Jeff, recently back from Nepal, didn’t have too much to say today, but right now he is working on testing out the RADAR blanking software with Matt. He also shared a fantastic photo (one of 1600) of the Himalayas. Although his trip was great fun, he did admit that it was a “scientific wash”—there was no Yeti to be found.

Dave is back from the BOINC conference over in Europe. There was a lot of people there, a lot of talks and papers. The main topics of discussion were GPUs and computing in virtual machines.

In Matt’s radar blanker news: SETI@Home users haven’t been able to get any work over the last couple of days because, well, we simple don’t have any work to be done at the moment. Over the weekend Matt has been trying to feed data into the pipeline, but he had some trouble getting it to work. Hopefully we’ll have something to get out there by tomorrow afternoon, so people can start getting work again. We are also getting in new data from Arecibo, and so soon we’ll be sending out a combination of old and new data that has already been blanked by the software radar blanker.

There’s a new CASPER server up and running, to be used for SERENDIP V.5 data storage and processing. We need to find a good name for it and assign it an IP address. LOTF (an acronym for Lord of the Flies, after the Fly’s Eye array) was suggested. Everyone generally liked the name—so LOTF it is.

Some good news: ALFA is back online after a one-month period of being offline for servicing. It was taken down because there was one polarization on beam seven that wasn’t working. We’ll have to take a look at the data we’re getting from it now in order to double check if all seven beams and dual polarizations really are up and running.

Josh has been experiencing a bit of a technical problem. When he runs his programs to update the columns in the RFI database, he cannot access the database. He tried setting up his program to sleep every four min- just so that it could access the database, but it still gets all locked up. This is a strange occurrence, and it shouldn’t be a problem. Nobody seemed to be able to figure it out, and for now he’ll just have to turn off his program to access the database. This issue could be coupled with some of the other performance problems we’ve been experiencing lately. Maybe it is time to think about switching from Informix after all.

That’s all for this week from SSL!