:: 27-Feb-2001 23:31 (Tuesday) ::

The master is back-logged right now, and has been for quite some time.
(http://n0cgi.distributed.net/rc5-proxyinfo.html) This is due to a
‘MegaFlush’ that the Dutch Power Cows are doing, despite our requests that
they discontinue this practice.

The effect of this backlog is that daily stats will be off for the next
several days. Everyone’s stats will appear low for today, and will slowly
return to normal over the next few days.

Outbound work will still be available. Once the backlog has been processed
by the master, RC5 stats will return to normal. OGR stats should be
un-affected. Expect the occurance of dupes to increase while this backlog
exists as well.

:: 25-Feb-2001 21:09 (Sunday) ::

We had to back rev the latest set of clients. V2.8012.466 contains a bug
that will produce bad results. Please downgrade to clients in the v2.8010.*
family. All v2.8012 clients have been removed from the download page
(http://www.distributed.net/download/clients.html) At this time we are
not rejecting results from v2.8012, but in the near future we will be.

We will pre-release fixed clients ASAP, but once again for the time being
please downgrade to v2.8010 or before.

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Paul

:: 11-Feb-2001 16:21 (Sunday) ::

Before my in-box gets flooded… :)

Master was down for about 4 hours at the end of Feb 10, so everyone’s
stats for Feb 10 will be a little low. The back-logged work will be in
the run for Feb 11.

:: 07-Feb-2001 16:59 (Wednesday) ::

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill today, take a look at an interesting
exercise in steganography. http://www.spammimic.com/ can hide a short
message by making it look like SPAM.

:: 02-Feb-2001 16:26 (Friday) ::

The rc5 run aborted last night, and at this point it’s really too late to
start it for today, so I’m just going to leave it for tonight. That means
that there will be two rc5 runs tonight instead of the usual one.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 24-Jan-2001 15:56 (Wednesday) ::

Just updated http://www.distributed.net/source/ with a new source download.
Delete your old source files and refresh with these and go nuts. New cores
are always welcome -hint, hint ;)-

Happy coding!

:: 20-Jan-2001 07:51 (Saturday) ::

I’ve released an updated version of my log visualizer for win32. Version
1.2.1 corrects a log parsing issue that caused it to ignore block entries
produced by older “rc5des” clients (between about versions v2.7100.417
and v2.8000). Additionally, it adds a menu item to quickly “zoom full”
and show the entire log file, in case you have used the zoom selection to
restrict it to a specific date period. Finally, when you have the “idle
period emphasis” enabled, the lower bound of the y-axis (keyrate) is now
forced to 0, allowing the idle periods to be accentuated at their actual
level of non-productivity. As always, source can be found at
http://www.distributed.net/source/ or binaries at
http://www.distributed.net/download/addon.html
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/win32vis.png is a nice snapshot of
the display, in case any of you have not seen it before.

I encourage any motivated participants that have C++ and Win32 API
experience and a bit of free time to consider looking at the TODO file
included with the source code and possibly working on any of the outstanding
tasks. Contact me directly if you’re thinking on working on anything (or
have additional suggestions for other TODO items) so that I can coordinate
who is working on what.

:: 16-Jan-2001 03:23 (Tuesday) ::

Just thought I’d share a picture of the present that my fellow cow-orkers
from distributed.net and United Devices got me!
http://www.bovine.net/~jlawson/webcam/archive/burfday-hay.jpg

:: 15-Jan-2001 22:48 (Monday) ::

[Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Automatic processor detection found 4 processors.
[Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loading crunchers with work… [Jan 15 22:49:07
UTC] Loaded OGR stub 25/12-11-2-8-18-19 (35.50% done) [Jan 15 22:49:07
UTC] Loaded OGR stub 25/12-11-2-8-19-5 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loaded OGR
stub 25/12-11-2-8-19-1 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loaded OGR stub
25/12-11-2-15-16-10 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 10 OGR packets (10 work units)
remain in buff-in.ogr [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 10 OGR packets (10 work units)
are in buff-out.ogr [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 4 crunchers (‘a’-‘d’) have been
started.

Even though we don’t have bandwidth yet, the new statsbox is being
productive.

:: 15-Jan-2001 10:28 (Monday) ::

Well, here is a new plan update since many people have been nagging me
for an update (and one johnla in particular).

I have just made available new versions of the Win32 Log Visualizer and
Java Log Visualizer utilities. For both of them, I added support for the
new log file format used by the recently released v2.8012.465 client
builds. Additionally, in the Win32 version I have added support for
selecting which project data to look at, instead of viewing all projects
mixed together (the Java version has separated the projects by painting
each with a different color since the last version or two). The Win32
version also adds the ability to turn off the artificial “emphasis” of
idle periods when the dnetc client was not running, because the emphasis
would frequently become distracting on large log files. You can retrieve
precompiled binaries or source from
http://www.distributed.net/download/addons.html or
http://www.distributed.net/source/

Also noteworthy is that distributed.net has recently migrated its primary
IRC channel from the EFNET irc network to a new private IRC network.
Although http://www.distributed.net/discussion/irc.html has not yet been
updated to reflect this fact, you can now find us on irc.distributed.net
(port 6667) in the #distributed or #ud channels. To help maintain a
partial presence on EFNET and ease with the migration to the new IRC
network, I have also written a two-way Perl IRC relaybot that sits on both
networks and relays conversations across the gap. Nugget has put together
a page summarizing scripts for several popular IRC clients that makes this
relaying a little bit more transparent:
http://www1.distributed.net/~nugget/dctirelay.html

For those of you interested in news from the United Devices front, as of
this weekend the entire UD staff has moved to a new 16800 sq ft office
building. There will undoubtedly be a significant amount of unpacking
and equipment/network set-up during this coming week, so there may be
intermittent reachability to http://cvs.distributed.net/ More importantly,
the increased amount of bandwidth to the UD office (that we have been
promising for awhile) is expected to be arriving very soon after this
office move settles down. The limited bandwidth to the United Devices
office has been the factor that has been preventing us from bringing the
new, replacement stats server online. Once the bandwidth issue is resolved,
the database contents will merely need to be transferred over and then
the new server will be able to take over right in its place. However I
can’t be any more specific on the timeframe for the full conversion, since
Nugget and Decibel would be the ones in charge of that entire process.

Well, that’s all for now. I wonder how many more birthday emails I’ll
end up getting today…