:: 12-Dec-1999 23:38 (Sunday) ::

I don’t like posting a .plan update when I don’t have any news to
report, but I sort of forced myself to after breaking a personal rule
and making a release-date announcement a week ago. I’ll be careful in
the future not to do that.

We’re up to beta eight, internally. Nearly all of the bugs you’ve
reported to us have been fixed. There are a few outstanding major ones
that are blocking a release, though: the AltiVec CSC core still doesn’t
pass -test, an infinite loop kicks in when the client is paused, and the
lurk mode doesn’t properly detect when the TCP stack is open.

As soon as one of these bugs is fixed I’ll release a stopgap public
pre-release (not really a ‘beta’, because we know what bugs are
remaining at this point). If a few more days pass and none of the above
are fixed, I may throw out b7 as that stopgap measure (b8 is unstable).

Rest assured that there is -massive- progress occuring behind the
scenes. One of the reasons this is taking so long, actually, is that two
coders both working like mad at the client are occasionally colliding in
midair.

RC5 core news is good. We’ve had reports of 5.8 Mk/s on 450 MHz Sawtooth
boxen. The next public beta will, finally, have the AltiVec RC5 core
in it.

In the mid-term future, we’re looking at an FBA for the massive G4 farms
out there – that “Velocity Engine” is just waiting to be put to use.
We’re also considering implementing a “Send Command…” dialogue a la
Anarchie’s FTP command dialogue…

http://sine.com/dcti/send-command.jpg

Our long-term goal is to have a GUI “controller” application that
communicates with the FBA engine. The CLI would become optional, for
die-hard users who like a commandline. We’re aiming for 100% carbon
compatibility.

But that’s long term. In the meanwhile, please understand that the Mac
effort is not dead – it’s just progressing so fast that its wheels are
wobbling.

:: 11-Dec-1999 14:29 (Saturday) ::

MOOOOO!

Well great news we have our first MMX core for CSC!

More clients will be coming with the core incorporated, but for now
you will need to make do with the following client:

– dnetc-freebsd-x86-elf.tar.gz

So have fun, and yes we are working to get more CSC clients with the
MMX core out, so please be patient

Moose

:: 09-Dec-1999 08:36 (Thursday) ::

It seems that the gremlins aren’t dont messing with statsbox just
yet. For some reason, all the data for rc5 for Dec. 7th is gone.
I looked at the logs, and it did get imported, so I have no idea
where the data went.

I’m re-running stats for Dec. 7th. This will almost certainly
screw up all the ‘ranking deltas’ (those cute little up/down arrows
that let you know how much your ranking changed from yesterday),
so don’t be alarmed when things look a little weird. All should be
back to normal after the Dec. 9th statsrun.

:: 09-Dec-1999 03:53 (Thursday) ::

For those of you who are either hyper-observant, or addicted to
stats, you will notice that although the CSC main page says we
did 1.7% of the keyspace yesterday (which we did), and reports
that we’ve completed 26.9% of the keyspace overall (which we
have), that this math doesn’t make sense since yesterday it
reported that we had completed 26.4% of the keyspace overall
(which we hadn’t). This was because I forgot to delete a
record when the Dec 5 statsrun got botched.

This only affects the main CSC stats page and the CSC graphs.
No participant info was harmed in the making of this ‘whoops’.

All is now well again on that front.

Unfortunately, rc5-64/psearch.php3 is now broken. To make a long
story short, nugget had backed out a change made to this page
on the live site manually. I then fixed the file and put the
fixed version into CVS, and ran the normal command to update
the main site from CVS. CVS saw that the version of psearch on
the main site had been modified, so it created an ‘annotated
checkout’ of the file, with some nice commentary to let us know
what changed. Of course, PHP has not clue what all the extra
stuff in this file is supposed to do, so trying to pull up that
page results in a ‘The document contains no data’ error. Since
I don’t have root on the box, I can’t fix the garbled file either.
So, it’ll be broken until I can find someone rootly to fix it,
which hopefully won’t be long.

Sorry for the cowfusion and thanks for your patience!

