Posts by AthlonRob

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Please sign petition to accept BOINC XHTML changes (Message 288851) Posted 24 Apr 2006 by AthlonRob Post: with regard to the CVS, could i draw your attention to: help needed for a beginner with WinCVS It looks from your post that it is now working? CVS can be iffy sometimes, IME. also are there any plans to submit the current code into the CVS so the rest of us can look/help? I actually noticed a few features seem to have been implemented here that weren't here before... so I guess maybe Janus committed some stuff to CVS? I'd have to look. I've been distracted for the last month and haven't been paying much attention to things related to boinc or computers in general. School, work, and girl are all taking up my previous boinc/computer time. :-)
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Please sign petition to accept BOINC XHTML changes (Message 286913) Posted 21 Apr 2006 by AthlonRob Post: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> conflicts with <?php echo "Hello" ?>, even though (as you correctly pointed out) "The stuff in the PHP tags is parsed and processed before it gets off the web server...". So we do a <? echo "<?xml version=\\"1.0\\" encoding=\\"utf-8\\"\\?>"; ?> instead... NBD. Look at all the sites out there that are driven by Java these days. That's like saying that "I use Flash on my site" and the entirety of the HTML reads: <html><body> <object src="index.swf"> </body></html> Flash is an application within [X]HTML, not a substitute thereof. Likewise, Java is Java, and not an acceptable {X\|D}HTML substitute. No, no, no... Java for the back-end stuff. Tomcat. Servlets. All that good stuff. Not Java applets (who uses those these days??) but rather Java used similarly to how PHP is used.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Please sign petition to accept BOINC XHTML changes (Message 285519) Posted 20 Apr 2006 by AthlonRob Post: (2) The fora are PHP-based. You'd have to replace every <?php ... ?> with <script language="php" type="text/php"> ... </script>, and most browsers don't honour (or simply weren't given enough brains by their equally dim-witted programmers) the rule regarding ingoring illegal tags. Actually, no, you would not. The stuff in the PHP tags is parsed and processed before it gets off the web server and to the browser. Look at the source code for this page and you won't see any <?php ... ?> type stuff. That's all server-side stuff. It has nothing to do with whether things are HTML, XHTML, XML, plain text, or even a graphic. (3) C, C++, Java, and assembly programmers do not have the kind of brains that are needed to do great markup, and vice versa. The Devs don't care about HTML because they're too busy in processes, functions, and objects. Hmmm? Sure they do. Look at all the sites out there that are driven by Java these days. (5) XHTML is, by W3C fiat, UTF-8. PHP is not. I think PHP can do UTF-8 stuff... and you don't need to do UTF-8 in order to do XHTML. It works fine with plain-old ASCII text, too. :-)
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Please sign petition to accept BOINC XHTML changes (Message 283877) Posted 18 Apr 2006 by AthlonRob Post: For those of you advocating that XHTML is not supported by current day browsers (please, don't tell me IE 1.0 does not understand it. Noone uses it anymore. You get the point), go ahead and visit PrimeGrid's frontpage. It's pure XHTML. If you find it does not work, let me know. I will shut up about making BOINC XHTML compatible then. For now, I'm still for it. Please visit this page for some details on why XHTML is a Bad Thing(tm) for use on sites that wish to be compatible and standards compliant. Yes, XHTML makes more logical sense than HTML 4.01... but there is nothing it can do in IE that HTML 4.01 strict can't do. Make the pages HTML 4.01 strict, use CSS for layout, get rid of all these damned tables, and life will be good. In five years when XHTML is a viable option for regular use, it will be trivial to convert the pages over. Modify your patches to HTML 4.01 and I'll bet David will take them... and wouldn't that be better than where we are now, anyway?
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Please sign petition to accept BOINC XHTML changes (Message 283292) Posted 17 Apr 2006 by AthlonRob Post: I know this has been addressed here many times before. It's kept this way for ease of use, personalization and compatability. I'm not going to go back and search thru hundreds of threads trying to find them but perhaps Matt, Rom or Rob would care to comment again? Sure I will. :-) There's no valid reason to reach for xhtml compliance. I love xhtml, but there just isn't a "right" way to use it until browser support is there. And browser support isn't there yet. When IE7 is released we'll still be looking at years of a significant portion of the web using IE6 without xhtml support. So of course David turned down xhtml compliance. I've had conversations with Janus on the issue and I think we're in agreement that we need to be reaching towards valid HTML... it's on the list of things to do, but we're both busy people. :-) And a lot of the web code is in a state of flux with the most up-to-date code not in boinc CVS yet... so I would be wary of writing any patches just yet.
