China Built 600 Dams per Year Since 1950

, 1 min read

According Los Angeles Times (dead link) China built 600 dams per year on average. This trend will continue. According Wikipedia, or Jie Cai's Master Thesis (dead link), China has the largest potential for hydropower in the world and currently ranks first in hydroelectric generating capacity with…

Newer GPUGRID Tasks Keep GPU Really Hot

, 1 min read

Recent GPUGRID tasks, like I60R2-NATHAN_KIDKIXc22 or 27x0-SANTI_RAP74wtCUBIC really keep my NVidia GTX 560 hot, i.e., as warm as 70° Celsius or higher. Fri Sep 6 17:16:38 2013 +------------------------------------------------------+ | NVIDIA-SMI 5.325.15 Driver…

Using WordPress for 5 Years Now

, 1 min read

Saving URLs in del.icio.us Still Troublesome

, 2 min read

I have been using del.icio.us (dead link) since at least the year 2005. During that time del.icio.us (dead link) was sold to Yahoo, which didn't do very much with this bookmarking service. It simply worked. In 2011 the service was acquired by a company named AVOS (dead link), see Wikipedia for the…

Mark Twain Commentary on the MacBook Air

, 1 min read

Mark Twain's (1835-1910) words still relevant today for people who want to change established things hastily. From Ken Krugler on Mark Twain Commentary on the MacBook Air: One of my favorite posts to the Unicode mailing list came during a heated debate about “simplifying” certain character…

Copy Directories with Symbolic Links via ssh

, 1 min read

Although probably known in most circles, it is worth repeating that scp by itself does not honor symbolic links. To overcome this limitation just combine tar and ssh, i.e., tar on sending side, untar on receiving side: tar cf - /src/dir | ssh remotehost "cd /dst/dir ; tar xf -" Usually…

Average Size of Web Pages plus Prediction

, 1 min read

Average Size of Web Pages plus Prediction shows an exponential fitting to web-page sizes. From above article: As you can see, the 1/2 MB mark was cracked in 2009 and the 1 MB mark was cracked in 2012. Despite the seemingly random fluctuations, an exponential trend is clearly visible. The power…

SyncSort Sort is Not Stable

, 1 min read

A colleague of mine noticed some strange behaviours in his programs. It was later discovered that this is due to SyncSort not conducting a stable sort. Stable sort means that the sequence of elements in input is not changed if there is no strict need to change them. Unfortunately, the documentation…

WordPress.com by the Numbers: The July 2013 Hot List

, 1 min read

Some statistics from WordPress just for month July, 2013. These sheer numbers almost sound unbelievable: 1 million new blogs 7 Exabyte of data 1 billion pages accessed by mobile devices 9 million YouTube videos embedded 500.000 posts per e-mail 200 posts per voice

Design Notes on System for the Analysis of Order- and Stepsize Changes for Cyclic Composite Multistep Methods

, 2 min read

For the numerical solution of the ordinary differential equation, initial value problem $$ y'=f(t,y), \quad y(t_0)=y_0,$$ one can use a cyclic composite multistep method of the form $$ \sum\limits_{i=0}^{m} A_i Y_{k+i} = h \sum\limits_{i=0}^{m} B_i Y'_{k+i}, \qquad…

ssh and rsync for Android

, 3 min read

I got somewhat tired of using FTP with my Android, even with lftp. Keeping multiple folders in sync is simply very cumbersome. If I only had rsync working on Android! I found SSHelper, written by Paul Lutus, see also Arachnoid. SSHelper offers ssh, scp, rsync. You can ssh to your Android phone and…

Google Now Emergency Alert

, 1 min read

When visiting Harvard University I received an Emergency Alert directly on my phone, see below. Google Now Emergency Alert At first I thought that this was a kind of student hack, but others just received the same alerts. After inspection it contained additional information, shown below. Flood…

SUNDIALS (SUite of Nonlinear and DIfferential/ALgebraic equation Solvers)

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides a suite of software packages for the solution of ordinary differential equations. This suite is called SUNDIALS. SUNDIALS consists of CVODE: solves initial value problems for ordinary differential equation (ODE) systems; successor of GEAR, EPISODE,…

HipHop Virtual Machine can run WordPress

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HipHop Virtual Machine says that HHVM can run WordPress. A more technical description of the HHVM can be found in Speeding up PHP-based development with HipHop VM. One of the main targets was to be as fast as the previous PHP to C++ translater. This goal has been achieved, see below…

Blend "Söhne und Weltmacht" and "Why Nations Fail"

, 3 min read

Gunnar Heinsohn (German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia) wrote a book with title Söhne und Weltmacht -- Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen in German. This book is about: youth bulge and its implication to criminal or war activity genocide property and possession This book can explain why…

Hashing Just Random Numbers

, 2 min read

My recent project had some issues with hashing some 10 million numbers. To analyze the matter I wrote a small test program, see numberhash.c. I wanted to know which influence the following factors play: hashing just numbers (no alphabetic characters) ASCII vs. EBCIDC choice of hash function load…

Very simple SHA1 test program written in C

, 1 min read

Here is a simple test program to call SHA1 hashing routine from OpenSSL. #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <openssl/sha.h> int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { unsigned long i, n; unsigned char md[1024]; if (argc <= 1) return 0; n…

Hash functions: An empirical comparison -- article by Peter Kankowski

, 1 min read

Peter Kankowski wrote a very interesting article on hashing functions. It compares a number of current hash functions and conducts some performance benchmarks. iSCSI CRC Meiyan Murmur2 XXHfast32 SBox (dead link: https://home.comcast.net/~bretm/hash/10.html) Larson XXHstrong32 Sedgewick Novak…

GNU C: Extensions to the C Language Family

, 1 min read

Here is an article GNU C: Extensions to the C Language Family about extensions in GNU C vs. ANSI C. Nested functions, i.e., a function defined within another function Double-word integers, i.e., 64 bit signed and unsigned long long int and unsigned long long int Arrays of variable length, f(int z)…

Memory Limitations with IBM Enterprise COBOL Compiler

, 1 min read

Recently I learned the hard way that IBM Enterprise COBOL compiler for z/OS (mainframe) cannot generate 8-byte long POINTER variables, but only 4-byte pointers. This means, you cannot use more than 2GB in COBOL on a mainframe. I.e., you cannot make use of AMODE=64 with COBOL on the mainframe. You…