Spoilt's blog

LHC restart – 2009 LHC beams.

Edward Karavakis — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:47:45 +0000

The LHC restarts today aiming for the first beam circulation… to be followed by the very first LHC collision in the next couple of days or so… will keep you updated

– update –
Display of a splash event just seen online on the CMS:

World of Goo sale ends today!

Edward Karavakis — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:17:55 +0000

World of Goo is a puzzle game with a strong emphasis on physics, for WiiWare, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux by 2D Boy, an independent game developer. The game is built around the idea of creating large structures using balls of goo.

On 13 October 2009 – it’s first birthday, 2Dboy announced a one week offer (which was later extended till 25 October 2009) on their blog where people could pay whatever amount they liked to buy the game.

The sale ends today, the 25th, so hurry up and grab a copy. The game is addictive and highly recommended.

Amarok Awesomeness!!!

Edward Karavakis — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:38:03 +0000

Currently it is not planned for inclusion in any version. It will be debated among the developers in the near future though. Go Amarok, go Qt!!!

Direct link here

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1 released

Edward Karavakis — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:19:45 +0000

Amarok 2.1 will come with many new features and some old favourites. The Beta 1 release gives you a sneak preview of all these improvements.

Major new features include a new, completely user configurable playlist with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor, cue sheet support, a new take on managing applets in the Context View, bookmarks – allowing you, among other things, to save and share favorite finds in the services, support for showing radio stations with many alternate streams as one track in the playlist, much faster startup when reloading large playlists containing non local tracks, as well as many other improvements, UI tweaks and bug fixes across the board.

Compiling the amarok 2.1 beta 1 tarball on Fedora 10 / 9:

sudo yum groupinstall buildsys-build

sudo yum install cmake subversion kdelibs4-devel phonon-devel mysql-embedded-devel strigi-devel taglib-devel

For the mysql-embedded : F10 already has it but for F9 users try the following step:

sudo yum install kde-redhat unstable

Download the 2.1 beta 1 tarball from http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Source

tar xjf amarok-2.0.90.tar.bz2
cd amarok-2.0.90
mkdir amarok-2.0.90-build
cd amarok-2.0.90-build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull
make
sudo make install

You’re done! Type amarok to start Amarok. The 2.1 release will be simply awesome!!!

Update from Rex: “Just stuffed amarok-2.0.90 into kde-redhat/unstable too (F-10 only atm, F-9 builds shortly)”. If you don’t want to enable the kde-redhat repo, you can still install amarok directly (for fedora 10):

# sudo rpm -Uvh http://mirror.unl.edu/kde-redhat/fedora/10/i386/RPMS.unstable/amarok-2.0.90-2.fc10.i386.rpm http://mirror.unl.edu/kde-redhat/fedora/10/i386/RPMS.unstable/amarok-utilities-2.0.90-2.fc10.i386.rpm

Prague here I come!!!

Edward Karavakis — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:32:16 +0000

My abstract was accepted @ CHEP 2009 (Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics) International Conference (21-27 March in Prague). Hurraaaay!!!

Fedora 10 Graphical Bootsplash – Plymouth

Edward Karavakis — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:54:03 +0000

Plymouth is a new and amazing Graphical Boot splash for Fedora 10. In order to see the graphical boot and not just the text loader, you must enable a mode setting for your video:

spoilt@spoiltspace.co.uk:~$ sudo nano /boot/grub/grub.conf, and add ‘vga=0x318‘ to the end of the kernel line:
title Fedora (2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686) root (hd0,2) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=9ae10394-2c58-4076-83c4-b8095211ed2f rhgb quiet vga=0x318 initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686.img

Do a reboot and check out the fancy Plymouth graphical booter. Tip: Use vga=ask instead and then follow the instructions to find the appropriate value for your monitor. Then, replace vga=ask with your value. If you’d like to try out the remaining plymouth themes:

spoilt@spoiltspace.co.uk:~$ sudo yum install plymouth-plugin-fade-in plymouth-plugin-pulser plymouth-plugin-spinfinity

spoilt@spoiltspace.co.uk:~$ sudo plymouth-set-default-plugin name_of_the_plugin

spoilt@spoiltspace.co.uk:~$ sudo /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

Enjoy!

Photos of the CERN Computer Centre

Edward Karavakis — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:53:33 +0000

50,000 processor cores and counting.. about half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the LHC which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons. The Computer Centre will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors. The grid is linked to the centre through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the centre owns 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of hard disks and 30 petabytes of tapes by the end of the year. Check out the photos, enjoy!

For more posters & photos, check out the CERN section @ my photo Gallery.

CERN posters

Edward Karavakis — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:47:43 +0000

CPU capacity required at CERN =)

The four detectors of the LHC project.

CERN Computer Centre. PC Farms: Inexpensive mass market components (running Scientific Linux CERN – recompiled RHEL).

For more posters & photos, check out the CERN section @ my photo Gallery.

Last minute update

Edward Karavakis — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:11:13 +0000

In a few hours I’ll be boarding on the airplane and flying to Geneva, Switzerland.. CERN here I come again! =) More to follow..

Happy birthday to me!

Edward Karavakis — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:33:45 +0000

Today is my birthday – my 25th birthday. Thank you all for the happy bday greetings! It was a busy week… I didn’t get the chance to stop and rest a little bit yet.. I’ve been busy busy busy.. but what the hell… I will be going to CERN in Geneva from 3rd till 17th of Nov. =) CERN here I come again – actually it’s going to be my second time so I’m quite excited!