Number One on Seti@HOME Again

Posted on 2 May, 2000 by steevithak

WooHoo! I’m number one on the Seti@HOME Team Slashdot stats again. Another 15 minutes of fame… Even though there are only a few boxes left here running the Seti@HOME software, I still check in on my stats every once in a while. Most of the people on Team Slashdot gave up long ago and I’ve been slowly moving up through the ranks. But I’m still falling farther behind all the time in the overall stats. I got as high 300th or so back when we had dozens of machines working on it but as more of the machines here went back to doing real work I’ve fallen to about 900th. Looks like Team Slashdot has fallen quite a ways in the Club stats too – they used to be number one.

A friend emailed me a link to Vigor today. Wow! now vi users can have an annoying Microsoft-like talking paperclip hopping around their Linux desktop. I don’t even use vi, so I found it particularly helpful when it offered messages such as “Are you sure you want to move the cursor left?”. And if you try to kill it, the response is “Are you sure you don’t want to close the Vigor assistant? Ok/Cancel”. Now, if they could just add a feature that would generate the BSOD randomly, I wouldn’t need Windows at all anymore.

Random Software Updates

Posted on 4 December, 1999 by steevithak

The work stacked up pretty fast while I was gone this week and I’ll be spending the weekend trying to get caught up. The biggest part of the weekend will be spent completing the Apache/Perl setup on Windows NT.

We finally received our Red Hat 6.1 Professional package with the new version of the secure server. Once we get our certs updated, I’ll be bringing at least one new machine online. The new version includes sendmail enhancements to make filtering out spam easier. Hopefully, this will help reduce the amount of spam that everyone is getting these days.

I haven’t mentioned SETI@home lately but after a month or so in the number one position in group slashdot, we fell back to number two and recently to number three. Well, we had our fifteen minutes of fame, what more can you ask?

SETI@Home Update

Posted on 30 October, 1999 by steevithak

I don’t know if anyone is still following the SETI@home stats but, if so, this is a historic day for NCC. We have moved into first position on Team Slashdot.

SETI@Home Update

Posted on 4 October, 1999 by steevithak

I forgot to post a SETI@Home news item about it but we recently took over second place on Team Slashdot.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Nadsat

Posted on 19 September, 1999 by steevithak

Susan and I attended our first performance of the DSO season last night. The works performed included Fanfare: Legacies of Honor by Bert Truax, a member of the DSO’s trumpet section. This piece was commissioned by West Point for use in the US Military Academy’s Bicentennial in 2002. This was followed by Beethoven’s Fantasia in C Minor for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra, Op 80. I had never heard this piece and, while I generally loathe piano works, this wasn’t too bad at all. The final piece was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The 9th is without question my favorite of the Beethoven works and the DSO did a reasonably good performance of it (better than many I’ve heard). Of course, thanks to Kubrick, it’s impossible to hear the 9th without remembering his film of Anthony Burgess’s book, A Clockwork Orange, and the Walter Carlos version of the 9th that was included in the soundtrack. (ummm… okay, the artist formerly known as Walter Carlos.) Well, my droogs, without a bit of rabbit I can’t prod the pretty polly. So, I’ll have to itty and ookadeet for now. (had to get in at least a bit of Nadsat!)

In other news, we’ve moved back up to third place on the SETI@Home Team Slashdot list.

SETI@Home Update

Posted on 4 September, 1999 by steevithak

SETI@Home update: I’ve just moved into third place on Team Slashdot. I’m closing in on second place but there’s a good chance I’ll be overtaken by a faster user about the time I move up. It may take another couple of computers to get to first place – I just hope nobody discovers alien transmissions before I get there.