Astronomy at Home – Brian Koberlein

, 1 min read

Great article about Einstein@Home by Brian Koberlein: Astronomy at Home – Brian Koberlein. This is interesting in particular: The team used the distributed computing network to analyze x-ray data from the Fermi gamma ray telescope. From this they found four new gamma ray pulsars. Most gamma ray…

Output from deviceQuery for NVidia GTX 560

, 3 min read

This article "CUDA-Enabled GPUs" made me check my GPU again using deviceQuery in /usr/local/cuda/samples/sdk/1_Utilities/deviceQuery: CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking) Detected 1 CUDA Capable device(s) Device 0: "GeForce GTX 560" CUDA Driver…

Working with System V IPC queues

, 4 min read

There are a variety of ways to work with queues: You can purchase IBM WebSphere MQ (formerly known as MQSeries), or similar products from Oracle or Microsoft. On most Unix systems queues are already built in, as long as you do not need any functionality to cross machine boundaries, i.e., hop from…

How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

, 1 min read

Comparing the academic industry with a rather disparate industry, thereby highlighting a number of shortcomings of the current situation in academia. Also see Marcio von Muhlen: We Need a Github of Science, documenting the "Profzi"-scheme. Interesting article from Alexandre Alfonso on…

Reblog: Beware sexy honeybots spear phishing on social media

, 1 min read

Most IT people know about trojan horses, virus, worms, honeypots, etc. They know about buffer overruns, SQL injection and the like. What is probably not that well known is that even "friendships" on social networks can pose some risks: They give credibility to possibly complete fake…

Malcolm Gladwell: Don't go to Harvard, go to the Lousy Schools!

, 15 min read

Malcolm Gladwell held a speech at Google Zeitgeist Americas 2013 about drop-out rates in schools, especially in math and science. It turns out that going to one of the top universities is rarely a good idea, contrary to popular belief. Some quotes: EICD - elite institution cognitive disorder Your…

Good, Fast, Cheap: You Can Only Pick Two!

, 1 min read

A recent article "Five Minutes with Alison Barrett" linked to a speech by Alison Barrett on Unit Testing in particular in PHP. The speech almost in passing made a reference to a famous quote on "good fast cheap, pick two", which I found quite noteworthy. Using Google I found a…

Statistics of this Blog: 1.000 Views, 60 Countries, 10 Likes

, 1 min read

Thanks for reading my blog. Not all countries are shown in above picture. See My Blog Statistics by Country from September.

Programming in Excel VBA Compared To LibreOffice (OpenOffice) Calc

, 2 min read

Programming in Excel VBA is quite easy. Below are some simple basic concepts to access and change the spreadsheet data. Worksheets(i) references the i-th sheet, usually they are called Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3 Cells(i,j) references i-th row, j-th column, e.g., Cells(2,3) is C2 Cells(i,j).Value is…

Why Brian Koberlein Is In The Dark Matter Camp

, 1 min read

Brian Koberlein blogged in Ugly Theory, Beautiful Data why he is in the dark matter camp, and not in the MOND camp. He very nicely weights each of the arguments of each theory to conclude why there is compelling evidence for dark matter. He concludes with: Of course dark matter still has a serious…

Google Earth Used to Reunite Australian Boy With His Indian Mother

, 1 min read

Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his lost mother in India after more than 25 years of separation. When Saroo was 5 years old he wrongly took a train to Calcutta near from his home-town which was more than 1,500 km away. In Calcutta he was adopted by an Australian couple. It is amazing what…

Clearing Cookie Junk in Google Chrome Web Browser

, 1 min read

From time to time I check what I have collected as cookies in my browser and I spot web sites which I probably have never visited directly but somehow set cookies. Instead of deleting them individually I now use sqlite3 to do this. cd ~/.config/google-chrome/Default sqlite3 Cookies "delete…

What Makes a Good Programming Environment?

, 4 min read

I was recently asked about my opinion regarding agile software development. I think the core problem is not agile or extreme programming, or object-oriented or structured. I think this simply misses the point. Below are the key ingredients to succeed in software development when it comes to…

JavaScript grid editor: I want to be Excel

, 1 min read

Good summary of some current JavaScript grid solutions. See also JavaScript Open-Source Spreadsheets and Data Grids.

AMD Bulldozer CPU Architecture Overview

, 1 min read

Architecture per core: At the chip level, 8 cores per CPU: Registers per core: Unfortunately I didn't find opcode clock cycles on AMD's website. AMD's website seems to be almost unmaintained, i.e., lots of dead links. Below are some clock cycles gathered through experiment by Agner Fog. I took…

NASA Shutdown due to USA Government Shutdown

, 1 min read

The world largest economy shut down its most prestigious space center agency. Wikipedia provides some background information here: government shutdown. Regarding NASA it says: NASA will furlough 98% of its staff, leaving fewer than 600 out of more than 18,000 employees on the job. NASA will…

Patrick Pichette on Google Fiber

, 1 min read

Google CFO, Patrick Pichette, on the evolution of computing power storage capacity network bandwith He shows the following remarkable slide on the disparity of the latter to the former. It was this disparity which apparently led Google to enter the broadband market with its own…

Force rsync Not To Use Timestamps

, 1 min read

Most common usage of rsync is rsync -anv ./ user@remote:/dir/ But when the timestamps of the files on source and target vary wildly it is better to use: rsync -crntlv ./ user@remote:/dir/ The option -c stands for checksum. The option -n is used to not overwrite anything (dry run). Drop -n to…

Photographs from Space by Karen L. Nyberg

, 1 min read

Amazing photographs from astronaut and engineer Karen L. Nyberg on Twitter during ISS-Expeditionen 36/37: The astronauts and engineers in space have internet: NASA Extends the World Wide Web Out Into Space. BTW, Karen L. Nyberg also posted a photo of a dinosaur in space.

Electronic Mathematical Journals

, 1 min read

Below journals, loosely related to topics in Numerical Analysis, offer unencumbered full text: Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis Applied Mathematics E-Notes (no longer active) The Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra arXiv Unfortunately, Numerische Mathematik, BIT, SIAM Journal on…