News
November 21, 2004
I'm releasing today KSetiSpy 0.6.4, which fixes a few more bugs.
October 20, 2004
The source file (ksetispy-0.6.3.tar.bz2) that I uploaded last night is corrupt.
I've just uploaded a fresh copy. If you were planning to download it, just
wait until tomorrow to give time for this file to be propagated to all mirrors.
The correct file size should be 2281226; the corrupt copy is about 100KB
shorter. My apologies to all those who already downloaded this file.
October 19, 2004
When KDE 3.0 was released, it offered a new API called KDirWatch designed
to notify a program whenever a group of files were being modified. Using
this API to track changes in the .sah seemed more convenient than polling
files, which was what KSetiSpy was doing back then. The KDirWatch API never
worked according to the documentation, but at least it worked for the things
KSetiSpy needed from it... until recently. Rather than fixing what was broken,
KDE 3.3 breaks KDirWatch some more, to the point it is too unreliable for
KSetiSpy to use. I'm releasing today KSetiSpy 0.6.3, which reverts to
file polling to monitor the .sah files, and that for this reason will work OK
with all versions of KDE (starting from 3.1).
Version 0.6.3 also fixes some bugs reported by users (many thanks to Charlie,
Mark, and Laurent for their bug reports), and comes with the new translations
mentioned before in this page.
You can get KSetiSpy 0.6.3 from the download area.
October 6, 2004
I've just registered the
SourceForge project, and, more importantly, I've populated the CVS repository with a current snapshot of the development source code.
The reason why I'm making available this alpha-grade source code
is not because I'm looking for testers. So please, until KBoincSpy is officially released, do not submit bug reports. Also, if you have problems retrieving the source code from CVS and/or compiling it, please do not write me about it, but instead wait for the official release, which will offer pre-compiled packages for most popular distros.
The rationale for making this early version publicly available is as follows. Currently the state of BOINC GUIs for Unix-like operating systems is not very good. Even in its currently buggy and incomplete state, KBoincSpy is still (IMHO) better than 80% than what's out there. So, as long as you let me finish writing it and fixing it in peace, I see no harm in letting you enjoy what I've produced so far.
One final note: contrarily to what I've said before, it turns out that KBoincSpy will require KDE 3.3. There is something that's essential (pluggable preferences pages) that's only available for KDE 3.3. If you're compiling it under 3.2 (if you don't have at least KDE 3.2, don't even bother), there will be a point in the code where compilation will fail. You could comment out those few lines, or (better yet!) you could upgrade to 3.3.
September 29, 2004
To tease you,
here
are a couple of
preliminary
screenshots ;-).
As you can see, I've tried to retain as much as possible the classic SETI Spy
layout, while making it able to monitor multiple projects/hosts. You'll also be
able to inspect workunits stored in the cache.
KBoincSpy will require KDE 3.2 or later (there is a couple of KDE 3.3 APIs
I like, but I'll refrain from using them for this initial version).
Getting back for a moment to KSetiSpy (which is, after all, what this site
should be about :-)), I'd like to thank Nicolas Ternisien for translating
KSetiSpy to French. His translation, as well as Zbigniew's one, will be
included in KSetiSpy 0.6.3, to be released soon (and about at the same time as
KBoincSpy 0.8.0).
August 27, 2004
I've checked in CVS a translation of KSetiSpy into Polish language
by Zbigniew Czernik.
In other news, KBOINCSpy is progressing nicely. The "engine" part is almost
completed, while much of the GUI remains to be done.
June 30, 2004
There is a bug in the KDE sytem tray of Mandrake 10 so that tray icons don't
seem to respond to the "show()" command properly. This means that, depending
on your configuration, the KSetiSpy tray icon doesn't appear when you
minimize the window, and therefore, although the application is still running,
there is no way to restore its window.
A work-around to this problem is as follows:
-
start KSetiSpy,
-
in Settings->Display, check "Run in tray" (if it is not already
checked) and uncheck "Close to tray"
-
close KSetiSpy by clicking the close box of the window,
-
re-start KSetiSpy.
These steps should restore the tray icon. Keep always these settings.
June 28, 2004
I release today version 0.6.2. This is a bugfix release that should
take care of all the bugs that have been reported in these last
few months. Most likely, this will be the last release of KSetiSpy,
since the transition to BOINC is near completion.
It's very likely (although I'm making no promises at this time) that I'll
release sometime in the future a BOINC add-on program (KBOINCSpy ?), based
in part on code from KSetiSpy, but more modular, so to accommodate also
'intra-terrestrial' BOINC projects like
Predictor@home.
When/if I have something more definite, I'll make an announcement
on this page.
May 20, 2004
The SETI@home folks have set up a second web server to handle stats requests.
You can read the news
here.
If you're having frequent problems updating your stats, maybe it's worthwhile
to set up KSetiSpy to get the stats from this new server. To do this, go
to the
Statistics Servers Setup dialog
(it's accessible from the third tab of the Setup panel), and
set "setiatome2.ssl.berkeley.edu" as Host (the pop-up menu is editable, so
just type the new host name in) for all five categories (User Data, User Link,
Group Data, etc.).
Note: as I write this (May 20th), all stats are temporarily down for database
tuning, so don't panic if neither the old nor the new servers work.
January 22, 2004
Release 0.6.1 is out. It fixes some annoying bugs and shortcomings of
0.6.0. The icon themes for 0.6.0 work also in 0.6.1.
