Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: New mining program for Slush's pool
by
VishwaJay
on 16/04/2013, 10:35:47 UTC
My Review
I will say this... I've been running it for about 10 hours.

The Upside
Hash rate increased to 33 MH/s ... not sure what that's about, but hey, it's 7 MH/s faster than before, so I'm going with it. Zero stales this time, too. Not sure if that's the pool or the miner, but it's pretty cool.

Pulls the information from slush's pool flawlessly. Confirmed with all of the exchanges, no errors. Confirmed with slush's pool, no errors, and consistently faster than my browser. Yay!

I'm actually very impressed with this little app.

The Downside
I'm not sure why, but poclbm fails to terminate with the application when I click the "close" box. In fact, it ran in the background for almost 4 hours, slowing down my hash rate on another miner and not reporting any shares to slush the whole time. I wouldn't have noticed, except that my fan was still going when I shut down the other one to switch and fired up your program again. This was really the only bugfix issue I noticed. Great job!

I have to run it as an administrator, for some really strange reason that I can't fathom, or it doesn't get access to my old laptop's GPU. This might not be wise, but setting the shortcut to require admin privileges might actually be a good short-term solution.

The Wishlist
This is my wishlist (not that joshua70448 has to conform... I can still dream!) (and the list is in no particular order):
  • A fix for the miniscule amounts I sometimes pull... rather than 1 satoshi displaying as 1.000E-08 BTC, having it display as 0.00000001 BTC. This might simply need to be a math-to-text conversion for the purposes of display, though I'm not sure if something like that is possible.
  • An image of Scarlett Johansson lying nude on the... wait, no, that's just me. Never mind.
  • Difficulty of hashes submitted, with an independent points calculator based on slush's disclosed calculations (just because I hate relying on web sites which might mis-report at any given moment because of heavy usage or hack attacks, etc., and it's good to have something independent to check with). And if it varies by a satoshi or two, I'm pretty sure nobody will care much... but significant differences should trigger a highlight on the tab.
  • Data from the "statistics" page: I would like a running log of as much of the data as I want to store (i.e., "lines of log to store" settable to 0 (off) and from 1b to 16mb), pulled on a regular basis from the pool's website. I believe this is really about as complex as pulling the information from the user page, though the link with the JSON information at the bottom might warrant its own tab. No math needs to be done on these numbers, just a display-and-log mechanism. If the log is updated and information corrected, highlighting would be awesome.
  • If we have the API key, why is there a need to manually pull the worker passwords? Auto-populating the passwords from the web page would be awesome, if that's even possible (I don't know anything about slush's API, so this very well might not even be possible or practical).
  • A selector which allows data pulled from multiple exchanges, with an "average" price per share (and optionally, from a single exchange).
  • A selector which allows multiple currencies to be pulled.
  • A way to completely turn off the financials... mainly because I'm not interested in the minute (as in: tiny) gains or losses of the exchange rates while I mine. This one might just be me, but I really don't care about the exchange rate at the moment.
  • An image of Scarlett Johansson, standing nude... woops, never mind, that's not a good feature for everyone.
  • An option to donate a small portion of my proceeds to the developer's BTC or NMC fund, with optons for flat-rate amount per time period AND/OR percentage of each payout from slush. I think this is fair, so long as it defaults to being "off" and isn't pumped or hyped any more than the link on the "about" window, etc. (some of us are less concerned about the money and reminders tend to be annoying)
  • The ability to select a miner other than poclbm (not because I necessarily want to, but experimentation and a snazzy interface like the one for poclbm would be nice... different miners seem to work better with specific pieces of hardware than others... not sure if there's a pattern to this or not).
  • The ability to input a command to the command line, such as C:\cgminer\cgminer -w32 -I15 so that an alternate miner can be used, if a new one happens to come out. This could be complicated, though, since it would necessarily have to reject the URL and user/password stuff... just an idea.
  • A comprehensive help file, for those who aren't necessarily the most literate on Bitcoin, your software, etc.
  • Tooltips! The ones that are there during the non-mining would be helpful so that we can research and figure out what we want to do during mining, stop, drop in the extra flags or check/uncheck a box, and get back to mining before anyone notices that it's even down. As mining gets faster and more complex, this could actually become a bigger issue.
  • Log export function, copy-to-clipboard, save-to-text-file, send-report-to-developer, etc., just some button so that we don't have to copypasta by hand.
  • Adjustable log verbosity (export is full verbosity, but we might not want everything in the display).
  • Some kind of "easter egg"/undocumented fun to discover.
  • An image of Scarlett Johansson... geez, I really have to let that go.
  • An option to set/change worker difficulty.

I'm kind of an asshole to people (if you haven't read some of my other posts on the other threads). But truth be told, I find very little wrong with this software, from a user perspective. The only issues I see are that this community tends to want to look at the code, so open sourcing might be good for marketing purposes here.

And I'll pass it through my rootkit detectors and multiple virus checkers, really torture-test stuff later on (just to see if there are any compatibility issues with any virus checkers out there, since Chrome apparently labels one of the miners as malware, even though it's clearly not), but for now I'm really liking what I see. I reiterate: great job, joshua70448!