KSetiSpy 0.6.4 review

KSetiSpy is a KDE utility that monitors the progress of the SETI@home client, and displays all kinds of information about the work un

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Roberto Virga

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KSetiSpy is a KDE utility that monitors the progress of the SETI@home client, and displays all kinds of information about the work unit(s) being processed.

It uses the same interface as SETI Spy, a Windows program written by Roelof Engelbrecht.

The SETI@home project started in May 1999; its goal is to harness the power of distributed computing to analyze radio signals from space, for "the small but captivating possibility of detecting the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth".

To participate in this exciting project, all you have to do is to run the SETI@home client program. This program downloads a set of data (usually called "work unit") from the SETI@home servers, processes it on the local machine (using idle processing time that would otherwise go wasted), and then transmits the result back to the servers.

Over time, SETI@home participants people have become more and more interested in learning everything about the data contained in these work units and the computations done on them. To address these needs, several SETI@home monitoring add-on programs were developed. These extract interesting information from the SETI@home client and present it in a user-friendly way.

One of the most complete SETI@home monitoring tools available today is a Windows program named SETI Spy. KSetiSpy has been created with the intent of providing a version of SETI Spy for my favorite desktop environment (KDE). KSetiSpy borrows most of its user interface conventions from SETI Spy, so SETI Spy users will feel immediately at home with KSetiSpy.

KSetiSpy started as a programming experiment in KDE in June 2001, and has grown a lot since then, mainly to keep up with the ever-increasing feature set of its Windows counterpart. Like many open source projects, it's basically the work of a single developer (that would be me), working on it on his spare time. Therefore advancement is not linear, and debugging is mostly left to the users (that would be you). If you run into a bug, please report it to Roberto Virga

What's New in This Release:
fixed RA and Dec formatting
fixed julian date conversion (was off by 6 hours - thanks to Bengt-Erik Soderstrom for reporting this)
fixed constellation links (the P.A.S. re-organized their web site)