The 'Your computers' listing at SETI has been changed (breaking various things, and causing yet more stress for the part-time project staff, as usual).

The owner's display has a new 'Location' column (displaying the information elsewhere known as 'venue'), which is marginally useful, but to make space, they've shrunk the 'CPU Type' column to the point of uselessness.

IMO, anyway. Anyone?

The natives are restless, again. Strong pressure (there and in Technical News) to bring back a direct link to 'Results for computer'.

Any chance we could get David Anderson to make his sixth visit to these public fora in 30 months, and explain what the **** he's on about?

"Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it."
And it almost always turns out differently to what you thought you'd wished for.

"Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it."
And it almost always turns out differently to what you thought you'd wished for.

Well done Les - it turns out that it was a wish, by one SETI user, turned into a trac ticket [trac]#569[/trac] by our own dear Ageless, and closed two months ago so it doesn't show on the default trac filter.

And no, it didn't ask for the change to be made this way. Looking at [trac]changeset:14897[/trac], $host->p_model should have been kept in preference to $host->p_vendor (I think we know which vendor makes Pentiums, and which vendor makes Athlons). And there's a lot of affection for $ltr.

to make space, they've shrunk the 'CPU Type' column to the point of uselessness.

Now #631.

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I've just found out that it's also infected the cpdn beta site, which is now telling me that my Intel processor is genuine.

I've just found out that it's also infected the cpdn beta site, which is now telling me that my Intel processor is genuine.

yes, and my AMD is authentic ;-)

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Now #631.

The CPU model is now back.

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Now #631.

The CPU model is now back.

So is the OS sub-type and a link to (but not a count of) tasks assigned.

The link to the actual computer details is currently broken,

The CPU model is now back.

So is the OS sub-type and a link to (but not a count of) tasks assigned.

The lack of the physical count is really aggravating for me. I have a very large number of hosts and the ability to scan this count while scrolling many pages has been most useful. It's very easy to see at a glance if something unusual is going on by simply noting unexpectedly large or small values for the number of tasks as I scroll through the complete list of hosts.

I believe the word "tasks" is used (rather than an ambiguous number) to save the need for two sub-headings at the top of the two sub-columns that now form the "Computer ID" column. Surely it would be preferable to get rid of the words (in black) "Click for more info" since, at first glance, this seems to imply that clicking on the column heading will give more info rather than what actually happens (a sort based on that column}. The space released could be used to have sub-column headings like "Host ID" and "# Tasks" so that the actual number of tasks that a host has could be once again displayed.

Also, it would probably be worthwhile to put a note somewhere near the top of the page to say "Please click any column heading to sort on that heading"

The link to the actual computer details is currently broken,

This must have been fixed as it seems to work for me.

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Cheers,
Gary.

The lack of the physical count is really aggravating for me.....

Have you been following the two parallel threads at SETI? Your computers page in Number Crunching, and Lesson Today: Databases (Apr 29 2008) in Technical News.

Nicolas (posting as PovAddict) found a quote from David Anderson:

Getting the result count for a host is a potentially expensive query, and doing this for each host in a long list would be bad.

(in a mailing list, not a code changeset or trac ticket).

Yet we have Matt Lebofsky, actually managing probably the most highly-stressed servers in the BOINC business, saying

... we can handle a ton more web page queries ...

The jury is still out.