[2002-10-28]
2002-10-28 - Clarified and added link to stats page for the new client.
2002-10-22 - Updated strand
2002-08-10 - Added info on the new 3.0 client.
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The net is full of distributed projects where people join up to work an parts of a bigger puzzle. Some of these projects are worthless in their own, such as the distributed.net effort of bruteforceing cryptographic keys. Some are more playful than scientific, such as calculating more decimals of pi or finding new Mersenne primes.
Of course, we all know about seti@home. The reason I'm no longer with them is that I'm not convinced of the scientific validity of what they're doing, and also they treated the community pretty badly for a while which resulted in me leaving them.
By comparison, the folding@home and genome@home projects seem far more serious and useful. Team Wicked Old Atheists are currently working on genome@home, but some of the members are also working at folding.
The name? Ah, the name. Well, there's a fidonet echo named Holysmoke in which theists and atheists meet and, more often than not, battle it out. Anyway, one of the participants is Don Martin, and this is what he has to say on the topic of WOAs:
"Wicked Old Atheist, a phrase and abbreviation I have the honor of coining here some years back in response to one religionist who was certain that atheists did no good works. Use it in good health--it may be my only claim to fame when I shuffle off this mortal coil."
So there you have it. We're atheists, we're "wicked", and we've been so since the dawn of time. We never do good deeds, right?
If you haven't already, I'm urging you to join one of these two projects. Both are important. You can read more about the science of these projects at their respective homepage.
You don't need to join our team. The important thing is to contribute something. The teams are merely a way to organize the statistics, basically. However, we'd be overjoyed if you wanted to join our little team. There's a healthy dose of friendly competition between the teams - and between individual team members too in some cases - which can add to your enjoyment.
You should join our team if you're proud to be an atheist and want to be on a winning team :-)
To join up you need to go to the genome@home download page sign up, get a suitable client and install it.
Simply install the client, and in the configuration enter your username exactly as you registered it, and then enter our team number; 396840272. Confusingly the current client can only be configured for one team, even though it supports both genome-at-home and folding-at-home. Which project your units are donated to is automatically deduced based on the team number. I hope they'll support being a member of two teams, one for each effort, in the future.
If you want to only run genome-at-home, select your preferred client type under advanced options.
Please note that as of writing the new client does not seem to be giving out genome jobs, you will instead be forced to work on folding. Also note that the new client will not - as far as I can see - contribute to the same statistics as the old client, but will instead show up here.
The first time it runs it will come up in configuration mode, at which time you're given the option of entering a "team account" number. This number is 396840272. That is all you have to do. If you are already running the client you can join the team by rerunning the configuration procedure (check the documentation) or by simply editing the configuration file, ghclient.cfg. Make it so that there's a line reading account=396840272 under the account section.
You will enter the statistics after finishing your first complete genome. When you do, feel free to drop me a message and I'll include you in the team member list below.
(This is only relevant to the old 0.99 client of genome-at-home. The new client will run in the systray)
Crybaby.
Sure you can, you'll just have to be a little smart about it. Personally I use a tool called CopyText which is quite handy to have around. You install CopyText by unpacking it in a suitable location, then you create a shortcut with a keyboard shortcut to access it from anywhere. Try SHIFT+CTRL+T, that's what I use. Once you get it working you should be able to point your mouse almost anywhere, and bring up CopyText by pressing that shortcut combination. When that works, focus the Genome@home console window, put the mouse-pointer over the title bar and press your shortcut. You should see CopyText pop up, with the correct text in the title field. Now simply push the button that says hide and the application won't bother you again.
The bad thing about doing it this way is that there really isn't any easy way to get the application back. For those of you who feel that this is a major shortcoming, I instead recommend the small and gratis application TrayIt which can be used to send almost any application to the tray. Make sure you enter options and enable "Allow minimizing of the Console windows under Windows NT" if that is your thing.
If you have the MS Resource Kit you can use srvany to make any application, even g@h I'll wager, into a service under NT. I've never done that though, so don't ask me how.
You can go here for our team statistics (or here for the new client) or maybe check out our current world ranking. For some pretty graphs of our projected future production, and more, you can go to statman.
This list may be slightly outdated when you read this, since it's handled manually.
I'm currently running genome@home on my AMD K6-2 400Mhz linux-box, and my 1.4GHz AMD Athlon workstation.
Running on one 1.4GHz AMD Athlon and one AMD Duron 800MHz.
Athlon XP2000+, Athlon XP1800+, Celeron-1000, Athlon 800 and a PII-400 (on and off).
1GHz Athlon, 600 MHz Pentium, 266 MHz Pentium, 4x 300 MHz Celeron.
Duron 1GHz.
My genome@home computer is a slightly overclocked P3@760MHz.
"1 Pentium III running at 700 MHz, 2 Pentium III's running at 500 MHz each, 1 Athlon running at 450 MHz, 1 dual Pentium Pro, both processors running at 450 MHz and 1 Pentium II running at 266 MHz"
1) PIII Tecra 8100 (unsure of CPU speed, but probably 600-733, something like that), 256 MB, Windows ME
2) PII 450, 64 MB, Windows 98
3) P 166, 32 MB, Windows NT 4.0 w/SP 6.a
AMD Thunderbird 1,2 GHz
Right now just my 1.4 GHz Win2k Athlon
I'm using a 1 Ghz Athlon.
p4 1.7 ghz
1.4ghz P4.
AMD Duron, 850 MHz with 256MB RAM
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