:: 08-Dec-1999 10:09 (Wednesday) ::

I’ve just made version 1.1 of the LOGVIS (Log Visualizer) utility
available for download. It adds a number of improvements in user
interface, including drag-and-drop file acceptance, command line
filename opening, Reload menu option, Status bar text updates, and
several other minor things. You can find the download link on our
addons page: http://www.distributed.net/download/addon.html

:: 07-Dec-1999 14:56 (Tuesday) ::

I guess now that I have a .plan, I really ought to have a plan.

By way of introduction, I’m the guy who eats, drinks and
breathes SQL. I also have a Real Job, a wife and a baby on the
way. Whatever time is left after all of the above usually
goes to Starcraft. If you want to know more, check out my home
page at http://www.geocities.com/bruce-wilson

At the moment, I’m trying to help Nugget and Decibel stay out
of trouble, and to avoid opening any big cans of worms
with stats until (a) the changes Nugget and Decibel and I have
discussed are in place and working, (b) I have a good feel for
the flow of the data, and (c) my wife delivers the baby (any
day now).

Moo!

:: 07-Dec-1999 05:49 (Tuesday) ::

“Uhoh.”

– Number one thing you don’t want to hear a stats person say while
testing new statsrun code

For all you stats-junkies that noticed, stats was down for several
hours. I had changed the queries that insert new participants into
the main participants table in the interest of cleaner and faster
code.

Unfortunately, what should have been a relatively simple change didn’t
work. The net result was that some 13,000 emails were added to
STATS_participant even thought they were already in the table. This is
a BadThing(tm).

To make matters worse, while deleting the duplicated records, I ‘went a
bit too far’, and deleted new rc5-64 participants from yesterday (57
people all told). I was able to add these records back in, but any changes
made to these records during the day yesterday (such as joining a team,
setting up your friends, adding a motto, etc.) were lost.

Anyway, everything is pretty much back in one piece again. Sorry for all
the cowfusion!

On a different note, as Nugget mentioned, we found out what was slowing
statsbox to a crawl before. It was a change made right before the slowdown
that really shouldn’t have had the impact that it did. The only thing we
can figure is that the change was just enough to cause sybase to start
turning over it’s internal cache at a very rapid rate. Another BadThing(tm).

Bruce, Nugget, and I came up with a plan for fixing this on a more long-term
basis, which we should be implementing sometime this week. Once we do
implement that change, we should be able to make some other changes that
should speed up the statsrun.

RC5 stats are now running, and I’ve got apache disabled to speed them up as
much as possible. Stats should be back up in an hour or two.

Thanks as always for your patience.

:: 06-Dec-1999 22:47 (Monday) ::

The glibc2.0, nomt linux-ppc client is on the FTP sites.

A glibc2.1 mt client will hopefully follow shortly, but I need to
upgrade my build machine first. I won’t be incorporating the AltiVec
cores until binutils supports AltiVec.

:: 06-Dec-1999 05:58 (Monday) ::

By popular request, a new add-on utility is being provided to people
who have not been able to live with the new Win32 client because it
couldn’t “moo” like the old Win32GUI client could. The MooSounds
utility was developed by Scott Ludwig and myself, and a download link
has been provided on http://www.distributed.net/download/addon.html

:: 04-Dec-1999 23:24 (Saturday) ::

Congratulations (and thanks, to those of you that have helped!), we’ve
reached the 20% complete point in the CSC challenge. The odds are
getting better and better that we find the key in the next day.

We’ve reached the point where we’re about to start recycling keyspaces. This
means that we’ve assigned almost all the keys in the CSC keyspace and need
to begin reassigning keys that have yet tobe returned. Optimally, we would
like to reassign keys in the order that we originally assigned them (so that
minimal work is wasted), but due to our “keyspace jumping” method of
assigning keys, this isn’t realistically possible. Regardless, we will be doing
our best to reassign in the rough order that we started with.

This should serve as a significant reminder to most people that it’s not a good
idea to buffer an amount of blocks that your computer(s) couldn’t complete in
four or five days. Accordingly, now is an optimal time to review your
configuration for optimal performance, and to flush any outstanding
CSC blocks.

Keep on cracking. Good luck!

-dbaker