Now, where was I?

Twelve years have passed & TSBT has risen and soared supreme, for a while at least, only to decline somewhat. A consequence of that decline, greatly aided by the appalling Online Safety Act, has been the demise of our splendid, all singing, all dancing, forum.  While it worked there was no need to update this blog. But it works no more so here I am, back again, trying to stop the team sinking into total interweb silence. 

First I need to work out how to redirect our domains to this humble blog.

Oh, just in case you are wondering, I am indeed the Cruncher previously known as Mega, but I identify as the much more couthy Garioch Loon these days. Megacruncher was just too bombastic a moniker for an old guy with, on a good day, 3 working machines, and I don’t want to trigger rage reactions on Formula BOINC now that Timbo has allowed me back in.

The Bitcoin Utopia Revolution

Eeeck!
A game changer!
Just as the advent of GPU crunching a few years back challenged us to adapt or vanish so too has the sudden take off of  Bitcoin Utopia forced us to decide whether to cry foul to or join in the uses/abuses of the credit system by a new project.
Fortunately Alez and scole250 have been aggressive  enough users of dedicated hardware to keep TSBT in contention. Despite having an AMD 6 core board which has somehow managed to crunch  11 million credits in 2 days I have dropped from 67th to 89th in about a week!
Game on!
Let's adapt!

New Glories & a Glorious New Homepage.

Despite no major crunch-ware purchases in the last year, I have by deploying my resources wisely, mainly pointing them at Collatz with optimized settings (thanks Alez!),  got my RAC up to nearly 3.8Million  [45th in the world] and my total credit past 2 billion [74th in the world by this measure].

This leaves me UK #4, and rising, and Team #1!  I've finally prised the TSBT crown from the long cold dead fingers of Merlyn. This had to be done but wasn't an unqualified feel-good triumph. 

Enough of my achievements, much more importantly PinkPenguin and Janos have updated the forums so that they look splendid and have the functionality that makes the forum index page fit to be the TSBT  home page.  So that is what it will become. I've pointed tsbt.co.uk and thescottishboincteam.co.uk domains towards the forum.

This humble blog will continue, but probably won't be updated any more frequently.

Upgrade Successful!

The forum is back up & is now phpBB3.

The reversion to a bog-standard skin makes it look rather bland but the developmental brakes are off & we'll soon get it looking and working much better.

And deleting the bogus accounts is much easier than before.

Rejoice!

Another Outage & Hopefully Another Upgrade

Finally, I got my hosting package updated. So I should be able to upgrade to phpBB3.

I don't want to do this on a school night. Accordingly, I'll take the forum off-line at 11:30 BST on Friday 11th October. I'll make the necessary back-ups and hopefully effect a hassle free upgrade over the next couple of hours. This blog and the stats will remain available. [Probably, unless some unforeseen disaster coincides.] 

Forum back but not upgraded.

Friday's outage was all for nothing. Easyspace tried to upgrade the webspace but, for reasons which they have yet to explain properly, failed. Maybe next time!

FORUM SHUTTING DOWN FOR MAINTAINANCE

the server on which our forum is hosted is ancient and stopping us from upgrading from phpBB 2. EasySpace have agreed to move it to a more modern platform for free but unfortunately this means the forum will be off-line for a day.

I'll shut it down a Midnight tonight so that I can make a back-up.

I'm hoping it will be back up sometime tomorrow.

The stats still work and you can post stuff here if you want to.

Absent Friends, Returning Friends & a Forum "issue"

The absent friend is of course Merlyn who's life & achievements are being celebrated by a series of team  challenges on Boincstats. Details of these and all the other challenges can be found in this bit of the forum.

Returning friends are Jockmacmad & Buster Gunn, both one time TSBT Total Credit leaders who have been away for a while but are back crunching and have posted on the forum again. A big Woo Hoo for the prodigal lambs!

Yes, I confess I broke the forum!

