As you may or may not have heard, Sony and Stanford University released a Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. This is awesome in itself, but what’s more is amazing is the effect it’s had on the computing power of F@H. If you look at the current numbers, the PS3 has almost tripled the computing performance (in teraflops) of every other operating system.

This absurd amount of processing power is primarily due to the fact that the PS3 is designed to produce beautiful graphics, which seems to have the same sort of needs as folding proteins. Video cards, in general, seem to have a tremendous ability to process these sorts of numbers, because if you look at the numbers, although there are only about 700 GPUs (other than PS3) crunching numbers for F@H, they are doing the same amount of work of around 25,000 Linux boxes.

Hopefully this move by Sony will encourage Nintendo and Microsoft to implement similar clients on the Wii and Xbox. By allowing these machines to fold proteins in their spare time, it may very well lead to significant advances in research of diseases such as cancer. Pretty amazing that playing video games may very well lead to a cure for cancer.

I have finally managed to snag myself a Wii! After my parents essentially gave me an “I.O.U.” for Christmas, it’s been a little over 2 months until I was able to locate one. My mom and I were flying to Florida fairly early on Sunday, so my dad went by Target after dropping us off and got one from their shipment. So far, Zelda: Twilight Princess is the only game I’ve bought in addition to the included Wii Sports, but I’ve logged quite a few hours of playing time nonetheless.

So far, I’m really liking the controller—it just feels much more intuitive. For instance, yesterday I got my sister and parents playing Wii Sports with virtually no instructions: all I had to say is “do it like you’re playing tennis,” and they played Wii Tennis with ease. Were this a regular controller, they would’ve had no chance of learning with so little instruction. As of right now, there really aren’t too many games out for the Wii yet, but I think as soon as developers start figuring out how to best use the new controller, there will be a heavy flow of innovative titles. Personally, I’m really looking forward to First Person Shooters on the Wii (there’s a good article over at Joystiq about possible controls), but I’m even more excited to see how many new ways game developers find to use the Wiimote.

Hopefully I’ll pick up a more few games soon—Excite Truck looks like it should be lots of fun, as will Mario Party 8 when it comes out.

I went and saw The Last King of Scotland tonight, and it was excellent—Forest Whitaker certainly deserved the Oscar, and the rest of the movie was superb. The best moment came after the film, however, as we were walking out: a group of 5 older ladies, all dressed up very nicely, were walking in front of us and were all looking quite distressed. (No doubt due to some of the gruesome sights in the film.) I then hear one lady, dressed in an expensive looking fur coat, exclaim, “Well that certainly wasn’t the movie I thought it would be! It was supposed to be about Scotland!”

Classic.

Fidgeting.net is finally looking as it should, in a design created solely by me. It feels good to be rid of the standard theme I had before and to have something original. Here’s a look into what went into the new design:

Keep it Simple, Stupid

With the redesign of the site, I really wanted to make sure everything was reader friendly—I hate sites with overfilled sidebars and inaccessibly content. I (hopefully) made it easy to read and browse—the simple 2-column layout helps this, and I tried not to go overboard on extras. I also reduced the number of full entries on the front page to 3–this way the it isn’t as intimidating, and it will load (slightly) faster.

This Redesign Brought to you by…

A lot of the underlying code was inspired by Cutline, a fantastically modifiable WordPress theme. I also referred to the SimpleBits stylesheet if I ran into trouble coding the design.  Also, all the icons are from the Silk set.

What Comes Next?

I’m certainly not done tweaking the site—there are a lot of things I still need to play around with until I get them right. I’m also taking this as an opportunity to go back and rewrite my static pages. Once I finalize how I want to do it, I’m also going to have a portion of the sidebar dedicated to the recent movies I’ve seen. I have that featured pretty much finished, I’m just working on how to best implement it. Beyond that, who knows? In a few months’ time, I’ll probably be fed up with this design and ready for a new one. Also, as far as cross-browser compatibility, I’m sure this design sucks. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it accessible to many browsers, but for right now, I only know that it works in Firefox and IE7. Enjoy!