TMcG

Late Saturday night I installed World Community Grid software on my newest desktop. After two full days of run time: thumbs-up.

As of this morning my device has returned eight results: three for FightAIDS@Home (homepage here), two for Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, one for Help Defeat Cancer, and two I'm not sure of because the jobs ran from start to finish while I was sleeping or working or running errands or out at a christening and luncheon on Sunday. It's 76% done with some more work for Human Proteome Folding 2 right now. If I decide to, I can set my preferences so that my device works only on certain projects, but I've left it at the All Projects default for now, because I don't want my machine to sit idle if it queries for more work and my chosen project doesn't happen to have any at that moment.

The computer doesn't seem to be running appreciably hotter (I left the CPU throttle at the current default of 60%), and I haven't noticed any effect on other applications. The interface/screensaver has a duration-configurable Snooze button, and I can set the application to run only when the screensaver kicks in, but so far it's been problem-free running all the time, and I'll probably open the throttle.

I feel quite virtuous, and much better about leaving the machine on when I'm off doing other things, and I'm very glad I heard about this and decided to participate. Thanks for the heads-up, Dan!

If anybody around here feels like joining forces to start a team, let me know. I'm user IronGall over there.

A couple of posts I found useful/interesting in the WCG forum are this one (and the one it links to) about hibernation in Windows XP (to avoid losing work because of a reboot), this one about electricity cost, and this one about dual-core processors and the UD Windows client versus BOINC (worth reading before downloading and installing a client).


Edit to add: This post is a spam attractor for some reason, along with the Gilhoolie post, so I started logging spam IPs because I'm just curious like that. 24.3.221.48.

Well, that was a pain.

It turns out that if you have the Web 11 (Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition) electronic version already installed on your machine, the current Web 3 (Merriam-Webster's Third New International Unabridged Dictionary) electronic version won't load correctly. You need to uninstall Web 11, install Web 3, then install Web 11 again.

I pretty much figured that when I ran into a problem, but I contacted tech support. ( here's our exchange, which solved the problem )

Maybe eventually they'll revise the FAQ, or maybe it's just not a Q that's F enough A. Or maybe they'd rather we all subscribe to the online versions of the dictionaries. But I can't always get online when I need access to Web 11 and/or Web 3, and I'd rather buy once than subscribe, so I am still thrilled that they offer these references on disk. And tech support got back to me within a day.

I was this close to pulling the trigger on a Dell Inspiron 710m I have in an online shopping cart when I stopped at Circuit City to pick something up and decided to try out the keyboards on whatever ultralight notebooks they had there. (I gather that not many other people do that. They want to know how pretty movies will look on the screen, or how good the speakers sound, or something. I spent nearly fifteen minutes going from machine to machine, typing in long passages of Shakespeare. The sales rep was courteous but bemused. *g*) The Sony Vaio SZ somethingsomething 120 had the most comfortable notebook keyboard I've ever tried. It was perfectly natural, no adaptation required. From the first line I typed, it felt as though I'd been typing on it for years.

No matter how I price it out, though, to get the same extended warranty and extra RAM and other stuff, the Vaio (or a super-ultralight Toughbook, also of interest) would cost me an extra thousand dollars. Dell's deals really do make them hard to resist, despite the decrapification required. If I can find an Inspiron 710m to type on before the promotions run out on the one I configured, and I really hate the keyboard, I'll think about going for the Vaio. But for grand's difference in price...I'm a really good typist and a musician and I can adapt to anything I have to.

Still, I'm in love with that Vaio keyboard. I'm still having a tactile affair with it in my head, hours after testing it out.

(Interestingly, a lot of the reviews I've read, on review sites and from users, complain about the Vaio's keyboard. Which makes me leery of the complaints I've read about the Inspiron's. And the word "Vaio" is itself weirdly hard to type. I've had to type it twice every time in this post. Maybe that's telling me something.)

Woot! Chicago 15 is coming out on CD-ROM.

You can search for the location of terms in the book at chicagomanualofstyle.org, but that requires you to be online while you're sitting there with your hardcover copy going "Dammit, I know it's in here somewhere...." Having the entire text on a local disk will induce euphoria equaled only by the euphoria of having (hypertext!) Web 11 on disk.

If they'll just make CD-ROM versions of the good Roget's and a fully updated Star Trek Encyclopedia, I'll be in writer/copyeditor heaven.

(Words into Type would be nice, too, although I've always found the WiT index to be more compatible with the way my mind works.)

And now, the Martha Stewart Oxyacetylene Torch, brought to you by Sears/Kmart. Breaks through those pesky prison bars, then caramelizes your creme brulee.

---

Offline for a couple of days because my firewall had a nervous breakdown. I don't know what possessed me to install ZoneAlarm Pro in the first place, but it's been nothing but cranky, and I'm back to the freeware version. Anybody have firewall recommendations, just in case?

planetalyx linked to The Gender Genie, which "uses an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author."

I input three passages from separate sections of my last novel, each from the point of view of a different character (one male, one adult female, one female child). All came out male. I input the first few paragraphs from two of my other novels. Both came out male.

I input my last LJ entry ("Bits of Oak"), and it came out female.

Looked like there might be something interesting afoot. But the previous LJ entry of any length (about the blackout) came out male, and so did a chunk of my private journal. So much for an analyzable delineation between constructed narrative and personal narrative.

I just input the above three paragraphs. "The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Male!"

I suspect George Eliot has nothing to worry about.

After a day and a half of studying flashcards at this useful site and practicing writing with the help of this useful site, I can now read Japanese words rendered in Hiragana characters. Very slowly, by sounding them out, but it works, and it's something I couldn't do on Monday or Tuesday.

This is the first time I've tackled a non-European language with a writing system different from the one we use. (I took Spanish through college, Irish Gaelic for a few years after college, and the equivalent of about two years of high-school Latin through my former employer.) It's a thoroughly amazing experience to learn to read all over again. I don't remember learning to sound out words in English; the only memory I have of learning to read was missing the word "penny" on flashcard in first grade and being mad at myself and getting it right the next time, which makes me think that I learned words whole rather than letter by letter.

This whole thing was prompted by my current triumvirate of overlapping film obsessions: Akira Kurosawa movies, samurai movies, and Toshiro Mifune movies. (Netflix is a wonderful thing.) I've heard so many hours of Japanese lately, and seen so many conflicting subtitle translations (Sanjuro to a gaggle of overeager young samurai on his heels: "We're walking like one big centipede! I can't move like this!" as opposed to "This is like being followed by a trail of goldfish dung--how can I get rid of you?"), that I wanted to understand some of the dialogue on my own, so I looked for online instruction--and found some, and found that after Lesson 5 I was going to need to be able to read Hiragana.

I'm inordinately pleased with myself. And my brain feels good.

So I come across this local file called GTH.HTML. Usually I don't name things in caps. I have no idea what this thing is.

I open it. The entire page consists of three words: "Go to hell."

What is this? Something I created it in a fit of pique? At least then the filename ("Go to hell, HTML!") would make sense. And be kinda catchy when you say it out loud.

Finally light dawns when I see the page title: "I need to translate this." For a story I wrote (for Dead Cats Bouncing, a wickedly fun anthology), I needed to translate and transliterate the sentence "Go to hell" into Greek, Latin, and a bunch of other languages. I made that page so I could point Babelfish or something like that at it. (Didn't help with ancient Sumerian, but another Website did.)

So now I sorta like this tiny little file and don't want to delete it. And in two years I'll probably notice it again and go "What is this?!" and start the whole thing all over again.

Which is sort of like the cyclical spiraling weirdness that happens to the cat hero in the story. But that's another story.