:: 30-Aug-1999 15:02 (Monday) ::

Yes, the statsbox died in the middle of the night last night. It’s rebooted
and everything look healthy enough. Should be in good shape now, although
slow because everyone’s hitting it all at once.

:: 30-Aug-1999 05:12 (Monday) ::

After reading a very interesting web site about HTTP caching
(http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/), I thought I’d try making our .php
scripts more cache friendly. What I soon found out was that Sybase
and php like to use different date/time formats. Sybase likes to
output formated date/time strings (like ‘Apr 4 1999, 13:40’), but .php
is very heavily biased towards unix style timestamps.

If any of you have any functions we could use to convert from the
Sybase format to the .php format, I’d love to hear about them! You
might want to add the info to the php annotated manual too
(http://www.php.net/manual/).

:: 30-Aug-1999 02:45 (Monday) ::

Just thought I’d do a quick update. I’m working on implementing
some logging capabilities on stats that will log info to a table,
making analyzing that data much easier. The primary reason for
doing this is to be able to gather performance data on the .php3
scripts that sit between apache and sybase. This info will let us
intelligently tune the scripts for the best trade-off between
speed and ease of maintenance. Yeah, pretty boring stuff, but my
hope is that it will prove very useful in the long run.

Of course I’ve got my usual ‘internal’ stuff going on too. I’d
tell you all about it, but then I’d have to kill all of you, which
would have a detrimental effect on our keyrate ;P

BTW, in case you missed it, we broke 12% last night. 13% should
come in 25-30 days.

:: 29-Aug-1999 21:07 (Sunday) ::

Nothing too exciting to report, but I did finally get the nationality
demographics report cleaned up and in place.

http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/countries.html

:: 26-Aug-1999 21:55 (Thursday) ::

Oh, regarding note below: the white shirts seen on www.nerdgear.com are
the poor-quality transfer that was sent as a sample several months ago. You
probably don’t want one of those, mine is quite faded after just two washings.

:: 26-Aug-1999 21:54 (Thursday) ::

In response to the many inquiries regarding distributed.net t-shirts and
other merchandise:

No, I do not know when distributed.net merchandise will become available.
We signed an agreement many months ago with www.nerdgear.com with the
understanding that they’d be producing a variety of distributed.net
branded merchandise and handle all sales and distribution of the products.

Progress has been quite slow for some reason. If you’re curious when
we’ll see merchandise, you might wish to mail support@nerdgear.com and
see if they have more current information.

The last I heard, they had found a way to do black shirts with the planet
logo in a cost-effective manner and were hoping to have samples to us
soon to preview, but I haven’t heard from them in several weeks.

We’re just as eager to start wearing distributed.net t-shirts as you guys
are — as soon as we know more I’ll let you know.

:: 23-Aug-1999 16:06 (Monday) ::

24,182,427 blocks were completed yesterday (0.035% of the keyspace) at a
sustained rate of 75,132,185 KKeys/sec!

^ this is fixed now (on http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/)

:: 23-Aug-1999 15:12 (Monday) ::

Ok, I fixed the Athlon’s spelling on the submit form, and so far have 2
submissions:

Operating System: DOS (MSDOS/PCDOS/etc.) —
CPU Type : AMD K7 (Althion) —
CPU Speed : 600 Mhz — nomal
Client Running : Bovine v2.7100 (RC5) —
Client Speed : 2,011,659,59

Operating System: Linux —
CPU Type : AMD K7 (Althion) — <- Athlon!
CPU Speed : 500 Mhz —
Client Running : Bovine v2.7106 (RC5) —
Client Speed : 1.517.000,00

I would put the 600 as an outlyer, but the 500 looks to be valid.

(I haven’t seen one live to be a viable source of data on the Athlon.)

–Pete

:: 22-Aug-1999 20:51 (Sunday) ::

As you’ve probably noticed, statsbox was down for several hours today.
It took us a while to find sunday staff to reboot the box, but it’s back
up and humming now and everything looks healthy so far. Now I just need
to sanity-check the data and run through the re-identity code to avoid the
dreaded Sybase runaway identity bug. We’re certainly on-target for
running todays stats at the scheduled 00:00 UTC, and I suspect we’ll
actually be online for a while before then.

More details here, if anything happens. Thanks for your patience.

:: 17-Aug-1999 23:00 (Tuesday) ::

OK, So I’ve been a bit lax in my iGiving lately. I just noticed yesterday
that I’m getting 4 cents per click (limit five, as usual) when I do my
iGive looking each day. Quite nice, I can now raise 20 cents a day for
distributed.net before I’m even fully awake yet.

Plus, their den of attorneys has come up with a way for you to deduct a
portion of any purchases you make with an iGive advertiser. Pretty neat
trick.

It’s been a good eight months since I’ve mentioned iGive in my plan, so for
those who are not familiar with the concept, here’s the Reader’s Digest
Condensed version:

If you’re not aware, iGive is an easy way for you to help us fund
distributed.net without much effort on your part. iGive will donate money
to distributed.net in return for your viewing advertisements on the web or
buying stuff from iGive advertisers. distributed.net is one of the charter
non-profits with iGive, and distributed.net participants have used iGive to
raise over US$19,000, which has made statsbox-ii a reality and made it
possible for us to make much- needed hardware purchases. Although our
expenses aren’t huge, they do exist and our ability to branch out beyond
RSA-sponsored contests is dependent on our ability to generate a modest
income. (http://www.distributed.net/legal/ledger.html)

If nothing else, I’m glad that we’re in a position to support an
internet-based business model that in no way involves spam or bulk email.
iGive is a very net-friendly way for businesses to conduct business and I
wish them every success.

If you’d like to help us build statsbox-ii, it’s rather simple.

http://www.iGive.com/html/ssi.cfm?cid=1098&mid=3311

Right off the bat, we’ll get a couple bucks for the new membership, plus
each day you visit the iGive website and view five advertisements, we get
another $.50 or so. All in all, it takes only a few seconds and given the
number of participants we have, it really does add up.

Our relationship with iGive has been nothing but rewarding for both sides.
Excuse the shameless plug, but I really do think that these guys are on to
something worthwhile.

(end of the advert, it’s safe to look again…)

As AldE and decibel have described, our junket to Atlanta was a resounding
success. It was a real treat to finally meet some of the dnet cadre in
person. One downside is that decibel has ruined me by bringing along his
PalmV. I’ve made it several years resisting the temptation for a PDA,
but in the time I spent fiddling with his all my resistance has been
lost. I really need to get one of those things. Let the rationalizations
begin!

Now that I’m sobering up from the weekend, I’m digging back into statsbox.
The main issue right now is the recent breakage of the yesterday blocks
and keyrate info on the main rc5-64 stats page. I’m guessing this is a
simple fix — I hope to have it wrapped up tonight. I’m also putting the
finishing touches on a quick, but fun page of demographic information
culled from the participant edit pages of those participants who have
chosen to provide us with that information. It’s just a quick tally of
motivations and nationalities and such.

On the mid-term horizon, there’s a two new versions of Sybase ASE for Linux
that I need to investigate. One’s free, one isn’t. I need to run some
benchmarks and see if there’s a compelling reason to upgrade to one or the
other. From a cursory inspection of the new features, we can probably live
without the upgrade, but if the performance is better it’s obviously
something we need to schedule. Thanks to Wim ten Have and the rest of the
Sybase developers for their tireless support of the Open Source Software
community.

I’m sunburned, windblown, and it’s 100F (38C) at 18:00. Nothing to do
now but stay inside where’s it’s air conditioned and get back to coding.

Moo…