p.s i have been following hak5 for a good time now and iam sry if i had spoke anything in excess

best regards

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see what you guys hack together, and waiting to get my hands on one of my own.

Thanks for your good work!

My first thought of what do do with such a cluster was Folding@Home, but I’m not sure that would work, since I don’t think theres a F@h client out for ARM chips like the Marvell Sheeva (or Kirkwood, or whatever) and F@H doesnt make their source available. I think SETI@Home does, though. I believe Marvell will be helping support a gcc compiler for their chip, so theoretically you can run whatever you can get source for. Theoretically.

I know a lot of those distributed rendering projects work really fast on GPU hardware, which of course the SheevaPlug lacks entirely, but it would be interesting (to me, anyway) to see how a GPU-based client stacks up next to a Sheeva-based one in terms of efficiency, ie, work units either per dollar or per watt.

I’m kinda excited about the SheevaPlug, too. I ordered one about a week ago and it should be here in another week or two. I’m intrigued to see what it can do.

I had some ideas I had that I’m pretty sure I won’t have the time or patience to work on, but maybe you might try. At $50 to $100 per computer, I really like the idea of a cluster on a powerstrip (or UPS). The SheevaPlugs have gigabit ethernet, so if you threw a couple of them on a power strip along with a gigabit swtich, you could have a couple of gigahertz of CPU-intensive cluster for cheaper and less wattage than a “real” computer. Hey, put a powerline ethernet adapter to the WAN port on the switch and have a 2-plug cluster-to-go.

Even more interesting and maybe fun if it could show a page of all the netscum as it was blocking them in real time. Buried somewhere I have a little USB device that looks like a British mailbox that pops up a flag every time OE gets a new mail. I was going to hack this to feed off the log file of a router firewall and have it wave at me every time it bounced scum, but I couldn’t get it working. If this could be done with a Fon or equivalent that might be amusing.

And what is it about the /www.hak5.org web pages that makes the cursor in Opera in XP invisible unless it is moving? This happens in versions 9.27 and 9.64. For a minute I thought it was this month’s Microsoft bug patches, but it only shows up thus far in your domain. Wait a minute, I check and see the same behavior with IE6 after I start filling in this form. This is annoying.

Lastly, geeze it would be nice if there was a convenient way to fast-forward to the end of a topic that isn’t interesting to a viewer. As it is it is really difficult to tell when one item ends and the next begins. The Tivo remote has an “advance” button that I think I remember hops forward to the next “time point” that is set in a video, but if no time points are set then it just hops to the end of the whole episode, maybe something like that could be incorporated that everyone could use. If you could think of any way to make it easy for people to skip to the next topic I think some might find this really useful.

Thanks for all your work

http://www.dojotoolkit.org/

also xAjax

http://xajaxproject.org/