Fuck seti@home

A long long time ago when they first started out, I signed up to participate in seti@home. For those of you who don't know it is a distributed computing platform that was analyzing date for the SETI program.

I had it running on 4 machines at one point and it was really tough to manage since they didn't allow you to register the machines asa group. You had to have seperate email addresses for each account. That wasn't too much of a problem for me at the time since I had 4 email addresses. I was able to at least group my results in what they called a 'team'.

The problem was that to manage the accounts I had to deal with their incredibly slow web server. It was a pain. As a group I had completed hundreds of work units (each unit took about a day to complete). It was tough to manage them all since I chagned email addresses sometimes and I couldn't have easy to remember passwords on their site.

Finally I gave up and stuck with one account. All of that work was useful for them, but I had no way of gaining recognition for my work. The account I stuck with had over 500 units completed at the time. I had it running for a year or two after that point and the problem was that I had changed my email address and forgot to let them know. I had also lost the password they gave me. That meant that there was no way to log into the account and change the email address to my new one. I let the program run anyway.

A couple of years ago I found the password and changed the account to my new email address.

Seti just changed the way the do processing and are migrating accounts to their new system and sent me an email about it. I haven't run the software in a while and thought, hey, I can get back into this. I logged into their website to try and migrate my account.

Guess what, their web server is still slow as shit and it took 10 seconds per page change to work. That would be find if it would accept my account info. It didn't. It said at one point "a registration key will be mailed to your account email address, enter it here". I waited, and waited, never to get the email. I tried all kinds of ways to get into my account, any account. I tried all my old accounts, everything. All told I spent 2 hours trying to get set up. No luck.

Finally I tried to contact them. Surely a longtime user (early adopter nonetheless!) would get some help. Nope, no way to contact them. They do have a help message board, but of course you need your account info to log into it.

I've got a machine that runs 24/7 that could totally be helping the cause, but they can go fuck themselves!

Ok.. I'm really going on vacation now. bye!