:: 26-Mar-2003 22:39 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Statsrun puked and the normal procedure for rebuilding things isn’t working.
I’ve been drinking, so I’m not going to screw with it right now. :) I’ll look
at it (and hopefully fix it) tomorrow.

:: 18-Mar-2003 22:25 GMT (Tuesday) ::

DOH! I botched the OGR run last night with my manual shenanigans. I’m
re-running right now.

:: 17-Mar-2003 22:58 GMT (Monday) ::

A number of new clients are now available on the pre-release page:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html

:: 16-Mar-2003 18:49 GMT (Sunday) ::

Looks like the teamjoin code (in fact, sybase itself) was using CST and not
GMT. I’ve fixed that problem; I’m going to see if it fixes the team join issue.

:: 16-Mar-2003 18:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

Ok, I might actually work on stats tonight, even though I should be working on
my resume (anyone need a database architect in Austin, TX?). I’m going to put
the statsrun on hold for right now.

:: 16-Mar-2003 18:02 GMT (Sunday) ::

A rather serious bug regarding team joins has been found in stats
(http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3182). In a nutshell, any
work you submit on the day you join a team will not be credited to that team.
This also means that if you weren’t on a team and join one, the work for that
day will not be credited to that team.

I’m going to do tomorrow’s statsrun by hand in the hope that I can track
down what’s causing this. This means you can expect tomorrow’s stats to be
late. Additionally, I will at some point correct the database to reflect what
should have happened in the first place. This will probably change a few team
rankings, but I don’t expect it to be major, and more importantly, this means
that the data will reflect what should have happened and that everything in the
database will be in sync again.

More info once I figure out what’s actually broken.

:: 16-Mar-2003 04:07 GMT (Sunday) ::

Andreas Beckmann and I have traced another bug on the new SS 2-pipe core for
x86 processors (currently present on the pre-release 2.9003.481/481a clients
only), in addition to the reentrancy issues already known for some time. From
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3187:

“Aside from the reentrancy issue, this core has a problem whereby signal
handlers on Unix systems can overwrite the core’s local variables, rendering
the results incorrect. A fix brings its performance down to ca. 94% of
DG 2-pipe, and thus the core is being removed from the client until the
author provides a reentrant and signal handler safe version with improved
performance.”

This bug affects uniprocessor machines as well. Since we have no guarantees
about the correctness of results produced by this core, every result returned
by an x86 machine running the 481/481a clients will have to be rechecked. Rest
assured that no stats are going to be rolled back because of this; however,
we do ask that any installations of this pre-release client on x86 machines
be removed. The buggy clients will soon be taken down from the pre-release
download page, and we will be refusing results from these clients after some
time.

:: 16-Mar-2003 00:52 GMT (Sunday) ::

The email fetch/flusher should now be fully operational again.
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2989

:: 10-Mar-2003 02:53 GMT (Monday) ::

The speed database pages at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/ have
undergone a significant rewrite and cleanup. The pages have been
converted from Perl to PHP to simplify implementation and maintenance.
Additionally, a new voting facility has been added to allow people to
more easily report specific entries as being potentially bogus.

Also the statistics link on our main website has been updated to
include links to the new RC5-72 and OGR plots that pstadt had created:
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/statistics/

There is a new public source tarball available for download from
http://www.distributed.net/source/

:: 08-Mar-2003 10:59 GMT (Saturday) ::

Many new clients for various platforms have been put on both the
release and prerelease pages. Two personal proxies have also moved
from the prerelease page to the formal release page.

You can look at the Updates page to see a list of the official client
releases by date: http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.html

Experienced MacOS X users might be interested in helping test the
current prerelease Mac client as it includes some very dramatic rc5-72
altivec speed increases, making it faster than rc5-64 was for some.
The prerelease clients for other platforms may also have slight speed
increases over previous versions as well.