Penultimate Reality

I’ve been fascinated by distributed computing for several (perhaps as many as six or seven) years now, running a variety of various projects on various computers. One project that I’ve been involved with for a long time is distributed.net, a project whose primary claim to fame was working on various RC5 cracking efforts over the years. In recent years, the project has stagnated in ways, working primarily on two projects with dubious value.

RC5

RC5 is a particular encryption scheme for which RSA Laboratories had sponsored several contests to crack messages encrypted with various key lengths. Distributed.net previously cracked both the 56-bit and 64-bit variants, and is currently working on the 72-bit variant. The only real value here is measuring the current ability of a large network of computers to brute-force crack an encryption key. We know that we can do it, and we also know that cracking 72 bits is beyond any practical purpose for now. This could, of course, change quite rapidly (there is some interesting work being done on GPU and FPGA cores that may push the limits extensively).

OGR

OGR, or optimal Golomb rulers, is a project to find the shortest Golomb rulers of various lengths. The project is mildly interesting, doesn’t take too incredibly long, but is of dubious practical value.

In the beginning, both of these projects were interesting enough on their own. Today, however, with the wide array of projects available via the BOINC platform (which I run on a few of my machines), these projects are looking more like a waste of my valuable CPU cycles. I continue to assist, however, as the end of OGR-25 is in sight (a few months at most, by my estimation) and I’d hate to abandon it so near the finish line. I have no problem keeping RC5-72 active, even though RSA Laboratories has ended the challenges, simply as a barometer of what kind of processing power is currently available. I would, however, like to see some new and interesting projects. I’d love to come up with one on my own, but I don’t currently have any ideas that need that kind of processing power, are easily breakable into small parts, and are of value to the world community at large.

I’m not sure there’s a point here, but it’s not like I need one all the time.

I’ve gone ahead and bitten the bullet and installed a forum package. It’s beta software, so don’t be entirely surprised if I’m forced to reset the database at some point. I’ll, of course, do my best to avoid that situation, but sometimes drastic changes can happen, and if the inevitable happens, and I’m somehow unable to fix it myself, this configuration won’t be supported by the developers.

For the curious, the software is a beta phpBB3, which is a vast improvement over the very popular version 2 of the software. It’s not recommended to use it in a production environment, and that’s a risk I’m taking. That aside, I expect the forum to be a welcome addition to the site. The topics of discussion are anything related to the core topics of Penultimate Reality: science, technology, the Internet, and so on. In addition, this is where you may go for support for any of my projects, including the Custom Title MOD for phpBB, which I may eventually port for 3.0.x.

As many stories have reported in the past few days, it looks like Dell is going to offer Ubuntu on select machines. In general, I think I like this move. I’m not sure if they’re going to offer any additional distributions, but at the very least, offering a Debian-derived system, as opposed to an RPM-based one strikes me as a good thing. From what I’ve seen, upgrading between major releases is far easier on Debian-derived systems, with RPM ones requiring essentially a reinstall, though you get to keep your data in most cases.

In any case, I’ve felt for a while that Ubuntu offered the best hope for a mainstream desktop Linux, despite its shortcomings. It’s by no means perfect, but Windows isn’t either. With Dell preinstalling it, they’ll be able to at least make sure the appropriate drivers are installed, which is probably the most difficult part of getting any operating system running. For now, most users will inevitably end up with Windows, simply because it’s almost expected in many cases. I maintain, however, that for completely beginning computer users who are unlikely to play the latest games, learning Ubuntu is no more difficult than learning Windows, and these users are the prime target of any desktop Linux initiative. I only hope that in the coming few years, a Linux distribution (not necessarily Ubuntu) can become the default, and Windows can be relegated to secondary status. After all, desktop Linux is improving rapidly, and Microsoft is going to end up with more of a fight than they’d like.

The next step is, of course, that Microsoft will finally open-source some version of Windows. Sure, it seems unlikely, but that’s my ultimate prediction.