I've never used an account manager, but on Monday evening my son JV who has a Facebook account but doesn't do Boinc installed PtP on his laptop in a VM while I watched what happened. I made notes on his observations and have a lot of screenshots of the process. * Facebook members have had no email notification about PtP and there's no indication in our Facebook accounts that it exists.
* Intel, GR & Facebook have used CPDN, Malaria and Rosetta as PtP's three lead projects but everyone who joins PtP at a later stage gets access if they wish to the full range of projects supported by GR. * You select your project(s) from the lead three before you download anything at all. JV chose CPDN. * PtP is for Windows & Mac. No Linux. * The download was 9.27MB ie Boinc + GR. * There appears to be a bug in the installer. If you click on the Back button during the installation process you get an error and have to start the whole download again. * There's no option to choose between a service & non-service installation. When JV had the whole thing set up, his BM messages said running as a daemon which means he automatically got a service installation. *I think that to exit from this sort of Boinc installation it's still a two-part process. But will any of our PtP members know this? (A computer shutdown without first exiting from Boinc can sooner or later crash climate models.) * * After the installation the computer had to be restarted. On restart three things appeared: 1) a GR icon in the notification area 2) a PtP pane which on closer inspection turned out to be a GR-skinned Boinc Simple GUI. This said that JV had no projects. But he'd already selected CPDN before the download started. 3) a pane saying that the Account Manager ie GR was temporarily unavailable. JV managed to connect by going into the Advanced GUI > Tools > Connect to GR. *I don't know why GR wasn't available or what proportion of prospective members would manage to solve this problem.* * A Facebook page now opened suggesting that JV invite his friends to PtP. He declined because he can't actually run CPDN on his laptop or desktop and was just testing for me. * A pane appeared saying the computer needed to install Flash, which he did. * Options appeared to 1) 'add a 'PtP widget' to your Facebook profile' 2) 'donate your profile status to spread the world [sic] about PtP'. *Neither JV nor I understood what the second option meant. The typo should be corrected. * * At this point JV, who's an IT professional, stopped and said: 'It's never asked me for a name or nickname.' * His BM/GRM messages produced no Computer ID for CPDN, but a climate model was downloading and started up. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind at all that the d/l was 125MB which is normal for a HadAM3P model. * He got 60% CPU usage by default. * In his CPDN account his computer was hidden by default and the name said Anonymous. He wanted to see what name would appear on his CPDN pages. He thought he'd have to find his CPDN profile to discover this, rapidly found the CPDN website > Boinc pages (with my help) and started searching the list of profiles until I stopped him. * We got into his account by using the CPDN-Boinc menu option 'Your account'. (I had to help him find this on the CPDN website.) He unhid his computer to see his name. At this point he saw his CPDN user ID and also *saw that GR/CPDN had automatically used his Facebook name. He was not pleased about this.* By the time I realised he could hide his name permanently by hiding his computer again or edit his username he'd uninstalled the entire thing. It appears to me that the alpha-testing process (which to my knowledge no CPDN moderators participated in) was not thorough enough to throw up all the problems likely to be experienced by Boinc-naive prospective members. I've italicised aspects of the PtP installation process that I think should be changed or improved. Mo _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
