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.

This rewritten Wordpress plugin displays user stats compiled from the SETI@Home project site. You can display your stats with a widget or with a snippet of PHP code.

• Member name
• Join date
• URL (if applicable)
• Total credit
• Recent average credit
• SETI@Home Classic workunits
• SETI@Home Classic CPU time
• Team membership (if applicable)
• SETI@Home site status
• Time of last update

Download
You can download this plugin from Wordpress.org.

Installation
After unzipping the download file, upload the folder “setihome-stats” into your “wp-content/plugins” directory.

Login to the Wordpress Administration area, choose “Plugins” from the dashboard, find “SETI@Home Stats”, and click “Activate”.

Choose “Settings->SETI Options” from the main menu and enter your SETI@Home Account number and an interval period for refreshing locally cached stats.

You can also activate the SETI@Home Stats Widget using the sequence described above.

Usage
SETI@Home Stats uses a widget to display your stats on the sidebar.

You can display your stats anywhere on your blog using

get_seti_stats();


You can see the plugin at work on the sidebar of this blog.

Bugs
None that I know of. If you find any please let me know.

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?!

DigitizeThis.org has all of the features of the reCAPTCHA Challenge I’ve created here but by being a stand-alone site I’ll have much more flexibility to add features and maintain the site.

The reCAPTCHA Challenge and DigitizeThis.org do not share the same database so playing here won’t affect the scores in both places. I plan on eventually deleting all trace of reCAPTCHA Challenge and just having DigitizeThis.org be the only place to record scores for solved reCAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs have always annoyed me. They are hard to read and not as effective as using math problems to prevent spam. Then along came reCAPTCHA. The premise behind preventing spam and digitizing books at the same time impressed me. Now these little anti-spam tools are doing something useful!

From recaptcha.net:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

…

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

…

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

I immediately began wondering what it would take to turn reCAPTCHAs into a stand-alone application. Digitizing books is worth it right? So I threw together a little game where folks can play against each other for the highest score - kind of like an old-fashioned puzzle/arcade game without the poor quality beeps and bops.

I hope you enjoy it!

reCAPTCHA Challenge

New Golden Gray is based on William Pramana’s Golden Grey theme. Golden Gray was originally written for Alex King’s 2005 Wordpress theme competition. In the last few years Wordpress has undergone many changes and the coding requirements for themes has also changed. New Golden Gray is a rewrite of Golden Grey to meet those requirements and to exploit the new functionality of today’s Wordpress, version 2.6, while preserving the aesthetic quality of the original theme.

Features
New Golden Gray has been written to include:

• Support for widgets!
• Accessibility features: access keys and friendly text browser support.
• A 404 page.
• An archive page.
• Support for GaMerZ’ WP-Print plugin.
• Gravatars.

Screen shot

Download
Download New Golden Gray 1.8 (81K).
Download William Pramana’s original Golden Grey (29K).

Support
Use the comments section for all requests for support or to recommend improvements to NGG.

What’s Next

• Improved navigation bar.
• Improved support for mobile devices.

Known Issues

• If your blog contains more than about eight page links, they will not all fit in the navigation bar and they page layout will distort.
• Some CSS3 code is used in the style sheet which won’t validate against W3C’s current CSS validation.

I’ve been on an accessibility kick with my websites lately.  I’ve long supported the PSP with the Winksite plugin but today I decided to add activate the plugins for the other two game systems as well.  In the coming days, months I’ll be updating this site with accessibility controls to improve navigation and appearance on multiple browsers.

• [Internet Search] has been added as a feature under [Network].
• You can now change viewing speed during video playback. Use this feature if you want to watch a video quickly, or if you want to slow down playback and listen to the dialogue carefully.

So that’s it! Or at least that is what is reported during the firmware update process. Earlier other features were rumored to be added such as Adobe Flash 8. An early check by me reveals that this is not the case.  So we’re all still stuck using an old version of Flash on the PSP.

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.