6) Message boards : Cafe SETI : The best post wins! (Message 238140) Posted 27 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: I need it to impress somebody. Can you help? :-) I.E. you need a great pickup line/story for a girl you like. She's hot. And it's not so much a pickup line as a story... to be used online.. not in person. :-)
7) Message boards : Cafe SETI : The best post wins! (Message 238130) Posted 27 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: Hey All- I'm looking for the best post ever. I need to post something somewhere. It has to impress. It has to be intelligent. It must be witty. Dry humor would be appreciated. It has to leave a lasting impression on all those who read it. A short story, a little bit of advice, whatever. It doesn't need to be original. It can be some email forward you got. It can be some blog post you read somewhere. Whatever. I need it to impress somebody. Can you help? :-)
8) Message boards : Number crunching : a rare message i get trying to acsess statistics (Message 234371) Posted 20 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: thanks Rob but i keep having this weired messAGE AND NO ACSESS to the statistics, aswell i am running out of WUs but thats an other mess caused by berkely Please copy and paste the URL that you're getting the message from....
9) Message boards : Number crunching : a rare message i get trying to acsess statistics (Message 234286) Posted 20 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: does anybody know what this means or better when it get fixed Looks like a typo in a project-specific PHP include. Also, it appears to be fixed now... unless I'm missing something. I checked both the servers, it seems to be good-to-go. :-)
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231875) Posted 16 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: If you are going to go that far, going the last step is not all that tough. I know, I did my older site as pure XHTML Strict. I also found that it did help slightly with non-conforming browsers like IE ... XHTML is going to render, in IE, in quirks mode. Since most people out there are still using IE (unfortunately), it causes things to frequently not render correctly. To make life easier, just stick with HTML... but use the optional close tags to make migration to XHTML, if and when it becomes viable, easier. Use lower-case tags. Make your HTML look as close to XHTML as you can while still making it vaild HTML.... See http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml for more information.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231259) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: I'm getting Last-Modified and Expires dates in 1970 on some of the cached pages (like Top computers). I think I found the bug that caused that and patched it. Hopefully Janus verify and apply it to CVS for me. :-)
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231250) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: I'd like to move the forum stuff to /forum/ but don't know if it'll happen. Nope =) Yeah, thought as much. Too bad. :-) Just to put a historical perspective to this discussion, one of the things that kept stats online was in fact caching. Without the current caching scheme the stats pages (top users, teams etc) took up way too much of the DB bandwidth. At some point all stats pages were taken offline due to this load. The cache is located serverside (and not clientside which most people are used to). It also allows some clientside caching queries like "if-modified-since", these are used by most modern browsers. We might have a few bugs in there, then. I'm getting Last-Modified and Expires dates in 1970 on some of the cached pages (like Top computers). Today there are very few performance related issues left in the web frontend and most of these will be taken care of quite soon. What's left in your opinion? The forum is and will not be cached (except using the MySQL query cache) - mostly due to the decision that the content will remain highly dynamic (it displays stuff directly based on your user prefs for instance, time is relative on some pages instead of being displayed as absolute etc etc.) an hence it wouldn't be as effective as caching more static stuff. Indeed. Just not worth the hassle. About standards: The html is not going to follow the XHTML standard. We are, however, aiming at HTML4.01 transitional or similar. The original code did not follow any standard at all. The quality of the current code is improving patch by patch as more and more ugly code is dumped to the waste bucket and replaced by better code. Wasn't BURP originally going for XHTML? Is that where I remeber XHTML dealing with boinc? And read yer email. :-P
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231191) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: also it's not just about editing pages as you know, server config comes into it a lot too, so that needs to be addressed as well Server configuration doesn't really come in to play so much with what we're discussing (standards compliance and organization). Caching can to some degree, but most web admins use sane defaults - for images, anyway. Everything else is dynamic, which doesn't fall under the web server configuration banner at all. for php yes, and besides, the http headers can be generated internally as you know, for other, quite basic stuff, like character encoding, and mime type (new feed), unless these can be set to the correct values as the defaults in the installation package then they should be changed (at least on seti as an example of the "right thing" to do) All that stuff is just in the PHP - no server configuration needed. The web server really isn't doing much of anything except handing stuff off to PHP. for URL structure, well i'll be honest, i don't know, for my own site, i own the server, and have full access to it (i host from home) so changing the URL structure has been simply a matter of changing the directory structure but i don't know if this is possible, or how to do it using a CVS system, i'm guessing it must be possible thou, so that everything can be done using best practices to be a shining example to others :) David is currently set against any changes to the way the directory structure is laid out. He doesn't want to move the files around. And moving them around to prepare for a potential filename (URL) change isn't worth the time - the project is PHP, we aren't going to switch to anything else. The files are already named .php. Putting every page in its own directory doesn't seem particularly sane to me, anyway. :-) I'd like to move the forum stuff to /forum/ but don't know if it'll happen. David really likes the mostly flat layout we're using right now.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Privacy Issues (Message 231181) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: Thanks Rob. Works nicely now with my IE. Thank David for getting it deployed so quickly!