Or at least the account formation bit of it. While this means that I don't run the risk of RSI to keep the bogus accounts pruned it means that bona fide newbies can't sign up. I've asked some of the more computerate guys to see if they can sort it & I'm sure they will eventually.

 

For now, if you want an forum account email me using mail4tsbtAT_SYMBOL_HEREgmail.com and I'll create one manually for you. All I need to know is your email address, your desired username and password. 

Clicking hell!

"Only" 35,000 bogus accounts now! I'm winning but at the cost of a potentially crippling RSI!

More Drudgery

Another 30 minutes of clicking and I've got the number of bogus account below 38,000!

Sheer Drudgery & a Challenge.

By dint of lots of clicking ( on avererage one click deletes 10 bogus accounts) I've got us down to 38500 duff accounts!

If you want to support TSBT in a challenge try this one for SAT@Home It's ongoing and we are languishing a little.

July Already!

Michty that's June gone without a post.
Anyhow, we didn't exactly shine in the Pentathon but, it's the taking part that counts, or so I keep telling myself.

Anyway my first priority for the summer is to try and expand this site and specifically to add a FAQ/howto page.  My second priority is to prune the 45,000+ bogus accounts on the forum, growing at up to 900 per day!

A Pentathlon & a mystery solved (Maybe).

It's the annual SETI Germany Boinc Pentathalon and we are struggling to make an impact. So far we are the lowliest of the 28 teams with points which is better than being one of the 8 pointless teams. All the same it's a reminder that we are a rather small team punching above our weight by using a disproportionate number of top end GPUs to crunch some of the more generous projects.

in particular we are indebted to Merlyn who was once the top cruncher in the world by RAC and who, even though he suddenly stopped crunching in April 2011 is still #52 by total credit and accounts for over a quarter of our credit.

I think I may have solved the mystery of why he stopped. http://www.ecurie-cymraeg.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?tid=278&page=2 The forename & surname are the same, the part of the UK is right, Merlyn was into motorsports, and most conclusively Merlyn stopped crunching the same week that this poor fellow stopped everything.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Merlyn/Steve Sandles.

Tedium & Triumph.

The tedium remains the deleting of the bogus forum accounts which slow down the forum database. About 450 are being set up daily. 8-0

FFS why? If any of us want to buy some dodgy viagra or to webcam with a Nude Russian Teen then surely we'll do it with the site of our choice without being distracted from matters Boinc by the spam these arseholes want to post!

Anyhoo dealing with the bogus accounts requires about 4 minutes on gmail each day to check that they aren't real, then another 10 min or so using the mass delete option in phpBB2.0 to delete them. This would be fine if my circumstances and my psychological make-up allowed for such regularity & discipline. As it is I just let the number of bogus accounts exceed 20,000. Some major deleting has trimmed this back to 17,043 and 20 min per day over the next week might get the figures back to 3 digits. Unless I can't be bothered!

The triumph is our continuing out crunching of  UBT. We are 2-4 years from regaining our UK #1 slot but as thing stand it will happen sooner or later!

FightMalaria@Home chosen as team project.

After careful deliberation, and with all due respects and and apologies to the many, almost as, worthy alternatives this anti-malaria project (please tell me you didn't need that bit explained to you) has been chosen as the first Official TSBT Project. Further details in this thread .

A big start to 2013!

Look at this graph and rejoice! 

That's what happens when several members independently rediscovered the bountiful pleasures of DistRTGen. So many credits it feels like cheating. We are even gaining on UBT (very slowly - they were 5,085 million ahead of us at the beginning of the week but we've narrowed the gap to 5,080 million!). I've switched most of my apparatus onto the project which might let me pass Merlyn this year and briefly be team number one before Janos tramples me underfoot on his way to the top.

From now on I'll do mainly DistRTGen with maybe 25% for Primegrid & enough SETI & Einstein to keep them afloat in the Top 100. WCG I'm afraid I'll pretty much abandon. Getting it top 100 is realistically just going to cost too much. 

And the forums have suddenly got lively again. Happy New Year!

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.