Well, just came back from a meeting of the local ACM chapter at my college and was elected vice president of the club! It seems that the current president of the club is graduating this semester, and they were missing a vice president before, so I jumped on the opportunity even though no one challenged it. 
So, I’ll be officially the vice president there next semester, which is pretty cool.
Besides that, we are also preparing for a pretty interesting programming competition at the local large university. Five hour competition on a Saturday, with not much of a chance of winning (seems that local large university also has the largest selection of CS students, so they always win). But hopefully we’ll be right under that university, beating out all the other small colleges in the area.
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I’ve been doing some more studying and researching on cluster softwares and how to build different types of clusters for the new release of Clusterix. I had came across this site while doing some google searches which features just about every clustering software available. That site is definitely going to be a valuable resource for the next release.
Also, I checked in with paul_c about this mini_fo backport for the next release, but it seems that it will not be as easy as I had hoped. I might just have to use two different mini_fo’s or find a better translucency module for 2.4.x kernels. I’ll need to find something soon because once my cluster is built, I’ll be doing heavy development on Clusterix.
Besides that, bhartshorn has been working on a mod of Clusterix, which sounds really interesting. I’ll post more details about it once he has it up and ready to download.
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Bah, I just can’t take it any longer. Where are my parts for my cluster? It’s only been a couple days with a day off for post office workers because of a holiday in the middle, but it still should be here! (Guess I’m kinda impatient )
Anyway, I’ve been looking into an interesting thing for my future career. I noticed a poster hanging on a bulletin board in the science building at my college. It mentioned about a fellowship program for high performance computing. Checked out their site and it’s quite interesting. I’m going to request some more info about it.
Besides that, nothing much else is happening besides the usual classes, tests, quizzes and such. Once my cluster is built, however, I’m going to need to do a lot of work for Clusterix.
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These last few days have been quite quiet. I’ve been mostly waiting for parts to come in for my cluster, so I haven’t been able to do much with it. It’s still just steel plates, two hard drives and two cdroms just sitting on a plate while I wait for special IDE adapters to be shipped which will determine how I\’m going to mount them.
Besides this, I’ve been working on an interesting coding project for my parents business. They needed a way to enter what inventory they had into a program, and add up identical inventory items. Seems quite simple, but I took it a bit over the top 
Its now over 600 lines of C++ code and even though its just a console app, it’s pretty interactive. Going to look into maybe making a gui for it, but not sure. Besides it helping the business, it also helped me refresh my C++ knowledge which I really needed.
Also, Clusterix development has slowed to a stop. I have basically declared that I won’t use my old dev machines for Clusterix development anymore They were aggravating me since I couldn’t do much with them. So, once my cluster is built, Clusterix development will continue.
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While watching Fox News Channel this morning, they showed a political cartoon about our US election that I just have to post it. I found it ridiculously funny and could\’t stop watching it on the creators website (http://www.jibjab.com). They actually created two of them, which was even better Here are the links:
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/goodtobeindc_af
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/this_land_af
Dang it, I just can’t stop watching them and haven’t gotten anything done
As for my cluster, got in the two laptop cdroms, and after pulling off the proprietary brackets, found they needed a special adapter to work with a normal IDE interface. I asked my friend at IFF if he had any, and sure enough he did. So I’ll purchase them with the order of my VIA EPIA 5000 fanless motherboards. Now I just need to figure out how to mount them to one of the 16 gauge steel plates.
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Just had to post this after seeing it a couple of minutes ago. Take a look at this site:
http://www.robijn.net/lcdproc/lcdvc/
It is actually a client of the software from the last post for the LCD driver that makes your little textual LCD into a screen where you can login without a monitor or any fancy headless networking! Here’s a pic:
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After doing some reading at http://www.mini-itx.com about some of mini-itx projects, I had stumbled across this open source Linux project. The project is called LCDproc. It basically takes a bunch of different LCD displays and displays info on what resources are being used in the computer and how much. This would be really quite interesting for my cluster because I can basically monitor its load balancing/distribution by just looking at the LCD. Going to have to look into one of those.
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While searching for which mini-itx motherboards I should purchase for my cluster, I stumbled across this company called Industrial Flower Factory. After talking with one of the owners about one of the boards, we had come across as to why I’m purchasing the boards. I had mentioned that I will be using the boards to build my cluster for developing and testing Clusterix. Because of that, he offered me some great hardware for the cluster at no charge or discounted price. Thank you very much IFF!!! I and the Clusterix community truly appreciate your kindness
In other news, got my exams back from last week. All are A’s so I’m quite pleased, even for my over-achieving point of view.
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After looking for those laptop cdroms, finally found two on eBay for an insanely cheap price. I got one for $10.50 US and the other for $3.99 US with a $12 US shipping cost totaling $26.49 US. That’s is really quite good, even though they don’t burn cds. Gotta love eBay
Besides that, I have been looking for some cool lighting effects for this cluster. And this is just amazing. Here’s a pic of one:
Isn’t that something? Not sure if I’ll go with one or two of those because they take up quite a bit of power, but still it is just amazing. Might have to go with cold cathode lights instead.
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Ok, after some more discussions and planning, I changed the PSU again to this I’ll still go with the DC to DC converters, but it seems that each converter has a different form factor to fit each type of motherboard. I guess I’ll order the specific one after I choose the motherboards for my cluster.
Besides the PSU issues, I’m going to be getting some older laptop style cdroms. Even though they cannot burn any cds, they use very little power and are much smaller than normal sized cdroms. This is particularly helpful since two of the normal sized ones would just barely fit on an 8×12 inch plate. Plus, I’m hoping to get the two laptop cdroms extremely cheap. Now all I need to look for is some mini-itx motherboards.
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