NEWS

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

Ready For Prime Time!
Yup.......Its here! Contrary to what was posted a couple of days ago the version 2.0 i386-winnt-commandline client is available for download.   It is even official like, available for download on the download page.  Get it.  It is FAST!  I didn't do a benchmark on the new command line version, but I did do a normal work unit with it and it shaved almost 2 hrs off of my average time!

There are also two BeOs clients available for downloads....one for the i586-PC and one for the PowerMac.

Hiding the GUI and CLI clients.......
I found this on the alt.sci.seti newsgroups from poster Durk van Veen:

I've seen a couple of requests for a program that removes the SETI
application icon from the Windows system tray. I whipped up such a program
just know. You can download it from

ftp://24.30.130.161/d:/ftproot/users/anon/seti_iconremover.exe

If people find it useful I'll find a more permanent server to house the
program. The idea is that you set your machine up to run this program after
the SETI client has started. One way to do this is to package start-up for
SETI@Home and this thing into a batch file, to be run from the RunServices
key in the registry. I'll consider making a version that runs as a service
and continually kicks the icon out of the system tray in case the program is
stopped, then restarted, but this is it for now. Just download it to any
directory on your machine and run it. It doesn't have to install anything.
It will immediately exit after you start it, but the SETI icon will
disappear from the system tray while leaving the application itself running.

I tested this program with the v2.00 client on a Windows98 machine. It
should run as is on Windows95, WindowsNT and Windows2000, but I haven't had
a chance to test it. Let me know if you find this useful. Just respond to
the group, unless you feel the urge to respond directly to my e-mail.

Durk

I personally haven't tried it to see if it works......but if you want to hide the GUI SETI icon give it a whilr.

Also on the newsgroup there was a couple of posts from the makers of SETILog and SETI Spy saying that their programs can let you hide the command line clients.  Again I haven't tried them out, but they could be a way of hiding the command line clients for you.  Finally there is a new version of SETILog for you to be able to use with the version 2.0 command line client.  Hopefully sometime this week I will try both of the new versions out and write up a little blurb here on the page.

Team Stuff
I haven't done the weekly stuff yet.  That will probably get done tomorrow, not today/tonight.  There are a few things of note with the team in the past couple of days.  It looks like guru thinks it is lonely at the top.  It appears that he has shut down his guru account, and fired up his SpeedRacer account to give guru some company up top!

There was a couple of movers in the top 40 the past two days....romkey moved past AutoLign and now is #13.  Grimas moved up one to #30, Vasp up one to #33, and finally mzanthrope is up one to #37.

New Clients Abound!
There are several new clients for download on the SETI ftp server. These incluce the version 2.02 Mac and Win9x GUI clients.  But beware of downloading them.....only one of them are up for "official" download (the only official GUI download is the version 2.00 client).  The new clients are:
setiathome-2.0.i386-pc-solaris2.6 (Officially Released)
setiathome_win_2_02
setiathome_mac_2_02
setiathome-2.0.mips3-sgi-irix6.2

On The Team Front
There has only been three movers in the past couple of days in the top 40.  Warthog has cracked the top 40, he moved up a total of 5 spots over the past couple of days to rank in at #40.  Tobler Design keeps on rolling up 2 spots to #11.  And finally C. Eric Smith moved up one notch to #9.

Hrmmmmm...
Thought I had something else to say, but oh well.......

Till next time.........SPOON!

No v 2.0 CLI Client This Week
Taken from the alt.sci.seti newsgroup today.  Hiram the person responsible for the Unix ports posted this:

And we find yet more problems with winnt-cmdline in the moment. Since I'm out of town for a week beginning this Sunday evening on a business trip, it is now looking like maybe after I get back, after the 11th of February.

In fact, while I am out of town, _NO NEW UNIX CLIENTS_ will be posted since that is my task at S&H.

Ya'all are just going to have to learn some patience.

