Happy 2008

Happy New Year everyone.

Resolutions for 2008

1. Relegate personal ambitions to 2nd place to help get all TSBT teams to 100th place or higher.
2. Get Rosetta, WCG, Seti, & Cosmology to 1,000,000 credits each - that'll be 8 million plus projects.
3. Reach 10,000,000 overall & stay in the top 500.
4. Reduce my home PC farm from 10 to 9 machines (including 2 laptops) - upgrades over proliferation.
5. Sell all the sellable PC bits on e-bay. Recycle everything else.
6. Lose 2 stones, exercise lots, drink little & go to bed before midnight every night. Aye, right!

Top 100 Campaign

Buster and Nightlord (and in a smaller way, lots of others) have transformed WCG adding an extra 10K per day and moving us from 235th up to 223rd place in a few days. Rosetta is making steady but unspectacular progress with an RAC that would make us 66th and there are immediate prospects of Total Credit gains in the next week. Lots of new members seem to be flocking to join us.

Progress Update

Last update 00:45 16th December 2007
This update 00:30 6th January 2008
Total Active Members 322 (+23)
Recent Active Members 157 (+17)
Total Credit 49,813,936(+2,985,054=136K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (+2)

I'm Back!

I couldn't resist it.

So, 9 months on, how is it looking?

TSBT is healthy in the extreme. We've dropped a couple of places, but are higher in RAC ranking than at any time in the last 3 years at 58th.

Last update 23:20 14th March 2007
This update 00:45 16th December 2007
Total Active Members 299 (+66)
Recent Active Members 140 (+26)
Total Credit 46,828,882 (+21,146,566=77.5 K/day our current RAC is nearly twice that!)
Overall Boinc Place 75nd (-3)

On the personal crunching front I've almost totally rebuilt the Farm. I now have 2 E6600s and, even better, 3 Q6600s, all of which have allowed me to rise back into the world top 300 and up to UK 15th. As well as increasing raw power I was aiming to reduce the space taken up by PCs in my house and also the racket and heat they produce.

Nightlord, a former Scotland's Seti member, was good enough to rejoin the team and displace me from team #1. After lots of upgrades I finally got the top place back. In a rare synthesis of cowardice and altruism I plan to sacrifice pole position to him, by running, mainly Rosetta then largely WCG until both these project teams rejoin all our others in the top 100 of teams.

And to crown my happiness there is talk f some moe talented individuals taking over the website. Hurrah!

14 March 2007 Update & Finis.

The popular demand for this blog is pretty damn muted & the only comments I ever get are spam. Also I've been neglecting it - three months tut tut. To be honest there's no real need for this blog now that we've got the forum. Also I can't help but think that there are simply too many blogs in the world.

Anyhoo before I switch out the lights here is a final update.

Last update 23:31 12th December 2006
This update 23:20 14th March 2007
Total Active Members 233 (+18)
Recent Active Members 114 (+8)
Total Credit 25,682,316 (+4,873,434=53.0 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (-1)

All of which is pretty good really. Halting the slide at the low 70s is better than I anticipated a year ago when I predicted we might hit 80th as other Boinc teams, slower than us to switch from Seti, caught up.

As regards my own crunching the recent addition of a Conroe E6600 has pulled me into 491st overall and UK 33rd. Nae sae bad!

Anyway I'll be back if there is a clamour for my witterings. Otherwise farewell & thanks for reading (or not as the case may be)!

December 12th Update

Thought I'd update this for you loyal souls who keep logging on. Thanks for your interest.

Firstly team news. LHC is still AWOL but we should it back in the New Year. Overall the team is slowly but steadily growing and even moving gradually up the rankings, the membership is growing and we have a nice wee community on the forum. In numbers:

Last update 00:45 8th October 2006
This update 23:31 12th December 2006
Total Active Members 215 (+19)
Recent Active Members 106 (+8)
Total Credit 20,808,882 (+3,704,210 =56.1 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 71st (+2 & more to come)

On the home front my resolve not to tamper with the boinc farm crumbled. I read that the P4-805D was processing power/£ one of the best you could buy and fairly overclockable (it is!) so I bought one [for once PC World was doing a good deal] and what I thought was a suitable LGA775 MoBo. Turned out the MoBo wasn't dual processor compatible so I had to get another one that was. And then of course a 3.2 HT P4 for the board that I'd already bought. Sheesh!

So both my XPs are retired and I've started climbing the rankings again from a low of 540-something to 513 last time I checked. Whoop-dee-doo!

October Musings

Still Split

It's a wee bit frustrating that as soon as we changed our name two of our projects, who had always been reliable in this respectstopped exporting their updates for the benefits of the combined Boinc Statistics sites. As a result TSBT (as we insiders like to refer to The Scottish Boinc Team) is still missing 511K credits from Predictor and 83K from LHC.

That aside the name change has gone swimmingly although the following progress will look a bit sluggish because of the temporarily mislaid 593K.

Last update 01:50 10th September 2006
This update 00:45 8th October 2006
Total Active Members 196 (+1)
Recent Active Members 98 (+1)
Total Credit 17,104,672 (+649,060 =22.4 K/day )
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (-1 but would be +1 without the lost credits)

In fact we are tucking away about 43K per day which for the first time in a long time is significantly more than our rivals "Scotland". Hurrah.

