Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC

Grok Headline matches for Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC

BOINC: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for
Network Computing

BOINC: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for
Network Computing 01/07/2004 06:13 PM

""BERKELEY – With the Democratic
National Convention over and the
Republican one beginning next week, it
seemed a good time to check in with
George Lakoff, the UC Berkeley professor
of cognitive linguistics whose scrutiny
of the language of politics has..."

""BERKELEY – With the Democratic
National Convention over and the
Republican one beginning next week, it
seemed a good time to check in with
George Lakoff, the UC Berkeley professor
of cognitive linguistics whose scrutiny
of the language of politics has..." 08/27/2004 01:45 PM

boinc 1.3

boinc 1.3 09/08/2004 10:59 AM
A tool that displays information about BOINC projects.

boinc 1.2

boinc 1.2 07/11/2004 09:11 AM
A tool that displays information about BOINC projects.

boinc 1.0

boinc 1.0 06/29/2004 09:16 AM
A tool that displays information about BOINC projects.

boinc 1.1

boinc 1.1 07/05/2004 10:54 AM
A tool that displays information about BOINC projects.

boinc 1.4

boinc 1.4 09/19/2004 09:40 AM
A tool that displays information about BOINC projects.

BOINC Menubar 4.25 (v2)

BOINC Menubar 4.25 (v2) 03/30/2005 02:10 AM
Graphical front-end for BOINC.

Update: BOINC Menubar 4.25 v2

Update: BOINC Menubar 4.25 v2 03/31/2005 11:27 AM
The graphical front end for BOINC adds support for HTTP and SOCKS proxies, support for dual processor machines, and various other improvements and bug fixes.

SETI@Home Transitions To BOINC

SETI@Home Transitions To BOINC 06/23/2004 05:24 PM

BOINC Project to Search for
Gravitational Waves

BOINC Project to Search for
Gravitational Waves 07/15/2004 03:24 AM

Seti's Boinc project hit by DDoS attack

Seti's Boinc project hit by DDoS attack 07/29/2004 06:42 AM

SETI@Home (finally) begins transitioning
to BOINC

SETI@Home (finally) begins transitioning
to BOINC 06/24/2004 01:19 PM
SETI@Home begins their transition to the BOINC client and infrastructure. Congrats to Team Lamb Chop members for their efforts in the "classic" portion of the project and we look forward to your contribution using the new BOINC client.

Berkeley DB XML 2.0.9

Berkeley DB XML 2.0.9 01/03/2005 02:28 PM
A native XML database with XQuery access.

How Berkeley Can You Be?

How Berkeley Can You Be? 10/29/2003 01:16 AM
I finally got around to sorting through and captioning the photos I took of the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade and Art Car fest that was held in Berkeley at the end of September. Going through the pictures reminded me of some of the reasons I like living in Berkeley so much. Sure, people regularly overdo political correctness here, and there were a lot of "Only in Berkeley" groups and moments in the parade, but on the whole it was an amazing display of the diversity, creativity and sense of humor that make this a fun place to live. There were also a lot of self-mocking groups poking fun at Berkley. I love it when people retain the ability to laugh at themselves, and it is a highly desirable quality for living in Berkeley. Luckily, it is also a frequently displayed quality. One of the stars of the parade was the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir, an art car from Houston Texas, of all places. 5 miles of wiring that must have taken months of work to put together, all for a bunch of plastic fish and lobsters who sing while being conducted by large crustacean. It sounds silly, but it was wonderful. I could track its progress down University Avenue by the gales of laughter is spawned as it passed by. After the parade, people crowded around for hours and were treated to special performances by the Choir. I got some good photos. If it comes to your town, don't miss it. Or it even has its own website, with a very funny account of its construction, you can check it out at www.sashimitabernaclechoir.org....

