Open-MPI
Comment sent to Massachusetts on open document formats
Well I did email a comment to the state of Massachusetts to support their latest draft on document formats that has nominated OpenDoc (the format that OpenOffice.org v2 will use), and I’ve put into this blog so people can see why I personally think it is important.
Think of it as taking a more long term view..
Read on for what I have to say..
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Bootable Wikipedia DVD
Saw a very nice hack demo’d last night at LUV; Jason King (who did the remastering Knoppix talk back in August) had created (with help from a couple of other folks) a (mostly) working, bootable Knoppix DVD that had a fully functional Wikipedia installed. It comes up running Apache, MySQL, KDE and you can then browse Wikipedia from the DVD.
I say mostly working because it had none of the submitted images, but given that the downloadable database dump of the current pages in English is 900MB gzip’d, it’s not suprising! Of course it’s not particularly fast (around 60 seconds to do a search), but it could be extremely useful as a free information source in places where there is no (or very limited) Internet access.
It’s still a work in progress, but there was quite a bit of interest in helping Jason out with the project, and one of the LUV members who works for MySQL reckoned that with some tweaking of the indexes, etc, it could be sped up too..
CSS Zen Garden
The wonderfully named CSS Zen Garden is a great little demonstration of what you can do with CSS to customise a website. The demo is a single page of HTML and a whole raft of original and submitted CSS’s that you can see by clicking on the links on the right hand side. Pretty neat!
New Orleans Blues
Now the scale of the disaster in New Orleans has had time to sink in, the media are starting to ask awkward questions about how the US has so badly fumbled its emergency response.
There are some telling points from a rather biting BBC News editorial on the problems with the disaster response for Hurricane Katrina:
The havoc of Katrina had been predicted countless times on a local and federal level – even to the point where it was acknowledged that tens of thousands of the poorest residents would not be able to leave the city in advance.
No official plan was ever put in place for them.
The famous levees that were breached could have been strengthened and raised at what now seems like a trifling cost of a few billion dollars.
The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases.
[…]
When President Bush told “Good Morning America” on Thursday morning that nobody could have “anticipated” the breach of the New Orleans levees, it pointed to not only a remote leader in denial, but a whole political class.
The Australian ABC News has a story on the US and international medias response to the handling of the crisis, and both the ABC and the BBC have reports on comments by rapper Kanye West criticising President Bush and according to the ABC report, rascism through neglect, quoting him as saying that America was set up “to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible”.
For those wanting to help the best bet at present seems to be the American Red Cross.
Massachusetts Backs OpenDoc XML as Office Standard
Groklaw is reporting a potential strong win for open standards over proprietary document formats, Massachusetts has decided to back OpenDoc XML as the state-wide standard that their office applications must support in their latest draft!
If this is put into practice this is likely to be a very significant move as there will be a considerable knock-on effect for those who deal with the state government there.
They’re asking for comments and I ask folks who support this move to write with the reasons why they feel this is a good move.
Incompetent virus
Bah, SpamAssassin here is picking up lots of attempted viruses being sent to me, which isn’t that strange, except that ClamAV doesn’t spot them. Turns out the reason it’s not spotting them is that when you look at the email it looks like it’s forgetting to attach the virus payload, so it’s actually a completely safe (though annoying) email. D’oh!
The messages have an attachment that’s labelled application/x-compressed & base64 and given the name of a zip file, but then instead of the expected payload it has the text %TS_ZIP_ATTACH%. I’m not the only one though, there’s plenty of archived messages to lists with the same..
Of course, this begs the question of how it’s spreading in the first place.
New twist on spam redirection
Rich Boakes writes about spammers creating Yahoo Groups to post their messages in and then using referral spam to entice people to read them, but today I received a spam in email with another new twist on redirection.
It looks like to get around the (highly effective) URL blacklists that contain the URLs of spam sites that the spammers send to you they are now using legitimate sites badly written redirect scripts to bounce you onto their rubbish. They are taking advantage of buggy scripts that allow you to specify the URL to redirect you to, rather than tieing you into a list of allowed sites.
Because tools like SpamAssassin look at the URL rather than the arguments to the script (delineated by the ? in the URL) it is currently not matching those against the black lists.
I guess in a little bit we’ll see an upgrade to SpamAssassin to add checks to the arguments in the URL to make sure they’re not spam sites, and I guess a possible blacklist of broken redirect script URLs!
Graphics Cards – a possible future for HPC ?
The current edition of the Australian APC Magazine has a really interesting article on Hijacking the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to use it for general purpose programming. Their take is that the latest graphics cards give you an awsome amount of processing power which you can now take advantage of if you can frame your problem in a manner which is acceptable to the way a graphics card works. It’s possible, but it takes work.
From my point of view this is really interesting because of the fact that now you can get more power (theoretically) than some supercomputers from a few years ago had in a *current* top end PC for a few thousand dollars if you can make use of it. As a quick point of reference, from 2000 to 2004 VPAC had a Compaq AlphaServer SC Cluster that took up 9 19″ racks and was in the June 2001 Top 500 List at number 151 with a peak rating of 213 gigaflops.
Now the article says that one of the new nVidia 7800XT cards can do 165 gigaflops (peak presumably) and current generation motherboards can support two of these (they’re x16 PCI-Express cards, not AGP). That gives you (theoretically) 330 gigaflops, excluding whatever processor is on the motherboard!
It would be fab to see an MPI implementation that could take advantage of this. 🙂
Read on for some quotes from the original article followed by a link to a site that is all about general purpose programming of GPUs for real world tasks.