m0mchil's poclbm seems to have stopped??

[mintymark]

Or am I just suddenly unlucky?
My rig was working well and I generated 50 btc as follows:

20/3/11
26/3/11
28/3/11
02/4/11
03/4/11
10/4/11

Since then, nothing!!  The logfiles look exactly the same as before, with hash rates reported and numbers being checked.

The difficulty changed around 03/4/11 and possibly again around 10/4/11. Since then, the miner has been work exactly the same as before
with occasional restarts. The calculator says that there is a 5% chance of 28 days passing with no bitcoins, that
would be on 8/5/11, ok we are not there yet, but I am suspicious. I know the difficulty has increased, but even so.

Has anyone seen this before (miner not working)?  Or have I just hit an unlucky patch? :-(

I am running poclbm/201103.beta1

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[Grinder]

If 5% is in 10 days then you've just been lucky with the other blocks.

[mintymark]

Yes, maybe.

I decided to upgrade to the latest miner. Wow, it seems much faster.  255kH/sec to 280.

I did not do this previously as there seemed to be an issue present in beta1, but much much worse in beta3 (Not absolutely sure of this number as I only tried it for a couple of days.) where every now and then the whole machine would freeze.
The only solution was to press the reset button or ssh into the machine and reboot. For us ubuntu people, this is pretty traumatic. (Gasp!) with Beta1 this happened about once a week, with the more recent version  about 3 times a day.

We will see about beta 4.

[mintymark]

Well here I am 4 days latter and still nothing.
The miner says it its hashing away, and checking certain large numbers.
What could possibly go wrong?
So I had a few ideas, maybe the miner is repeatedly getting the same work block. In which case I could grep the log file and easily find whats happned as there would be the same number "checked" many times.
No, wasnt that.
Also the comparison number has gone down which I presume means the difficulty has gone up. Not welcome, but it means the miner is connected properly.
The GPU's are hot (not too hot) when the miner is running and not when its not.
So short of mining code which is a deliberate spoof or sends of promising results elsewhere (rather than to the bitcoin client) I think its not possible.
(And I do not believe that)
So I suppose I'll sit here until I have waited out my 95% probability of getting a block.
I know what the average rate of bitcoin generation is supposed to be, can someone tell me what the standard deviation or the variance is ?
Is it a guaussian distribution?

[Grinder]

http://mining.bitcoin.cz/stats/graphs/

You're not remotely close to really bad luck yet.