Why cant I cut or copy from paint and paste here?
No, that's not the question.
I'm on the shifts page.
The names to the left appear really random and multi-national. Are they randomly generated to help identify the shift?
Shifts appear to be around 45 minutes so I guess that if you're mining for more than that, you're 'in' for that shift.
The 'your diff' column says 60/63 but I'm mining at diff 80.
What's the 'inv diff'. It's either 0 or 80 as I read it. Why the difference?
Why to the right is the PPS%? It's either 0 or if I scroll down it jumps to 19 or so%. Why does this matter.
If you want to make mountains out of molehills I can help.
To expand on the reply already given
The characters to the left of the shift name are a base 32 encoding of (the number of seconds since 2-Jan-2014) / 16
The name on the right is an incrementing a-z name for each consecutive shift.
The "Your Diff" is the total share Difficulty you submitted in that shift
The "Inv Diff" is the total rejected share Difficulty you submitted in that shift
The PPS% is how much each share has been rewarded compared to 100% PPS
Shifts above the red line
may be rewarded again (they are expected, on average, when pool luck is 100%, to be rewarded 5 times)
Shifts below the red line will not be rewarded again and their final PPS% value won't increase.
The
BTC marker shows each block found and thus the PPS% will change (go up) at that point, reading down the page.
When a difficulty change occurs, you will notice that the shift PPS% is also affected.
Shifts (as of recently) also end on the network block before a difficulty change.
tl;dr of the shift name follows:
The shift 'code' makes for a small but readable code that (as you may notice) increases with each shift
However, the first 5 characters are not guaranteed to be unique, since more than one shift could start/end within 16 seconds, so I added a single character 'a' to 'z' on the end, since it's not possible to have 26 shifts end in 16 seconds.
Thus I had a small and simple to read (currently 5+1 character) code rather than a long number
Then I had the idea of instead using a name for each letter since it was more interesting
You will notice that the a-z character added on the end is always sequential, so for any sequence of 26 shifts, that's unique, so it's easy to identify a shift by name (e.g. kosaki) without having to remember the full 5 character code and not confuse which one, if you refer to the approximate time also. A shift a-z name can usually only occur at most twice a day.