Over the last several weeks, I fine tuned the software, ironed out several bugs, and generally made the interface more user-friendly. Not surprisingly, the LAF found nothing except a few false returns from some communication satellites, muon showers, and stray cosmic rays. The results were logged to a text file on an SSD, and I inspect the log each night after work.  If it is empty for three or four days straight, I sometimes tweak LAF’s search strategy.  This may be a lot harder than I thought.

Exactly two days ago, I came home, ordered a pizza, and turned on the TV.  Zoe (my girlfriend) came over a bit later and we watched some old Star Trek episodes for a bit.  Eventually I got up to check my email in my office and noticed my computer was dead. Well, it wasn’t exactly dead. It just wouldn’t boot. I try everything. At first it looked like it was just a hosed OS. Luckily, I had a Linux box handy, and I mounted the drive with LAF as a secondary.  After about an hour of checking and fiddling with recovery software, I finally got some information off the disk.  I could see the filenames and their structure, but their contents were corrupt. At first, nothing seemed unusual.  Zoe suggested that I check the LAF log directory. All the correct filenames were present. The odd part was the log file sizes. All together, the logs were nearly 1.5 terabytes in size!

I think I can now fit the pieces together. Looks like LAF locked onto a signal and wouldn’t let it go.  Apparently, the LAF thought this was the real deal.  The data was captured to the log file which eventually filled up the disk.  The OS then collapsed without any temporary storage to write to and eventually corrupted itself.  What a mess.

At first I was devastated. But Zoe reassured me.  The LAF had found something! But, what had it found?  Was it significant? An alien intelligence, or just radiating sun spots?  If it was significant, maybe it could change the world. I thought about sending the corrupted hard drive out to get it properly salvaged, but decided against it when Zoe looked up the current recovery rates. They want two grand! I didn’t even spend one grand on the home-built computer, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend twice as much on fixing it.

But the data is definitely toast. I can see the log file times and sizes, but the records aren’t formatted the way they should – consist of all zeros.  They must have been corrupted when the computer ran out of space.  There is no way to figure out what LAF found with what I have.  Still, there is some good news. I have a recent printout of the code for LAF software, and I even have another computer.  The only thing I needed to know now is where in the sky LAF was looking, and the exact time of the failure.  After poking around the recovered directory listings, I can see that there are valid time stamps on the files. The main log has a modification time listed as 3:13pm and 44 seconds. Now all that was left is to figure out where it was pointing.

The answer to that question may be easier to figure out than I first thought. We just went outside and circled the dish. To me it looks like it is pointing straight up. Maybe the dish was trying to return to its “stowed” position after the crash.  But Zoe says it isn’t exactly pointing straight up.  This is really puzzling…