Zagadka's Site

Work.


Ran into Dave on the train, caught up a little bit. It seems he's scored some sweet 19" monitors and a sweet glass "Graphic Designer's" desk. Sounds really cool.


8:57 AM:

Mmmm blueberry muffin today. Yumyumyum.


2:25 PM:

Terribly interesting day. Fixed Gary's Home PC after some amateur dude looked at it who was "good with computers" tried to. Friends don't give the name "Guru" lightly. This is the name I have, because, when I fix stuff and it stays fixed, unless people mess with it. Then that "warranty" doesn't apply. If you don't try to mess with it, it will STAY FIXED!


There is also the compulsory installation of both Firefox and Thunderbird. This almost guarantees that their PC won't be filled with spy ware crap after a day of use. "This browser is really quick, I haven't had any spy ware or rubbish install it's self for months now" - yes, that’s why I installed it and told you NOT to use Internet Explorer. Except for windows updates… Meh, enough showing off…


7:32 PM:

Yum, Fish for dinner. Beautiful crumbed Dory with Golden brown potatoe wedge goodness! Mmmmmmm. Don't forget the chicken salt on the wedges! Oh, and the vegies with cheese sauce mmmmmmmmmmm.


It seems as though I am talking about food too much these days. I like food. I like eating food. I like to cook it too - when Kel trusts me enough to let loose in the kitchen sometimes...


Remember the comment earlier about staying fixed? Yeah, it's true. I have had Mum's PC for 4 days now. I reinstalled everything and reseated all the components. It has been folding for FOUR DAYS at FULL LOAD! It has completed 4 WUs!.


Folding is a great idea. Folding refers to the folding and un-folding of proteins. We are talking about Folding@Home or FAH. The reason for this research is when a protein unfolds incorrectly it can cause diseases or defects in the body. It would consume massive ammounts of CPU and RAM resources on a supercomputer and years to simulate the folding and un-folding of proteins under different conditions. They use dontated "CPU Time" from millions of people around the world that want to help to run their simulations for them. So, what happens is the person wishing to donate some CPU time downloads a client. These guys then pass out WUs or "Work Units", this is data for the client to crunch. Once the client has finished with the WU the results are passed back to the FAH guys and their server passes the client another WU. This type of system is called "Distributed Computing". There are also other projects like SETI@Home that works a similar way. SETI is a project that is looking for extra-terrestrial signals using a big radio teliscope. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They do a similar thing but pass out blocks of signal for the people to analyse and send back.