EOC Folding @ Home - Stats News & Updates

Okay, after fidgeting around with the code I think I have a workable solution up for now. Above the production graph for both team & individual there are the choices for Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly. Just click on the link and the chart will reload with the appropriate one. If you have JavaScript disabled then it should still display the Daily graph. On the Monthly table, the dates are month.year instead of the usual month.day format.

I've tested this in Firefox & IE and didn't come across any issues. It is just basic JavaScript (no AJAX involved). If for some reason something weird happens for you, please let me know and I can look into it.

I also moved the CSS to a separate file instead of having it inline on each page. Just trying to save a little bandwidth and have things load faster. It's not much but every little bit helps.

I made a few changes this morning, hopefully everyone will like them. Shoot me an email with a thumbs up or down, or any other suggestions!

• First, I modified most of the graphs to only show 7 data spaces into the future instead of the previous 14. This allowed 7 more historical points in each graph.
  
• Second, I added a weekly production graphs that shows a little over 8 months production (based on weekly totals).
  
• Third, I extended the tables below the graphs by a few rows. Now you can see production back a whole year based on the monthly totals. I'm not too sure about this change, it kind of makes the page seem cluttered to me.
  

That's it for now. In the future I want to modify the code so there is only one graph spot, maybe try and use AJAX so the user can switch between hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly totals. I just realized I have over FIVE years worth of stats for some of these teams! Now I just need to work in the archived data somehow so people can see how things have grown over the years.

Sadly the issue that started with next door has grown into something I would of never expected in a million years. I received my "open records request" (aka email messages from the Public Infrastructure Department) and discovered some disturbing bits of info. If people thought the Chuck Rosenthal scandal was bad, they ain't seen nothing yet. Not only did I find really bad things, my "request" I can tell is very incomplete,they did not send me all the emails I requested... oops. I just made another info request with the county commissioners office tied to some communication at the HCPID. We'll have to see if they fulfill it, or if the emails "don't exist" there (even though I know they do). I wish I could tell you guys more, but I really shouldn't until we get to talk to a lawyer. Who knows, this might make national news since it involves at least three different county departments with people at the highest levels.

I've been discriminated against, lied to, and ignored. Unfortunately the county left a paper trail that a blind illiterate person could follow. As the saying goes, payback is hell...

On a similar note, I finally remembered to send a request for the entire property appraisal data for Harris County. This kind of ties into the above, the appraisal district is somewhat (very) incompetent too. We are only talking about 1.4 million pieces of property with a little over a million buildings in the county. Sadly, that amount of data is peanuts compared to what I typically work with. You guys know how I *love* to generate statistics and make graphs and such. I figure why not offer a free website for home & business owners to gather solid data they can use to protest their property taxes with. Right now I am finding so much inconsistent and incorrect data it's not even funny. If if was my job to manage this data and my boss saw how bad it was I would be fired in a heart beat. I guess that is government bureaucracy for you...

So, to that end I'm sorry I haven't had time to work on the folding stats. Maybe when all this blows over I can once again return to my regular activities. Until then... Boom Baby!

Just trying to keep some constant updates so you guys don't worry about me. *grin*

First up, there was some weird Russian search engine that was indexing all the pages using the non-standard sorting options. I edited the relevant links to have "nofollow" tags, but I also had to block that search engine because of the load it was creating. Guess I should be a little more vigilant in using nofollow tags for pages that don't really need to be indexed.

Second up, you might have noticed I removed part of the post below. I want to thank everyone that emailed me with help and suggestions. Sadly, while so many county and state agencies say they want to help, and even though they make the rules & regulations, they have no authority to enforce what they do! It kind of boggles the mind why we (taxpayers) pay their salaries yet they don't actually "do" anything. In essence they are like the BBB, except the BBB doesn't hide the fact that they don't have any real authority. I've been writing letters and sending emails in the evenings, I'm still not going to let up on the matter.

Third, one of these days I'll be upgrading the server to MySQL 5.1, but to play it safe I want to do a full export/import of the data. I'm sure the stats will be down for several hours while this takes place. I'll try to do it in the early AM when traffic is at its lowest.

That's about it for now. I've just been swamped with product reviews for EOC and everything else under the sun...

Man, I had a long post typed out but when I went to click submit the session timed out and it didn't save! Argh! So here I go again...

I've been meaning to post an update for well... the past few months, but somehow I always seem to get sidetracked.

First, I upgraded the server a couple weeks ago (I think it was). I added an additional 16GB of RAM (for a total of 24GB), and two more hard drives to split off some of the databases. Believe it or not, the server will use around 6GB-9GB of RAM just during non-peak hours! There's a fair amount that is used for caching, but also depending on the load all the Apache processes eat up RAM too. I think 24GB should be more than adequate for quite some time.

In case you are wondering what the specs for the server are, here's a short list, it's a Dell PowerEdge 2970.

