:: 27-Feb-1999 08:38 (Saturday) ::

I have started to commit OGR code to the client code base. You will start
to see options for OGR configuration, and notifications from the proxy
that the OGR contest “is closed”. Just so there’s no confusion, OGR has
not started yet. The OGR contest is “not yet open”. :)

:: 23-Feb-1999 03:01 (Tuesday) ::

Team stats are coming soon. I am working hard to get the various team stats
pages. Keep your eyes here for future announcements.

:: 21-Feb-1999 22:54 (Sunday) ::

Preliminary Stats: http://tally.distributed.net/rc5-64/

:: 20-Feb-1999 19:54 (Saturday) ::

Although I don’t hold a ‘high visibility position’ like stats or operations, I
have been working on things; they’ve just all been ‘internal’. :)

One of those things is bringing more support staff on board. DCTI has grown
tremendously in the past year. While this is a Good Thing ™, it also means
that it’s more and more difficult for us to keep things under control and
running smoothly. To facilitate this, we’re looking for a Logistics Coordinator.
It’s hard to sum up in one sentence what this person(s) will be doing, so I
won’t try. We’ll be announcing more info in the coming weeks.

I’ve handed off the job of Regional Support Coordinator to Jerome Froment-Curtil
(JFC), and he’s putting a lot of effort into it! He just showed me the tool he’s
working on to allow our regional support staff to translate web pages for us
and it looks very cool indeed. It’s still in very early beta, so I’m sure it
will be a while before it’s up and running, but we are moving closer to having
multi-lingual pages.

Those of you who are subscribed to rc5@lists.distributed.net have no doubt
noticed that things have been a tad flaky of late. EA is working on the
problem, and as soon as he gets it fixed we’ll be able to return the list to
normal. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you should really
visit our mailing list page!

On a personal note, I want to thank everyone who’s sent me their well-wishes.
For those that don’t know, my Mom had a heart attack 2/18. She’s now doing fine,
and the support I’ve gotten from DCTI has been heart-warming. Thanks!!!

:: 19-Feb-1999 19:42 (Friday) ::

Hi. I don’t have much to say.

I am helping nugget a bit on sbII, but I’m pretty much just being
a big slacker. I should finish up my projects for him this weekend
before I start feeling really guilty.

Stuff is pretty stable. I’m happy about that.

Hmm that’s all I have to report.

:: 19-Feb-1999 04:39 (Friday) ::

I’m back on the crew after an extended “vacation”. I’ll be helping Nugget out with stats.

:: 19-Feb-1999 03:59 (Friday) ::

I’ve received a handful of reports of underreporting on the new stats site,
so I did some digging and found a particularly strange error in one
of the daily processing sql queries. The problem has been corrected, and
I’m now re-running the 18-Feb numbers to re-audit. If it looks like
this solves the problem, I’ll be re-running the stats from 2-Feb through
present (which represents the total processing that has been done with the
new code.

:: 19-Feb-1999 03:16 (Friday) ::

I’m working on the Mac client. Right now I’m concentrating on optimizing
the scheduling code, including making it work with the next release of
the MacOS, and making the settings to control scheduling much easier
to use. I also do the BeOS client builds.

:: 19-Feb-1999 03:11 (Friday) ::

I’m working on the Mac client. Right now I’m concentrating on optimizing
the scheduling code, including making it work with the next release of
the MacOS, and making the settings to control scheduling much easier
to use.

:: 17-Feb-1999 04:31 (Wednesday) ::

For the first time in well over a year, stats are current before that day
ends here in the central time zone. The 16-Feb numbers are tabulated and
it’s still 16-Feb here. It’s almost unsettling. It’s taking just over
an hour to do a nightly stats run, and I’m running them without disabling
user access to the database, so those times are with me fighting all of
you for cpu and ram.

So, at this point the data on the demo pages has graduated to the “I
think these numbers are accurate, and nobody had told me otherwise”
category. Stats will continue to run nightly. Basically, we’ve got some
really featureless and really ugly stats available right now. But they
are current and they are worth looking at.

I’m still completely unsettled on how stats will ultimately “look”. I’d
hope you’ve all figured out by now that the appearance of the demo pages
was merely an afterthought. It’s ugly, I know. I’ve been more concerned
with function over form so far. I know the html is broken. I know the
colors look like someone threw up. But it works, and that’s enough for
me. :) If you’re feeling creative, I’d love to see some ideas for the
look and feel of statsbox-ii. I’m a database guy, not a design person,
and this is one area I think we’d do well to outsource. Feel free to
flood me with mock-ups and concepts. I’m open to just about anything at
this point. If enough good submissions make it in, perhaps we’ll hold a
vote or something.

In the meantime, expect to see more and more of my ugly pages start to
appear. At the top of the list is bringing back team creation and
teamjoining capability.

If you happen to get the “select permission denied on table “
error message, don’t panic. That just means I’m working with the
database, or an update is running, or whatever. I don’t have an elegant
“stats on / stats off” switch in place yet, so just pretend it says
“sorry, stats are down for programming” instead of whatever funky Sybase
message it does say.

Just through word of mouth (and links from the statsoff page on the old
rc5stats site), the box has been *hammered* today. Even with me working
hard on the database, it’s held up phenomenally well. I think this box
is going to do just fine under the load of a full site and extensive use.
Sybase is handling the load admirably.

CPU usage has barely broken a sweat, and despite all of our best efforts
the box is still actually cranking out rc5 blocks at an impressive rate.
That’s the best test I know for estimating capacity. :)

Thanks for all the inquiries, we’ve gotten no further complaints out of
the hard drive. no new bad sectors, no weirdness at all.

Also, especially, thanks for all the kind words of encouragement the past
few days. I know how patient you’ve all been. It’s extremely gratifying
to see the box actually start to become useful.

Finally, in case you haven’t heard the word, you can actually *see* the
new stats server (and the old one) now. Petr has hooked up a cam to the
old box and they’re both visible.

http://nodezero.distributed.net/~nugget/statsbox.jpg