John Danielson's Blog

December 26, 2011

I no longer host with Go Daddy. Their stance on SOPA rankled me too much. So, have changed hosting providers.

I now have Windows 7 Professional plus XP Mode on my main laptop. It is a new Lenovo w520, and FLIES when working hard or just cruising along at low load. I replaced my older Dell ex-main laptop, it is about 3 years old and kept overheating.

June 25, 2010

I now have Windows 7 Ultimate on my main laptop. I upgraded it from Windows Vista Home Premium because I have some older programs that I wanted to have left on it.... From playing with them and the newer ones I also have on this main machine, it looks like they all work.

March 7, 2010

I am the proud owner of a relatively new Dell laptop and an older laptop from Lenovo. The Dell laptop is going to sometime become a Windows 7 laptop (It now has Windows Vista Home Premium on it.), and it has a 2-Year On-Site Service Warrantee. The Lenovo laptop has Windows XP Professional on it. Between the two laptops I can run almost any software that is at all modern and is written for or to work with Windows.

February 18, 2010

Short summary of some changes to my life: have had two heart attacks, and two stents put in in a heart artery, and an ICD (defribullator\pacemaker)put into my chest; no longer drive so no more computer business; both desktop computers are junk now due to overheating aggregate damage so I have a Dell laptop now as well as an older Lenovo laptop, and am learning a lot about Windows Vista. These two laptops do not fold for folding@home.

January 23, 2008 5:11 PM

I have changed hosts to Godaddy due to Sarcnet's change of its hosting to a place that will not let me login correctly to upload new pages and revised content of pages. I fought with that abortion of a login system and tried the technical support of the company Sarcnet now uses, no go at all. That company's technical support rep concluded that I did not know how to use a browser (WRONG!!!).

My computers are not folding for Folding @ Home any more at all, though that might again change at some future time. I will have to think long and hard before folding again.

I no longer have the business Danielson Systems operating, too little business in the little town I live in to justify running it for now-- as the town grows, will probably work for another computer business part time.

January 24, 2006 12:19 PM
Folding@Home has worked on the issues I had, and my boxes are folding again. More servers are in place so folks have fewer problems with turnin and pointage credit is updated more on time. Grade b+ now.

My life in general is better than it was a year ago also, I am getting occassional customers still, but am keeping those customers happy. Most of my work is in the areas of computer security and computer cleanup of virals and malware.

January 15, 2005 6:37 PM
I have had to stop folding for Folding@Home-- so far the folding admins have refused to allow credit for more than 1 K of points earned by my computers here, refused to set up a time sync on servers so points due can be adequately tracked, and according to what the admins say, I turned in dupes of WUs and on my end I show no such thing. The "straw that broke the camel's back" was a 600 point turnin with manual override of pointages or malfunctioning code or bad logging of server end work records. This is coupled with client logs that say those admins are outright lying. I will be hard-pressed to justifiy folding in the future, so Folding@Home does not any longer run at my SOHO office. Grade for folding, from my end, about D-.

December 13, 2004 8:37 AM
Folding Client 5.03 is working well compared to Client 4.+. Production for folding is floating based on WU effectiveness variations, but is averaging about 264 points per day for one P4 Northwood and one P4 Prescott at about 3 GHz each. Both machines do better with folding during the cooler weather.

I might end up with a Northwood HT in the Prescott box as most software does not take full advantage of Prescott. Either that or I need to have the newer, larger cache Prescott to get full use of Prescott while using existing software and a standard XP.

It has been a while since I posted here in this blog, I have been busy working on the needs of this house and yard and working to develop my consulantcy business related to IT things. I have about 120 man hours of house and yard work in the last three months, just related to the hurricane recovery for here. I put in another 30-40 hours in doing data entry for the city effort to populate a FEMA damage assessment database for Charley and some Frances impact. Jeanne also damaged things with further water damage as some houses had not been covered over well enough to be watertight.

It is estimated that 5000 houses and trailers had significant damage. Of 700 business, governmental, and institutional buildings in this city at least 300 sustained major damage.

For about a month after the hurricane major medial needs were being met with medivac and ambulance service(and at least one MASH unit locally) to Fort Myers, Sarasota, and Tampa as local hospitals were running with VERY limited service. Fort Myers hospitals are about 30 miles south or more, and Tampa is about 200 miles north of my house as the roads go. We had a MASH unit for an emergency room in this city.