• 2 x 2.0GHz AMD Opteron Quad Core Processors (Barcelona)
  
• 24GB of RAM (4 x 4GB & 4 x 2GB)
  
• 2 x 146GB 2.5" 10K RPM SAS HDs (RAID-1) - Static Content
  
• 2 x 73GB 2.5" 15K RPM SAS HDs (RAID-1) - DB Disk 1
  
• 2 x 73GB 2.5" 15K RPM SAS HDs (RAID-1) - DB Disk 2
  

I think the next upgrade will be for some faster AMD Shanghai processors. But that is a long time down the road (hopefully).

Second, I was hoping to have the new version of the stats online before the end of 2008, but that didn't happen. Right now things are really chaotic around here so they are kind of put on hold until things calm down and I get some free time.

Hey Guys,

Sorry for not giving an update in a while. I have just been crazy busy lately with anything and everything imaginable.

Things have pretty much returned to normal since the hurricane. Hard to believe it has been two months since it hit. We were without power for exactly two weeks (almost to the hour)! But thankfully nobody got hurt and everything that got damaged is replaceable. I've been wanting to post some pictures but just haven't had the time. Today I'm trying to rush and get as much done as possible before I head out of town for a couple days (on business).

XML UPDATE: The XML feeds no longer require a special URL, so anyone is free to use them. PLEASE read the info on the XML page as I have updated it. The old XML links will still continue to work, so no worries if you already have an app using them.

I would really like to include some more interactive graphs in the next folding stats version. If anyone has any info on good charting packages that support PHP, please let me know! Specifically I'm looking for something that will work kind of like the Google / Yahoo finance charts where you can scale out the time line dynamically.

Finally, one last heads up... I'll probably be changing the color ranges again. With the huge jump in points from GPU2 clients, a person could go red just from a single high performance video card! I don't know the scale yet, I like to crunch the overall averages and get a good distribution.

P.S. I just changed the processing script to process the top 6,000 teams (was 3,000). I'm kind of curious to see how many are active in that group.

I'm not sure how many of you know that I live in Houston. Anyhow, we survived the hurricane, but there is no power. It is pretty bad in this area, LOTS of downed trees, broken power lines, and just general devastation. I'm pretty sure the edge of the eye passed through where we live. Thankfully it looked like everone in this area pulled through with no homes having any serious damage.

I've hopped online a couple times briefly by powering my DSL modem via a UPS and using my notebook. I've gotten several emails from people, but I'm really trying to conserve power as they say it could be a couple weeks before we get power back... Realistically I'm hoping maybe more like a few days in this area but you never know. Either way, I'm NOT ignoring you guys, but it might be a while before I reply back to your emails. There's a lot of clean-up to do here and I'm sure it will be a while before things return back to normal.

Congrats! If you are reading this then it means you are accessing the stats from the new server. I'm going to continue to run the stats on the old server for a few more days just to make sure everyone's DNS has switched over and to continue to compare stats. So far everything looks good though.

I still need to fix some of the graphs & sig images to accommodate the point totals for some of the bigger teams, but that's just a minor thing.

One more thing I just noticed... Team 0 reached so many points that it reached the max field size. I just altered the table so by the next update the numbers should go back to normal. I might manually edit some of the historical numbers since I have the raw files and it's only one team.

Okay, it's been a while since the rest of the EOC site has been on the new server and everything has been running smooth. I really need to cancel my old server because for the past couple months I've been paying for two services!

Today I'm planning on moving the folding stats over to the new server after the 3pm update. I'm going to have to close off access to the stats to do a proper export. If all goes well I'll have the stats imported and running on the new server by the 6pm update. Then it's just a simple DNS change and letting things propagate.

The stats will still be the same as they are currently, no big changes on the user interface / front end. The back-end I had to make some changes for proper support of the newer MySQL that we are running. Also, I am using the multi-threaded code for processing teams so everything should complete much faster. After the changeover to the new server I need to tweak a couple graphs / sig image things because of how some teams have reached higher point counts.

As for the new v3 of the folding stats... maybe by the end of this month? You know the saying... time flies when you are having fun...

I don't know how many of you use FahMon, I know I do! It's a great little program that monitors your folding progress on local and/or remote machines.

Anyhow, this is the email I got from Mitsimonsta of team OCAU and I thought I would pass it along:

We are trying to scrape together some cash for Uncle Fungus to put some big time development into FahMon. I was chatting to him earlier on MSN and he told me that he is going to basically re-write the core monitoring code which is about 70% of the code, and is what he inherited when he took over the project.

If you use the program and really like it, you might want to consider throwing a few bucks his way for all the hard work, there is a PayPal & Google Checkout link on his site. Same goes for any FAH program that you guys might use. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to keep these 3rd party projects going and supported.

On another note, I've had to side-line working on the new FAH stats these past couple weeks. Long story short, after the big power outage at my hosting facility and the ongoing issues they had/have, I decided it is time to move to another provider. I found my old ISP here in town offers colo in the Level 3 facility not too far from my office so that worked out perfect! I've been prepping the server getting all the sites mirrored over, all the services configured and running, and of course all the custom bits of code working. The day has finally arrived for me to take it to the datacenter and I'm as excited as a kid on Christmas eve! The stats will probably be the last thing to move over, I'm going to switch one site at a time and make sure everything is kosher. Just taking it slow to make sure nothing gets messed up or left behind in the transfer.