Back in 2000 I was working for Intel. I worked in a lab that had a lot of client computers powered up but doing nothing. Some coworkers turned me on to SETI@Home and we started a little game of running it on as many otherwise jobless computers as were running in our lab. At one point I had a line-up of six headless desktop computers each running an Intel P2 and Linux just to run the SETI@Home task. They were tucked under a desk and one of them served as a router for the other five to provide Internet access. I liked to jokingly think of that as my own personal “supercomputer”.

My interest in SETI@Home never waned. In the last eight years I’ve had several computers pass through my hands and I always installed SETI@Home sooner or later. My last laptop was a Dell P3 running Windows XP. Windows XP absolutely killed the performance of the laptop so I long delayed installing SETI@Home. Recently I began taking an online MS course at Colorado State University. That provided the impetus to buy a new laptop. I bought an HP Pavilion with an AMD Turion 64. Now that I’ve got a new laptop my interest in SETI@Home has flared up once again. I’ve installed SETI@Home on the new laptop and it is fast. I’ve also relegated the old Dell P3 to doing nothing but running the SETI@Home task in a quite corner of the house where the constant whirring of the CPU fan won’t drive my wife crazy.

Not stopping there, I began scouring the Internet for a Wordpress plugin to display my SETI@Home participation on my blog. In past searches I had found Jason Irwin’s SETI Stats plugin. It was an effective plugin except that it used a mobile device URL for the stats data source. That data source didn’t provide the depth of stats that I wanted to display on my blog. Using Jason’s plugin, I rewrote the source code to use a more robust data source and I included a sidebar widget. The rewritten plugin is now hosted at Wordpress.org.

After all that introduction, here are my SETI@Home stats:

• tiogaplanet
• Member since 26 May 2000
• Country: United States
• URL: http://www.trassare.com
• Total credit: 42,471
• RAC: 211.09
• Classic workunits: 7,453
• Classic CPU time: 81,802 hours
• S@H Status:

  online

• As of 4 Dec 2008 3:38:57 UTC

Supporting SETI@Home is an endless task and there are many other distributed processing projects out there. I encourage anyone with CPU time to spare to get involved in any of them. For those interested in combating disease there’s Folding@home which I’ve heard some folks argue is a much more “practical” project to spend CPU cycles on compared to SETI. Another distributed computing project that searches space is the Einstein@Home project. Unlike SETI, E@H is looking for spinning neutron stars also known as pulsars.

Obviously, my favorite is SETI@Home hosted by University of California, Berkeley. If you leave at least one computer constantly running with little to do I recommend installing any one of the above tasks to put your computer to good use on a distributed computing project that suits your interest.

From a Reuters article:

German biologists have discovered a new species of ant they believe is the oldest on the planet.

If it’s the oldest species on the planet then it isn’t new is it?!

George Carlin, one of my favorite performers, has died.  Read the AP obituary.

Immediately after posting my six-month review of the PSP-2000 I received a trackback from a site I had never heard of before (I am NOT going to post the site’s address.  If your curious send me a message and I’ll give you the address).  I thought it was pretty strange as there was no way someone could have read the post that soon after me posting it.  I took a look at the site the trackback came from and found that the site contained no original material at all.  The site contained nearly 10,000 uncategorized posts all linking to other sites and every page had a huge advertisement for a paid file download service. 

I decided I’d let that one go and not delete the comment but a few days later I received a very similar post from a different website (again, I’ll withhold the address).  This second site didn’t contain any overly intrusive advertising other than Google’s AdWords.  The site was once again nothing but a collection of excerpts to other blogs.

I Googled “wordpress site reposts” trying to find any reporting on this practice. My first item in the search results was for a plug-in called “rePost”.  Ah, so now I’m starting to understand.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame any author or plug-in, especially rePost.  What I began to realize is that with user-friendly publishing tools like Wordpress and its plug-in system it is now incredibly easy to set up a website that exists solely for the purpose of leveraging bloggers content to slap blatant affiliate network advertising in front of the viewer.

I’ve never understood what the logic is in this. These websites must work or they wouldn’t exist but who really cares to surf on over to a website that contains no original material and whose only intent is to reap the money skimmed from affiliate advertising networks and dubious subscription services? The money made can’t be that great nor can the traffic be that substantial.

This kind of comment spam is another way that spammers are getting around spam tools. These comments also devalue original content by implying through use of the trackback that some kind of positive relationship exists between the blogger with valuable original content and the site containing affiliate advertising or lame subscription services. I’ve now marked the comments from those sites as spam and removed them from the article.  I hope the other authors linked from these spam sites have done the same.