Topics

Add: Graphic presentation of received tasks. Menu Show -> Tasks graphic.

Is it a list of tasks, currently available on-board - how many of them were received at which point of time? I suppose.

The graph contains a lot of spikes from 0 to 1, just one goes to 2. Like a rainbow grass on a lawn. Maybe I should have seen a screenshot from someone else, who gets a lot of smaller tasks...

Could there be one more display mode, which would not show the receive moments as spikes (going to number of received tasks and then immediately back to zero), but the lines would go between different levels as number of tasks, available on-board from some project at the moment of time. I understand that some history of task-received-datetime should be kept in order to display it, in addition to the moments when a task was reported...

Changed: Tasks and History, added walking ..... to updating...

What is this "walking"?

When I open the "Find new BT version" dialog, it displays

Code Select Expand

Press Check to find a new version.
(uses Http connection to www.efmer.eu on port 80)
When I press "Check", it displays e.g.

Code Select Expand

Current version: 0.93  ( Latest version : 0.87 , (Latest beta version : 0.93) )
You already have the most current version!
OK, I close this dialog and open it 10 days later. It still shows

Code Select Expand

Current version: 0.93  ( Latest version : 0.87 , (Latest beta version : 0.93) )
You already have the most current version! Well, I believe, so I close it again for today (or next 10 days).
Although the Latest beta version is actually maybe 0.96!!

I'd recommend that, regardless of when the dialog gets opened (or maybe after some delay after the last check), it would display something like

Code Select Expand

Current version: 0.93

Press Check to find a new version.
(uses Http connection to www.efmer.eu on port 80)

Task properties window can display multiple tasks simultaneously. But when I'm displaying UK Met Office FAMOUS 6.11 from CPDN Beta and UK Met Office FAMOUS 6.11 from climateprediction.net, I'm not that sure, which is which... But I think that even when displaying just a single task, for the sake of completeness, also the Project name could be displayed.

Changed: The detach/reset project dialog added columns.

In these dialogs, a list of selected projects is displayed, but both terminate the list with a <QuestionAbort> question from Abort task dialog: "Do you want to abort the tasks above?", possibly instead of the <QuestionDetach> and <QuestionReset> questions.

This question would be meaningful, if the dialog would also contain a list of tasks to-be-lost (which could be a goodie, at least if the user does not have some thousands of tasks cached , maybe to show at least the number of them and list the already started and unreported tasks?).

And, neither of the three mentioned dialogs display its name in their title bar - is this possible to master, so that it would describe the operation to-be-done with the list of projects?

Since some time BT gives us the possibility to define our own thousands separator character. But there are still few places where it is not used, although at some of them it would for sure be helpful:

• Project props
  
  
  • all credits
  • RS
  • DCF? (not sure - nowhere that high)
  • all debts
  • disk usage? (not sure - nowhere above 930 MiB)
• Projects tab
  
  
  • RS column
• Task props
  
  
  • Est. task size

IIRC the TThrottle's wish list used to be much longer. It must have been lost or purged some time ago...
At least what I remembered off top of my head:

One more wish:

• To all time selector popup menus, add some value into the large gap between 1 and 12 hours - maybe 3 or 4 hours.

When the red (straight) lines for temperature limits are drawn over the temperature values' texts at the graph left side, they can under circumstances render them unreadable, e.g. the values 60º and 80º are now stroked through, the 6 is not distinguishable from an 8 at all.
Is it possible to draw the lines _under_ the temperature texts?

Noted.

Add: Projects: Extra counter for non CPU intensive tasks like FreeHAL. Format CPU/GPU/LOW, LOW only shown when > 0.

The third value, if displayed, is often some huge random number like 544 372 079 or 1 869 182 049.

As the number of projects on a computer rises, the width of the widest bars in "Share %" column, which symbolize the single projects' Resource Share, effectively approaches zero pixels. The narrow ones were indefinitely thin already a long ago...

If some new optional mode would be introduced to size them not absolutely to the 0-100% width, but to maximize the widest one and the narrower ones (on the same computer) relatively to it, the functionality might be again useful even with larger number of projects. (I understand that the bar width would be not comparable across computers anymore, but therefore 'optional'.)

When a task (with small CPU usage) is started, its "Elapsed Time" column in Tasks tab initially displays just the elapsed wall clock time formatted e.g. "00:08:12-", which probably means that the CPU usage was less than 1 second.

• Could the format be slightly modified towards e.g. "00:08:12 (-)" or at least with a space in front of the dash "00:08:12 -"? A full format "00:08:12 (00:00:00)" is probably not necessary.
• Simultaneously (I believe it has been already mentioned) please let's have the (CPU:time) of a finished task visible in the same column too.

If the BT Temperature Graphics' CPU%+GPU% checkboxes and time selector would be placed above the CPU cores' and GPUs' checkboxes, then it would be possible to resize the window at the user's will to make it much thinner vertically. Now the mentioned controls get obscured and on a machine with just a few cores, there remains a lot of unused visible place above them.
And owners of a lot of cores would possibly anyway need to keep the window high to see them all...

As there is no wish list for webpage, I'm adding it here...

I'm occasionally coloring parts of my text with gray color, funny or sad coincidence is that gray is the only one not directly available in the "Change Color" selector. I've always to workaround it by using the green color and manually change the BBCode green->gray.

I'd like to ask Fred to edit corresponding PHP file and add the gray color item to the "Change Color" selector. (Maybe then report the patch to SMF dev team, so that the change will survive any future updates?)

BTW, the [acronym=Simple Machines Forum]SMF[/acronym] code works fine in a message preview, but anymore in the posted message.

BTW2, after adding the previous BTW, the feature started to work (got scared )

« Reply #75 on: Today at 12:16:32 »
Added: Taskbar->Snooze:Remaining snooze time.

