Profile: AiboPet

Personal background
I'm just a small-time network Admin....with a few computers under my wing with extra unused clock cycles :-)

I live in San Diego, I am a 36 year old german guy, raised in Hong Kong by a chinese family. In my spare time, I like to play with robotics (own eight Sony "aibo" robot doggies). I like to write code and behavior programs for the Sony aibo, as well as some serious hardware mods. I love any and all things A.I., build and play with computers and OS's...Linux, FreeBSD (most flavors)and the GUIs (KDE,Gnome..etc),OS2,DOS...and EVEN the evil Windows as well. My fascination with "E.T." started as a kid. I queued up for almost eight hours to see that movie in Hong Kong. Later, I saw the movie "Contact" here in the states. I was only mildly impressed (ummm...Her dad ends up the alien?..Wha?)I had the internet a few years later and saw Contact again. This time I became curious about SETI and went to the Web immediately to look at SETI stuff. I figured if that movie was good for ANYTHING, at least I was going to learn if SETI was truly "unplugged" and why! I read of the "WOW!" incident, and a few other things of SETI and its hard times, And then....here was this "distributed computing" model. THIS alone was quite a concept, and then I see that SETI lives on via this concept! Thousands and thousands of computers doing nothing useful in their spare time. This was during the time that most computer techs advised you to leave computers running, instead of cycling them more than once a day. This is an old habit I STILL practice even though it really originates from the fact that the big old clunky Seagate hard drives of the time, did not like the spin-up and parking of the heads very often. So why not USE that downtime for other than watching the little toasters? This is cool, the idea of a distributed effort to keep SETI research going.

I used to run the old client on about twenty or so VERY SLOW machines at work, They ranged from P1/233 to AMD-K62/550, and a couple Athlon 1.5 stations. I would leave the "run all the time" switch on with some of the faster machines. I have a few WinDOZE machines on a little Novell network at home that run stuff like cam servers...and they all run SETI as well. And then my laptop is always running it in background too :-)



7-7-2004:


Welp.....Got most the XP machines running the BOINC proggy now. Nice to see that Distro 'puting is still alive and well, and attempting to settle on a "standard". I find the 98se machines I still use at work are not very happy with the 3D screensaver though, so they continue to run the old 3.08 client. Looks like the BOINC based proggy is still going through some growing pains, but I'm sure they will iron out all the wrinkles on the server side pretty quickly.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Of course E.T. exists, we just have to be there listenning if he (she?) calls :-)
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