Berkeley DB 4.3.27

Berkeley DB 4.3.27 01/03/2005 02:28 PM
Provides embedded database support for traditional and client/server application

Berkeley DB 4.2.52

Berkeley DB 4.2.52 04/13/2004 12:36 PM
Provides embedded database support for traditional and client/server application

At CFP 2004 in Berkeley

At CFP 2004 in Berkeley 04/21/2004 12:54 PM
This week I'm at the ACM's 14th Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP), at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley (walking distance from my house). There are good sessions on issues such as e-voting and digital rights management, and savvy...

The Berkeley Pit Mascot

The Berkeley Pit Mascot 04/14/2005 06:53 PM
"The Auditor", an amazing dog, lived a long life in one of the harshest environments, the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. The mine site has no vegetation, the water in the pit is full of heavy metals and very acidic (pH 2.5) and yet the Auditor held on long after mining operations halted. He has inspired a web site and even an art project.

ScienceMatters@Berkeley

ScienceMatters@Berkeley 09/22/2004 06:16 AM
David Pescovitz: In this month's issue of my research digest ScienceMatters@Berkeley...

* Flipping the Switch on Cancer: Improving the effectiveness of Cancer drugs one molecule at a time.
* Think Molecularly, Act Globally: Studying the atmosphere from a converted spy plane.
* Quantum Computing's Magnetic Attraction: A new spin on magnetic atoms.
* The secret history of Vitamin B-12

Link

Clueless in Berkeley

Clueless in Berkeley 07/12/2004 04:07 PM
I have written before of my love for my favorite feature in the Berkeley Daily Planet, the Police Blotter. Today while reading it, I ran across this absolute gem which caused me to lose a mouthful of hot Peet's coffee in front of the Cheeseboard. Knife-Wielder Earns Cellular Domicile A 48-year-old Berkeley man found himself with a new and tightly confined residence after police busted him for flashing a knife at a fellow citizen near the corner of Center Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 9:37 a.m. Friday. The felon seems to have overlooked that building on the corner and all those blue-clad badge-wearing folks who pass through its portals en route to their black-and-white cars. (For those of you unfamiliar with Berkeley geography, our new police headquarters is at the corner of MLK and Center.) How do you get a job writing stuff like this? I want one. It made my day....

Discovering Berkeley DB

Discovering Berkeley DB 11/25/2003 10:23 PM

I'm working on a project at the moment which involves exporting a whole bunch of data out of an existing system. The system is written in Perl and uses Berkeley DB files for most of its storage.

I'd never done anything with Berkeley DB before, but luckily Python has a module which seems to do all of the hard work for me:

>>> db = bsddb.btopen('xpand.db')
>>> db.keys()[0:10]
[':archives:index.html', ':art:test.html', ... 
>>> db[':art:test.html']
'template;front.tp\x01\x01'
>>> 

The Berkeley DB libraries are maintained by Sleepycat Software. Unfortunately, their site is completely saturated with marketing jargon. Our customers rely on Berkeley DB for fast, scalable, reliable and cost-effective data management for their mission-critical applications. Great - now what does it do exactly?

Some digging around turned up the real information: the Berkeley DB Tutorial and Reference Guide, which contains pretty much everything you could possible want to know about the technology. It turns out that at a basic level Berkeley DB is just a very high performance, reliable way of persisting dictionary style data structures - anything where a piece of data can be stored and looked up using a unique key. The key and the value can each be up to 4 gigabytes in length and can consist of anything that can be crammed in to a string of bytes, so what you do with it is completely up to you. The only operations available are "store this value under this key", "check if this key exists" and "retrieve the value for this key" so conceptually it's pretty simple - the complicated stuff all happens under the hood.

It seems like a great alternative to a full on relational database for simple applications, although I'm slightly confused by the license which allows free use for open source products but requires a license for commercial applications. Does that mean that if I use the bsddb Python module in a commercial app I need to get a license from Sleepycat?

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley 12/11/2003 01:13 PM
In this issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* Grabbing waste heat from industry to warm your apartment
* Engineering our water resources against El Nino
* Simulating cyber-attacks on a microscale model of the Net

I hope you enjoy it! Link

Prostitution to be legalized in
Berkeley?