Example of an excellent utilization of available information!

Try to find some more problems.

Will try with 0.82
Later, later...

With pleasure here I go:

• I believe this bug did not get into the ToDo list:
  

  
  

  
  
  • When cells in "Deadline" and "CPU %" are highlighted, then the auto-resizing makes the column too wide, with a plenty of free space around (or to the left). I believe this bug has already been addressed somewhere (the cell color value?).

• I've updated 0.81 -> 0.82 with BT's autostart afterwards. As soon as BT's tray icon appeared, I've clicked on it to open it, but BT immediately crashed. Sending crash dump off-list.
  

Afterwards BT 0.82 seems to work flawlessly

A bug:

• I'm getting a very fast crash and silent restart upon attempt to snooze or unsnooze GPU or the whole client through the tray icon. Snoozing through the Extra menu works fine. (Nice the countdown timer )
  

A wish:

• what about being able to unsnooze a snoozed external machine through the Extra menu?

In the past, I've sometimes been faced with the necessity to temporarily snooze external clients (I've been using more of them simultaneously in the past). I do not remember anymore whether BoincView contained this functionality, but at least since using BT I always had to use BOINC Manager to connect to any remote client and snooze it.

As BT is pretty good prepared for it, I'd like to ask for additional entries in Extra menu, there are two equally logical possibilities:

• just below the "Allow to run" + "Allow to run GPU" items, a "Snooze" item, with similar contents like the previous ones:
  
  
  • first level = "All computers" + separator + "1st machine" + "2nd machine" + ...
  • second level = "Snooze" + "Snooze Gpu"
• inside the "Allow to run" + "Allow to run GPU" items, then deeper inside the each of "All computers" + separator + "1st machine" + "2nd machine" + ...
  
  
  • in the "Allow to run" tree, a "Snooze" item just below each "Never" (possibly with a separator in between)
  • in the "Allow to run GPU" tree, a "Snooze Gpu" item just below each "Never" (possibly with a separator in between)

Displayed lines with tasks, projects, messages, history etc. are too tight vertically - a couple of characters' pixels below the base font line are overwritten by the adjacent line - characters like "j/i", "y/v", "g/q/o/p", "_/ ", ";/:", ",/.", "Q/O" are hard (or impossible) to distinguish between...

Changed: Tasks: CPU % warning color, is now applied to the deadline cell only.

Fred, you may want to edit the text. The warning color was correctly applied to the "CPU %" cell
Thanks for the change. The display is now much less cluttered with colors, although the warnings are still there and good visible! (JM7 has hot a really good idea. Some 5 years ago, I've been enhancing BoincPHP-GUI exactly the same way, but forgot it...)

I must admit that the "Switched, busy..." text in the status bar is killing my patience. I was looking around for any description of this state and the single place whitch mentions it was pretty unrelated

... the status box (third from right at on the bottom row), which usually says "updating very briefly, then a count-down from 5 seconds to next update, instead said "switched, busy" for a while, perhaps 20 seconds. Then it changed to "updating..."

without any explanation.

Thus the big question from me, Fred: WHAT is happening under the BT's hoods, when it has to keep this message displayed for a long while, exactly each time I enter any tab's page, and if I want to switch from the tab to another one or click anything else prior to finishing this page's update, the clicks are just buffered and buffered and buffered...

Is it necessary to postpone any other GUI activity (like entering any tab or menu or dialog) until this particular one page is refreshed? (Is it because the same thread (as GUI) is waiting for network data?)

The same way as the "Checkpoint time" warning is coloring only its column, could the "CPU/GPU less than/between/more than" warning also recolor just the "CPU %" column? It would then be available independently of the other Tasks warnings.

V 0.70

-Add: Extra checkpoint options: http://www.efmer.eu/forum_tt/index.php?topic=503.0
-Add: Checkpoint counter like [3] 00:00:15, this is the 3th checkpoint.

This is NICE 

-Fixed: The checkpoint tooltip shows some extra characters, that should be hidden.

...and yet some more extra training spaces slipped in into the value, displayed in the tooltip and possibly somehow influencing the column.

After double-clicking the Checkpoint column's resizer bar, the column got auto-resized extraordinarily wide - maybe twice the width of normal (less-than-a-day) values. Maybe the culprit is my Lattice Garli's checkpoint value "[1] 06d,01:26:28". After manually narrowing the column to still display even this (more-than-a-day) value without trailing dots, it was already displaying a tooltip with a couple (5-6?) of trailing spaces appended. The normal (less-than-a-day) values' tooltips do not contain such trailing spaces.

• Paused tasks already show up in the Checkpoint column but! their "CPU time at last checkpoint" value, rather than the CPU times' difference (or fred's elapsed equivalent). A pretty lot red warnings are now visible in the column
• What does the checkpoint's tooltip e.g. "|0:19:43 ^L7960312" mean? The second vaue is the same overall.
• Intially, after enabling its checkbox, my Debt column was invisible, zero-sized. (After resizing my right-most column, the Debt column suddenly popped-up with some half-width and I could finally resize it.)
• Sorting according to the Debt column does not work correctly - the values are wildly spread across the column.

Checkpoint column is wonderful (except that is is displaying wildly varying numbers, depending on the varying CPU load and speed, instead of simple pure CPU time difference ), but paused tasks' checkpointing times are hidden, although they can often be non-zero, even very big. (You know this can often happen automatically, when a task is preempted without a checkpoint because some other have to be started with higher priority.)

IIRC BOINC considers some CPU time difference between maybe 10 seconds as if a task has "just checkpointed". Maybe if a paused task's checkpointing difference is above some small threshold, it should be displayed too.