Hoorah, KDE 3.5.7 is out, and I’ve just upgraded my home machine using the available packages for Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty).
Category Archives: News
Cutty Sark badly damaged by fire
Some bad news out of London..
A fire which severely damaged the famous 19th Century ship Cutty Sark is being treated as suspicious by police. The ship, which was undergoing a £25m restoration project, is kept in a dry dock at Greenwich in south-east London. An area around the 138-year-old tea clipper had to be evacuated when the fire broke out in the early hours.
Fortunately it appears that because of the restoration work about 50% of the ship had already been removed for work, but this will make the conservation work much harder.
The images below are linked from the BBC.
Before:
During:
After:
Dell to ship Ubuntu Linux
Dell have announced they will sell systems bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though the details are yet to be announced. Here’s hoping that this time they escape beyond the USA (hello Dell, there is a world outside the US!). There’s also a report on the BBC, which is where I first saw this mentioned.
On the Direct2Dell page that announces this there is a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical in a variety of formats, including the free Theora codec. Props to Dell for including that.
If this gets to Australia I suspect my next laptop will be ones of these Dell’s (as long as they have a model with an Intel graphics card).
A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3
Eugen Leitl has just posted on the Beowulf list a message with a link to a draft of a paper by Alfredo Buttari, Piotr Luszczek, Jakub Kurzak, Jack Dongarra and George Bosilca called A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3. It’s a 74 page PDF looking at the possibilities and problems with using the PS3 for scientific computing (there is already a PS3 Linux cluster at NCSU).
The introduction to the paper lets you know that this isn’t going to be easy..
As exciting as it may sound, using the PS3 for scientiï¬c computing is a bumpy ride. Parallel programming models for multi-core processors are in their infancy, and standardized APIs are not even on the horizon. As a result, presently, only hand-written code fully exploits the hardware capabilities of the CELL processor. Ultimately, the suitability of the PS3 platform for scientiï¬c computing is most heavily impaired by the devastating disproportion between the processing power of the processor and the crippling slowness of the interconnect, explained in detail in section 9.1. Nevertheless, the CELL processor is a revolutionary chip, delivering ground-breaking performance and now available in an affordable package. We hope that this rough guide will make the ride slightly less bumpy.
Of course, it’s unlikely you’re going to see the PS3 being used in production clusters anyway, so the interconnect shouldn’t be such a problem there.. 🙂
The paper covers the hardware, Linux support and how to get it onto a PS3, programming methods and models, MPI, performance, etc. The paper isn’t complete as I write, but it is still a very interesting read. HPC folks will certainly want to read section 9.1 “Limitations of the PS 3 for Scientiï¬c Computing”, especially the part that says:
Double precision performance. Peak performance of double precision floating point arithmetic is a factor of 14 below the peak performance of single precision. Computations which demand full precision accuracy will see a peak performance of only 14 Gflop/s, unless mixed-precision approaches can be applied.
Compare and Contrast – Pre-entrance Chinese University Question and First Year UK University Question
For anyone who doubts that graduates in China are going to be more than a match for the rest of the world, go and read this BBC news article comparing a maths question set to first year chemistry students in the UK with a maths question that is set to students wishing to enter university in China.
The Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK is running a competition offering a GBP500 prize to a winner who can correctly answer the question from China. This is because of their concerns about the poor level of mathematics that Chemistry students in the UK have:
Increasingly, universities are mounting remedial sessions for incoming science undergraduates because their maths skills are so limited, with many having stopped formal lessons in mathematics two years earlier at the GCSE level.
Tuberculosis – Be Afraid
The Western World has been fretting about SARS and Avian Influenza for some time now, but all the while there’s been another bug that we thought we had previously conquered sitting in the wings evolving drug resistance, and it could be far deadlier.
It’s the wrong leech, Gromit!
Oops, it looks like there’s been a bit of a mix up with the humble leech in medical research!
In the slimiest and perhaps costliest case of mistaken identity in modern biology, hundreds of scientific papers and years of research could be thrown into doubt, for they may have been based on experiments carried out on the wrong leech
It’s the wrong leech Gromit, and they’ve gone wrong! (Apologies to The Wrong Trousers)
“What has been sold and used as Hirudo medicinalis is usually another species, Hirudo verbana,” said Dr Siddall, who led an international team of researchers in examining dozens of specimens procured from leech farms in Europe and the United States. “Indeed, we have never received a true medicinalis from a commercial supplier,” he said, adding a few leeches from a third species, H. orientalis, from Turkey or Azerbaijan, may also have crept into the mix.
There is an upside to this (asides from the increasing volume of medical papers as they try and correct their previous research and try and work out what compound came from which species):
“With three species rather than one, there may three times as many interesting compounds to be discovered and harnessed,” he said.
OpenOffice.org to get Business Reporting Capabilities
Now this looks like it might be rather an interesting extension to the capabilities of OpenOffice.org, it appears Sun and Pentaho are planning to integrate the business reporting engine from Pentaho into OpenOffice.org 2.3, tentatively due for September this year.
With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary and open source relational databases, OLAP and XML sources. For example, users will be able to generate customer invoices by creating a customer invoice template and then pulling customer names, addresses, and current due balances from an accounts receivable application or database. They can then produce the invoices as OpenOffice.org Writer documents.
Given that this is only at the thinking about stage at the moment there’s precious little real information asides many rewordings of the press release (including this), the best real information I could find was from Ocke Janssen’s blog at Sun which has real information, including a couple of very early screenshots!
The new report designer will extend the database application. You then have the possibility to create reports not only with the famous wizard, but also manually. As output format you have the choice between text documents or spreadsheets. (OASIS Open Document Format). The designer uses the classical way of presenting reports. To navigate through the components of your report, you’ll have a navigator as you for sure already know from forms. Each repeating section of the report has its own area where text can be inserted. In the first release you’ll be able to create groups (with header and footer), functions, page header/footer, report header/footer. The best way to find all features is to try it when a stable version is available;-)
Must. Have. Patience! 🙂
33 Dead in Virginia Tech Shooting Spree
RIP Kurt Vonnegut – 1922 to 2007
So it goes.. 🙁
American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, has died on Tuesday in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times has reported. Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.