KludgeHack

PS3 Triples Folding@Home Computing Power to Over 500 TFLOPS…
26 March 2007 in Tech | Comments (0)

General purpose CPU’s just lost the race… the disproportionate contribution that Playstation 3 consoles are making to the Folding@Home is amazing. The OS statistics page for Folding@Home tells more:

The Playstation 3 is indeed dominating the charts.

PS3 is responsible for a whopping 72 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home project.

There are even reports that It’s only a matter of time– a few weeks at most– before the PS3 constitutes more than 95 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home network. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. The Playstation 3 can harness the considerable power of its specialized Cell CPU to crunch work units far more efficiently than any general purpose CPU ever could.

With these kinds of performance ratios there’s almost no point in adding general purpose CPUs to the folding network any more. It’s a waste of time, effort, and electricity.

“The project just needs about 18,000 more PS3s participating to make the Folding at Home project the first distributed computing project to hit a Petaflop. To put that into perspective, the Japanese MDGRAPE-3, RIKEN’s supercomputer, has about a Petaflop of computing power.”

Microsoft defines the Future!
23 March 2007 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

Today I want to share with you these cool clips I found at Microsoft new video service SoupBox.

Microsoft Vision of 2010:

Virtual Earth 3D:

Microsoft Computer future Concept:

External Posting…
23 March 2007 in Blogging & Personal Experience | Comments (0)

Although I use Wordpress as my blogging system, it’s not practical to use the Web interface every time I want to write a post, even when I just want to change or even manage some posts/comments.

There are those who use Browsers plugins like Firefox ScribeFire (previously Performancing), those who use Browsers already fully equipped for this, like Flock and some use Windows applications like the famous Windows Live Writer but recently I found out that my new Word 2007 also brings blogging features. What’s better than use a well-know Word processor to publish content?

If you have Office 2007 installed, give it a try…

Programming Wizards
17 March 2007 in Programming | Comments (0)

I do think programming can be fun, specially when I make my periodic visits to the old thedailywtf, now renamed to Worse Than Failure and see some beautiful examples of work, like this ones added recently to the website:

Evidence for the mystical power of C can be gleaned directly from code…

if (error)
  if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to the file")<0){
    if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
      if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
        if (fprintf(stderr,"An error occured while writing to stderr")<0){
          return fprintf(stderr, "An error occured while writing to stderr");
          /* lets stop here, its enough */
        }
      }
    }
  }

and some Math skills…

public String rowClass( int index ) {
    String evenRow =
        (BigInteger.valueOf(index).mod(new BigInteger("2"))).toString();
    return ( (evenRow.equals("0")) ? "odd" : "even" );
}

instead of a simple:

return (( index%2 == 0) ? "even" : "odd" );

and Some SQL tricks…

  If sAction = "Send" Then
      bAccepted = True
  ElseIf sAction = "Cancel" Then
      bAccepted = False
  ElseIf IsNull(sAction) Then
      bAccepted = 1
  EndIf

  ' ...

  sql = "INSERT INTO MyTable (...,b_accepted)
VALUES(...,'"&CInt(bAccepted)&"')"

probably the most ugly javascript you will ever see (detect leap years):

  div = year / 4;
  str = new String( div );
  var dec = str.indexOf(".");
  if ( dec != -1 )
      { feb_end = 28; }
  else
      { feb_end = 29; }

and Last, but not least, Screenshots of chaos:

For more of these, please visit this great website…
Worse Than Failure

Safe JSON
6 March 2007 in WebDev | Comments (0)

There are two famous problems with JSON security. The first is CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) which is known as one click attack and allows the attacker to bypass cookie based authentication. The second, and lest known, is the JSON/Array hack that allows a user to steal JSON data on any other platform with a modern JavaScript interpreter.

Jeremiah Grossman used CSRF to break GMail over a year ago.

Joe Walker’s writes in his blog about the problems with JSON and secured data, specially the JSON/Array hack.