Fog (Dec 16 2009)

Outside of the usual end-of-the-year fund raising efforts that occupy a lot of my time, there's some actual technical projects going on. You may have noticed a dip in work an hour or so ago. Maybe not - it was quick. We're in (what we hope to be) the final stages of this massive science database shell game that's been taking months to complete at this point. The problem with a database so huge, so active, and so uniquely implemented is that paths of action are never entirely clear and one small misunderstanding could lead to a week of cleanup and starting again from scratch. All part of the big learning curve. Bottom line is we're almost there.

Oops... spoke too soon. Looks like the current restore phase aborted on its own <big sigh>.

Jeff and I also spent a moment considering some massive power outages over the holidays. Yes, there are major power upgrades happening on the hill starting later this month (affecting many buildings, not just ours). It makes some sense to do such things during what is usually "down time," i.e. when most everybody is on winter vacation. Of course that means computing staff has to be around to (a) safely power everything off before the outages and (b) power everything back on. And yes I mean two outages - one on December 27th/28th and another the following week. So that's four total complete power ups or power downs combined. In theory we could just leave everything off for a whole week after the first power down to save ourselves the extra cycle, but given we're trying to keep participants happy during donation season... well, it's worth the trouble. Yes, there will be announcement on the home page once we have a more solid plan.

Oh... look at that. Seems like Dave is implementing some new generic BOINC project news/announcement code - the upshot of which thread creation is broken and there's a new message board forum called "News" with my name on every post. I'll have him fix that shortly... I only write technical news. Okay.. it's fixed.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Thanks for the update Matt,

How the astropulse signal table reload project getting on?,

If you have a look at Seti Beta, there's a few problems happening with the new Hybrid ATI Astropulse app,

Claggy

Thats cool Matt,
Now we can comment on the front page news items.

Its a really great new feature!

Matt,
Happy Christmas or happy Holidays!. Enjoy you time with your family, SETI will still be there in the new year. Thanks for the time and hard work you put in in the past year.

John.
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[...]
In theory we could just leave everything off for a whole week after the first power down to save ourselves the extra cycle, but given we're trying to keep participants happy during donation season... well, it's worth the trouble. Yes, there will be announcement on the home page once we have a more solid plan.
[...]

Hmm.. since I'm a member of SETI@home I learned the characteristic to be patiently.


It would be nice to have 24/7 running well servers. But we (old here around) know it's not possible.

If we'll have one week servers down, we'll see (again) lot of members leaving.
I can't understand this, but it's true.


BTW. I posted for around one hour a message in a NC subforum thread, the message is now lost. No prob, but maybe interesting..