Satya's blog - BOINC distributed computing

So I got the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (hmm, pasted that from the project web page, where it is shown in all capitals, but it pastes correctly. Looking at their style sheet -- horrible HTML, by the way -- I see they're using font-variant: small-caps, just like on this blog entry. Nice.)

BOINC installed easily on Windows XP and I'm running SETI@Home, Climate Prediction, Einstein@Home (something to do with pulsars) and Predictor@Home (hope the spam harvester bots choke on these names). They round-robin for an hour at a time.

The Linux version? Forget it. The CVS one, I can't figure out how to configure, let alone build. the ready-made one is a shell-script, so I made a new safe un-privileged user to run this stuff anyway.

(It was interesting getting an X desktop off gort _for the new user_, who doesn't have a working password -- isn't allowed to log in -- so I do something like sudo su - boinc.)

Anyway, the ready-made one runs, but its GUI manager shows no text, or rather all text shows up as under-scores. So I'm compiling a new one from the nightly build tarballs, and the compilation just failed. Let's see why.
upper_case.C: In function `int main(int, char**)':
upper_case.C:219: error: invalid initialization of non-const reference of type 'std::string&' from a temporary of type 'std::string'
../api/boinc_api.h:101: error: in passing argument 1 of `int boinc_upload_file(std::string&)'

Well, forget that.