• Fixed two compile errors on systems where Qt wasn't built with the -kde option.
• Displaying selected WUs on the skymap failed due to a falsely parsed location string. Fixed thanks to a patch submitted by Xet Erixon.
• Fixed a bug where switching "Dock to Panel" in the Options tab off and on would only restore to the default dock icon, irrespectively of the selection made in the Analysis tab.
• Disabled the "Show on Skymap" popup menu item for the "Returned Signals" branch in the Completed Work Units tab. In the present design, the "Show on Skymap" feature makes only sense for completed work units and not for returned signals.

2.2.3 is out. Originally planned only as a maintenance release for KDE 2.2, a few new features managed to sneak in. The details:

• Added two more buttons to the Analysis tab, which allow one to start or stop all clients at once in the list above. This feature may be useful for people running multi-processor machines. Please don't take it as an invitation to run many SETI@home client processes on a single-processor machine. You won't gain anything!
• The lists of returned signals provide now more details about the top signal strengths. The average amount of signals per work unit is now displayed in brackets in the respective columns of the summary list.
• Message boxes reporting a new signal now contain a little picture of the signal found. Please note that the spike graph does not contain 'real' data, since the client does not provide this information. It's merely a placeholder, and can be regarded as an illustration of the ratio between spike power and noise level.
• The About tab contains a new text box with clickable links (e.g., to the download section of the SETI@home web site).
• Added a Spanish translation (thanks to Juan Manuel Garcia Molina).
• Added new high-color and low-color icons in accordance with the KDE guidelines.
• Updated the documentation so that it works with KDE 2.2.
• Updated all admin/configure scripts and files (which caused the size of the source package to increase by more than 100 kB, btw).

Enjoy, and please report any bugs or problems via the SourceForge services.

Ero Carrera wrote in to tell me that he has developed a client-server utility which allows to monitor and maintain SETI@home clients in a network. This is really a neat tool, especially if mounting of Samba or NFS network shares is not an option or is too cumbersome. The installation is very easy and it works perfectly together with Ksetiwatch, so just give it a try. More details can be found on his Remote Seti Project Homepage.

Here is an advice for those who are monitoring Windows command-line clients via Samba. I recently noticed that sometimes Ksetiwatch fails to log the results of completed work units, when the client is running continuously and the machine has a permanent internet connection. As a workaround, I have written a small batch script that should solve the problem. It can be found in the Help Forum at SourceForge. Just put it in the SETI@home directory on your Windows computer, and start the client via the batch file.

All right, it's time for the promised update of the SetiContainer package. Enough changes have accumulated to justify a new release. Most (but not all) changes and fixes are already included in the latest release of Ksetiwatch, btw. Here are the details:

• More improvements to the detection of the client's state. When terminating or killing the S@h client while loading a new work unit, the state switches now reliably to `Stopped'.
• Reduced harddisk access by caching the version number and process id of the client.
• Interoperability with network shares has been improved. When mounting a network share, all data is read and the corresponding signals are emitted. The client state remains `Stopped' until progress is detected. On unmount, the client state quickly switches to `Stopped' after the next scheduled check.
• The definitions of structures (signal scores, work unit data, etc.) have been moved into a separate header file: `setidefs.h'. This allows the use of these structures without explicitly including the SetiContainer class.
• Added a frequency member to the signal structures. Moreover, the GaussianScore, PulseScore, and TripletScore structures have been extended with a `data length' member to take into account the variable length of the signal profiles.
• Two new signals: updatedUserInfoData() and updatedWorkUnitData(). They are emitted whenever the respective information changes during runtime, e.g. after moving of files, or mounting of a network share. These signals are not emitted after loading a new work unit from the server, in which case newWorkUnit() is emitted.
• Two new static methods: convertRAToString() and convertDecToString(). Both methods return the sky position parameters as a nicely formatted string.
• initWUScore() method: data arrays are now filled with zeros as well.

Note that the SetiContainer package is not required to run Ksetiwatch. If you're not interested in the development of add-on tools for the SETI@home project, there's probably no need to download it (unless you have some interest in the details of all the sah files). Furthermore, the SetiContainer package is not a stand-alone program. If you are interested in a ready-to-use program, please download the latest release of Ksetiwatch.

A bit delayed by the `unscheduled maintenance event' at SourceForge, a new version of Ksetiwatch is finally available. Having been in feature mode in the past weeks, you will find some new goodies in this release. The most prominent new feature is the already promised `Logged Signals' dialog. See here for a screenshot.

The changelog:

• Added a `Logged Signals' dialog which allows you to browse through the list of interesting signals (the signals that have been returned to the SETI@home server) for each logged work unit. If available, gaussians, pulses and triplets are displayed graphically. This dialog can be accessed via the `Completed Work Units' tab: either right-click on a work unit entry in the lists and choose the option in the popup menu, or simply double-click an entry in the signals list.
• Ksetiwatch goes multimedia (well, sort of :-). Added the option to play a sound whenever a notification message for a new high signal appears on the screen. The sound sample included in this package has been borrowed from Ellie, an excellent monitoring tool for OS/2.
• A previously selected location in the `Analysis' list (e.g. for the purpose of monitoring the progress in the systray) is now automatically restored on startup of Ksetiwatch. This will save you a few mouse button clicks on every restart.
• Many changes and tweaks to the SetiContainer class, the core class of Ksetiwatch, specifically reduced the harddisk access, and generally improved the behaviour when mounting network shares during runtime. Details will follow in a separate announcement.

More rpm packages. John Aldrich made both binary and source rpm packages for the RedHat 7.1 distribution. What's more, he even volunteered to provide updated packages whenever a new release of Ksetiwatch comes out (thanks, John!). Look here for downloads.