The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Fri, 25 Jun 2004

BEEP

I still like to troll mbp about using BEEP as a transport for rsync 3 but the (good) comeback was that there were no applications that used it.

Enter Xgrid:

[University of Toronto researcher Dr. Daniel Côté says] that "If you use other computers, controlling who will do what task and with what parameter and monitoring the status is extremely annoying, painful, complicated, and error prone. You often have to set it all up yourself, and it is hard. On Mac OS X, Xgrid bypasses all of that. Apple was smart enough to build Xgrid on top of open source protocols such as BEEP. This should be easy to implement on other machines."

Presumably Apple's angle here to what basically looks like a batch-job submission system, is the integration of their Rendesvous zero-configuration networking protocols and some (presumably) usable GUI management tools. There is a screenshot of a tachometer which sums the total clock speed in GHz of the cluster which really isn't such a good measure of it's overall computing power, but is nice eyecandy.

Slashdot reports a implementation of Xgrid for Linux in which a bit more is explained about the protocol:

"The XGrid protocol is actually quite simple to understand, since there are only three types of messages that can be passed: a request (to which one replies) or a notification (to which there is no need to reply). Each message is identified with a CorrelationID, a name, a type (request/reply/notification) and a payload (which contains something specific to current message (identified by name))." [...] "Each XGrid message is sent as a BEEP MSG, and must be acknowledged when received completely by an empty RPY. MSG's can be sent in smaller chunks (frames). The implementation of BEEP that is used in this xgridagent is Roadrunner, but there is also beepcore-c (which is not as flexible)." "It is convenient but not necessary that both XGrid and BEEP rely on XML. Some BEEP information (in the initiation of the connection for instance) is encoded in XML. XGrid uses XML extensively, which makes it trivial to analyze."

At the moment BEEP is one of those solutions looking for a problem so maybe it will starting gaining more visibility and acceptance as a result of Xgrid.

Thu, 24 Jun 2004

PyGTK 2.0 Reference Manual

Finally, a PyGTK 2.0 reference manual is available on the web. The combination of Python, Glade 2 and PyGTK is going to be very good for writing little throwaway GUIs.

Now, to figure out how to use the new GTK TreeStore and TreeView interface...

Sat, 05 Jun 2004

Another good blog

Marginal Revolution. posted at: 23:51 | path: /blogs | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 04 Jun 2004

NFS (still) sucks

I can't believe that NFS still doesn't work between two random (modern) Linux machines without one of them crashing or generally crapping out. )-: I reckon Microsoft does a much better job with CIFS at sharing files over a network protocol. posted at: 15:54 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry