Found a Prime!
by Ryan Jones on Aug.15, 2010, under General
I’m quite happy to have found my first prime as part of PrimeGrid!
I got the following e-mail this morning:
Congratulations! Our records indicate that a computer registered by you has
found a unique prime number. This computer is running BOINC, is attached to
the PrimeGrid project, and is assigned to the Sophie Germain Prime Search. What makes
this prime unique is that it’s large enough to enter the Top 5000 List in Chris Caldwell’s
The Largest Known Primes Database.Since you have auto-reporting selected, the following prime was submitted on your
behalf:Added 94172 : 7318825406445*2^666666-1 (200701 digits)
On other news I will soon be starting work on an online recycling database for CCC. Keep checking for updates on that.
BOINC Contributions
by Ryan Jones on Jul.31, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
I am once again contributing my spare CPU run time to the BOINC PrimeGrid project once again with my new PC. And I have the cool signature image to show for it:
Keep an eye for my new contributions and milestones!
My New PC Has Arrived!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.31, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone.
Just a quick post to let you know that my new PC has arrived and it is stunning, not to mention fast. It has:
- A 64GB SSD primary hard drive
- A 2TB secondary hard drive
- 12GB of 1600MHz RAM
- An Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card
- An i7-930 processor
And much more!
New PC!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.24, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
Well. I have finally ordered my new PC and it is going to be a monster. It will have 12GB of 1600 MHz memory, a solid state hard drive and liquid cooling as an i7 processor. I can’t wait for it to come back, it should be here sometime next week.
I will post about my experience with the new system when I get it.
Busy, Busy!
by Ryan Jones on Jul.11, 2010, under Personal
Hi everyone!
Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. I have been quite busy with CCC related work. Now that we’ve sent off the 90k bid to the CoalFields Regeneration Trust and the 45k bid to the Rhonda Trust I have a little more free time. I will be getting a new computer in short order and then I should be able to continue work on CSIT (and hopefully provide some updates for you guys!).
Hopefully I will talk more soon!
Localization using WPF and C#
by Ryan Jones on Jun.23, 2010, under General, Tutorials
For anyone who is interested I have posted a tutorial on building a localizable application using C# and WPF here for anyone who is interested. I will hopefully post a copy here in time but for the moment I see no need to duplicate the content.
If you have any comments, suggestions or improvements please let me know!
CSIT and Network Information
by Ryan Jones on Jun.17, 2010, under Code Snippet, Projects
Hi guys!
Network information is a complex subject at the best of times and simplifying it for the average user is no simple feat. Even harder it seems is actually writing code to get this information programatically! I was quite disappointed to find that there was no simple way to get an IP address via code – mainly since Windows does not actually know it until a request is made. I eventually made a work around and used a web script to scrape the information. It saved a lot of time and effort in the end.
Getting the internal IP address was also quite interesting. It involved using some built-in .NET code. The only issue is that there were nearly always IPv6 addresses returned first. Since these are not well known (yet) I decided to list only the IPv4 address instead. The code I came up with is listed below – hopefully it will help someone else.
1 2 | IPHostEntry localIPAddresses = Dns.GetHostEntry(Dns.GetHostName()); string localIP = (from ip in localIPAddresses.AddressList where (ip.AddressFamily == AddressFamily.InterNetwork) select ip).First().ToString(); |
As you can see I also use LINQ there instead of a foreach loop since I find it much more readable. I am nearly finished with the main basic info page now so pretty soon I will have some new screen shots to demonstrate the new design of CSIT!
Thoughts on Localization with WPF
by Ryan Jones on Jun.13, 2010, under General, Personal
Hi everyone!
I just thought I would stop by and share some thoughts with you on localization with WPF. I have spent the last few hours working on making CSIT localization before I add to much content to make it worth while. This is the first time I have ever made the effort to make an application localizable and I must say that it was not as painful as I thought it would be.
Eventually I decided to use a simple XML file and bound elements to it using data binding and XPath. Some things could not be bound to however and I had to implement a class that would read strings from the file and load them so they can be used later in the processing functions.
So far however it seems to be working just fine. And as proof here is a screenshot of the current CSIT interface that uses the new localization system.
The current CSIT Interface (v3)
Hopefully I will be posting more on this shortly. Once I am sure that the code works as intended I will try to release the code for others to use.
Stupid Mistakes
by Ryan Jones on Jun.11, 2010, under Personal
I spent a good few hours yesterday trying to figure out why my code to extract the Windows key from the registry was not working. The key was there but the code would not read it! It was infuriating.
After taking a little time to sit back and think about the problem – it dawned upon me. I am using a 64-bit operating system. This means that although the key appeared to be present in the location I was checking, it may indeed have been under the WOW64 part. After digging there it was.
With only a few modifications to my code, it now works successfully. I am quite pleased that Microsoft added a method to the register editing features in .NET framework 4 and for those who are interested I used the OpenBaseKey method of the RegistryKey class with the RegistryView attribute set depending on if the operating system is 64-bit or not.
The code now works perfectly. Let that be a lesson to you – focusing on answers to simple problems gets you nowhere fast!
Firefox, YouTube and WebM – The Experiment
by Ryan Jones on Jun.10, 2010, under General, Personal
Hi everyone
I have just spent a little while playing with the new WebM and HTML5 experimental support in Mozilla Firefox and I mus say. I am quite impressed. The 760p video samples I have seen are truly quite impressive. I would suggest that anyone capable should get their hands on a browser with experimental support and give it a shot themselves.
But for those of you who are not so daring – here are a few screen shot of what a video looks like in 720p with the new experimental features. For those who are a little more daring, see the information at the bottom of this page about where you can find the experimental Firefox builds.
WebM Sample 1 (720p)
WebM Sample 2 (720p)
WebM Sample 3 (720p)
Firefox Experimental Builds
- First you will need to go and get yourself a Firefox nightly build, or a nightly of your favourite browser. If you use Windows then you can get a build here. For Mac you can get a build here and for Linux you can get it from here.
- Install the nightly build. Note that if you are already using Firefox you may wish to read this before you install it!
- Load the the video here and try out the different resolution settings and enjoy!
