NEWS

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

Site Stuff
I will be messing around with the site this afternoon/nite. If things are looking strange or doesnt work that is prolly why. Hopefully it wont take too long. I am going to try to update all of the pages with the new logo/layout, and also implement the links page (which is sort of up already)

SETI Benchmarking
Have you submitted your results yet? If not....what have you been waiting for? Rat Bastard has compiled a bunch 'o results from members already. Go on over to his Benchmarking Page and check them out. Do it yourselves and submit your results. Hopefully from those who are cranking out the work units quicklike, we can find out thier machine settings and we can pass them all along to the rest of you. Hopefully we can find something out which can help out the whole team.

Team Moves
davycroc continues his incredible rise. He has passed up Ars guru Gonzo, and has now staken claim to the #4 spot overall. Panders is up next for him.....and should be #3 sometime over the weekend at the earliest. leech is showing some moves himself, passing up mjdewitt and settling in at the #8 spot. Moving down the list just alittle bit, romkey swept by OrlBamf and into the #11 spot. Caesar has cranked it up just a tad and slides by Beryllium and takes over #16. I would be amiss if i forgot to mention that Dr. Xing has moved into the top 20! He passed FluffyPants a couple of days ago and is now sitting pretty at the #20 spot. Lets see if he can hang on to it for a while (and maybe even move on up!)

Random SETI News
Some of the SETI Berkeley guys cruise the alt.sci.seti newsgroup and answer some questions there. I caught the ear of Eric Korpela and asked him a question about the servers and team stats being kept over at the SETI homepage.

Q: Do the SETI Berkeley servers update the work units differently for members in the "top 100" for a team compared to the members not in the "top 100"?

A: Actually, it's a little confusing... Team stats are being updated by a separate program, while most individual stats are being updated roughly real time.   The team stats are of lower priority (we don't want to sacrifice server performance to update them) so the team stats update is running up to a week behind schedule.  So when you look at the team stats top 100 page you're actually seeing the team totals as they were a week ago, but the individual stats are current.   Because of this it's possible for the total team stats displayed to be less than the sum of the stats for the top 100 users.   Depending upon how fast your top 100 users are adding results compared to the rest, it may look like "the rest of the bunch" weren't doing any work, or it may look like they were doing negative work.

Hopefully problems like these will go away when we get the new user database
server.

Eric

So what does that mean? Well to make a long story short. For the members in the top 100 their stats on the Team page and their contribution to the total team numbers are updated real time. For those members not in the top 100, their work units received may not get added to the team total immediately, and it may take a week or more for them to get added. This is the reason why we have seen sort of sudden "jumps" to our team totals. The backlog of work units from team members not in the top 100 get added all at once, and it seems we get a huge bonus. This also explains why it seems that all the work units were being contributed by the top 100 members. It isnt that the teams not in the top 100 are "weekend warriors", it is all just the way the servers handle the data (did i lose you yet? :-).

There has been talk of a new version of the SETI client(s). Yes it is true. They are working on a version 2.0 of the client, and will hopefully have it ported for different OSes and machine types and will all be released at the same time. Will this new client be radically different and lead to different work unit times? Apparently the answer is no. The main reason for this new version is for security. There are alot of SETI hacks out there, and they are trying to push this new version out the door so they can stop results coming from all these unauthorized hacks. It may be true that the results from these hacks may be identical if you used an "authorized" client, but the problem is that the SETI Berkeley guys do not have the time and resources to test and confirm all the results from unauthorized clients. To get the security contained in the new version, the ability to extract more results from the data has been sacrificed. When the new version hits the street, you will need to update the client, or the Berkeley servers will refuse the work unit results. I will keep you informed when the new version will be released.

Ok....I cant think of anything else now....catch ya next time...

#5 with a bullet
.....davycroc hopped another whopping 5 spots in the top 20 to the #5 spot overall. If he keeps it up guru will be shaking in his boots soon!

.....other top 20 movement: C. Eric Smith passes tron for the #13 position. FluffyPants hopped into the top 20, passing the defunct Rat Bastard along the way.

.....top 100 news: Moving back into the top 100 after a short absence, Other slides back in at #100. Also new to the top 100 is The Weeblows at #95. To make room for them, Rob and mickey352 dropped out of the top 100.

