Folding@Home screen saver for KDE

It bugged me that there was no fancy visualization front end around for Folding@Home that yields more than a progress bar and whatever else it could extract from the unitinfo.txt file. Especially the PS3 client looks awesome (I've never seen the Windows client) so I thought it's time to do one myself. It didn't take me too long because I've already written a KDE screen saver for a molecule dynamics framework at University of Stuttgart/HLRS.

So, here it is. FAHss displays the current work unit as an OpenGL model. The configuration dialog is a main part of the application and aims to give the user a choice as to how it should handle rendering. It allows the user to choose to ...

• let the camera move (e.g. rotate around the center).
• set the speed with which the camera moves.
• select a background color.
• draw a grid box around the unit and choose its color.
• display the models solidly or as a wireframe.
• adjust the number of subdivisions on models to increase performance.

Furthermore the user can select which information to display as an OSD, e.g. the progress and the due date. The font type and color and its position can be specified. All changes being made in the dialog are directly reflected in the preview window it contains.

There are several features which aren't implemented yet (such as core status or CPU usage) but it's already usable. Maybe I'll set the project up on Google Code some when, but for now I'm hosting it on my own server. It can be checked out like this:

svn co http://svnro.alphagemini.org/fahss/

I've also set up a WebSVN service to track changes at http://svn.alphagemini.org

HDAPS patch for 2.6.24-rc8

I've been a Thinkpad fan since the first time I laid hand on one so my next portable companion had to be the model X61 which turned out to be exceptionally reliable (and portable), with all its features running in Linux including the fingerprint sensor and the hard disk Active Protection System (HDAPS). Since I've had reasons to use iwlwifi drivers for my 3945ABG Wifi card I chose to use the in-kernel driver provided by the upcoming 2.6.24 release. This kernel also supports the intel HDA sound card well. I prefer to have all drivers in one place other than having to compile them externally, so this was the way to go.
What's lacking was the HDAPS disk parking kernel patch which isn't yet included in the mainstream kernel. Up until release candidate 6 (don't know about 7) the patch 1077-002.patch found on thinkwiki.org worked after some fiddling with the line numbers. As of rc8 I needed to swap some functions around in order to make it compile, the resulting patch can be found here.

Maybe later I'll take a look at the 'error check fix' mentioned on thinkwiki.org as well.

Christmas holidays

Now that holidays are over and everything settled down again I found some time to report back. It was relaxing on Christmas and New Year's Eve as this time we weren't bound to go anyway but instead got visitors. My girlfriend's parents decided to stay in Germany for some days so we had an interesting mix of Spanish and German style celebrations, without hurries or obligations and quite the only (European) inhabitants of the dorms around this time of the year.

On Christmas Eve we lighted some kind of brush-wood flares as it's supposed to be customs in Jijona.

We were quite lucky because it snowed from the 25th on.

We've reserved a table in the traditional room of Stuttgart's finest Japanese restaurant for a change - we've had enough of raclette sweets and pizza.

Last but not least we've had a great time on New Year's Eve, not only because we bought a whole bunch of fireworks but mostly because it started snowing heavily just around 11:45pm. So while we watched the fireworks and fired off our own, everything - including ourselves - got covered in snow.

During the celebrations I also spent some time in the workshop to get my PC water cooling system solution to work. As there were some complications and thus it ain't complete yet, I'll rant about it another time.