Subject: Re: Programming

SETI@home: I've been working for the UC Berkeley SETI group since 1997 as a programmer, systems administrator, database administrator, webmaster, etc... SETI@home ended up (quite unexpectedly) being the biggest distributed computing project to date, thus requiring lots of seat-of-your-pants effort on all possible aspects of computing, as there's only a handful of people maintaining the entire project. A little stressful at times, but I do feel very lucky that I get to work on such a creative, interesting project.

Matt's Gibberish Engine: Time killer. Despite its limited vocabulary it can spew well over a quadrillion different sentences. Some of them may actually mean something. By the way, this was my very first perl CGI script written many many years ago, so don't regard this as an example of my best work. In fact, it kinda sucks.

Randomly Generated Press Quote: A slightly better version of the above gibberish engine, this time written in PHP and much more useful to me. Ever notice how any press regarding any rock band is utterly worthless - a string of pointless opinions and uneducated observations glued together with choice shock-value words and pretentious references? I got tired of waiting for the media at large to give me any useful text to put on one particular band's web site, so I decided to make my computer generate equally informative text.

..and that's about it for now, kids. I'll add more links to other projects and programs in good time.