Farm Expansion

Having deretired my XP 3000 I acquired a Mobile XP on ebay to let me make use of an old socket A board and other bits & pieces I have. As a result of this and the revaluing of the BBC trickles I'm managing to hover about 530th in boinc overall. It's tempting to consider how little extra it would take to make me a top 500 contender again. Hmmm... Conroe or cheaper AMD?

Nothing to do with Boinc

Last sunday I saw a red squirrel. This made me happy. Earlier in the day some arsehole broke into my car. This didn't. Funny that.

Hello The Scottish Boinc Team

Well we did it. All but one team - QMC -has been renamed. & BoincStats has got all but 600K of the credit gathered together under the new name. Nobody has left in protest.
So that's a good result so far. Hurrah!

Goodbye Scotland's Seti

The poll closes in about 22 hrs (I really should be asleep) and with no votes so far for the old name it seems sure that tomorrow we will be called something else - almost certainly The Scottish Boinc Team.

Still it feels like evolution not revolution. After all "only" 9 of our 16 millions have been crunched for Seti. We need to acknowledge that other 7 million in the name.

The switch over might be messy so I will note the eve of change stats:

Last update 00:05 29th August 2006
This update 01:50 10th September 2006
Total Active Members 194 (+2)
Recent Active Members 97 (+12!!! all that emailing paid off)
Total Credit 16,455,612 ((+796,387 =72.4 K/day helped by a CPDN/BBC credit recalculation)
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (static but watch out hungarian dudes!)

Scotland's Seti isn't going, just changing and updating but I'll still miss the old name. I feel like a bride on the eve of her marriage - but I'll never find one at this time of night so why bother to think such disgusting thoughts?

Dearie Me is that the Date?

Where does the time go? A shameful seven weeks since I last updated my blog. In my defense I've not been idle.

There's been a fair bit of action on the forum: The name change campaign is in full swing with "The Scottish Boinc Team" currently leading "Scotland's Boinc" & nobody at all opting to keep "Scotland's Seti" which even as a proponent of change I think is a little sad.

I've made a few changes to the website although keeping up with the number of project teams (26 at the last count) to be detailed on the Statistics Page is the sort of challenge that I'm inclined to just avoid.

I've also extended the Boinc Farm by bringing back from retirement an old Athlon XP 3000+ which just needed a PSU & HD to make it useful again. This might slow my decline down the ranks for a little while until I replace everything with Conroes! This gives me 3 cased, & 4 caseless rigs in the main bit of the farm. Just ridiculous - especially in the recent heatwave.

According to Boincstats we lost a great heap of members but I think that this is an accounting artefact. In fact we've gained a few (Hello to Marcus & Dalyplanet) and some long retired members have started crunching again. Particularly welcome was the return after illness of Ian (Buster) Gunn whom I for one had assumed was gone for ever.

Here's how we're doing. Quite well really.

Last update 23:45 6th July 2006
This update 00:05 29th August 2006
Total Active Members 192 (not comparable, something funny on BoincStats)
Recent Active Members 85 (ditto)
Total Credit 15,659,225 ((+1,738,206 =32.7 K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 72nd (+1 and further gains likely)

Merger Off

After a promising start, when a fair head of enthusiasm for a merger built up, Scotland got cold feet: I think a wish to retain identity and autonomy lay behind it rather than the previous mistrust. So the merger is off and we've to work out how to grow on our own. At least we're all back home and our BBC CCE team is up to 35th in the world.
Now the question is what to call ourselves? "Scotland's Boinc" is the early favourite but I quite like the sound of "The Scottish Boinc Team"

Last update 21:00 24th June 2006
This update 23:45 6th July 2006
Total Active Members 206 (+1)
Recent Active Members 101 (static)
Total Credit 13,921,019 ((+507,670)=41.9K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (static, but World Wide Seti & DPRGI Team Italy are just ahead)

24th June Update - The Merger Begins?

Rowpie's been nagging me to update this so here goes.

Merger negotiations are starting in earnest with Scotland, with our opening gambit being 4 of us moving from the SS BBC CCE team to the Scotland one. This practical demonstration of the benefits of merger has been much better received than any earlier abstract discussion ever was. Maybe in a month or so we will have a single unified Scottish team, with nearly 15 Million credits in the bank and earning about 60,000 per day. If it could be done then we would be a top 50 contender in no time at all.

I can see a lot of emailing and forum posting being involved. So far there has been no serious opposition to the idea of a name change on the forum. The wider membership might be more conservative.

The current team position is

Last update 23:45 25 th May 2006
This update 21:00 24th June 2006
Total Active Members 205 (+5)
Recent Active Members 101 (-14) A bit worrying!
Total Credit 13,413,349 ((+742,581)=24.8K/day)
Overall Boinc Place 73rd (-2)

Obviously lending 172,ooo credits to another team doesn't help the accounts in the short-term!

On the personal crunching front I've set myself the following priorities (don't ask why I just have):
1.Concentrate on BBC CCE. I've got myself in 41st place overall for it and would hope I could maybe make the top 25.
2.Run LHC@Home for 50% of my capacity if work is available.
3. Run Einstein on my slower PCs until my TC for this matches my CPDN TC and the team breaks 1 million.
4.Then run SETI on the slower PCs to see if I can at least make it to the top 20,000.
Overall I'm holding steady at about 540th, which is still top 0.1%.