Onward & Upward.

Triumph #1
Since the last post I've risen to the giddy height of 107th by Total Credit. Moving at the alarming speed of 38th by RAC I should be top 100 by the end of October. Which will be quite good.

Triumph #2
Is that these gains have been achieved with no new upgrades!
Once I've made top 100 I'll downgrade a little. At present I'm managing just over 2 million per day. Two thirds of this would be more than enough to keep  me in or about the top 100.

I'd like to have the basement a bit emptier, a lot cooler and reduce the lecky bill and carbon footprint substantially. Moving beefier GPUs upstairs and selling outmoded CPUs will make the farm more efficient and raise enough dosh to allow for a third i7 machine downstairs. If they were the only 3 PCs in the basement the place would be much more habitable the costs would be less and my CPU capacity would be at least preserved. My plan is to spend nothing new on crunching hardware over the next year.

All Right!!!

Woohoo!!!

I'm now, according to Boincstats, 126th overall [Mental but there it is!]

More Glory Hunting

Now I got a GTX 590 : The most powerful NVidia card on the planet! Until next week or so. 

But it crunches out about 890K credits for Primegrid per day which with the rest of the farm should be enough to net me an average of 2 million per day.

It and the 580, along with one of the bigger ATI cards (I forget the one you lose track) moving, thus retiring a rig with minimal CPU crunching capacity,  will altogether allow me to retire no less than 5 GTX 260s which are being redistributed, for a nominal fee to any member of the team interested.

I'm therefore up to 138th by Total Credit and  an utterly ridiculous 63rd by RAC.  Top 100 by Xmas is looking likely.

And shedding 5 GTX 260s in exchange for a 580 and a 590 (with a PC totally retired) with make the Boinc Basement a tidier, quieter more efficient and possibly cooler place than it was.

So, I lied. And just as well!

Okay, so I didn't stick to the PSU only pledge. Somehow [And I make no apology for it - surely the ease of online shopping combined with escalating alcohol consumption in the western world must be one of the few viable prospects for an end to the current global economic crisis!] I found myself acquiring a GTX 580 Nvidia card which raised my Primegrid output to such levels that I'm now 140th in the world by total overall boinc credit and 74th by RAC.

Top 100 status is now a realistic possibility: I've got 369 million and the guy currently in 100th has 493 million.

Leaving aside personal glory, the interests of TSBT have demanded that I up my game as Merlyn has ceased crunching. Grateful though we are to the Welsh Wizard for his contribution to the team his sudden and unexplained quiting of the field has left us likely to drift down the table, though not disasterously.

As well as my own upgrading efforts the return of past Boincers to action armed with new GPU cards offers hope for our future: Robert McLennam & darkmast2 we need more like you. We also need more real Boincers, ordinary computer users donating their spare cycles for science & humanity. If we can get just 1 or 2 percent of the millions of Scottish computers available tp Boinc then it will totally eclipse the efforts of over equipped nutters like me! I'm not quite sure how to reach them however. Ideas please ..

Where am I?

Hurrah! I'm 180th in the individual total credit rankings as determined by Boincstats.
This is my highest ever and made possible only by replacing the blown PSUs on two of the basement crunchers.
Apart from replacing further blown PSUs, I'll not be upgrading/repairing the farm beyond what is required to make sure that everyone in the household has a PC that does what they need it to do..

Top 200 again.

Hurrah! I'm back at 200 in the world with a personal high a real possibility for the spring/early summer. I must replace the PSU in my dual 260 GTX i7 which stops & restarts every 15 min, no blue screen or anything just stop and start again, so something fundamental seems likely. It's not overheating either as leaving the basement door open & thereby dropping the ambient temp by 15 Celsius doesn't improve things at all.

TSBT aren't doing too badly either. Our graceful retreat from our high of  15th back down to 25th seems to have bottomed out and we are heading back up a few places, all being well.

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.