Prostitution to be legalized in
Berkeley? 07/07/2004 02:35 PM
This article in the SF Bay Guardian reports on a new ballot meaure in Berkeley, California to legalize prostitution -- another measure in SF is on the way. Link (Thanks, Creative_ten !)

My Berkeley Voting Experience

My Berkeley Voting Experience 12/17/2004 06:40 PM
I took my absentee ballot over to my polling place in Berkeley this morning around 11 AM to drop it off. The polling place has the dreadful Diebold touch screen machines that are known to be extremely vulnerable to fraud. There was about a 10 minutes wait, then people were being asked "Paper or Machine". About half the people chose paper, and there was a long table at one end of the polling place where people were sitting and filling out the paper ballots (no real secrecy possible, but on the other hand no one had to use the table). I went by the Cheeseboard on my way home. Downtown and North Berkeley were empty in a way they never are at 11 AM on a weekday -- I'm guessing and hoping that lots of people are either in a battleground state or were at home calling voters to encourage them to vote....

Flashing, Berkeley style

Flashing, Berkeley style 08/20/2004 11:35 PM
From the ever amusing Berkeley police blotter: Exposer Stalks BART Rider A woman arriving at the North Berkeley BART station last Friday afternoon found herself being pursued by a not-so-gentlemanly fellow who exposed his shortcomings before fleeing in his wheelchair. Only in Berkeley can I imagine a wheelchair flasher....

BlogOn Blogs Berkeley

BlogOn Blogs Berkeley 07/08/2004 02:01 PM
One of the greatest reasons I love living in the Bay Area is for all the great geeky events that...

New: Berkeley Packet Monitor 1.0

New: Berkeley Packet Monitor 1.0 07/27/2004 11:24 AM
Berkeley Packet Monitor is a network traffic monitoring and diagnostic utility that uses the Berkeley Packet Filter devices built into Mac OS X.

Another issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley

Another issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley 07/19/2004 11:47 AM
My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is now online. While my Lab Notes site highlights interesting engineering research, ScienceMatters explores the physical sciences, biology, and chemistry. Inside this month's issue:

* The Cellular Mechanic
* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes
* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways

Link

Blogon Berkeley Style

Blogon Berkeley Style 07/17/2004 04:10 PM
Join us for a get together for BlogOn conference attendees, local bloggers, techies, media folks, and anyone else who wants...

Pure Java Berkeley DB

Pure Java Berkeley DB 06/16/2004 09:14 PM

Wow.  Pure Java edition of Berkeley DB is out.  I guess pure Java version of Berkeley DB XML is coming as well.  As to the performance, I haven't checked it myself but if this quote means anything, I think this is a major event for Java developers:

"With Berkeley DB Java Edition, we have a simpler setup, a 3x increase in data import speed, a 5x increase in performance and a 10x decrease in disk storage requirements."

--  Eric Jain, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.5.0

Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.5.0 06/16/2004 01:30 PM
A transactional Java database.

Emerging Technologies at Berkeley

Emerging Technologies at Berkeley 03/06/2004 01:57 AM
I spent today at the University of California at Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments Annual Research Symposium. It was a blast, in many ways the academic equivalent of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference I went to two weeks ago. Instead of the O'Reilly fare of Robots and Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter and Emergent Democracy Worldwide, they had Smart Dust, Electric Clothes (Transistors made from woven textiles), Circuits printed on Plastic and Technology Research for Developing Regions. While some of the subjects were similar to ETech, the crowd and format were very different. While anyone who stumbled across the website in the last month could register and attend for free, the crowd consisted almost entirely of invited academics and members of the research divisions of large corporations, plus a few Europeans and a very large crowd from Finland. Instead of young hackers giving talks then joining the audience, there were graduate students who gave presentations or demos but then went back to their labs/cubes. The conference appeared to be primarily Berkeley CS and EE showing their stuff to current and potential sponsors and collaborators. Nothing wrong with that, and I was delighted with the chance to attend and see the profs and grad students present their research results. I was very impressed with the breadth of the research being done, and with the number of labs that are scattered around town, working on things as different as extremely low power self organizing sensors connected by wireless networks to very interesting design methodologies for real-time fault tolerant software. I suspect that the people who tied up Sprint's application to put up 3 cell antennas on a building in Berkeley for 2 years have no idea of all the wacky and creative things that the UC wireless researchers are up to with radio in Berkeley. I probably won't get a chance to write up my notes, but if I don't and you are interested, I highly recommend the three (1, 2, 3) talks mentioned above, all of which are archived on the Berkeley CSEE web site....

ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches

ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches 06/17/2004 11:36 AM
Based on the model of Lab Notes, my online research digest from UC Berkeley Engineering, we've now launched a new publication to focus on the sciences at the university. In ScienceMatters@Berkeley, I'll report on mind-bending research in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.

In the premier issue:
* Crystallizing Nanoscience
* Hunting the Achilles' Heel of Hepatitis
* The Mysterious Matter of Dark Matter

If hope you enjoy it! If you do, please feel free to subscribe to the email or RSS ScienceMatters digest. Link

Saturday is Cal Day (and bakesale day)
in Berkeley

Saturday is Cal Day (and bakesale day)
in Berkeley 04/17/2004 02:23 AM
This Saturday is Cal Day, when UC Berkeley has an open house all day. Although it is supposedly geared towards prospective students, it's lots of fun for everybody. For the autodidact, there are lots of free lectures and demonstrations. I'd recommend Professor Tyrone Hayes' lecture, Genetically Modified Weeds, Hermaphroditic Frogs, and Premature Babies, if you can get yourself to the Valley Life Sciences Building by 9 AM. Cal Day is also a great place to bring kids for the day. There are lots of fun hands-on activities for kids of all ages. We went last year (in the rain) and had a blast. Based on last year's experiences, I would especially recommend Activities in Archaeology at the Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College Ave. for elementary school age children. The university students were very sweet, and they really set things up nicely for kids, with lots of interesting activities, and the kids get to take the home the "artifacts" they discover. The parents can watch hand tools being made from obsidian and flint, just as our ancestors did 10,000 plus years ago. Another good pick is visiting the usually pricey Art Museum or Lawrence Hall of Science, both of which are free for the day. It would be hard to go wrong taking a kid to Cal Day. As a final bonus, MoveOn activists are holding their Bake Sale for Democracy Saturday, and there are 6 bake sales being held within a mile of campus. Rumor has it that the founders of MoveOn will be at Kerry's Benvenue Bake Sale for part of the day. Highly recommended....

Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.4.5

Berkeley DB Java Edition 1.4.5 05/03/2004 10:45 AM
A transactional Java database.

Lab Notes from Berkeley Engineering

Lab Notes from Berkeley Engineering 05/12/2004 10:00 AM
In this issue of Lab Notes, my research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* A.I. systems that uncover the needles in haystacks of data, from software bugs to hidden genes.
* Using x-ray microscopes to design concrete Band-Aids for decaying buildings and bridges.
* Medical imaging via modem that will enable remote village doctors to perform minimally-invasive cancer surgery.
Link

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering 01/16/2004 11:35 AM
In my new issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley:

* Software that recognizes faces in the news
* A satellite to unravel the mysteries of dark matter
* High-performance computer chips that don't melt
* The father of Fuzzy Logic
* and more... Link

