Bad timing today (yesterday now), I was tied up in that Real World we all hear about.
Here is some feedback anyway, in the order that I ran into each issue:
The project
Registration and
FAQ pages are
unviewable in iCab ... but work in Safari. The problem is most likely heavy use of CSS (CSS2?) in the pages.
The client arrives with execute permissions already set. No need to chmod it before it will execute - an improvement over the first beta Folding clients.
An issue listed on the project forum is that the beta client doesn't run under 10.3 at this time. I have 10.2.8, so I didn't observe this problem.
Launching the beta client with the
-h flag (with or without any other flags) to make it print more startup info apparently causes the client to print the info and exit. This isn't clear from the readme. I spent a few minutes trying different flag combinations to find out which flag was causing the exit problem.
The client does not like combined flags. Example:
./lifemapper -le (email) does not work.
./lifemapper -l -e (email) works
A server on the project side did not respond to the client when I did get it running, this has already been mentioned in the project forum, and will be addressed.
I registered through Safari, checked the FAQ in Safari, then went back to researching other project pages in iCab. When registering, there is a user work preference for Country. The "Unspecified" choice is mislabeled as "Unknown" which is a bit confusing. Logically, the "No Preference" option should be at the top or bottom of the country list rather than be albatized somewhere in the middle.
Attempting to register a new team "Team MacNN" through my account resulted in an error message:
-1
EMail and/or Password did not pass validation, try again.
-2147217871
Error in GetCPUAgentByPWAndEMail: Timeout expired
This message came up twice on two different tries. Those attempts were made through Safari (more invisible text in iCab), but the error looks like a server-side error. Another team registration attempt through Mozilla apparently went through, it came back with a success message. Perhaps the server was running repair scripts at the time of the first two registration attempts.
The technical answers about just what Lifemapper does, and how it works through individual work units, are found in this
paper that the LM team presented. It is far more detailed than the answers on the LM website. An example of a question that the paper answered:
Is museum source data obtained on the client end after a work unit is downloaded, or by the project servers for inclusion in the downloaded work units? The museum source data is obtained on the project side, the user's client is not expected to reach various museum databases before it can start processing a unit.
The species mapping info that comprises the project results are made available on the LM website. It's not clear if anyone is making use of the result data - I poked around the several FAQs, as well as the technical paper and the project
news forum. Nor is it clear if anyone is requesting specific data or if the project is systematically generating the data on all available species.
Lifemapper doesn't appear to have obvious commercial value, but may have a great appeal for those who are environmentally active. I don't have a good enough feel for the science yet to post an opinion on the scientific value - this post comes from skimming a fair number of assorted data pages.
More feedback welcomed.
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