After spending several weeks documenting the entire code base, the Ksetiwatch API documentation is finally online. Not an exciting job, but something that has to be done, I think, especially for an open-source project. You can find all docs on the new documentation page. I hope this work will be useful to everyone who wants to dig into the source code in order to learn something about the inner workings of Ksetiwatch.

KDE3 is rapidly approaching, and Ksetiwatch still hasn't been ported to the new architecture. I'm currently in the process of installing KDE3 on my system, and hope to find some time in the next weeks to make the necessary changes. So, please stay tuned for an update.

After a period of nearly six months without an update, I'm back with a new release. I finally decided to backport several new features and changes from my development version to the stable branch. Nothing spectacular, but I'm sure some of you will like the new options dialog. Here is the complete changelog:

• Improved the appearance of the Add/Edit dialog box. It now inherits from KDE's KDialogBase class, thereby presenting all options and settings on several clearly arranged pages.
• The path and file name of the SETI@home client executable are now configurable.
• The priority of the client process can now easily be adjusted with a slider.
• Support for proxy server has been added to the SETI@home client settings. Note that whenever you change the settings of the client, you have to restart the client to make the changes take effect.
• Added a little more eye-candy. Most items in the right-mouse-button context menus are now decorated with icons.
• Minor changes and tweaks to the SetiContainer class. Specifically, fixed a bug that prevented Ksetiwatch from switching to the "Finished" state for clients which can only passively monitored (i.e. clients on network shares in most cases) ... (After packaging this release, I noticed that the bug fix re-introduces another minor problem, which I hopefully will be able to eliminate in the next version. The problem is that you cannot restart the client from within Ksetiwatch when it is stuck in the "Loading" state, e.g. a stalled download.)
• Made Ksetiwatch less picky when comparing directory paths (white space and trailing slashes are ignored). This affects the Completed Work Units tab page, where the "See other S@h location" message in case of a log file redirection wouldn't show up sometimes.

At the same time, the SetiContainer class has been updated as well. The code hasn't changed much, but there is now a much more detailed API documentation (including a HTMLized and heavily cross-linked source code listing), thanks to the use of doxygen. The changelog for version 0.5:

• As already stated above, fixed a bug that prevented the switch to the "Finished" state when monitoring clients for which there is no valid process ID (i.e. clients that can only be passively monitored).
• Minor tweaks to the initialization of the class, and the way the sah files are scanned.
• The SetiContainer class now relies on the NDEBUG compile switch when deciding whether to output debug information.
• Generally improved the documentation. Added more explanations to the data structures of the sah files.
• Switched to doxygen as documentation tool.

Yeah! As of yesterday, Ksetiwatch has been downloaded more than 50000 times from the Sourceforge servers, according to this Statistics page. Although there are quite a few other projects getting so many downloads within a day or so, it's more than I had ever imagined when starting this project (especially in light of the fact that the primary reason for kicking off Ksetiwatch was only to get familiar with Linux, and to learn some C++ :-). So, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of you, the users and contributors, for your support during the more than two years this project is now in existence.

Ok, what's next, you might ask. Well, those of you who are looking a bit behind the scenes might have noticed the increased CVS activity in the last weeks, usually indicating that I could get some work done. So, yes, be prepared for an upgrade in the next days. Details will follow soon. Meanwhile, check out that strong pulse signal I recently discovered in one of my work units. Anybody got a better one?

I recently came across a new (at least to me) WU caching utility for SETI@home, called SetiBatch. The interesting thing about it is its ability to create a specific Ksetiwatch configuration file for the monitoring of the complete batch of cached work units. Very useful indeed. Check it out.

Not much activity on this web site lately. The reason is that my work on Ksetiwatch has largely been preempted by both private and job-related tasks in the past weeks. However, I managed to get a few things done recently, mainly a clean-up and redesign of the source code (in preparation of new features to be added). So, development hasn't stalled, it's only proceeding a bit slowly.

Meanwhile, I noticed that the batch script I advertised a few months ago for running the S@h client on Windows machines doesn't work on Win2k and above. This is because the CHOICE command, which I used to specify a delay, isn't available on that platforms any more. A rewritten script can be found here. I've been using it for quite some time now without any problems. Maybe it is of some help.