Prism is a sandboxed web-app tool, essentially it is Firefox for one application at a time. It’s been a while since I played with it, so I’m taking another look.
This should work on any Debian based system really, but I did it on Sidux. Here’s how I installed the latest version on my machine.
# wget http://prism.mozilla.com/downloads/1.0b1/prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 --2010-01-26 16:01:08-- http://prism.mozilla.com/downloads/1.0b1/prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 Resolving prism.mozilla.com... 63.245.208.216 Connecting to prism.mozilla.com|63.245.208.216|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 9101612 (8.7M) [application/x-bzip2] Saving to: “prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2” 100%[==========================================================================================================================================================================================================>] 9,101,612 212K/s in 42s 2010-01-26 16:01:55 (213 KB/s) - “prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2” saved [9101612/9101612] # mv prism /opt/prism-1.0b1 # ln -s /opt/prism-1.0b1/prism /usr/bin
At that point it should be in your path and ready to invoke!
Posted January 26th, 2010 - PermalinkAs I’ve posted before, I’ve started running Folding@home on my machines. One issue I’ve found is that on a dual core machine I will sometimes bog down as F@h consumes a whole core. That plus a lot of busy Firefox tabs and my box starts to crawl.
To fix that, I added a few pieces to my F@h init script, which was originally scavenged from this site, though on Googling there is a much nicer one on the F@h wiki. You might just want to apply my changes to that one.
In any case, I just added two commands to throttle and unthrottle the F@h application using cpulimit. This way I can add a cron job to manage it, or just throttle it when it starts to bug me.
Here it is if you want it!
#!/bin/sh export DIRECTORY=/var/cache/fah USER=fah export OUTPUT=/dev/null test -f $DIRECTORY/fah6 || exit 0 title() { echo $1 error=0 } status() { error=0 } case "$1" in start) title "Starting Folding@Home." cd $DIRECTORY su $USER -c 'nohup $DIRECTORY/fah6 >$OUTPUT 2>&1 &' error=$? status ;; stop) title "Stopping Folding@Home." killall -15 $DIRECTORY/fah6 || error=$? status ;; restart) $0 stop; $0 start ;; unthrottle) FHPID=$(ps aux | grep FahCore | grep [TR]N | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}') CLPID=$(ps aux | grep "cpulimit -p $FHPID -l" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}') if [ "$CLPID" != "" ]; then echo "Killing existing cpulimit, $CLPID" kill -9 $CLPID fi kill -18 $FHPID # It may be in SIGSTOP, so send it a SIGCONT ;; throttle) $0 unthrottle; FHPID=$(ps aux | grep FahCore | grep [TR]N | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}') if [ "$FHPID" != "" ]; then echo "Found process $FHPID, throttle to 50%" nohup cpulimit -p $FHPID -l 50 >$OUTPUT 2>&1 & else echo "Could not find fah process!" fi ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop | restart | throttle | unthrottle }" exit 1 ;; esac exit 0
I’ve been firing up my old copies of Sim Tower and Yoot Tower to, um, research for pyTower. It’s been a while since I used wine, so when Yoot Tower borked because of a missing dll ( MFC420.DLL, natch ) I hit the Google and found this great little ditty: winetricks. It’s a little script that will install all kinds of DLL’s on demand from all over the net.

It even has a GUI!
It did the trick really fast, so I’d recommend it net time you get stuck.
Posted January 6th, 2010 - PermalinkUpdate 2010-01-05
I tried using the VNC mode and it choked and died, making me re-download a bunch of stuff when I ran it in text mode. Just an FYI, not saying it will happen to you, but warning that it might. Honestly, I didn’t see much difference running in VNC vs. Text, you get the same options.
It appears that over the internet installation is no longer a recommended way to get CentOS. However, I can not for the life of me convince my DVD burner to write the CentOS 5.4 ISO. I did however have a live CD. So I found a nice guide for 5.3 NetInstall and adapted it, very very little has changed.
The mirror list is here and it just so happens that UNL is a full mirror. So, thanks UNL!
Posted January 5th, 2010 - PermalinkI created a team for Little Filament on Folding@home. Our team number is 172406 (in case you want to join), but I wanted to add our latest stats on the Little Filament site. As far as I can tell there is no API for the stats, so I worked up a scraper in bash.
Basically all it does is fetch the page, then grep and sed it’s way to the variables, finally dumping them into a json file (for easy JavaScript consumption).
The kicker is that the stats server is overloaded or down a lot, so we can’t rely on it and we don’t want to stress it out further. My decision was to poll it at a large interval, 12-24 hours. I don’t have enough clients on the team to exact significant change over 6-12 hours, but I don’t want to fall too far out of date either. So if the server is overloaded and drops it once or twice, not a big deal.
Without further ado, here is the script.
#!/bin/bash NOW=$(date +%s) THEN=$(cat fah_check.lock | tr -d '\n') if [ $NOW -gt $(($THEN + 86400)) ]; then wget "http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=172406" -O fah_check.html if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then grep "Grand Score" fah_check.html > /dev/null 2&>1 if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then SCORE=$(grep -C 2 "Grand Score" fah_check.html | sed 's/[^0-9]//gm' | tr -d '\n') WU=$(grep -C 2 "Work Unit Count" fah_check.html | sed 's/[^0-9]//gm' | tr -d '\n') RANK=$(grep -C 1 "Team Ranking" fah_check.html | sed 's/[^0-9of]//gm' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/f\([0-9]*\)of\([0-9]*\)/\1 of \2/') echo "{\"score\": \"$SCORE\", \"work_units\": \"$WU\", \"rank\": \"$RANK\" }" > fah_check.json echo "[$NOW] - Success!" >> fah_check.log echo $NOW > fah_check.lock else echo "[$NOW] - Filter Failed" >> fah_check.log fi else echo "[$NOW] - Download Failed" >> fah_check.log fi else echo "[$NOW] - Skip Update" >> fah_check.log fi
That cranks out fah_check.json, which looks like this:
{"score": "4355", "work_units": "20", "rank": "39881 of 169721" }
To see it in action, check out the Little Filament Folding page.
Posted December 11th, 2009 - Permalink