Archives

June 2000

Oh Well...  :-(
I guess the questions now are 1) Can we do it again? 2) If so....how long?

You may noticed by today's graphs something significant happened in the past 24 hours...and it isn't necessarily good for the team.  Sometime last night guru left the team along with his three other accounts (Fremont Police SUCK! {aka. SpeedRacer], davycroc, and Cobra).  At the time I did the stats update today that meant a team net loss of over 143,000 work units for the day. 

Where did they go?
davycroc has landed on the Sun team,  and the other three has bounced around and landed on a team called Rnoggin (a team created by guru).

Why did they leave?
I cannot tell you for sure, there are only one or two people who could tell ya.  There are two reasons why I think they left.....1) They wanted to show C. Eric Smith their appreciation for the help he has been with the site and wanted him to have the #1 spot :-)....or 2) The option which I think is more likely.  guru seems to be quite a competitive fellow.  He really wanted to see us pass Art Bell...and when we did it was "mission accomplished".  He also likes to be able to climb up through the ranks.  He started the SpeedRacer account and also helped Cobra out to see those accounts rise up through the ranks of Team Lamb Chop.  They left the team for a couple of reasons.....the davycroc account went to Sun, because that is who they work for and they wanted to help out the Sun team a bit.  Also they formed their own team to see just how well their little team could do and move up the overall team ranks by themselves.   Unfortunately, I don't belive they realize that their work units would stay with the team, and eventually Team Lamb Chop will lose credit for the work units that they had.

Where does that put us? 
Well at the time it dropped us from the #4 team overall down to the #6 team overall.  The numbers are shown in the table below:

Possibly by now we may have passed back Intel....but I'm not sure.  You may go and look at the team page on the SETI servers and say to yourself "but hey we didn't lose the work units when they left!".  But believe me, we eventually will.  I will try to explain.  Contrary to what the SETI@Home pages state, work units processed with a team do not stay with the team if that member decides to leave.  Work units come and go with the user when they join/leave a team.  Currently, the SETI stats servers are so overloaded that many of the team housekeeping functions aren't processed during the day.  Right now there are two things that are broken with the team stats......1) When someone joins a team with work units already, those work units do not get added to the team totals.  2) When someone leaves a team with work units, those work units do not get subtracted from the team totals.  3) The SETI data servers cannot handle the sheer amount of work units being processed by ALL SETI@Home members....and there is a backlog of work units data to be processed into the team stats.  The work units being added to the team numbers today are probably from 2-3 or more weeks ago....they are that far behind. 

Because of these backlogs, I have been just using the total number of work units from each member on the teams.  The team totals that are listed on the SETI servers are just not accurate and not to be trusted. 

c'est la vie.   -zAmboni

Words Of Thanks
In addition to the Thanks and Credits I handed out yesterday, I have a few to add today.  First off goes to Caesar.  If you didn't catch the news on the Ars Technica front page from today, Caesar has given both Rat Bastard and I a $250 credit each at The Chip Merchant, for the work that the two of us have done with the site.  Both Rat Bastard and I thank you!  For me at least, it was something that came from left field and konked me upside the head.  Was definitely something that he didn't have to do and I appreciate it.  If Caesar didn't run such a kick ass site, I would have never found out about SETI and Team Lamb Chop....and this web page probably wouldn't be in existence right now.

The other BIG THANKS goes out to C. Eric Smith and Jason Johnston of Nimbus Networks.  Both CES and JJ stepped in a while back when I was having bandwidth problems hosting the team site on my personal ISP space.  CES and JJ came up with the very generous offer to 1) register the domain and 2) provide server space and web hosting FOR FREE.  Again, people doing things and providing services for which they didn't have to.  Thanks.  BTW I feel kind of bad that CES hasn't been around recently, ever since the Xanrel fiasco.  CES please come back?   Or at least drop in on the forum and say hi?

Server Strangeness
If you didn't notice earlier today, there was problems with the SETI servers.  The problem manifested itself by giving an error stating "Attempt to send duplicate result"  or a "unknown error -66" error when trying to upload a result to the servers.  Apparently the result was rejected and the user wouldn't get credited with a work unit processed.  Later on there was a change in the Technical News page, and also a post on the SETI newsgroups stating the following:

June 29th, 2000
We discovered a recent problem that is causing users to erroneously get messages that they are sending duplicate results. This has been fixed as of 4:45pm PDT, but the reasons why this was happening are currently unknown.
.....

At some point today the database started thinking every result was a duplicate.  It looked like another screwed up index, but regenerating the table and index involved didn't solve the problem.  We've temporarily gone back to the old method of duplicate  checking until we get this problem fixed.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Eric

The scary part about this is that they don't really know what happened......and I guess that means they don't know if it may happen again.  Lets hope they get it straightened out.  -zAmboni

Another One Bites the Dust!
Team Art Bell has succumbed to the power of the Lamb.....Lamb Chop to be more specific.  The numbers from today's stats update tell the story. 

I have to be honest...and I am sure that Rat Bastard would say the same.  When I started doing the stats for the site here, I NEVER thought that Team Lamb Chop could catch up to and pass Team Art Bell.  They just had too many members and were way too far ahead of us to catch them.  I am happy to admit that I was wrong.  The credit for this accomplishment can be split 2359 ways.  Without the hard work and perseverance from each and every member of Team Lamb Chop this could never have happened. 

The #1 Club Team in the WORLD.
The #4 Team in the WORLD.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!  

Well we do have to work on that second part up there :).  Next in line is Compaq.  Unfortunately they are quite a bit ahead of us right now.  700,000 work units in fact.  Hey.  I never thought we would pass Art Bell, so anything is possible.  Here is a chart showing the current status of the teams at today's update.  Also is a list of the estimated time we shall pass the teams above us (based on the past 10 days WU average.

I've changed the link in the menu bar to point to the nice and swanky Team UBB forum.  Mad Props go out to Rat Bastard for setting it up.  It is really nice to have an entire forum that we can play with.  No more humongous threads on the Ars Technica forums.  It may not have as many features as the Ars forums, but it is our own! :-).  Go in and state your case, call Art Bell names, and chat about their demise!
-zAmboni

Tips updated!
Will miracles never cease? Another update to the site! Actually, we can thank my new job for this one, I wrote the article at work this morning. Hey- I need something to do between coffee runs! And for those who might be wondering, the new position is going very very well, and I'm enjoying it alot. In another month or so it will pickup alot, and I won't have time to write a bunch of articles, but that's good too. If nothing else, it will prevent me from going through books so fast. After all, I finished Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four in 2 days, and I read one third of The Three Musketeers today. Anyways, on to the point.

For those who have been looking into caching programs for Seti, you will want to make sure that you take a look at Seti Queue. I use it myself, and find that it works very well. If you'd like some more info on it, read on. -Rat

A Break from tradition
Yep, we're breaking from tradition here at the site. How? Well, a couple of different ways. First of all, we've updated the news on the front page! Amazing, I know. The second break from tradition is with the team thread.  We now have a dedicated UBB setup on the server, which is located right here. It's still very much in it's most basic of forms, and I imagine it will go through some revisions as it continues to grow and mature (mutate?). So everyone should go there and post something, even if it's a complaint about my rambling style of discourse. 

As always, we'd love to hear feedback from everybody on how everything is. Don't like the forum titles? Let us know! Don't like the graphics for the submit buttons? Send us new ones! Need money? Join the club! Seriously though, everyone should hop and and say hello. Feel free to invite other people to discuss, even if they aren't members of Team LambChop. After all, they might change their mind.  :)  -Rat

Yup....Its Me!
As Rat said a couple of days ago I have been changing things around a bit.  Now every member with at least one work unit processed can check out their stats.  I have also included graphs for members 200-300.  I don't think I am going to include graphs for the rest of the team though.  If there is something wrong....of if you have any ideas of any type of stats you would like added or changed please drop me a line!

Back and Forth with the SETI Pages
You probably have noticed by now, but if you haven't, the news from the 12th is kind of moot.  The stats pages for the overall teams has reverted back to the wrong numbers for the teams.  It is kind of frustrating for me to do stats with numbers that I know aren't correct.  But right now I have to do with the numbers that they give me.  I will probably get things going soon to get CORRECT numbers for all of the teams, and other things....and not to RELY on the SETI stats pages that give me inaccurate numbers.  I'm running a couple of things right now to get some current accurate numbers for Ars and Art Bell to give you the CURRENT....and CORRECT! (ok not completely correct) numbers for us and Art Bell and how we stand.

Actually I think the numbers I showed for the 12th were a bit incorrect, and that Art Bell has more WUs than what I showed.....but I am waiting....still waiting to get the numbers....bear with me...this is like taking forever.

Ok off on a tangent here....You would think that M$ could actually integrate their Office products and other products halfway decently.  In getting the stuff for the charts ready, I had a b*tch of a time trying to get data from Excel included into FrontPage2000.  Isn't this integration of of M$'s selling points for their Office suite?  Unless I do some serious hand wringing, and trial and error, I lose all formatting from the Excel worksheets when I try to import the data into FP2K.  Somehow I got it to work.  Right now I am trying to get Excel to do a web query on both Art Bell's and Team Lamb Chop's stats pages on the SETI servers.  Yea I know Excel isn't IE5.0....but it is taking something on the order of 10x as long to pull data using Excel as it does to have a web page load up in IE5.  On top of the time, my CPU is being taxed to death while it is updating.  I have a PIII running at 800MHz and 256MB of RAM....and SETI has come to a grinding halt and trying to type this is quite choppy.  OH WAIT!  IT IS FINALLY DONE! WOOHOO!

OK NOW HERE IS THE GOODS:

again, something to take note of....the Art Bell "Actual WU" is probably a tad low.  This is because the team has 12,600 members...and the web page only shows 9,999 members.  The member at 9,999 has 2 work units for the team....so at the absolute worst their work unit totals are around 5,600 WU low....but the real number is probably around 2,000 (my guess).     -zAmboni

Something New From the Admiral
Since zAmboni apparently forgot to brag about it, I thought I'd better! zAmboni has been hard at work with VB scripting for the stats page. The result of his labors is now becoming apparent- as the charts now track all 2200+ team members! I'd like to congrat zAmboni on his dedication and hard effort, he's one of the determining factors behind the sense of competition on Team LambChop, and we all owe him alot! -Rat

Something New From the SETI Crew
Looks like I was right about them changing things on their web site concerning stats.  There is a nice new change in the user stats.  The user stats now contain the results from the last 10 work units submitted.  If you have your user stats page bookmarked, it will not show the new page.  Go to the user account page and enter your email address to get to the new page.  I am going to fix the link below the menu on the left to reflect this change also.

One Million Official!
Along with the change above, it seems that they are getting the team totals straightened out.  After hearing about the user account page above I checked the team totals.  This team total page has the correct number of work units for the team!    Unfortunately this page still hasn't caught up.  Where does this put us compared to Art Bell?

Actually the numbers for Art Bell seem a tad low.....so they all may not be accurate yet :)   At the worst.....ART BELL  WILL FALL WITHIN TWO WEEKS!

Backlogs and You.
I believe that I may have figured out the reason why there is a continually growing backlog in work units posted to the different teams.  (see graph at the right to see how much of a backlog there is at the moment).  Earlier when doing the stats, and generally checking around on the SETI@Home stats pages, I noticed something that didn't appear to be there before. 

For a little background, there were several stats pages that were updated "real time", there were several pages that were updated a couple of times a day, and there were some that were updated only once a day.  For example there are actually two different pages on the SETI servers that show Team Lamb Chops member stats.  They are linked up here:  Page 1, and Page 2.  What is the difference between the two?  Well the first page is a CGI scripted page which is updated real time.  The second is a page that used to be updated every several hours.  If you noticed.....I said used to.   It appears that now the team page, that used to be updated several times a day, is now only updated once a day.  And it appears that this page is updated at about the same time as the club team page is updated (notice that the team total work units are the about the same on both pages).  Another example of changes in the way they are doing their pages is on the top users page.  This page used to be updated in real time, but not looks like it is maybe only updated hourly. 

Why are they doing this?  Well, I believe it is due to two factors.  First off, the original stats database was probably not set up to handle the amount of work units and members currently in the project.  Many of the pages really do not need to be updated in real time or every few hours.  With 2,000,000 + members and who knows how many teams, updating each of the team pages, and stats pages frequently must be a big hit on their statistics servers.  Any way to decrease the load on the servers will help deal with an ever increasing team and member "work unit" force.  The second reason may be due to the upcoming version 3.0 release of the client.  With the added pulse detection of the new client, this will (i think) at least double the amount of data processed on their results database.  This will be a hit on their entire server network, and lessening the load on one end will help them out on the other.  I just hope that they keep the real time updating of the individual team pages....or it may make things kind of weird on my stats updates.

How does this backlog figure into all of this?  To me at least it looks like the backlog is currently being accrued from members who join one team, but brought along work units with them from another team.  If you take a look at the graph on the right, the backlog (ie. difference in the graph on the right) has been increasing when we have had members joining bringing along work units with them. On 6/5-6/9 we had members join who had significant numbers of work units already processed.  Those work units did not get added to the team totals shown on the SETI site (yellow line).  In the last two days Team Lamb Chop has had only 2-3 members bring along a several work units...and the backlog hasn't increased appreciably.  The yellow line has increased sort of steadily....but the we may not have reached a "speed limit" as I said previously...but that line shows the increase in work units actually processed by the team in those days. 

Why aren't the new member numbers included in the team totals?  I think it is due to the changing of the team stats pages with their servers.  Because when some member changes a team it effects two teams, they have halted the "exchange" of work units between teams for the moment.  This DOESN'T mean that the work units stay with the old team....they do seem to be subtracted when a member leaves....but the work units for that person joining a team doesn't get added to the totals.  I have a feeling that when they finish their stats pages/database overhaul, that the work units will get straightened out.  I am not sure when....but they should!  -zAmboni

1 GWU!...1 BWU!...1 MWU! (i need to learn some math)
I just want to point you to the graph at the right ------->
This is a graph (one of the new graphs I hope to implement on a permanent basis soon) showing the "Actual" work unit totals for Team Lamb Chop, The total work units which are shown on the Team page (On the SETI servers), and the difference between the two.  There are a couple of things to note about the graph.  It seems that new members to the team who bring work units with them, do not have their work units added to the team totals immediately.  I guess this is all part of the backlog that is still ongoing over there at S@H. The second thing to note is the total work units.  Currently the team has over 900,000 actual work units processed.  There is word on the SETI team thread, that previous Team Lamb Chop member aenima is going to rejoin the team tomorrow.  aenima will bring back over 7,000 work units to the team totals.  Wiith those numbers, sometime tomorrow, Team Lamb Chop should break the One Million Work Units Processed mark!

GO TEAM LAMBCHOP GO!  

Addendum
I have an addendum to the news from May 30 below.  I have received an email from Lord Gumby (John Underwood) from the Overclockers Network SETI team.  I guess I was a tad harsh on my news about their contest for their team.  LG pointed out "The contest at OCN is mainly for the members that were already on the team...I specifically waited until the day after the first two week period started to announce the contest so that one of the original 123 members would get the first CPU".  I guess I could have found this out myself if I read things correctly......but me read things closely?  NEVER!  :-)   -zAmboni

Poll time!
Okay, it's not quite a proper poll, mainly because I didn't feel like doing it right. However, I am contemplating setup a UBB just for TeamLambchop, and I'd love to see what everyone thinks of the idea. For more information (not that there's much more) head over to the Benchmarking Page! -Rat

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