December Update!

I'm getting over 400 bogus accounts created every day!

FFS, why? What possible gain is there for anyone in creating these accounts only to have them deleted sooner or later. Usually later here. I'd let the total raise to over 11,000 again. But with an hour or so of Admin Carnage I've got it cut back to 8,500 with more brutal pruning due tomorrow.

The Top Hundred For Everything Drive

SETI is now 97th after an epic effort. Well done guys! All other active projects are 100th or better except for World Community Grid where at the last count we were 180th by total credit. The advent of a GPU application has helped our position a bit and I think we are now 147th by Recent Active Credit. So, much to do, but at least the situation is getting a little better.

My Situation & Priorities

The former has been damaged by my, frankly, heroically selfless, pursuance of team goals to the detriment of my personal ambitions. Clearly this statement lacks internal coherence as my personal ambitions include the realisation of team goals! But nevertheless getting SETI back in the top 100 cost me an awful lot of DistRTGen credits and as a result I have sunk to 91st in the Pantheon of BOINC Gods by TC and to a truly alarming 198th by RAC.

 I want to stay top 100 so this will be what I shall prioritise over getting TSBT to top 100 for TC for WCG. The rest of you may increase your WCG contribution as you see fit! 

Clicking hell!

The only downside of being Admin in Chief and head bottle-washer for TSBT is the Spambots and the 2-300 bogus forum accounts they create every day.  With account names like xxlkvdilss and claiming to be from exotic places like obscure Polynesian kingdoms but with links to Russian porn sites or sites selling virility medication or Gucci handbags (both, no doubt, fake) they manifestly have nothing to do with Boinc.

Now if I was seriously obsessional I'd set aside 20 minutes each day to delete all the accounts , more than 48 hours old, where there hadn't been a confirmatory email generated by a human following my instructions. But I'm not obsessional. In fact on the Human Obsessionality Spectrum I'm more at the disorganised slob end and so I tend to let the bogus accounts build up. After a few days I can't face the back-log and stop checking. And so after a couple of months I can end up with 22,000 bogus accounts! Yikes!

This is exactly the situation I found myself in just over a week ago. An hour per night of clicking away frantically has let me whittle in down to just under 15,000 bogus accounts. Possibly there might have been a few genuine accounts deleted along the way. If one of them was yours please forgive me &; post a comment below to let me know.

Who wants to be a Billionaire? I am!

Woohoo!
Earlier today I became only the second person in the team, the ninth in the UK and the 83rd in the world to manage this feat.
I'll ease off the credit whoring now and concentrate on getting SETI into the top 100.
Congrats to Janos for winning the grand competition.

A campaign & an upgrade.

After a period of relative apathy I finally resolved to do something about the smattering of projects, mainly wee ones, where TSBT has drifted out of the top 100. A bit of concerted action has sorted most of the smaller projects but also set Rosetta and SETI back on track. The full tale is here if you want to relive the excitement here.

In order to do my bit to help this drive I thought my NVidia cards could be freed up if I got a top end HD7970 GPU to churn out DistRTGen units to offset the low return SETI ones. Once seTi is safe I can then do 2.5 million per day for DisTRGen.

That's my excuse anyway.

The new site and URL has gone pretty much uncommented on. Better than a storm of protest. Probably. It took a while for google to realise we'ed moved but put TSBT into Google and we are usually on the first page of results, whereas Bing has us somewhere on page 47, if we are lucky.

Website Moved To Blogger

I did it and I think it worked. Both TSBT.co.uk and the scottishboincteam.co.uk point towards blogger. All the links work as far as I can tell. The translator gadget is there to translate it into any language you can name except, sadly enough, Scottish Gaelic.

We have adverts now but they are padding out the sidebars rather cropping up in the thick of the action. They add a splash of colour and hopefully will be of enough interest to people that I can cover at least some of my hosting costs thru clickthrus. If you click on an advert I get a pittance. 

Anyway i hope you approve of the changes: you can comment directly here, use the forum or use twitter.

New TSBT Homepage ?

If you've logged in recently it should be fairly obvious that I've decided to merge the TSbT Homepage & my blog. This seems like a good idea to me. But your views, on the principle, content or colour scheme would be much appreciated. The forum would of course still stand alone. Feed back here or on the forum much apprechiated.

Is that the time?

It's been for ever since my last post. I did write a couple of banal paragraphs on the blogger App for iPhone but neither uploaded. So here goes again.

Team News
As predicted we drifted down the league table in the absence of the Welsh Wizard. But not that far really. We seem to have stopped at 29th which from 95,000+ competitors is respectable. The worst case scenario would have us 33rd by the end of this year. But a few new members, or returning old ones, would save us a drop.

The forum has been quiet but we do get the odd new member sifted at great expense in terms of time & tedium from 300 plus bogus members each day.

Of the many new members the most prolific is Janos who has gone from Zero to nearly 80 million in less than 4 months! Awesome.

Personal Boasting
I made top 100 and last time I checked I was 85th overall. Which is nice.

And I've done it despite no major new hardware acquisitions. Not a single GPU have I acquired since the ones mentioned last summer. I think my hardware addiction is at an end. Or maybe it's just that I've achieved the top 100 ambition and going for, say, top 10 would require such a ridiculous effort & expense that there's no scope for anything apart from resting on my laurels. I'm only running 4 machines in the basement and for the first time since we built it spring has sprung (sort of) without it being hellish hot by April.