The postal service was operating out of tents here and AFAIK still is partially operating out of tents. The post office boxes are outside with 24 hour security guards watching them and frequent police and sherrif's department drive-bys.

At least one of two city public works operations centers will need an almost total sturctural rebuild, the city had about 8 small tri-wheeled garbage haulers that have not been in operation (that I have seen) since Charley hit, and the city has a new garbage truck and the one of two that is still also in use of the big garbage trucks has been partially rebuilt. I have seen new sherrif's patrol cars, new fire trucks, over half parked outside as operations are being done from portable buildings and it is estimated that about half the fire stations ijn the county will need very major to total rebuilding in order to have the fire equipment back in stations.

So far, total estimates in damage recompense and recovery grants and funds which are needed or have been paid out for governmental ops, business recovery, and household recovery of residents in this county are over $20 billion US dollars as far as I know. Note that before Hurricane Charley Punta Gorda's ANNUAL budget was $52,000,000 US (rounded to millions) and the best estimate I have heard of direct hurricane damage from Charley to city governmental and service support STRUCTURES alone(yes, buildings alone) is $50,000,000 dollars.

As of last I heard, city employees, emergency services, and folks from outside Charlotte County, and even outside Florida, have done an extremely good job gettting recovery under way. I am guessing 2-5 years before this county is fully "back to normal," in effect what is considered normal has changed here for a while.

Let me add here a heart-felt and honest salute to the men in blue and green (some 1500 or more national guard folks who drove school busses, patroled streets LOOKING for folks in need and etc, plus US army engineers and pilots), and civilians who gave or donated funds or water or ice or time to help eval and coordinate recovery planning, or their skills, sometimes to neighbors, sometimes to folks they had never seen.

Salutes and thanks to you all from the bottom of my heart. Without water and ice and food that was safe to eat, many folks would have collapsed from heat alone within a situation where emergency folks were bogged down with a ton of work and not enough folks to totally respond normally (I would guess the emergency call load was 5-10X normal in terms of need and the city police dispatch crew was handling 911 from a normal phone number call in as the county EOC was out of action as far as a place and building went), much less the fact that those working were putting aside family and household needs themselves to dedicate themselves to help others.

The response of this nation to this disaster which is being recovered from was and is totally AWESOME. The emergency response network WORKED at many levels, surrounding counties sent folks to help and absorbed the bill, state resources responded, and federal help poured into this county. Our emergency ops director asked, just before the county EOC had to be evacuated, "What do we do now???" Response, from another county Emergency Ops person: "Hang tight, help is on the way now." That other director told total truth to Mr. Sallade.

July 29, 2004 10:37 AM
Folding is interesting. The Tinker Core and Client 4.0 have some problems with Prescott, they do not know how to use the HT capabilities of Prescott. Second, the Gormacs core cannot take advantage of the HT abilities of this chip properly. I reached this, by noting that one instance of folding on Prescott can fold Gromacs and Doubles better than Tinkers, by a long shot. Non-Gromacs (including doubles) do not belong folding on a Prescott, or even a latest GEN and structure Northwood (the latest Northwoods have HT capability).

IF I run two Client 4.0 instances simultaneously on one Prescott, and one or more are Tinkers, I get instability for folding. One or both clients go unstable, especially with big proteins and with large sets of possibilies where many factors are present to account for with each frame result. Part of this is a problem with the huge possibilities set for movement, the processor cannot anticipate the calcs being trhown at it from moment to next moment while under ehavy load, it chokes with two widely random chance sets of large domains of molecular objects. The lack of SSE2+ and SSE3 tunings also does not help-- the software for protein WU gen does not have this capability in solid form yet. Prescott thus limps badly with Tinkers with large factor set variables and with huge chain calcs, it cannot anticipate things not tuned for at least SSE2 well.

OTOH, Northwood in the subgen I have, which is a non-HT P4 Northwood, tends to be stable as heck with one client instance folding. With both CPUs running at same speed, I get almost identical Gromacs and Double Gromacs times, and MUCH worse Tinker times out of Prescott than with Northwood. Lest some say that this is due to hardware ineffectiveness or differentiation, I have two very close to identical boxes, same motherboard, same BIOS rev, same speed RAM, processors are running at close to same speed. Both the boxes are hyper stable in all respects as to software also. Yes, I am very experienced at getting working software and OS sets running stable across multiple OS and application sets.