This work has vastly subsidized my music career. If you're a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, come see one of my shows. Don't like supporting the performing arts? Perhaps you just don't like public places populated with actual people. Then listen to stuff on your computer. Maybe even buy something.

I post a lot about SETI@home servers and other geeky stuff in the my personal, wordy, (and rather vain) homepage, which, among other things, contains a rather silly gibberish engine which is way overdue for an update. I wrote a similar program which generates random press quotes for one of my band web sites. It's meant to prove that rock journalism is a total waste of time.

A: First off, let me point out that I work part time here at the lab, typically Monday through Thursday (i.e. 32 hours/week). Sometimes I work less, sometimes more. The flexible schedule is a large reason why I'm very happy to work here.

The UC Berkeley SETI program actually consists of several projects, including SERENDIP, SETI@home, Optical SETI, BOINC, and more. These projects all share the same tiny staff and computing facilities.

I help manage the whole SETI network of about 25 very busy machines. Most of these machines are new/not-so-new Sun boxes mostly running solaris, some linux. Thrown into the fold are a few PCs (linux and Windows), as well as a couple old Sun ultra 2s we use strictly as ftp/cvs servers and desktops. Since it is a relatively small but incredibly busy and exposed network, most of my management is making sure the machines stay alive, all public services are working, and secure.

I started working with SETI in earnest back in 1997, during the data analysis phase of SERENDIP III, and helped write several programs that sifted through the strong candidates, grouped together the juicy ones, and plotted them (using IDL) for all to behold the copious amounts of radio frequency interference and not much else. A paper about all these findings was published long after the fact.

For SERENDIP IV I've helped port a lot of SERENDIP III code and wrote new analytical programs and indexed all kinds of observation data. I also created the whole distributed data pipeline engine, which for some reason I decided create entirely with c-shell scripts. It was slow but it worked just fine. Perhaps someday I'll rewrite it all in perl/php, if need be. This project still exists and is doing valid science, but funding is minimal and SETI@home occupies most of my time so progress is incredibly slow.

For SETI@home my programming tasks fall under the categories of scientific data analysis, network monitoring, cgis, database administration (informix/mysql), occasional client/server tweaks and security. Maintaining the network/servers is a full time job in and of itself. It's such a small team working on a big project that everybody has their hand in everything to some extent. We're all computer geeks, and redundancy is good.

I guess I'm also the webmaster for SETI, whatever that means. I set up all the apache servers and monitor them to make sure they are tuned up to handle over up to 2 million hits a day. Several of us on the team generate the web content. Most of the BOINC web-based features were programmed by others, but I fix bugs and add my own items as time allows. For internal use I created a set of fun cgis which allow us to monitor all our systems and services. Some of these come free with BOINC.

And finally the "miscellaneous" category. We are chronically low of funds, so sometimes we drop everything to work on grant proposals or funding drives. I have little to no time for tech support, forum moderation, or other kinds public outreach, but nevertheless try to give our participants a happy experience as best I can.