:: 24-Nov-1999 03:20 (Wednesday) ::

The following is a development bitslicing AltiVec G4 core.

Benchmarking CSC … 100.00% done
Completed in 0.00:00:16.30 [2,251,498.52 keys/sec]

:: 24-Nov-1999 01:24 (Wednesday) ::

Well, there she be – the new design for the web site.

A total content rewrite and reorganization is coming. Stay tuned. But
this is the look. I’m still weeding out some bugs in the new display,
and the other languages will be switched over as the sidebars are
constructed in native tongues…

Send flames, criticism, and commentary to vetere@distributed.net .

:: 23-Nov-1999 15:37 (Tuesday) ::

The 21-Nov RC5 stats run is about half-way through, and after this will
come the 22-Nov RC5 run. CSC stats are current and accurate, it’s just
RC5 that is affected at this point.

The trouble stems from the fact that (as decibel mentioned last night)
the box has developed an annoying habit. If apache is on and serving
requests, the stats run completely halts. If I turn off apache, it
runs full speed. So, in the interests of wrapping up the late runs, I’ve
got apache turned off.

(Hey, if nothing else, it’s been a good opportunity to upgrade to the
most current apache and php releases)

Once the 21-Nov update wraps up, I think I’ll reboot the box, although
I dunno what I expect that to accomplish. Can’t hurt, I suppose.

More details as the situation progresses.

:: 23-Nov-1999 06:13 (Tuesday) ::

Well, bad news…. statsbox is looking rather unhealthy. It started acting
a little flaky during the CSC run, then when it hit the -04 logfile during
the rc5 run, it ground to a halt. Nugget shut down apache, and all was good
again.

Then, we discovered that it’s going to end up importing 2 of today’s (Nov. 23)
logfiles. This is bad.

Neither of us is going to stay up to babysit the run (damn day-jobs!), so we’ll
have to deal with it tommorow.

The box is also acting rather unhealthy again, so there’s probably something
funny going on… we’ll keep everyone informed as we know more.

Sorry for all the hassles.

:: 23-Nov-1999 01:15 (Tuesday) ::

Well, thanks to several sharp-eyed participants, we discovered
that the CSC logs were accidentally included in the RC5 stats-run
last night. This is obviously a BadThing(tm). So, we get to re-
process yesterday’s rc5 data in tonight’s run.

We also discovered another error that would have prevented a very
small number of people from searching for their stats using
psearch.php3. We’ve also fixed that.

What this all boils down to is that stats will be late tonight.

Sorry for the cowfusion.
Moo!
dB!

:: 21-Nov-1999 01:50 (Sunday) ::

Man, talk about being in the hot-seat! :)

For those who noticed, sorry that stats were about an hour late
tonight. I made some extensive changes to the CSC daily routine,
and it took some time to work the final bugs out. The good news
is that the script it now capable of handling multiple projects.
This means that instead of having several different import scripts
for different projects like we do now, we’ll soon be able to run
a single set of scripts to update any project. This will make
maintenance much easier, since we only need to change one script.

Of course, Murphy had to have his fun, so it took me several tries
to get everything working right. All is fine once again, and the
rc5-64 update is churning happily away (though it’s still using
the old scripts).

Before we can completely switch over to the single set of scripts,
we’ll have to rename some tables, which will also affect the PHPs,
so it’ll be a little while before that happens. In the meantime
though, I intend to take a crack at speeding up some of the SQL
routines that happen during the update. I also want to get things
setup so that instead of importing all of the log files during the
stats-run, they’ll get imported during the day as the logs come in.
This should save ~4 minutes for CSC, and ~32 minutes for rc5-64.

:: 19-Nov-1999 00:37 (Friday) ::

Just a few “known issues” with stats…

o the code that determines how many new participants and new teams
joined is horribly confused by the addition of the csc contest,
so don’t rely on any reported values there. Still need to figure
out how to work that out accurately.

o http://stats.distributed.net/csc/money.html describes the prize money
distribution for the csc challenge. Thanks mostly to the head-start
that dcti staff had on the general userbase, distributed.net has a
fragile lead on fsf for receiving the bulk of the prize money. Looking
at the numbers, it’s pretty clear that fsf will pull ahead tomorrow.

Just as a reminder, nonprofit voting doesn’t work like teams. If
you’d like to change your nonprofit selection for the csc contest,
all your blocks (past, present, and future) will count as votes for
whichever nonprofit you select. It sure would be nice to see some
competition in this area, instead of the landslide of fsf votes we
see for rc5-64. Perhaps the recent article on project gutenberg
as seen on slashdot.org would compel someone to vote for P.G. :)

:: 18-Nov-1999 22:17 (Thursday) ::

CSC stats are up, barely. There are still quite a number of minor “issues”
that need to be cleaned up, but for the most part we’re running just fine.

I apologize for taking so long, but a number of factors contributed to
my delinquency. Stacey and I moved into our new home this past weekend,
and slacker.com has lost its ISDN pipe and is on a 28.8 connection to
the net for the time being. (finger nugget@slacker.com for the gory
details, if you care…)

You’ve probably also noticed that last night’s rc5 stats run failed.
As soon as it rolls around to 00:00, I’m going to kick off the 18-Nov
CSC stats run (should take about two minutes to run) and then kick off the
17-Nov and 18-Nov RC5-64 stats. I’d guess we’ll be all straightened out
by 04:30 or so.

Thanks for your patience and support. And, *please*, if you haven’t
upgraded your clients to the latest CSC-enabled versions, now’s a good
time to do so. Think how fun it will be to tear through a quick contest
like CSC after watching RC5-64 lumber along for over two years.

:: 18-Nov-1999 17:09 (Thursday) ::

We’re dropping individual project mascots (butterfly, polar bear,
kangaroo) and standardizing on the Bovine as our corporate symbol.

Hail the cow.

(Yes, we’re keeping the planet as our logo. We lub planets and cows.)

:: 18-Nov-1999 00:14 (Thursday) ::

Wow, it sure has been a long time since I updated this plan.
Seems CSC is rolling allright! That’s why I took another look
at fetch@distributed.net and flush@distributed.net.
They now accept CSC blocks to flush and if you want to fetch
CSC buffers add “contest=csc” to your request.