ALL HAIL guru!

Sometime in the late hours last night guru passed up the SouthPark Admin Crew for the #1 spot on Team Lamb Chop. Congrats to guru!

Other stuff...
.....guru's bud davycroc turned it up a notch today and flew past a few top 20 members......he hopped from #15 up to #10......OrlBamf is next in his sites, and that may already have passed also!

.....C. Eric Smith is also in position to move past tron.....the inevitable should happen sometime tonight.

.....making a reappearance in the Team Lamb Chop Top 100 is alank. he hops in at the #99 spot today. A new spot was opened up in the Top 100, because apparently The Digital Dan left the team....taking with him 411+ work units. Sorry to see you go Dan.

Weekly Stuff
.....Updated the weekly graphs. Check them out here. Top WU crunchers of the week are ye ol' guru, followed by newcomer davycroc. Way to go!. Top movers of the week are Guidant and Lono.

The SouthPark Halloween Nighmare
.....You dont have to wait till the 31st to see the SouthPark Halloween nightmare....it may actually come tomorrow. guru is in position to take over the team #1 spot from the SouthPark crew. Even though their reign at #1 may not have lasted too long......we love them anyways.

More SETI Problems?
.....I had alittle trouble this morning connecting to the SETI Berkeley Servers, but eventually got through. Apparently some people are having problems connecting saying that they are getting a "Bad Header Error" while trying to upload some results. I personally havent had this problem, I am not sure if it has anything to do with the servers themselves, or a problem with the downloaded work units. I am betting on the former. If it has something to do with recently downloaded WUs I may have not run into it yet because I have several WUs downloaded and maybe havent processed the "bad" ones. Even if this is a problem I am sure they can do something server side that will fix this problem. Update: Seems that they may have gotten the problem licked.....

Team Update
.....leech passes up ojohnson for the #8 spot...after a meteoric rise, davycroc put it in idle yesterday....

Funniness with the Team Stats
.....Some of you may wonder what is going on with some of the stats and why things dont seem to add up right. I will try to explain a bit alittle.

Lesson #1

First off you may take a look at the total work units processed per day, and notice that they dont match with the numbers from the Club Teams page. This is simple....the data I get for this graph is updated sort of in "real time" and all depends on the time of day I update this graph. The data from the Club Teams page is updated only once per day (around 2pm EST). This is the source for the discrepancy.

Secondly, you may wonder why it seems that all of the work units processed for 10/22 and 10/23 are coming from members in the top 100. Well this isnt necessarily so. Team Lamb Chop is constantly adding and (unfortunately) losing members. When a team member leaves, he/she takes with them the work units associated with that account. For example on 10/22 team members not in the top 100 may have processed 450 WUs for that day....but on that same day, we may have lost 2 members which were not in the top 100. The total work units that those two members left with may be, say....460 WUs. This is 460 WUs lost from the team.....and from the calculations of the graph, there wouldnt appear to be any contribution from the members not in the top 100 (i.e. 450-460 = -10WUs).

In addition.....It appears that the SETI Servers do not update WUs from the top 100 members of a team the same way as they do the rest of the team. WUs for members in the top 100 seem to get processed and added immediately to team stats, while it may take several days for work units for the rest of the team to get processed. This can be shown in the WUs processed for today (10/24). There seems to be a huge amount of work units processed for the bottom of the team for the day.....but it is more likely that there was a backlog from the servers and it finally got flushed out. Over the past day our team only added 1 member, and all of the work units couldnt have come from them. They most likely came from the backlog for the past couple of days, days that it appeared the only WUs processed came from the top 100 team members.

Lesson #2

Why are there huge spikes and valleys in the daily average time? This all comes from team members being added and leaving. The spikes on the graph for the dates, 10/21, 10/12, and 10/8 can directly be attributed to a team member joining or leaving. On 10/8 we added member Darkmage who came in with 409 WUs and an average time of 23.5 hrs/WU. This caused a large upwards spike for that day. the downward spike for 10/12 can be traced to Fragmommy joining with 755 WUs and an average of 10.5 hrs/WU. Finally the large spike on 10/21 is from jackal651 leaving the team with 864 WUs and and average of 13 hrs/WU. Hope that makes things alittle clearer :-).

There will be a quiz next Sunday!