New OS X Widget

[pgwalsh]

PROJECT CANCELED AND FILES REMOVED
Unfortunately I have to cancel the project until I can find a third party that will allow me to access their Stats. Vijay Pande has asked me not to access the pages directly and I will obviously comply. I urge you to PLEASE remove your widget until we can find an alternative solution. If you do not remove the widget your IP address may get banned by
Folding@HOme. I apologize for the inconvenience.

*Note: All download have been removed from this site.

[Beberg]

Nice work... one less things I have to do

But can you make it not auto-update? Anything that automatically hits our web server is bound to cause load problems if many people use it. Add a update button instead of the "update in xx:xx"?

[WangFeiHong]

Maybe you could get it to parse 3rd-party feeds like the EOC stats, although you can't get the time of last WU and no. of active processors. (maybe this can be included in PG's stats to 3rd-parties)

[John Naylor]

Added to Tools List.

[pgwalsh]

Nice work... one less things I have to do

But can you make it not auto-update? Anything that automatically hits our web server is bound to cause load problems if many people use it. Add a update button instead of the "update in xx:xx"?

I could, but that may upset quite a few users. It updates every hour if/when you look at it in dashboard and if it fails it retries in 10 minutes if/when you look at it. It doesn't update until you show dashboard.

What would be the ideal update time of folding.stanford.edu?

Have you tried the widget yourself?

[pgwalsh]

Maybe you could get it to parse 3rd-party feeds like the EOC stats, although you can't get the time of last WU and no. of active processors. (maybe this can be included in PG's stats to 3rd-parties)

I was under the assumption that extreme overclocking didn't want something like this going to their site. There was another widget that used their XML feed, but that is banned. However, I don't know the details and haven't asked. I did look at alternatives, but didn't find a viable one.

[jackrabbit]

The EOC stats maintainer only asks that you don't update more frequently than every 3 hours. Other than that, you can use it with minor restrictions. The FAQ on EOC is quite clear on this.

Parsing the EOC XML rather than the Stanford tag soup would be a whole lot easier. From a quick inspection of the HTTP headers, you could even use -z switch (EOC includes the Last-Modified header), which may save additional bandwidth.

[pgwalsh]

The EOC stats maintainer only asks that you don't update more frequently than every 3 hours. Other than that, you can use it with minor restrictions. The FAQ on EOC is quite clear on this.

Every 3 hours is easy enough to do. I still hesitate to write something for his services after he cut off the other widgets.

[jackrabbit]

Just email him and ask for a usage recommendation. He's a nice enough guy.

Think about it: he would not provide this service if he did not want anyone using it.

[pgwalsh]

Just email him and ask for a usage recommendation. He's a nice enough guy.

Think about it: he would not provide this service if he did not want anyone using it.

I have emailed 3 times over the past year, but haven't received a response. However, I have minimized the access to stats quite a bit.

[pgwalsh]

There's a new Beta 1.1.6-Beta7 that fixes Tiger issues and includes other enhancements. It will most likely be the release version unless someone finds an issue.


http://sites.google.com/site/pgwalsh/beta

Cheers!

Peter

[strayduck]

After waiting around for months after upgrading to Snow Leopard and getting bored of waiting for InCrease to drop the Rosetta requirement I decided to completely uninstall it manually and install stanford's own folding software along with this widget (1.1.8Beta1).

I have to say that the widget really makes the whole thing work, without it one feels like they're flying blind--people always like to know what their contribution is to a program like this, as well as get that warm fuzzy feeling about how awesome their system is as they climb in the ranks.

So that to say: Nice work!

A few notes:

As an end user I don't mind at all if my stats only update every 4 hours -- or even every day, really (since my machine rarely finishes more than a WU each day anyway.

Since I keep my calculator and a few other reference widgets handy I open up dashboard frequently throughout the day and would hate to get my IP banned from one of the services providing me stats for too frequent of visits, so I think it's a good idea to limit the connections that the widget makes.

Lastly, I have a few questions about the widget that can be seen in red here:



Text version:
1: At the top of the widget there is a section with stats for my username. They are all showing 0 after about 14 hours of running the widget and the stanford app. Is this the stanford server not responding to the widget? I've accumulated much more than 0, which can be confirmed on the stanford website.

2: Under my team area stats are showing up for the team score and rank as well as MY rank within the team, but my user score and WUs aren't showing up. My team is TeamOSX (1971). Ideas?

3: The "server busy!" message at the bottom -- maybe I missed this higher up on the thread -- who's server is busy, exactly?

Cheers.

[pgwalsh]

Strayduck,

All your red highlights are from stanford not having the information available. They've had N/A for several fields going on a few weeks. Since F@HWUdget pull directly from their site, it is obviously problematic. We have contacted 3rd parties so we could use a option database from another site, but no one responds. We don't want to do it without permission.

1.) You have a rank but no score because they are pulled from different pages. Some pages are available and some are not. We hit two pages and all user pages are showing N/A for many fields.

2.) That's another N/A.

3.) Stanford stats pages are busy. If this never updates then let me know.

I know it's a pain, but until I'm allowed to pull stats from another site or stanford updates their server code, there's not much I can do. My site has a note about these problems and you can contact through my site.

I hope this helps.

pgwalsh

[strayduck]

Hey pgwalsh,

This helps -- looking at your website it seems that the numbers will update if and when the servers are back so I'm not going to worry about that for now. HOWEVER, I have two follow-ups:

1: If the servers respond and my data is populated in the widget, then the servers blink back off, will my data be zeroed out or will they simply display the last valid numbers until another update is available?
2: I would still really like a way to reduce the # of calls my widget makes to the server because if I know system admins (and I know system admins), they have no problems shutting down individual users that use too much of their resources. Right now the widget only allows me to turn off the stats outright. Would be a pain to turn on the stats whenever I want to glance at them. Maybe you could add an "stats update frequency" option for users allowing for 4, 12, 24, 168 hours?
3: You know how much bandwidth would be needed for helper servers to house stats?

Hopefully it's ok that I'm chatting to you via this forum instead of your website; I think this is good info for other users to know.

Cheers,

[pgwalsh]

The stats shouldn't change unless the server values change. They are stored locally on your computer within a preference file. They will load from the preference file every time you login or log out. When you get a retry message, it's only because the server is busy updating. This shouldn't be problematic for admins. Once updated it waits 90 minutes for the next update. The fairly limits the updates. The reason why there's not a manual update is because people were impatient and updating much more frequently than necessary. I could add a drop down list on the back to select your update interval. It's a good idea and something I may look into.

There bandwidth shouldn't be too much. For Folding@Home we access fast user pages first and if it's not available we access the regular page, which increases the load. It's accessing a fairly small amount of information nonetheless, but when you add the number of people, it's harder to judge.