:: 31-Jul-2000 18:07 (Monday) ::

We have added a distributed.net News page to the site which will be updated
monthly with brief updates on our projects and any other newsworthy items
that have relevance to distributed.net.

We have also updated the press kit page, many thanks to Tempest3K for his
help with this task.

There are currently quite a few problems on the non-English side of the
web site and my next task is to do as much as we can to get it tidy and
up-to-date as soon as possible. We are also working to fix other issues
that have been reported in other parts of the site.

:: 31-Jul-2000 12:17 (Monday) ::

Just thought I’d let it be known that we are now beginning to distribute
OGR-25 stubs right now. Although we have not yet fully received back
completed stubs for the first pass over OGR-24, it’s important for us to
allow a reasonable amount of time before reissuing OGR-24 stubs that we
have not yet received responses for.

It is important to note that there is nothing you need to explicitly do
to accommodate the OGR-25 stubs if your client has already been working
on OGR-24. Perhaps even more important to stress is the fact that you
should NOT intentionally dump or discard your existing OGR-24 buffers so
that you can begin working on OGR-25 sooner.

It’s also worth pointing out that due to the nature of the OGR project,
there will be a second complete pass over the OGR-24 stubs so that the
final nodecount data can be correlated between the two passes. Currently,
we’ve received back about 86.39% of the stubs necessary for the first
pass. However, since it’s not necessary to wait for the first pass to be
completed before starting the second pass, we’ve already finished partial
distribution of the second pass stubs and have received back 28.91% of
them so far.

Keep those clients running! And if you haven’t yet added your OGR client
benchmarks to our speed database, I encourage you to visit
http://www.distributed.net/speed/ today! Moo.

:: 23-Jul-2000 02:59 (Sunday) ::

Thanks to Wim ten Have and the dedicated, industrious folks at Sybase,
we’re getting closer to being able to deploy statsbox as a FreeBSD machine.
Earlier this week, Sybase re-released their Sybase ASE for Linux with a
relaxed license that allows it to be run on a FreeBSD machine using Linux
ABI compatibility. Plus — the really big deal — native libs for FreeBSD
which allows us to compile php and all that stuff.

I’ve spent much of today setting up a scrub installation on a box at my
house and so far it looks quite promising. A few hiccups with sqsh and
I still don’t have php talking, but it’s close.

There’s no other full-featured sql server around that’s free for both
development and deployment. It’s a hell of a deal.

http://www.sybase.com/linux/ase/

(and, since some of those links are broken)

http://www.sybase.com/detail/1,3151,1009264,00.html

(Just to be clear, I’m really enthused about this recent development.
We certainly don’t get anything for endorsing Sybase. )

:: 21-Jul-2000 12:03 (Friday) ::

I’m working on implementing a new table in the stats database that should
speed up the statsrun and improve the accuracy of team membership, but in
order to do so I’ll be needing to take the stats off-line at different
times today. I’ll try and keep them online as much as possible. Thanks
for your patience!

:: 20-Jul-2000 15:14 (Thursday) ::

Tally rebooted sometime during last night’s rc5 run, so I’m re-running
rc5 stats right now. In order to speed this up, I’m going to disable web
access for the next hour or so.

:: 17-Jul-2000 14:05 (Monday) ::

Ok, stats are back up, for the most part. The static pages are still
out-of-date or missing, but other than that everything should be golden.

:: 17-Jul-2000 12:57 (Monday) ::

Another update… I am aware that the index page for rc5-64 (as well as
the other static pages) is missing. Unfortunately, the only person who’s
not totally AFK is on the west coast, so it’ll probably be a few more
hours before he’s awake. We’ll get those pages up as soon as possible.

:: 17-Jul-2000 12:34 (Monday) ::

Sorry for keeping stats down for so long. I *finally* tracked down the
bug (retire_to’s weren’t happening properly) and I’m in the process of
fixing it. Until it’s fixed and I re-run OGR, the OGR numbers will be
wacky.

Sorry for the delay.

:: 17-Jul-2000 06:47 (Monday) ::

Great news! OGR is moving along at such a rapid rate that we have already
sent out the entire stub-space to participants!

While this is very encouraging, the downside is that there is still a
large amount of work (over 80%) that hasn’t come back to us yet. With a
fast moving contest like OGR, it is very important to keep your buffers
as small as possible, to avoid un-necessary duplication of work.

Also, the default client behavior will allow OGR work to build-up in the
out-buffer until a flush is called for (which might not happen until all
in-buffers, including RC5, are empty). It is suggested that anyone who is
participating in OGR change this by setting ‘Additional Buffer-Level
Checking’ on the buffer options menu to option 2 if you can tolerate the
additional network traffic this will produce. Note that if you have dial-up
network detection enabled that this adjustment isn’t needed. As well, if
you have configured your client to work only on OGR unless it runs out of
work, then simply setting a small number of OGR buffers will suffice.

:: 17-Jul-2000 05:16 (Monday) ::

While running OGR stats tonight, our error-detection routines found an
inconsistency in the OGR data for today. In order to track this down,
stats might be offline from time-to-time for the next several hours. I’ll
try and keep them online as much as I can. Also, please note that this is
strictly a stats issue; it in no way affects the contest itself.