:: 30-Jun-1999 05:40 (Wednesday) ::

This is mostly offtopic, but… I’ve just helped a few more poor souls
retire their quite dead *.ml.org email addresses and I thought I’d
take the opportunity to point out http://www.ihn.org/, which is a new
organization trying to carry on with the concept of free, dynamic dns.

It’s a shame that ml.org folded, and it’s nice to see that there are
people out there trying to pick up where they left off.

:: 29-Jun-1999 23:42 (Tuesday) ::

update time again. several bugs were found in the last release, and most are fixed.
try out the latest client (1.6.3b2) at the download locations below. Anyone who
downloaded the previous beta is strongly advised to upgrade. Keep the bug reports
coming. thank you.

http://web.triton.net/sampo/rc5des.PPC.sit [251k stuffit 5.x format]
http://web.triton.net/sampo/rc5des.PPC.bin.gz [243k gzip’d macbinary]

:: 28-Jun-1999 18:12 (Monday) ::

Banners submitted in the last 6 months have finally been processed
and moved into circulation. For instructions on adding a d.net
banner ad to your web site, check out

http://www.distributed.net/banners/recruit.html

To see all the banner ads currently in rotation on one glorious page,
and probably inflate your browser memory footprint to 20MB or so, see:

http://www.distributed.net/banners/all.cgi

As always, your 400×40 .gif or .jpg banner ad submissions are welcome
via anonymous ftp to upload.distributed.net’s incoming directory.
Please upload a .txt file with your name and email address, so we
can give credit on /banners/.

Please accept my apologies for the delay in processing submitted banner
ads, the volunteer who previously handled this has been away from
distributed.net and no one thought of it until it was mentioned
in #distributed channel on EFnet IRC.

Dave Hart

:: 27-Jun-1999 17:56 (Sunday) ::

No plans at the moment

:: 27-Jun-1999 18:00 (Sunday) ::

Well, the correction is underway for the stats under-reporting issue
from 13-Jun. We used a script that turned the duplicates log into a
keyserver buffer file and converted all the dupes from 13-Jun into
the outbuffer on the bhm.al.us proxy. You can see that the outbuffer
size as shown on http://www.distributed.net/rc5/proxyinfo.html is
a bit large for a proxy that’s only on the unusual ports.

It will take a while for the outbuffer to completely drain, and it’s
likely that all the dupes won’t get re-submitted until after 00:00
tonight. Still, you should see the bulk of the missing blocks in
tonight’s stats run.

Thanks for your patience as we worked through this issue.

:: 24-Jun-1999 06:19 (Thursday) ::

I’ll be AFK this weekend on a camping trip. My in-box hasn’t been overrun with
complaints about broken stats, so I assume everything’s ok. Nugget seems to remember
how stats work after his mini-vacation last weekend (;P), so if anything explodes,
it’s probably safe to talk to nugget about it. :)

See everyone on Monday.

:: 24-Jun-1999 04:05 (Thursday) ::

Just a brief note before I descend back into the salt mines…

dbaker has implemented some nice enhancements to the log-sending routines
on the keymaster, and I’ve been experimenting with some new log processing
code on statsbox, as well as generally shoring up the workflow of the
daily update. Trying to modularize things a bit, and (gasp) document
the code that I’ve got in place.

Adding support for ogr stats and csc stats is looming on the near-term
horizon, and I’m fleshing out the multi-contest issues to make sure
that implementation time is as rapid as possible for true multi-contest
stats. There’s also the small issue of working out exactly how (if at
all) the multiple contests will correlate. It would be really nice to
provide cross-project normalization at some level.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make, tonight’s stats run will be a bit
later than normal. I’ve been running some of the routines by hand, and
actually testing some optimizations that I’d been working on. Don’t panic
if things look a bit weird for the next few hours, or if stats finishes
up later than usual. That’s just me behind the wheel.

:: 20-Jun-1999 02:01 (Sunday) ::

Well, nugget is out of town for a few days. During this time, I’ll be
trying to fill his shoes, stats wise. Feel free to contact me with any
stats related questions or issues until he returns.

On an, uh, unrelated note, stats will be two hours late tonight.

:: 19-Jun-1999 14:23 (Saturday) ::

Some of you have noticed that we’re having some difficulty with stats still
showing your email address even after you change your settings to list you with
your name, or as ‘Participant #xxxxxx’. There’s two reasons for this. First,
plist.php3 (used for the top 100) and psummary.php3 (your actual stats page)
need to be changed so that they will look at your listmode setting. Nobody
realized that they didn’t do this until the recent incident with the spammer.
Second, php seems to be caching the old value of listmode. It appears that when
you change your settings, the database does actually get updated, but php won’t
reflect it for some time. It might be tied into the stats run, or it might not
(the stats-run shouldn’t affect it).

I probably won’t be able to work on these things until Monday; this weekend is
dedicated to doing some serious work on my Jeep
(http://www.enteract.com/~nasby/jeep for those who care… and note that a Jeep
could easily run over Nugget’s or Nitehawk’s Miata ;P), but I’ll work on it as
soon as I can. Thanks again for your patience.

:: 18-Jun-1999 00:36 (Friday) ::

feedback on the beta has been generally positive, and a couple bugs have
been reported which we will try to fix. Thank you. The reason some
individuals are experiencing difficulty expanding the archive is that it
is in Stuffit5 format. sorry for any inconvienence this may have caused.

bugs so far:
1) window coordinate bug
2) possible large block support bug