(I was excited last October, as I thought v2.0 was just about done then.  Little did I know.)
--Hiram -

Keep SETI Running After Logout
Daryle A. Tilroe emailed today with a way to get the SETI client to run on Win9x even after a person logs out of a machine.  I have added this to the Tips and Tricks Page (another page in serious need of attention and updating :-).  There is no word yet whether or not the old CLI version will run in this way, but we soon may know.

Meanwhile Back on the Range
Tobler Design was the only mover in the top 40 today.  He moved up a spot passing over Panders and moves into the #11 spot.

There is a race shaping up for the #5 team spot.  Currently Gonzo is a bit safe in the #5 spot, but there are several members who are shooting for him.  The interesting thing about the race is that two of his chasers are on track to pass Gonzo AT THE SAME TIME!  These two members are svdsinner and Tobler Design.  svdsinner is currently in the #7 spot, and Tobler Design is #11.  Vomesh is sitting at #6, but it doesnt look like he has the WU average to beat the other two to Gonzo.  I have posted a graph showing these four members, and the projected trends for each of them.  This graph is below the Top 100 Member Chart.  Right now it appears that it is too close to tell, but Gonzo is safe until maybe the second week in March.

Version 2.0, 2.01 Beta?
Well looks like we have a public beta going on with the version 2.x clients.  The version 2.00 GUI clients have already gone through a 2.01 revision....and it looks like a 2.02 is coming right behind them.  There have been reports of the 2.01 client having a bug in which the outfile.sah file (where temporary results are stored) will sometimes keep growing and growing.  The previous clients had a cap on the outfile.txt (on 1.x versions) file at 32K.  If the file was bigger than 32K, it was assumed that The work unit was full of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI), and the client would stop and then send the result in.  Apparently this cap is not in place in 2.01 (and maybe 2.00?) clients, and the outfile.sah can keep growing and growing.  One person reported that he had a crash due to the SETI client, and then found that the outfile.sah file was over 80MB!!!  Matt Lebofsky said that they have confirmed this and that there is a version 2.02 in works.  He also put in a warning about downloading clients which haven't "officially" been released from their download page.

Hi, All -

We built a version 2.01 and placed it on our local ftp site on Friday so that our ftp.cdrom.com mirror could pick it up. Due to the onslaught of anxious downloaders one of our local ftp mirrors kept crashing over the weekend so cdrom.com never got it. But that is okay, since there are a couple bugs that got uncovered and soon enough there will be a 2.02 version.

Anywho, since there hasn't been a formal policy about our support for "unreleased" yet "available" versions, I planted a first crack at a README file in the ftp download directory, and pasted it below.

FYI, known bugs being fixed in 2.01 include the windows bug that result file sizes are growing out of bounds. Other bugs (like the screen blanking bug or the WU returning to 0%) we have been unable to reproduce here at the lab, but we're looking into it.

- Matt - SETI@home

----------
The SETI@home web site <setiathome.berkeley.edu> is the _only_ official source for released versions of the client.  Recently, other sources have linked people directly to one of our FTP mirrors, where we put pre-release versions in preparation for making them available through our web site.

We are not opposed to direct downloads from this FTP server, but:

* Be aware that while all of the clients are "available" some are not yet "released." All released versions are linked to via our website. The remainder are simply available. In some cases, these may be transitional builds and so may be supplanted by later versions before they are released; in other words, some of these versions may never be officially released.  Use them at your own risk!

* We do appreciate the feedback via the sci.astro.seti news group or via our web site if you find bugs or problems, especially in the first few days after a new version is posted on the FTP server.

- the SETI@home team
  02/01/2000

Little Help?
Several team members have noticed that the new versions of the GUI clients are resistant to hiding on their Win9x computers.  The old trick by editing the registry files doesn't seem to hide the system tray icon for the GUI client.  If there is anyone who knows how to "hide" the client please drop me an email, or make a post to the "unofficial" team thread.

Team
Vasp was the only member to move up in the top 40 today.  He moved up one spot to #34.  Team Lamb Chop lost a top 200 member today with Other leaving.  He left the team with over 400+ Work Units.

Weekly Stuff
The Weekly winners and losers was updated yesterday actually, but I finally put something up here today :-).  guru is still kicking ass and taking names in the work unit department...he posted another 3K+ week.  Tobler Design again was second and svdsinner came in 3rd.  In the movement department....Daryle A. Tilroe came up in first this week....moving up 30 plus spots.  Joker was in second with a 24 spot move, and Scrap Iron moved up 20 spots.  

Team Lamb Chop posted two milestones this past week.  The team posted the 400,000th work unit a couple of days ago.  In addition to that, our average time per work unit dipped below the 15hr mark.  That is some serious average crunching power and speed.....Congrats to the whole team!

Daily Moving
Over the past couple of days there again was quite a bit movement in the top 40.  svdsinner moved up another notch today and now is sitting at the #7 spot.  Tobler Design moved up one spot each of the past three days and is now #12.  Darkmage moved up one to #32, outlander up one to #33, Vasp up one to #35, and finally Benjamin Alarie moved up two spots and cracked into the top 40 at #40.

Milestones!

New Clients
There have been two new clients released in the past couple of days and they are:
setiathome-2.0.i386-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1
setiathome-2.0.i486-pc-sco3.2v4.2

These new clients can be found on the text client download page.

Where is the NT-command-line client?  Word is that it will probably be released sometime later this week.  If you may be looking for a performance increase compared to the 1.3 client of the command line you may be interested in this comment....it is from Hiram, the person responsible for the sco ports of the SETI clients:

I promised a pointer to graphs that demonstrate something about V2.0 relative speed.

I'm definately taking a bit longer with V2.0 calculations.  If you will open your browser to the directory:
www.ocston.org/~hiramc/astro/seti/

You will see several items of interest. The most telling feature is: TotalHiram.png (for browser impaired: TotalHiram.gif)

Which is my WU per day graph. Since I began testing v2.0 clients at the end of November, my rate has been falling. I'm now almost fully converted to v2.0 clients and it looks like my rate is going to settle down to about %75 of what I used to do with v1.3

The August dip was due to my summer vacation:

And the late December dip was due to extensive v2.0 testing and debugging server reception of WUs properly.

Granted....he is only dealing with the sco ports of the client, but there is a possibility that the new NT command line client may show a performance decrease.  Why is there is performance hit?  I have no clue.....and Hiram didn't appear to provide one either.

No Formal Announcements for New Clients?
There may be a rational reason for this......as a reply to a post on alt.sci.seti, Matt Lebofsky (SETI Staff) explains:

> This is getting confusing. There is NO visible announcement on the website
> about the 2.0 client, though if you look at the download page 2.0 clients
> are available for most of the platforms I'm running it on. No explanation as
> to whether it's some kind of 'alpha test', 'beta test', or just intended for
> newbies only, though it seems obvious that a lot of the eager beavers are
> all agog.

The last time we announced SETI@home with a big ol' "Come and get it!" our ftp servers were immediately swamped and rendered useless. It's much nicer in many ways to slowly ramp up by announcing the release in small steps. I mean, jeez, within minutes of us putting it on our ftp site people in this NG were announcing it - and that's before we even linked to it on the web site (grin).

If we forced people to upgrade right away that could effectively mean hundreds of thousands of downloads of the client software a day for about a week. That kind of demand would cripple our network. Not to mention the fact that the ftp mirrors can only handle n requests at a time before rejecting people who will be forced to keep trying and trying and trying..

Besides, this "pre-release" enabled us also to uncover a couple small bugs that never surfaced
during beta testing, and quickly make a 2.01 version (which will be available over the weekend sometime). Updates will be listed on the "known bugs/updates" page.

Soon we'll make the client warn people that they should upgrade, and then eventually they will be forced to upgrade. By that time, a good number of people will have already downloaded 2.0x, and our servers will be able to handle the load.

Besides the obvious gaussian graphic, most users won't notice the big differences until version 3.0. But so many other things have been fixed that we had to release 2.0 as a stepping stone towards 3.0. It would be too much stuff to put in one major version upgrade and not expect it to explode.

- Matt - SETI@home

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