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| Personal background |
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Hi, I'm a computer programmer currently living and working in Singapore. Science, technology, and complicated things have always fascinated me, so naturally I was drawn to computers like a moth to a flame. I wrote my first real program on an IBM mainframe running
OS/360 in PL/I, using punch cards. My first personal computer was a (genuine) Apple II, sporting an 8-bit 6502 CPU running at 1MHz, with 16KB main memory.
Things have come a long way since then; I guess I've been around a while.
Initially, there was DOS. Then I discovered UNIX and never looked back. Today I run NetBSD and FreeBSD on several networked PCs at home. Rock solid. All systems run SETI@home. You won't find MS Windows on any of my machines.
You may be wondering what "LHF" stands for. If you really want to know, The Devil's DP Dictionary will help (the one originally written by Stan Kelly-Bootle).
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I find it difficult to imagine that we're alone in the universe. The depth of our belief in "aloneness" indirectly reflects the range of our thinking. As that range extends, the horizon of exploration widens. Projects like SETI show that we've made some progress along the way.
Personally, I find the SETI@home project very interesting, both for the science behind it and because it demonstrates distributed computing so well. Being able to participate and contribute to the project is exciting and captivating, and I wouldn't miss it for anything.
[ Timestamp: July 2003... ]
Some observations after more than two years of processing work units for SETI@home. SETI@home is not just a SETI-related project:-
o It is a massively distributed processing project.
o It is a unique community of more than 4.5 million people from across the world (check the message boards).
o It is possibly the most extensive testbed for current-day PCs, microprocessors, motherboards, chipsets, memory, you name it - even though it was never meant to be that (I bet Intel and AMD are just loving it).
o The most amazing thing of all is that a sizeable subset of the more than 600,000 active users are willingly - even feverishly - spending vast amounts of time and money to configure, tweak, coax, and hack their systems into doing more, buying increasingly powerful hardware at every opportunity, fighting the ever-present problem of heat dissipation, and paying for the electricity it takes to do all that - just to be first in the rankings. Yes, it's primarily for the science - but there will always be
undercurrents. Never before has so much been done so willingly, by so many - for free.
Personally, I think it's amazing. Someone once said: "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come." No doubt grid computing has come to stay.
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