The posts below are from my old blog. They’re mostly for historical reference just in case anyone actually found them to contain useful information (among my bad use of the English language at times). Unfortunately, I won’t be bringing over the comments made to these posts from the bBlog install as there is way too many spam comments that have crowded out the good ones. Also, some links maybe dead, and keep in mind, Clusterix as a project is dead.
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After watching this US Presidential campaign race from almost its beginning and watching different members of my family go and side with different candidates, I’m glad to hear its all over and not contested like 4 years ago (although I would have enjoyed it if it were a little more close then what it was, SNL would have tore it apart 
). Also, I am somewhat glad Bush was re-elected even though I really don’t like either of them. If only the Democrats put out a better candidate I might have felt differently (I myself would rather have a good independent candidate). At least we all know what to expect with Bush, and the economy won’t suffer at least these next few months because of uncertainty.
And, yes, check your Economics books, our economy would have suffered quite a bit with Kerry being elected not just because of uncertainty with a new President, but also his tax plan would have restarted a recession that started with President Clinton. At the end of Clinton’s term, the economy began showing signs of a recession due to his tax plan, which would increase the amount of taxes as the economy grew larger, he had in place. With Bush being elected and 9/11, that recession got horribly worse. However, with Bush’s tax plan, we won’t see this type of recession. If Kerry got his way with rolling back the tax cuts, I don’t know what would have happened. Sorry if this seems somewhat biased in one direction (like I mentioned I really don’t like either), but this one point about Kerry’s tax plan just didn’t jive with me. As for international affairs, I won’t go there, too risky.
Anyway, besides the election, these last two weeks have been quite insane for me. There has been quite a lot of work either due or tested these last two weeks that I haven’t been able to do much with either the cluster (besides what I did before) or Clusterix. Hopefully as things slow down again, I’ll have some more time and get some development done.
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After spending pretty much the entire day yesterday working on my cluster, I finally got somewhere with it. It’s almost ready to test even though it still needs three pieces of plexiglas and hard drives that actually work (ones shown are dead drives just so I didn’t kill the new ones that will be going in it). But, before I test the motherboard with a livecd, I still need to get some good ram and an ac to dc converter. It will probably be next week before I’ll be able to test them. Anyway, here’s some more pics:
In the first picture, you can see the front of the cluster with the cdroms and the motherboards. Also, one mobo does have its faceplate on just to show you what it will look like. The second pic is the right side of the cluster. The top mobo has the firewire card now. Also, those cables you see will be run through the back of the cluster then through the side as it is now. I will route out some grooves in the middle plate for the cables to go. The next pic is of the back of the cluster. As you can tell I have gotten one piece of plexiglas on it and it turned out pretty nice. The last pic is the left side of the cluster. You can really see the DC to DC converters with their atx cables pretty well.
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Well, after reading Verm’s blog, I just had to take this here file extension quiz. It basically asks you a bunch of questions and then tells you what file extension you are. I’m a .jpg:
Interesting, it’s quite accurate, except maybe for the truth distortion thingie (could be because I couldn’t really answer some questions )
Now, after taking that quiz, I then took the “Which OS are you?” one:
Now that’s more like it 
Besides taking these little quizzes, this week has been kinda nasty. With a true exam, quiz/test, and a CS project, all in a two day period, it has been quite hectic. Luckily I don’t have classes on Fridays so I can rest a bit from the stress (that Discrete Math exam wasn’t pretty). So hopefully I’ll be doing some work on the cluster and on Clusterix soon.
(EDIT)
Ok I just needed to take another one of those quizzes. Which Nigerian spammer are You?
Hehehe, gotta love them Nigerian spammers
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Wow, gotta say I really like this here new template for my blog. It seems bBlog is really, really nice for switching between themes and such. It has some really good features that I really like. (Did I say really? ) I still will be doing some more modding to it, but I don’t think it will be major. Anyway, if you have any suggestions, just post a comment (still moderated, just in case).
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It seems I have alot of work for college due this week and not much has been done with either the cluster or Clusterix development. I did compile another kernel for Clusterix and cut up some pieces of plexiglas for the cluster’s outside. More pics of the cluster will be coming soon, probably later in the week.
Also, mini_fo seems to be fairly stable, although it sill doesn’t allow .deb installs via apt-get yet. I’ll need to talk with Olivier some more about that.
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Here’s some more pics of the cluster. Sorry I didn’t get them up yesterday but still got them nonetheless. Also, the pics aren’t the best, but they should suffice.
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After quite a bit of testing and tweaking with help from both Olivier and paul_c, I can finally announce that the efforts to get the 2.6.x kernel version of mini_fo to work with 2.4.x kernels has been successful! For the first time today, I was actually able to successfully boot a Clusterix livecd using mini_fo instead of translucency. This is awesome as mini_fo is soooo much better than trans as an overlay filesystem. Testing is still being done with it (seems installing .debs via apt-get still doesn’t work yet), but it seems promising. Also, I’m seeing alot of changes between Morphix pre1 base (original base for Clusterix) and pre3. I’m seeing some issues with it, but hope that it won’t cause any major problems.
Besides that, I now have the laptop cdrom drives mounted to my cluster. At first I thought it was going to be fairly simple to mount them (once I figured on a plan to mount them) but it wasn’t so simple. What I did was run two pieces of aluminum over the bottom of the drives to sandwich them to the bottom of the top plate (will have pics tomorrow). However, if you apply too much pressure, the drive never opens. After some tweaking, I think I have the drives opening pretty well.
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Finally got do some work on my cluster today. I went to the local hardware store to pick up some threaded rods, rubber washers, nylon spacers, machine screws, and nuts. I then began working on drilling 5/16″ holes approximately a half an inch from the corners in the three 16 gauge steel plates for the threaded rods. After messing around with the drill for quite a while, I finally got it done and put it all together. That part of the case actually came out quite awesome. I then decided to work on mounting the motherboards and dc to dc converters but found out the machine screws I purchased were just a tad too wide. Oh well, I’ll mount it all later then. Anyway, I have a pic of it below and a link to more pics:
Here’s some more
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Well, after much wait, I got in some main parts for my cluster, and it is really starting to look cool as I now can see how the motherboards and dc to dc converters fit on the 16 gauge plates. I’ll hopefully be doing some work on the cluster tomorrow and will post some pictures of it then.
Besides that, there seems to be some good progress on the backport of mini_fo. With help from Olivier and paul_c, it has been slowly coaxed to compile. Although it still isn’t fully compiling, there has been some good progress on it, which is great. I’ll post some more info on it as we continue to test and fix it.
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