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F@H Spotlight #37

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LandShark

Super Shark Moderator
Joined
Aug 13, 2001
Location
Deep Blue Sea (Maryland)
This is the 37th in the series of T32 Spotlights!! I'll try my best to keep this Spotlight as regular post as possible as long as the nominations keep coming in!! So, keep sending me the nomination guys/gals!!!

For how to go about nominating a fellow folder, please go to THIS THREAD, or better yet, you can PM me directly. To see the ever growing list of who has been interviewed and the expected date of the next spotlight, please go to THIS THREAD.

Also, for any of the suggestions/questions/answers/etc. that you would like to see from other member, please PM me too!!

Now please give a warm welcome to..........................

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Helsyeah
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Again, Thanks for taking the time to allow me to interview you.

When did you join the Team? Approximate date is ok if you don't know the specific date.
I joined up in January of 2005.

If there was something recent that you did that you wanted your fellow teammembers to know about, what would it be?
After a bit of a hiatus from the forums I've slowly started getting involved again. I just recently built a Dual Core Opty machine and am in the final stages of adding water cooling to it and tweaking it (3ghz of dual core folding power to be unleashed soon :D)

What is your EOC (extremeoverclockers) stats link?
Stats

You do not have to give specifics (address), but what State do you live in, and if you don't mind telling, what town? (town is not required, but if not a town, a general direction and distance from the nearest 'big town/city' would suffice)
I live in Boise, Idaho. For the most part I grew up in northwestern Montana and Central Idaho and ended up down here for school and now work.

How did you initially hear about F@H?
I randomly wandered into the FAH forum and on a whim decided to give it a try. Then the Borging sickness took over, a meeting with my IT department at the time gave me access to borging several labs (40-50 computers worth of folding power). Real life of course decided to intervene, I left the University for a "real" job and have only kept itermitent contact with the IT guys. Eventually FAH was didnt make it through one of their reimaging of the labs last christmas, and I've haven't had the focus to see about reborging them yet, although I'm starting to feel the borging sickness stirring again...

After starting, why do you continue to Fold?
While I was very wrapped up the the competition aspects of FAH, with the change of jobs and general shift in life my focus has gone from massive point pwnage to just trying to do what I can to help the project and team. I had an aunt pass away from skin cancer and at the time it really hit home what this project was for... I fold now for a cure...

What do you do for a living?
I work as a Mechanical Design Engineer.

What do you do for fun?
Computers of course :D, oh, and hunting, fishing, mountain biking, drawing, hang out with the GF.

Is there anything special you do in your spare time that you really enjoy?
I guess I can be accurately described as a Redneck computer geek. While computers take up alot of my idle free time, things change when fall roles around. I spend as much time as I can spare out in the woods hunting deer and elk. Fall is definatelly my favorate time of the year, but in the summer I try to get in at least one back-country backpacking trip and in the spring its to the hills to look for shed deer and elk antlers and maybe chase some turkeys along the way.

Time to spill your guts. What are the stats of your main folding rig? Why is it your fave? What all do you use the rig for?
My main folding rig would have to be my Dual 1.6lv xeons @ 3.0 on a Asus PC-DL. It has 2 gigs of regular ol OCZ ram, my aging 6800 gt and is my main coding workstation, file server, game server and backup gaming rig. Its my favorate because it's been pretty much bomb-proof for the last 8 months or so, it just keeps on crunching away, day and night.

Do you have a Borg-Farm? If so, how many computers, and what are they? (CPU, RAM)
As I mentioned I had a nice collection of 40ish machines borged. Now I only have ~10 machines I actively maintain between my old lab at the school, my real job, and the machines at home. All of my current borgs are P4 machines with at least a gig of ram.

What are your future goals? What do you most want to accomplish with your life?
Ultimately I want to work up enough money to purchase serveral hundred acres of land out in the sticks of either central/northern Idaho or western Montana to retire on, and be able to buy the fastest net connection that is available at the time. I'll spend my days roaming the hills and working in my my couple hundred sq ft shop, and the nights will be filled with massive quantities of geeking out/gaming on my computers.

