Month: November 2007

The Folding@Home project running on user’s PS3s has been acknowledged by the Guinness World of Records as the most powerful distributed computing project. The donated computing time from user’s PS3s has reached 1 petaflop (compared to 256 teraflops for the next nearest, SETI@Home)

This has to the funniest (and most awesome) geek Halloween costume I’ve ever seen… and it was relatively low budget as well.

Every now and again it amazes me when you accidentally stumble across an underground group of people completely into some unusual topic – for example, Chiptunes, creating musical compositions using the tone generators of yesteryears computers or recreating the same style using regular musical instruments. I came across the band Machinae Supremacy because someone had used one of their tracks as the backing on their demo of Compiz on Linux – they create new songs influenced by the sound generator chip from the Commodore 64, and they’re pretty impressive. Doing a bit more searching, I came across this site, with a huge amount of links to other chiptune type websites… I think I’m going to be busy for a while…

I heard Dick Wall on the JavaPosse podcast raving about his ‘wobbly windows’ in Compiz and wasn’t too sure what he was talking about although it sounded interesting. Over the weekend I downloaded the ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 release of Ubuntu to install on my laptop and found in the release notes that Compiz was included in the standard install. And, WOW is it impressive. The Windows subtly swoop and fade in and out when they are opened, and when you move a window around the screen it wobbles like it’s made of Jelly 🙂 Very very impressive, some very neat touches in there. I’m not considering upgrading to Vista because I don’t need to spend that sort of money, but you have to admit XP is looking really dated now. Mac OS X really is the best example out there for a good looking and easy to use operating system UI, but seeing Compiz on Ubuntu really did blow me away. The only catch is I can’t get WPA working with my Netgear WG511 card to connect to my router, so that’s ruling it out for me right now. I spent a huge amount of time getting wpa supplicant working on a previous version of Ubuntu on my laptop, and I can’t be bothered right now to go through that again to work out why it’s not working, so I’m stuck with XP on my laptop for now.

Here’s a video of Compiz and Beryl being demonstrated…. pretty amazing stuff…