A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon

A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon 06/05/2005 11:33 PM
As long time readers know, I love the People's Republic of Berkeley, foibles and all, and have celebrated its wonderful quirks in my writing and photography for the last 3 years, and even been banned from Adsense for having done so. But sometimes the Berkeley scene and its inhabitants much-lampooned well-meaning but sometimes unthinking do-gooding missionary zeal and neo-puritanism is too much, even for me, and tonight's evening at the Berkeley CyberSalon was an example of such. I recently read about the Berkeley CyberSalon on Scott Rosenberg's blog, and joined the mailing list based on his recommendation. It seemed like a good opportunity to hear about new ideas in technology as well as a good way to meet other people in Berkeley interested in socio-political issues around technology. I also thought it was a brilliant idea for a publicist to host a salon, and it substantially increased my respect for Sylvia Paull, who had I last seen earlier this week at Kevin Werbach's Pre-Pre SuperNova party standing on a table frantically banging together two wine glasses in an effort to encourage people to sit down. When I got the email about tonight's panel discussion, it sounded quite interesting: While technology can level the playing field for developing countries, it often supplants and destroys the very cultures these societies have taken centuries, if not millennia, to develop. How should we introduce new technologies to developing countries so that we can keep the best of both worlds? ... Invited panelists include: Lee Felsenstein, who built the first portable computer, the Osborne, and has tried to port the Internet to the jungles of Laos using the pedal power of the bicycle. Eric Brewer, cofounder of spider search engine Inktomi and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, who just led a delegation of open source computing advocates to India. Richard Komans, who set up an Internet Bookmobile Project in Uganda to download and publish books on the spot, and Jessica Mitchell, a Geekcorps technology volunteer who is working with Ghana’s ISPs. And invited to join the discussion on the other side of the debate: Claudia Carr, UCB associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, who has firsthand experience of the way modern technology destroys ancient cultures. Iain Boal, social historian of science and technics at UCBs Institute of International Studies, edited a book called "Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics...
Grok Description matches for Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC
GrokA matches for Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC

ScienceMatters@Berkeley for April

ScienceMatters@Berkeley for April 04/06/2005 12:35 PM
David Pescovitz: I hope you enjoy my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley, including:

* Berkeley's Star Planet Hunter: Geoffrey Marcy's search for other Earths

* Tiny Test Tubes and Nanoscale Membranes: Building blocks for longer-lasting batteries and supersensitive poison detectors

* Yosemite Then and Now: Tracing the path of a century-old wildlife survey

Link

Berkeley on Joel Spolsky

Berkeley on Joel Spolsky 02/10/2004 02:56 AM


One of the great things about living in Berkeley is that a lot of interesting people come to town, from political figures giving talks on campus to writers at Cody's to musicians playing at Freight and Salvage, and if you are at all adventurous you can hear and meet many of them. Tonight Berkeley was host to a leading light from the small world of software product and project management, (which also happens to be my profession, to the extent I have one), Joel Spolsky, who writes a well-regarded weblog on software management, Joel on Software. The venue was a funny one, a cafe called Au Coquelet that also served as my alternative office and favorite lunch spot for the eight years that I had an office around the corner. It is a business person's lunch place and a student's dinner and study and hang out place. So I walked into the cafe tonight and looked around for the Joel group -- like any other geek, I was too shy to ask anyone, but when I spotted a big table lined entirely with males, mostly in their mid-twenties to early forties, not too well dressed, predominantly European-American, I knew that I had found the geek gathering. It was a curious scene. Joel was ensconced at the first table, attempting to swallow bites of foot between responding to questions. Latecomers like myself were filling in the table around the corner, where we slowly warmed up to each other by discussing computers in education and citing favorite Joel essays like The Law of Leaky Abstractions, 12 Steps to Better Code, and Fire And Motion. The crowd included its share of local luminaries, such as Berkeley tech writer Scott Mace, Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg, Ten Speed Press founder Phil Wood, Perl Guru Sriram "Ram" Srinivasan, plus the usual crowd of dot-com crash victims, cashed-out retirees and survivors looking for the next interesting thing that I run into at any tech gatherings these days. Next to us were two undergraduate women, who slowly got more and more alarmed as more men kept arriving and hauling over tables, eventually enveloping them on three sides, at which point the women got up and left.

