Steve Beach's Personal Page
Welcome to my world! It's not quite as suave as the
Suckster's , nor as plugged in as Sexychyck's
, but it's mine and I'm quite comfortable with it. In this incarnation,
it has sections on my beautiful daughters, my job/vocation, and various
other important things. Please come back frequently, because my world,
like my waistline, is constantly expanding.
The World's Most Beautiful Girls!
Yep, that's my Rose and Pearl. Rose was born on July 10, 1997,
and Pearl followed her out on August 4 1999, and they are both just the
most perfectest children you could imagine. But why take my word
for it when you can see these actual, unretouched pictures for yourself!
Click here for more pictures
of this adorable pumpkin.
My Work
When I'm not playing the doting daddy, I'm a grad student at Penn
State University . Yes, we actually have a mission in the world
other than playing football. I'm in the physics
department, working for Jim
Beatty , mostly on the High
Energy Antimatter Telescope (HEAT) project. Yeah, with
a name like that, it must be neat! We are trying to determine the
energy spectrum of the antimatter that is constantly bombarding the earth.
No, antimatter isn't just something they through in on Star Trek to make
it sound scientific, it really exists. For good or ill, it is blocked
by our atmosphere. That way, there's a heck of a lot less radiation,
but that means we have to fly our experiments on balloons
. But at least they're big balloons -- fully inflated, they carry
a 6,000 pound payload, and could fit two Boeing 747's inside -- nose to
nose!
I've been working on the HEAT project since January 1997, and I got
some good data in June of 2000 (third flight's a charm, I guess).
If all goes well, I should be getting my Ph.D. sometime in 2001.
If that comes true, I should be graduating somewhere around the year 2000.
If anybody wants to offer me a job then, let me know!
ROOT
One of the main software packages we use for HEAT is called "root", standing
for I don't know what. It's an extremely powerful package for doing
high-energy physics analysis, and it can be downloaded free from here
. One of the not-yet-perfect things about root is that it's still
just a little rough around the edges, documentation wise. In the
hope that somebody will find it useful, I am publishing here my contribution
to the root documentation, the ROOT CHEAT SHEET. Click
here
for a gzipped tar archive containing the LaTeX source, or here
for a gzipped postscript version. This is version
2.1, last updated August 18, 1998.
Free Software
In my copious free time, I do a little bit of coding of free software.
I've written a backup utility (zback) and a tool for modeling particle
physics events over a network. Click here
to see my little contribution to the free software movement. I've
also installed Linux on my laptop, and have a page
detailing how .
My Links
There must be a law that any home page must have a set of links.
Not wanting to violate the law, here's mine.
American Civil Liberties Union
-- Yes, I'm a card carrying member. No, unlike Michael Dukakis, I'm
not ashamed of it. Join it. It will save your ass. If
you don't believe me, see what happened in Oklahoma
City .
I use Linux on my home computer. Believe it or not, it's a free operating
system. It doesn't live up to Microsoft's standards, however -- it
doesn't crash! Because it is free, you can get it from a whole bunch
of people, either for free or at a nominal price for the CD. Some
of the more popular distributions are Red
Hat and S.u.S.E.
(some weird German acronym). Once you've got it installed, there
is plenty of software for it. For free stuff, see Red Hat or here
for general stuff or here
for general applications or here
and here for
scientific software. Now, if you would actually like to spend money
for software (no, it's not a perverted thought), see the Linux
Mall For a more general introduction to Linux, see the Linux
Home Page or the Linux
Documentation Project. .
Note that the dancing penguins and the Linux logo are covered by the
GNU public license , and can be downloaded
from here
. I forgot where I got the virtual brew, but I strongly suspect it's
covered by the GPL too.
In my computer's spare time, I'm doing my best to convince the US government
that encryption restrictions are pretty stupid. How? By showing
them how easy it is to decrypt messages! Distributed.net
has already broken the 56 bit RC5 code, and is now trying to break DES
(the governement's own standard) in a mere 25 days. Give it a shot
-- processors of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your
waste!
Contacting Me
The best way to reach me is via e-mail at steve@thebeachfamily.org
. I generally check it at least every morning, and usually at night
too.
By the way, this page was created with Netscape Communicator, version
4.7 for Linux. To get the RPM package, see the Red Hat web
site. Netscape works, but the occasional bus errors and shutdowns
are kind of annoying. But, and this is a big but, the rest of Linux
just sails on.