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: 112,954
• RAC: 190.88
• Classic workunits: 7,453
• Classic CPU time: 81,802 hours
• S@H Status:

  online

• As of 7 Sep 2010 6:03:32 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.