Of course in all reality I'm sure a wife and kids will interupt that last little bit of my plan... but mehh... I'll survive. :cool:


If there is something you want to tell the team, then spill your guts! What have I missed in my questions that could help the team learn more about you and who you are?
I do want to give a little heads up that I have been intermitently working on a FAH management client. I had made one that would work with a Deep-Freeze install and allow work units to be backed up and retrieved, and implemented it in two of the labs I was allowed to borg at the school. I took the basic concept and have since expanded it. I'm on a bit of a break from working on it, but hopefully sometime in the next couple months I'll get a beta out to you guys to play with. It's not much, but heres a little teaser screenie:

FAH_SVC_Manager.JPG
 
Where can I get that Deep Freeze capable version? I held off on installing it at school because they used Deep Freeze.
 
It's great to meet you, Helsyeah! :beer: I used to love to do all the hunting and fishing when I was younger too, before the hunting part got so expensive for a lease.:(
 
Great to meet you ... the man behind the massive ppd during the qmd days :thup:

Sounds like a beautiful part of the US to live in :)

It would be nice to see your borgage back too for the cause (and the team :D)

Fold on!

:beer: :beer:

and of course one for LS :beer:
 
Thanks guys, its been a while since I have posted in the Folding forum, and it's nice to come back and say hi again. I see that our production has seen better days, and while I would love to say that I could get mine back up to where it was a year or so ago, at this piont, it's fairly unlikely, RL has definitely taken over (which is a good thing in this case) :).

All things said and done, it's been a very eventfull last couple months since I filled this interview out and life has continued to progress, in quite a different direction than I thought it would actually. In way of an updated, I finished watercooling my Dual Core Opty rig (worklog found here for the curious), which I planned on doing, but I now find myself seeing the "wife and kids" mentioned above looming closer as my girlfriend and I find ourselves looking forward to our future together (with the planned path wandering through the "wife and kids" part ;)). And so, focus once again shifted from the forums and is now firmly rooted at home with her, but I still end up wandering through at least once a day to see what is going on, and whats new in the world of folding, watercooling and etc...

As for the FAH management client, I honestly see myself working on it again once winter hits, but it's one of those projects I like to work on when I feel like it, and I can't honestly say when I can get back to it. I will say that I got some good feedback from a couple folks I sent it out to do some early beta testing for me. I'll definitely keep you guys up to date and release a more stable beta once I'm ready to have you guys hammer on it.

As always, Fold on!! :D
 
Great to meet you Helsyeah! :thup:

Very interesting FAH Client Manager. I happen to be working on something similar myself. Been using my version in my home farm setup for months now. It's just not ready for prime time yet either.

Here's a screenie of an older build I'm still using on my work box.

FAHControl.jpg
 
harlam357 said:
Great to meet you Helsyeah! :thup:

Very interesting FAH Client Manager. I happen to be working on something similar myself. Been using my version in my home farm setup for months now. It's just not ready for prime time yet either.

Here's a screenie of an older build I'm still using on my work box.

Huh, sweet, hazarding a guess, it looks like your's is primarily ment for giving easy access to all your client config settings, flags etc. Just out of curiosity, what are you writing it in?

I'm writing mine in VB6, and it was mainly developed as a backup/service install tool and also to offer the ability to shutdown FAH services based on user activity (think a screen saver type of thing in that when a user is inactive for a specified amount of time, the FAH services are started, and when they become active again, the services are stopped). This works great on my main box whenever I want to game, FAH is shutdown automatically so I dont have any performance issues gaming, and then it is automatically restarted once I get off the computer, since lately I've only been using my PC's for gaming.

At any rate, it's a fun little project, and there is alot I still would like to do with it, ultimately ending up releasing it here for the forum members to use.
 
Ditto... VB6 for the moment. Once I get some more features laid down I'll be porting it to .NET though.

Yeah, it's basically a config for service installs. No console. Takes the human error factor out of modifying the client.cfg as well as startup parameters that are stored in the registry. Automatically recognizes Wedo One-Click installs (no user intervention). Also is configurable for Stanford service installs (just give it the path to FAHxxx-Console.exe).

The main feature I've been working on recently is network monitoring. Having this little puppy running on each one of my farm rigs and being able to view/change their config, start/stop services, etc via sockets. I want to get to the point where I can shutdown my entire farm with one click of the mouse instead of scrambling to kill my rigs when the power goes out (most are on UPS). :D

The idle timer idea sounds cool... that would be something I might like to add in the future (i.e. gaming mode or something like that). Looks good Helsyeah! :thup: I'll keep in touch as things progress... please do the same. :)
 
Great client managers guys. :thup: I look forward to trying both...if you make them available.
 
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