It is always fun meeting someone whom one knows only through their writing, and to compare their online persona to their physical one. In his writing in Joel on Software, Joel always comes across as a little Olympian, delivering his deep insights from his vast experience. Actually, I suspect that he just thinks more analytically about his experience than most of us, and he writes very well. His online persona is calm, considered, and wise. As another C alifornian reviewer noted, even though his website sports a picture of the skyline of Seattle, Joel Spolsky in person definitely comes across like a New Yorker, especially when surrounded by a sea of Californians. He spoke rapidly, intensely, bobbing his head as he held forth with opinions on all matters technical, changing topics with every other sentence, and punctuating each topic with a wisecrack. Although claiming exhaustion from his travels, he was the most energetic person in the room, and he was clearly performing, and performing well. He seemed to enjoy his performance as well, and he was good at it. Talking to him, it was clear that he would be very hard to best in an argument, because, as anyone who reads Joel on Software knows, he has a lot of intellectual horsepower and can express himself very well, but also because he clearly has a lot of stamina for arguing, and would be hard to outlast. The major deviation that he exhibited from the New York stereotype was his politeness. After he finished his meal he got up and moved to another table to talk with some of the other folks who had come, then after a while moved to the next table. He was as attentive to the questions of the twenty-something programmers as he was to those of the local luminaries. One of the things that was curious was to see the crowd (myself included) surrounding Joel and treating him like a Delphic Oracle, asking him "what are Mozilla/Firebird's chances of establishing browser competition again(good), how do you decide what features to put in the next version of Fog Buzz (whatever features the lack of which clearly blocked sales of the last version), what would you use for developing a cross-platform GUI desktop app (don't know). After all, even if he is smarter than I am he probably isn't any smarter than many of the people I've worked with over the years. What's the difference? He writes, frequently and well. It's nice to know that writing still can bring authority, as well as a bit of celebrity. All in all, a very pleasant and informative evening. Thank you Joel for organizing it. Cross posted on The Berkeley Blog

ScienceMatters@Berkeley for March

ScienceMatters@Berkeley for March 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
David Pescovitz: My March issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is online. I hope you enjoy it!

* Ring around the collar for chromosomes

* Rearing Rodents for behavioral insights

* Nanoscience imitating nature

Link

Judith Miller at UC Berkeley

Judith Miller at UC Berkeley 03/19/2005 03:02 AM
David Pescovitz: Last night at UC Berkeley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller discussed journalism and democracy with investigative reporter Lowe ll Bergman (played by Al Pacino in The Insider). In a few weeks, Miller may be behind bars for refusing to reveal confidential sources relating to another reporter's disclosure of a CIA operative's name. Before becoming a possible martyr for the First Amendment though, Miller was known for penning articles in the New York Times supporting claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Whether Miller was tricked by her sources (including members of the Bush administration) or, worse, in cahoots with them is still not clear to her many critics. From Bonnie Powell's coverage of the Berkeley event:

Miller argues that if she was duped by her unnamed sources, so was the Bush administration — and she's not apologizing for believing there were WMDs in Iraq until the president does. "I think I was given information by people who believed the information they were giving the president," she told Bergman. "When the president asked, you know, 'What about this WMD case? Are we sure about this?' [then-CIA director] George Tenet said to him, 'Mr. President, this is a slam dunk.' The people I talked to certainly thought that." Other WMD believers, she said, included the entire U.S. intelligence community as well as French, English, and Israeli agencies. The debate, she claimed, was not over whether Saddam had WMDs, but whether it was worth going to war over them...

Ultimately, Miller said, she "wrote the best assessment that I could based on the information that I had." She attempted to tie the controversy over her WMD reporting to her current struggle by saying that she had heard after the fact — after she returned from being embedded with an infantry division in Iraq — that there had been people who had reservations about the WMD intelligence she was receiving.

"I wish they had come forward at the time to express those reservations," she said. "To me, this case that I am now involved in emphasizes the importance of getting as many people as possible to come forward with a dissenting view, or allegations of wrongdoing."

Link

Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: "uc berkeley" "berkeley style"