:: 01-Jan-1999 00:01 (Friday) ::

As I sit here at the office, all alone, and watch statsbox-ii rebuild
onto the nifty 4gb uw-scsi drive which was generously donated by the
fine folks at macline.be, I cannot help but linger on this one thought:

Why on earth didn’t I think to ask them to include some nice, Belgian
beer in the box when they shipped me the drive? :)

Have a happy new year everyone! Stay safe and remember to use a
designated driver.

:: 30-Dec-1998 04:52 (Wednesday) ::

Greetings, I’ll be helping Nugget with the new stats server. Hopefully we
can get it up and running shortly. If you have any fresh ideas for stats,
let me hear them. We are always open to suggestions.

Kevin “DrSpoo” Pesce

:: 29-Dec-1998 03:10 (Tuesday) ::

Hello from the newest member of the coding team. I’m going to be working
on the OGR (Optimal Golomb Ruler) core of the client. Not much to report
right now, it’s still a work in progress.

:: 28-Dec-1998 19:43 (Monday) ::

There’s been considerable speculation on the mailing list and in IRC as to
EFF’s intentions regarding the DES-III challenge in January. Obviously
there’s concern that they’re bigger, better, and faster now and anyone who’s
done the math has realized that alone, the odds are against us collecting the
full US$10,000.

Things have been tentative this far, and we’ve been reluctant to announce
anything publically, but I’m finally comfortable telling everyone that we’ve
been in contact with John Gilmore @ EFF and we all have every intention of
cooperating on the DES-III Challenge.

The EFF is actually quite insistent on integrating their Deep Crack hardware
into the distributed.net network as seamlessly as possible, and our efforts
are headed in that direction. Gilmore’s vision is to basically just have a
Deep Crack client, rather than simple hand-carving the keyspace manually at
the onset of the challenge. Not only is this a much more aesthetically
solution, it means that distributed.net would be able to support multiple
deep cracks in the future.

Fortunately for me, I’m not in the position of having to make this work.
That task has fallen on bovine, and I’d defer all technical inquiries to him.
Also, we’re not positive that the timeframe will support integration at that
level. Still, we’re all very excited about the cooperation and aligned
interest in DES-III.

I’d point you towards my recent posting to the RC5 mailing list for
additional background on this issue:
http://nodezero.distributed.net/~nugget/listpost.txt

:: 28-Dec-1998 17:28 (Monday) ::

Just a few little things, none thrilling, but it’s better than no plan update:

New drive for statsbox-ii

Thanks to the generosity of the fine folks at MacLine, we’ve now got a
nice, new 4gb uw-scsi drive for statsbox-ii. If you’re near their neck
of the woods, have a look at http://www.macline.be for all your mac
needs. Looks like we’re also going to go ahead and spring for a 9gb
drive out of the money that you’ve all been able to raise from iGive
(See my 15-Dec .plan for details). This will give us sufficient
breathing room to move the stats database to a much faster and more
reliable uw-scsi subsystem.

I sure could use adsl

It takes roughly four hours to bcp the tot_team table from statsbox
to me over my ISDN. :)

I made it to work today

Thanks to all the well-wishers, both the wife and I are feeling much
better today.

21-Dec, seeing double?

Yeah, the stats are doubled on 21-Dec. This will be corrected within
the next couple of days. Sorry about the confusion.

:: 28-Dec-1998 17:04 (Monday) ::

Did a bit of updatin’ on /faq/ today. New files:

RC5DES Client Documentation: http://www.distributed.net/faq/rc5des.html
Mac OS Client Documentation: http://www.distributed.net/faq/macos.html

Other tweaks as well. The new generic MacOS doc will be included under
Help in all further distributions of the client.

:: 28-Dec-1998 00:27 (Monday) ::

All .420-423 clients have been declared unfit for operation, on grounds
they revert to the rc5 project after running out of des blocks.

It is requested that you downgrade to a .41x series client immediately.
All .420-423 clients are being removed from the distribution sites as I
post this.

I should make clear that there is nothing wrong with the actual
block-processing code in these clients; your rc5 work is valid and you
will retain credit for it. The problem lies solely in the
project-selection code, and does not affect actual work in any way.

Build 424 will remedy the problem. Watch cyp’s plan for further
information.

:: 27-Dec-1998 03:15 (Sunday) ::

I’m lost in a fog of Kleenex, Theraflu, and NyQuil at the moment.

:: 27-Dec-1998 02:48 (Sunday) ::

Well, not much is new code wise. I wrote a little snippet so that the win32
“cli” client minimizes to the task bar, and (also a “RuleR” suggestion)
added long block benchmarking as a right-click option.

:: 24-Dec-1998 05:18 (Thursday) ::

Craig Durkin, #distributed lurker and altogether too helpful a guy, has
compiled the new DES-III FAQ. I recomend you take a looksee at it –
though if you’ve been following this planboard at all, you’ll know
everything on it by now.

http://www.distributed.net/faq/des-iii-faq.html