Personal Glory Beckons!

Wow, for the 4th day in a row my output exceeded 500,000. Truly the addition of two new HD5770 video cards has more than doubled my productivity at a modest cost of £350 plus an extra £2 on the household 'lecky bill every day. I'm 228th by total credit and 174th by RAC so I must be in with a reasonable chance of beating my previous best of 182nd place. Charge!!!!

Forum Foul Up

Dearie me! What a time I've had of it.

In all the time the Forum has been around I pretty much left it to work. Certainly I never tinkered with MySQL or the phpBB code. This was wise: The following wasn't:

1. First I made a full [?fool] backup.
2. I started to footer in an ill-informed, near random, fashion trying to tweak the appearance of the various styles.
3. I broke all but the board default styles.
4. As a result I could only visit as a Guest and certainly couldn't do any administration.
5. In foolish desperation I tried a phpBB re-installation.
6. This went well until I found out that my 20MB fool back-up was 4 times over the 5MB max back-up size. Arse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7. Forunately, acute severe paranoia having set in, I had manually, slowly & tediously, renamed the 31 tables in the MySQL database that otherwise had to be over-written in the course of the phpBB reinstallation.
8. I rerenamed them, manually with all the slow tedium that entails, back to what they had been originally.
9. This got me back to stage 4.
10. Rather late in the day I did what I should have done at stage 4, scouring the interweb until I found the files for the broken styles.
11. Some downloading & ftping later the forum seemed to be whole and complete aside from everyone losing their avatars.

Truly a learning opportunity!

Forum Down

Bugger. I tried to upgrade from from phpBB2 to 3 last night. The version of PHP on my webhost wasn't new enough so I decided to do some manual tweaking. It was going quite well. I had the saltire replaced with various versions of the saltire, and was investigating how to add a link, to the homepage when I basically locked myself out!

I can get into the forum but not as registered user, & therefore not as an administrator!!

Fortunately I took a back-up just before I messed it up. Only problem is I need into the admin panel to restore it.

I think I might have to remove & reinstall the whole thing. Any thoughts?

Hurrah! The New Website is here.

Sometime about 2am this morning I finally uploaded the Home Page of the New (ish) Website.

It's not finished but still a worthwhile improvement; the horrible cluttered, unmaintainable & out of date stats page has been replaced by a stats section on the home page giving you the only two links you really need & the twitter doohdad works nicely. Best of all it doesn't look like it's had seven shades of ordure beaten out of it with an ugly stick.

Hopefully I'l get some feedback - if people haven't given up on looking at it that is.

New Website Imminent

Having long realised that the current website is pretty damn pants I've finally dusted down my HMTL & CSS to try and tidy it up. I think I might have finally cracked it. Once I get the hang of menus that is. Give me another 48hrs.

In breaks from honing my coding skills I've been trying to decorate the Boinc Basement. Problem is there is so much stuff in it that I can only do it a wee bit at a time. I suppose I could switch off the farm for a while but that's a bit extreme innit?

I added another HD 5770 to the farm, replacing the HD3850. Nice! I reckon with CPUs on AQUA, NVidias on Collatz & ATIs on DNETC that I could get half a million per day out of the farm. Mad, totally mad!

Anyway that's got to be an end to the upgrades. From now on it's failure replacements only. A consequence of shifting stuff about the basement is that I can see just how many IKEA Storage Solutions full of PC related shite I have. 23 floppy drive cables at the last count. No day is ever going to be rainy enough to justify keeping them. As for ebaying them... Recycling at last!

Centamegger-hood at last!

100,000,000 credits is not a bad tally & one that only 244 boincers have managed before. Clawing my way back to TSBT #2 isn't too bad either, even if the, hopefully temporary, inactivity of Nightlord & JockMacMad are the main things making that possible.

All of this has been achieved without resort to the sort of PC-excess that was a problem before. I'm not as down-sized as I was but from a peak of 10 machines (not including laptops & dodgily borrowed work PCs) I now have 7 PCs (2 of them serving a practical purpose to other members of the household) and no laptops or work PCs being bothered. Together these seven machines have 30 CPU cores, 6 NVidia GPUs & 3 ATI GPUs are allowing me an output of at least 400K per day.

Did some work on the website yesterday. I got the twitter thing working again but the overall effect is to put it politely inconsistent & incomplete. I must get to it.

I'm back!

After 16 months I unaccountably felt the need to post again.

Quick update.
TSBT scaled the giddy heights of 15th at one point but are gently floating back down although still crunching mightily. We held UK #1 slot for some months but UK Boinc Team wrestled it back from us. We are closing in on our second billion.

On the personal crunching front I finally managed to get my Boinc Basement built, moving the heat and noise of the farm out of the house, freeing up space for the family and giving me my own playroom.

I've regained the TSBT runner-up slot (steve at 1.2 billion is uncatchable!) and in the next day or two hope to pass 100 million.

Tonight I added my second i7 CPU. Specially for the Aqua crunch.

I must sort the website and get that bloody Twitter widget working properly. It was grand for a while but now seems well knacked.