 codec video for the AppleTV(by the way just upgraded)), and many more like GoogleVideo, MySpace and the newer Veoh. Most of them hold amateur video content or at least are uploaded by amateurs. Copyrighted material isn’t allowed but can be found such as complete anime series if you’re interested.

But, all of those were bad quality unlike real TV.

On the other side P2P video exchange became popular on sharing networks like bittorrent, the bad thing is, that most of the content offered in these networks is also pirated copyrighted material, thus must be the reason for Vuze? (former Zudeo, an enhanced version of the bittorrent cross-platform client Azureus) and Tribler? to establish a user-friendly and comfortable video sharing platform for LEGAL content. (Try it out, it’s really great.)

And again, downloading millions of bits for high quality video hence the problem that you have to wait for the download to finish, or even worse, you’ll have no real preview.
This is were Zattoo?, Joost?, Babelgum?, Joox? and TV-Links come in, the latter one more illegally I guess.
All of the above offering P2P realtime video for free with depending on service/channel and your own bandwidth, HD-quality TV.

This could be the future, at least giving competition to our cable-tv and internet-providers. Pay one bill get Internet/Phone/TV/Mobile. That’ s called Quadruple Play.

Google Maps StreetView – for the virtual tourist

Yet no update on my site, and still no native german content, but things are piling up so fast that I’ll post some quick news now.

Google Maps now has a new service called StreetView, which enables user to virtually walk through the streets and look around in 360 degrees of freedom.
(The service is available for some US cities only so far, if you have trouble accessing switch your browsers default language to english.)

A video will say more than a thousand words 😉

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Don’t buy a new computer, until…

Just in case you want to buy a new computer, and you can’t wait any longer for AMD biggest battleship to arrive, at least you want to wait for Intel’s price-drop on available processors.
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The highest category price-drop is almost 50%, this could also mean that the yet not publicly available QX6800 Core 2 Quad with 2,93GHz will be around the price of the Q6700 now. (950-1050US$)

By the way, my northbridge fan just cracked of the mainboard this afternoon. Is that a sign or what ? 😉

Long time no see you…

Hi Folks,

lang time no see ya….

No, it’s not because I upgrade my RapidWeaver blogging software finally, but because of the final steps at work moving to another building which now lasted almost one and a half years. Those last weeks in april and may I had to work all the weekends and some nightshift, that’s why the blog lost my attention.
Quite like my wife’s blog which is also unmaintained since she is just finishing her studies now. But the good thing is, that I have lots of content in the back which I just noted down from time to time and which is just waiting to be published.
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Ahhh, forgot one more bad thing for you guys, I’ll be on holiday next week, so don’t expect too much activity soon.
Further I want to redesign the blog content (without killing the permalinks) to be more informative, such as writing in german and english since my readers are germans, most of them. And I also want to start a new blog category about architecture which is one of my hobbies. Although I’m not sure yet how to bundle all these different contents into one blog, I hope you’ll soon be able to enjoy the first articles.

For the RapidWeaver Upgrade itself I must say, I’ve got absolutely no idea why I spent the money for the upgrade since I can’t see any difference yet. Hopefully I’ll discover some new features in the future, and don’t experience one or more of the known/unknown bugs. At least my old content and layout loaded without warnings.

Let’s see if everything breaks when I press publish…..

…yours Kobaan. I’m back.