:: 26-Apr-2000 01:50 (Wednesday) ::

Statsrun will be a bit late tonight. For some bizzare reason, the first
block for Apr 26 ended up in the last logfile for Apr 25. Statsbox doesn’t
like seeing this kind of thing. :) Sorry for the delay.

:: 25-Apr-2000 03:02 (Tuesday) ::

New Beta clients are starting to appear. They fix a few bugs we found,
but mostly replace the expired clients. Please keep the bug reports
coming.

Beta: http://www.distributed.net/download/beta.html Changes:
http://www.distributed.net/download/changes.txt

:: 24-Apr-2000 06:46 (Monday) ::

It’s way past my bedtime so this’ll be short. I just fixed the broken
images on stats… I’m not sure how they got broken, though it seems to
have been a CVS issue.

Many thanks to Bovine for helping me with CVS, especially in my current
cranky, sleep-needed-right-now state. :)

Moo.

:: 20-Apr-2000 20:58 (Thursday) ::

Ok what might be some great news. On the beta page
(http://www.distributed.net/download/beta/, we have a Linux client that
may work for all libc5 and glibc2.x systems. Please check this out. It
was cowpiled on a glibc2.1 systems, but we ae hoping it works for all (it
works on a redhat4.0 system.)

So have fun. Submit any bugs to http://www.distributed.net/bugs/

:: 20-Apr-2000 02:53 (Thursday) ::

Ok we launched our beta. There was only one problem with the launch and
we have corrected it. Please use beta.distributed.org NOT.net and
beta80.distributed.org NOT.net. The client falls back to the production
network if you use .net. So Mkae sure you use .org

So one last thing .org .org .org remmeber .org.

:: 18-Apr-2000 14:37 (Tuesday) ::

Two issues: one cool, one trivial…

Apparently, it’s just not very simple to send money from France to the
US. It’s also clear that the Euro as a monetary unit hasn’t yet gained
full acceptance. Regardless, we can now officially close the books on
the CSC project. This morning I picked up a cheque from CS Communications
for 65595,70 B.P.F’s. (No, I’m not altogether sure either, but I’m trusting
that our bank will be able to turn that into USD :)

I’d like to thank CS Communications again for sponsoring the CSC contest,
which turned out to be a fun and exciting project for us.

On a more trivial note, it seems that one or more of the crackers that
we’ve recently had to pull from stats for using the “C Share” worm client
have decided to retaliate in a rather unique way. The most recent variant
of the worm client distribution is spreading clients with *my* email
address in them. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for the impressive
keyrate on nugget@slacker.com — it’s mostly compromised machines running
the client without the user’s knowledge.

I can’t just yank my own email from stats, obviously, so I need to arrange
a way to strip out the illicit blocks from my stats prior to running each
daily update. Won’t be tough to do; I’ve been delayed from having been
in Atlanta for the past several days.

:: 18-Apr-2000 03:25 (Tuesday) ::

Ok what everyone has been waiting for. We are about to start our beta of
new clients for OGR and RC5. It looks like we have most of the bugs out,
but want to make sure.

We will be looking for your help to find any remaining bugs.

You are probably asking how can I help. Well If you feel up to it and
want to help the following will be happening.

On Thursday April 20th 2000 sometime UTC we will be opening our beta
network and clients to those who wish to help us test. Information on how
to help out with the beta process will be posted on a page that will be
announced on Thursday and can be access from http://www.distributed.net/

We will be making “beta” clients available with instructions for how to
test the client and functionality. These clients will use a time out
period so you will should not install then on machines that you will not
be visiting frequently. Also it is possible that this client version will
be ignored by our current network at sometime. Please only use it on the
beta network.

We have a large number of bug fixes and changes included in this version
so we need you to keep a sharp eye out to see that everything works in
your environment.

For changes check out http://www.distributed.net/download/changes.txt.

I’ll be working hard on all this in the next few days and will try to keep
everyone up to day.

Thank You for your patience.

:: 10-Apr-2000 23:15 (Monday) ::

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for PDA/AvantGo users in
my last plan. I am no longer accepting emails for help. Thanks to those
who offered.

:: 10-Apr-2000 13:39 (Monday) ::

Olah Gyula, one of our participants, noticed an error with the team summary
pages. If you look at an old team today, it will show they had been active
for 901 days, whereas the main statspage shows that the contest has been
active for 900 days.

To fix this error, I’ve made a change to the statsrun code so that the
number of days a team is working is now based on the first and last days
that the team had blocks submitted. This used to be the difference between
the first day a team had submitted blocks and the day of the statsrun, so
even if a team hadn’t received any blocks for the past month, the number
of days working for that team would continue to increase.

With this change, the number of days working will not increase durring
tonights statsrun (teams that have been working since the beginning of
the contest will show 901 days working again), and teams that havn’t
submitted blocks recently will have their days working count go down
accordingly.

Sorry for the confusion; hopefully this new method will make more sense.

:: 10-Apr-2000 05:56 (Monday) ::

Ok, if anyone out there has a Palm head device (Palm Pilot, Handspring
Visor, WinCE Device) and is subscribed to AvantGo Service
(http://www.avantgo.com/) wants to try something new, send me an email.
(thebigo@distributed.net)

Note: Please don’t email me asking me where or how to get either of these
things as you will be ignored.