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231178) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: EDIT: If there's going to be a separate list for the website issues, I'm interested in the subject well i had a look on the mailing-list list (the list of mailing lists lol) and was very tempted to just put in a request, because are you involved with the dev of the web side yoda? if so what are the current communication methods? I just sent the idea to David and Janus. Janus is the head of the web development, David the lead developer of boinc itself. Currently web-related communication happens either on the main development list or (more commonly) off list between those who are involved with it. Right now that's usually at least Janus, David, and me. Jens and Bruce often land on the list, as well. because on a colaborative project (such as this) when content/structure is completely seperate from presentation, i get the feeling there are going to be lots of problems when someone needs to change something in both (potentially breaking the presentation of other elements) especially with the initial over-haul, and because of this, i really feel that there needs to be a solid communication structure, and procedures put in place for making and submitting changes, and for the general work-flow of how things should be done etc. also it's not just about editing pages as you know, server config comes into it a lot too, so that needs to be addressed as well Server configuration doesn't really come in to play so much with what we're discussing (standards compliance and organization). Caching can to some degree, but most web admins use sane defaults - for images, anyway. Everything else is dynamic, which doesn't fall under the web server configuration banner at all. If y'all want to see things change (I was in your place a while back), fix it and send in the patch. :-)
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231173) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: tables shouldn't be used anyway, everything should (and can) be done using CSS layouts, which allows for much more customisablility (for other projects to tweak their own sites) and pages that use css will render much faster than those which use tables Tables shouldn't be used for layouts. Often times tables do make sense - such as displaying the list of threads, or the members of a team. Using <div>'s for that would be insane. :-) I hate table-based layouts... like the ones boinc regularly uses... but I don't have the time to clean them up all over the place. :-) Seriously, folks - the code is out there and available for cleanup. Start cleaning it up and we should be able to get some patches applied.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231170) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: I just had a go at changing the main "Message Boards" page to strict html and it's half the size. Anyway... Nuff said I believe Janus is rewriting the forum in such a way that I can more easiliy go in and clean up the generated HTML output... so the forums should shrink a fair amount after it's all applied.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 231164) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: Just on the issue of standards... Every page on the SETI site has the menu bar at the top and bottom of the page. These are made with a table full of repeated classes. It could be done with a lot less code (less than half of what it has now). Potential savings from just changing the structure of that menu are in the order of 1kb per page view (which is not cached). Now I don't know how many page views the SETI site gets per month, but I expect it to run into millions. Even at 1 million views a month, that's 1GB of bandwidth that could be used for more important things (and 1GB of data the server doesn't need to fetch from the hard-drive or memory) There's plenty of other markup in the pages that could be streamlined too. On SETI@Home specifically, some web design company donated the current design. I think we're stuck with it... and yeah, the code is ugly.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 230900) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: It's a slow go, though. Ah, it's helpful to know the background :) if stuff's still being developed then fair enough, i understand completely, i have to admit, i develop the same way, make it work first, then try to make it work "properly/correctly" lol but as long as it's a long term goal on the list then all is good Well, as I implement things, I implement them in a standards-compliant way... but to reimplement everything would take a lonnnngggg time. :-) some advice thou, avoid XHTML, IE doens't support it, and if it's served as text/html it'll be parsed with an HTML parser anyway, which will just interpret it as dodgy HTML with some extra / and other bits added in, might even make it go into quirks mode, not good you should only serve XHTML as application/xhtml+xml for it to work as intended, but IE will think any file with that mime type should be downloaded, so steer clear untill IE supports it properly (which is what something like 70-80% of people use, however firefox is fine thou and knows what's what) if you want the code to be as good as posible, just write your HTML using XHTML rules, always have an end tag, use lower case tags, use css as much as possible etc.... Indeed, that's how I generally do things. I have some old stuff that's still XHTML, but anything new I write I aim for HTML 4.01... However, this is an area I think you could help with! Dig in to the PHP and go through making it standards compliant. As you said, it's mostly just static content - there's not a ton of complicated PHP about. Supply patches. :-) sure, i'd love to help where i can, but i'm a newbie to CVS, and when i asked for some help on how to aquire the web source, the few who did reply just pointed me to some info about CVS, not how to use it, so i'm still at a loss, also are there some guidelines on the dev process? i assume everything is heading towards using UTF-8 etc. and other sensible stuff knowing how to submit/publish my modifications would be good too ;) Grab Eclipse. Install it. Check out the boinc project as a CVS module (the address is on the web site), make changes, then right click on the project and create a patch from there. It's all very simple... Eclipse makes CVS life easy. SVN life easy, too - but boinc hasn't yet switched to SVN unfortunately. I can give you more specifics if you get stuck along the way.
20) Message boards : Number crunching : Devs - Suggestion for improved web performance (Message 230897) Posted 14 Jan 2006 by AthlonRob Post: But we do always seem to have plenty of "vision" people ... maybe we can have them all get together and vision a solution ... :) well unless people are taught, they can only be "vision" people, it takes knowledge and experience to move up to "developer" status. Let's not forget the resources either. Many many smart people out there who given the tools would develop a whole new world, but it sucks when they can't even afford a current version of QBasic. Who needs QBasic when there's Java, PHP, Python, Perl, GCC, mingw, Eclipse, Qt, GTK+, and a plethora of other toolkits, compilers, and IDEs out there for free?

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