So here's a status report. I hope we can get new work soon, but I apologize that I've been busy lately with other things.

What I have done is upgrade the server software to the "boinc_stable" branch, and I've build the hello app for Linux and Mac with it. I want to build it for Windows too, before releaseing work, and that is more problematic. The BOINC team no longer supports MSVC++ 2003, which is what I have been using. There are two ways out of this, and actually I may choose both. One is to take over support of the VC++ 2003 build configuration files (which are fairly stable) and use those. The other is to switch to a newer machine I already have set up with VC++ 2005 and build with that. Both approaches have value, and the goal here is to do something valuable. Eventually I'll just use the newer machine.

After that, we'll start going through the suite of test apps again. There was a problem with yello with BOINC 6 that I didn't understand, and so we'll get that fixed. I'd also like to add the uppercase app from BOINC to the suite. The BOINC software builds the app, but I'll set up the rest of it - templates, release notes and tips and the like on how to run it, so that it's included in the suite. The idea of the test suite is that it's also an instructive set of examples, proceeding from simple to complex. The uppercase app demonstrates a lot at once, so it should come later in the sequence, after hello and yello but before lalanne.

And thanks to the suggestion of POVaddict I'm thinking I will put a BSD-style license on my examples, but I've not yet thought through which one.

I've also been working behind the scenes on the forum software a bit. We are very far behind the BOINC development path, and we need to get back up to date. I think I've recently characterized the changes needed to mate our customizations with the newer BOINC code, and I've also been documenting the changes in the wiki, but I have not got them all there yet. The forum changes have been on the back burner for a long time, but are now more important for the work I've been doing for I2U2, as I'll explain in a separate post.


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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

Also...

Yesterday I got work from LHC@Home. I didn't dare disturb the screensaver. So you guys looking for work could do something useful by crunching for them. Unfortunately I don't know the full story, but I'm guessing they now need to do more modeling of how the magnets are aligned, or are to be re-aligned. :-(

From the news on their site it seems they are testing a new version of sixtrack, so this is probably just a short test with more to follow. So I encourage the crew to be ready for more LHC work.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

When you're about to get up-to-date with current server SW and topping up the test suites, could you consider giving the multithreaded test app (from the BOINC test project server) a try too? (Under older clients, it should simply fallback to 1 thread.)
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Peter .-)

When you're about to get up-to-date with current server SW and topping up the test suites, could you consider giving the multithreaded test app (from the BOINC test project server) a try too? (Under older clients, it should simply fallback to 1 thread.)

could you consider giving the multithreaded test app (from the BOINC test project server) a try too?

Sure, good idea. What is it called, and where is the source?

I found the source code.

____________
-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats