NEWS

Hardware freaks trying to make some sense out of a bunch of numbers

Sieve! Sieve! Sieve!
.....Ya know.....I really cant think of anything witty to say :-P. I went to the U. Michigan/U Mass-Lowell hockey game tonight. UMich kicked some serious butt, UMass blew chunks....I lost count of the goals after it was 8-1 :-). The tix were free, sat in the press box and got free pizza and pop (soda.....for those backwards people) Just thought you would like to know!

Just Looking for Something to Say
.....Some notes about individual top 100 member trends.....K()de has slacked off a bit over the past week. He is still cranking out work units, but may soon drop out of the top 20.

.....movement.....Whiner moves up to #17 today, and probably will pass Rat Bastard tomorrow for #16. Romkey passes an idle Beryllium for #13. Leech moves into the top 10 by passing up OrlBamf.

.....more trends......Dr Xing and Perb are slicing through the second 20 and will be fighting soon for a spot in the top 20 members.

.....new member jackal651 is passing everyone up......he has moved up at least 15 spots in the past two days, will probably move into the second 20 this weekend, and maybe the top 20 by the end of next week.

......members not making too much impact in the past week include thestrange, seta@abella.net, neo1999, and Tom the Melaniephile. They are getting passed up by faster movers.....thestrange's spot in the top 100 may not last too much longer.....

.....one last note.....yours truly.....zAmboni's chance of making the top 100 seems slimmer and slimmer every day. 3 work units per day just isnt top 100 material! Now....if i could commandeer some of those machines in the computer rooms at U Michigan, then maybe i could ;-) hehehehehe

News Update.....FInally!
.....Sorry, but been busy for the past couple of days......so lets get Started!

SETI Guys tells everyone "Just Say No!"
.....I have seen some things on the alt.sci.seti newsgroup and other boards about people hacking the SETI clients for "performance enhancements".....what? did they give em 'roids? But this is actually a big no no. Granted, I dont think that the SETI guys/servers etc. would know a result from an "official" SETI client from a hacked version, but they released this "official" statement:

"UNAUTHORIZED PATCHES TO CLIENT: It has come to our attention that some users are distributing unauthorized patches to the SETI@home client. We cannot verify that these patches function properly and are virus free. It is very important to the science of SETI@home that you run only the unmodified SETI@home program."

In other words.....if you didnt get it from them, dont use it.

The Winds o' Change are blowing!
.....Apparently the SouthPark Admin Crew wrapped up another new SouthPark episode yesterday, and they are back to posting work units. I believe they had a new episode last night (Wed.) and they must have been burning the midnight oil on the rendering machines. They are back to SETI crunching.....that is until they have to start their Halloween special. For now they are back to help stop guru's onslaught.

.....A couple of new members have joined in the past several days. The one making the biggest splash is Fragmommy who immediately knocked Grimas down a notch and took over 20th place with over 700 WUs. Other members who entered the top 100 include: jackal651, Uncle Timbo, and Guidant. Guidant turns out to be Rat Bastard's alter ego, and should climb up the ranks quite quickly. jackal651 has put up 120 WUs in the past two days and should be in the top 20 very soon.

"Gettin' Faster Every Day"
.....Sometime tomorrow or over the weekend, our *team* average time per WU should creep under the 18 hour mark. Over the past two months we have shaved over 2 hrs off of our average time.....man o man....ya know that is quite an accomplishment! Good work team!

.....BTW with news of the average dropping, those Mac Users who brag on how fast the Mac/G3/G4's are in crunching the data, should take note. With passing below the 18 hrs/WU mark, Team Lamb Chop now has an average time *lower* than Team MacAddict. TAKE THAT! ;-) ......Now we have to shave another hour off the average to pass O'Grady's PowerBook team. Our average time for the past two weeks has been a shade over 16 hrs/WU.

Eyeballing Things.....
.....my best fit "guess" on when we shall pass Team Slashdot........December 18, 1999. Should we have a pool?

Discuss...........
.....Talk about this site or anything SETI related on the "unofficial" team thread in the Ars Technica Forum. Click here to go there. Or if you want to vent or talk about anything else post something in other Forums.

Big Reorganization!
.....I have changed quite a bit on the site today.....I hope you like! Added several links, including a link to the SETI@Home Berkeley page, a link to the Ars Technica "unofficial" team thread.....and also included a form at the bottom in which you can enter your SETI account address and lookup your stats right from this page! Because of this, there really isnt going to be a news update :P

I hope you enjoy!

-zAmboni

SETI@Home Balances their Checkbooks
.....You probably noticed something interesting in todays update. Yup looks like we added 6000+ work units today. Well I really dont think 6000+ WUs were processed yesterday, but it looks like the SETI guys again got a server backlog straightened out. I believe all of the "excess" work units came from the team members who were not in the top 100. That is sort of pointed out in the "split" graph. It looks like this "bookkeeping" from SETI affected all of the teams not just Team Lamb Chop.

A new #2
.....resident ass kicker, guru, passed up an idle Panders, and leaped into the #2 spot for the team. guru will have to take advantage of the idle SouthPark Admin Crew while they are getting their sure to be kick ass Halloween special out the door.

.....Other top 20 news...........leech smokes some Beryllium and moves into the #12 spot.

.....the now defunct Rat Bastard looks like he is going idle......and will let his other account crank out work units, and try to climb back through the top 100 that way......well probably until they get the WU transfer bug sorted out.

Links Fixed
.....yea i gotta check these things....with my update yesterday, i didnt save things right, and the links for the menu bar over there <----------- was busted. I quick refresh and save and thinks are ok now :P.....thanks to SpeedRacer for pointing it out.

Yea.........I knew it would happen...
.....I said something like "next thing you know they will be selling WUs on ebay".......well apparently they already have. I got this link from Roberto Virga. The result.txt files for 10 completed work units were apparently sold for a whopping $0.65. I am sure that the SouthPark Admin Crew could at least get $1.50 for their WUs! Enough for an extra large bag of Chezzy Poofs!

-zAmboni

Weekly Updates.........are....uh.......Updated.
.....check them out in the Weekly Team Stats page(s) which can be found here.
.....top work units for the week goes to guru...followed by Gonzo
.....top mover of the week is xtian followed by Whiner
.....ALSO added a graph showing Ars and the top 12 team overall....added this to the Misc Graphs section......check it out

Site News
.....I got my weekly page stats a couple of days ago via email. I am already over 50% of my monthly throughput quota! Tomorrow I am going to check out getting a new web host and a new domain name. Most likely sometime soon i shall be moving the site over......one without any type of throughput limits! In the meantime i am going to offload most of the images to another account (the page site will be the same for the time being) to help out on the throughput problem on this web account! If there are any link problems with images etc please let me know.

Note on the "split" graph
.....If you notice on the "split" graph, it looks like that the top 100 team members were the ones who contributed to all the WUs for the day. I really dont think that is truely accurate. The reason why I believe it looks like this is that we have had one (or maybe two) members leave the team who were not in the top 100. This would account for the numbers I ended up for that graph. You can check this graph out on the miscellaneous members graphs.

One Final Word (or two or three)
.....Many of you may know this, but even if i dont update the news pages (for some unknown reason ;-)....I still update the stats and graphs every day!