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1. Introduction

Ksetiwatch is a monitoring tool for the SETI@home distributed computing project, which searches for signals of extraterrestrial life. It circumvents the most annoying feature of text-based SETI@home clients: the lack of information about the state of the client(s), the progress of data crunching, the work units currently being processed, and about already completed work units.

Ksetiwatch tries to provide the same look-and-feel of the popular SETIWatch program, written for the Windows95/98/NT platforms by Mark Loukko. It shares many of the features offered by SETIWatch, and provides some other. The highlights are:

• monitors as many clients as you want,
• docks into KDE's panel,
• notifies you when new high signals occur,
• automatically logs completed work units,
• displays lists of completed work units,
• fully compatible to SETIWatch/SETILog log files,
• shows currently processed work units as well as logged WUs on a sky map,
• starts and stops SETI@home clients,
• detailed status display (running, stopped, finished, loading),
• shows Gaussian, pulse, and triplet graphs.

1.1 Changes

2.1.0 -> 2.2.0

• Completely redesigned the Add/Edit dialog. Many new features were added (see below). After upgrading, please make sure that the settings of all your configured locations are still correct.
• Logging information can now be redirected to a folder other than the default folder of the location. This is useful if you don't have write permission on a remote computer. Just redirect the log to a local folder in your home directory in that case. Alternatively, you could use this feature to collect the logs of several locations in one centralized logging folder.
• Ksetiwatch is now able to stop the SETI@home client whenever the program is closed (or when the user logs out of his/her KDE session). This is useful if you are running a multi-user PC, and you don't want to hog the machine with running SETI@home clients while other users are working on it.
• Some important command line arguments of the SETI@home client can now conveniently be selected via checkboxes.
• First-time users are now asked whether they want to add a SETI@home location to the list. This happens only when Ksetiwatch detects an empty list of locations at startup.
• The Completed Work Units tab now provides some statistics about the interesting signals returned to the SETI@home server. By selecting a specific location below the `Returned Signals' entry, you can examine how many and which kind of signals have been found in each work unit. These work units must have been logged with Ksetiwatch 2.1.0 or later.
• Some visual enhancements to the Completed Work Units tab. The `Grand Total' line can now be better distinguished from the other lines. The S@h locations are sorted correctly (in accordance with the tree view to the left).
• WUs with zero processing time are not counted for average stats any more.
• All listviews now show the sorting order in the header.
• Adjusted the formulas for the TeraFlops calculation.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the selection of listview entries when the list was scrolled.
• In the Completed Work Units tab, wrong TeraFlops values were sometimes shown for the work units.
• Eliminated some problems with reporting the status of clients on remote computers (always `Stopped').
• Fixed a bug that caused the fields in the Analysis tab to remain blank after loading a new work unit with the `-stop_after_xfer' option (reported by Dan Crooks).
• Location names in the Analysis tab now really get updated on editing.
• Fixed two issues with KDE 2.1: the window title wasn't showing up, and when minimizing to the panel, the taskbar entry didn't disappear (thanks to Marco Wirz for the bug report).
• Fixed a bug that prevented a minimized skymap window from getting maximized if requested.
• Fixed a bug that would cause a message box to appear twice in case of a new record.
• When checking whether the client is already running, Ksetiwatch examines if the process behind the given process id (pid) is really the SETI@home client.
• More code clean-up; improved compile speed.

2.0.2 -> 2.1.0

• Major restructuring of source code. Ksetiwatch uses the SetiContainer class now and monitors clients much more efficiently.
• Setting the tooltip text of the dock icon (which was the origin of a memleak) has been improved. The text is updated only when absolutely necessary. However, there still seems to leak some memory. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be within the Qt toolkit, and thus is beyond my responsibilities.
• After completion of a work unit, Ksetiwatch logs all signals that will be returned to the SETI@home server to a file (`SETIResult.log'). Currently there is no way to view the logged data from within Ksetiwatch. I hope I'll find some time to implement this in a future version.
• Added "Angle Range" and "TeraFlops" to the Data Info and Completed Work Units tab.
• The calculation of the amount of floating point operations (Flops) required to process a work unit depends now on the angle range, thus making the MFlops/s data more accurate. This is based on the work of Roelof Engelbrecht and Lawrence Kirby, who developed corresponding formulas.
• Before trying to start a S@h client, Ksetiwatch checks now whether the client is already running.
• When selecting the lists of completed work units, the WU info was always read twice from disk. By fixing this, displaying the WU lists should now be twice as fast.
• Ksetiwatch stopped monitoring when being in the Completed Work Units tab, Options tab, or About tab; fixed.
• Ksetiwatch should now reliably save its settings when shutting it down, or when logging out of KDE.
• All list views are now correctly updated after editing a location.

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