Archive for the General category
Ebook: HPC for Dummies
Posted on Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 12:37 AM by Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS)
Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
Posted on Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:35 AM by Malcolm
The Read Green Initiative
Posted on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 5:26 PM by Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS), Research (RSS)
NTU supports Earth Hour
Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 3:45 PM by Malcolm
Edited on: Monday, March 30, 2009 9:25 AMFree Wireless Broadband Access to NTU Wifi Network via SMS Registration
Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 9:07 AM by Malcolm
(Source) Visitors to NTU campus with mobile phone can now enjoy free, campus-wide seamless wireless broadband access with speed of up to 54Mbps.To register for the free wireless access day account, simply SMS the keyword 'register' to the phone number 98635582. The visitor will receive via SMS the account username in the format ASSOC\
Edited on: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:19 AM
Leap Year Bug in Microsoft Zune Player
Posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 12:45 PM by Malcolm
On December 31, 2008, every Zune 30 device freezes due to a leap year bug in a driver from Freescale Semiconductor in a "while loop". Obviously a leap year test case is not carried out on the driver. See this article for details. Edited on: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:20 PMPosted in General (RSS), Teaching (RSS)
Google Code University - Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce
Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 12:40 AM by Malcolm
This tutorial from the Google Code University covers the basics of parallel programming and the MapReduce programming model. The pre-requisites are significant programming experience with a language such as C++ or Java, and data structures & algorithms.
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS), Research (RSS)
Obama Wins Historic US Election
Posted on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 11:09 PM by Malcolm
Edited on: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:31 PM
Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing
Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2008 at 7:50 PM by Malcolm
This article from the July issue of IEEE Spectrum describes a state-of-the-art agent-based robotic warehousing system. Unlike traditional warehouse where operators go around the warehouse picking orders, in this system, swarms of robots controlled by an agent-based scheduling, dispatching and traffic control system, worked in parallel to bring shelves to the operators for picking. The system has already been deployed by Staples, Walgreens and Zappos.
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
10 Great Tech Books
Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 6:59 PM by Malcolm
From the July issue of IEEE Spectrum, below are 10 great general-interest books about technology.- The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
- Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean by David Gelernter
- A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
- The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Professor Who Wrote 200,000+ Books
Posted on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 12:17 PM by Malcolm
This interesting article describes how a management science professor make use of publicly available data on internet and computer AI to automatically "generate" 200,000 books and publishes and sells them for profit.Edited on: Saturday, October 18, 2008 12:18 PM
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 at 10:24 AM by Malcolm
Links to Programming Languages
6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Edited on: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:39 PMPosted in General (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Oxford and Cambridge offer lectures on Apple's iTunes
Posted on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 at 10:21 AM by Malcolm
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are to make lectures by well-known academics available through Apple's iTunes.More than 150 hours of free audio and video podcasts from the University of Oxford are now available on a new site on iTunes U.
Cambridge on iTunes U offer more than 300 audio and video tracks covering a broad range of themes; delve into the Enron scandal, take a guided tour of the exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam museum by leading experts, and listen to the regular contributions from the St John's College choir - all without having to leave your house!
Edited on: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:22 AM
Posted in General (RSS), Teaching (RSS)
Why Lazy Functional Programming Languages are Good for Multicore
Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 11:25 AM by Malcolm
In this article, Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevance in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters. "I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt.'"
Edited on: Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:27 AM
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS)
Stanford frees CS, robotics courses
Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 11:02 AM by Malcolm
Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.
Edited on: Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:26 AM
How Videogames Blind Us With Science
Posted on Monday, September 08, 2008 at 2:17 PM by Malcolm
Kids who are turning away from Science are actually applying scientific reasoning to analyze videogames.
From the article:
"they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she
found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they'd dump all the
information they'd gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks
it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they'd develop a mathematical model to explain
how the boss worked -- and to predict how to beat it."
Posted in General (RSS), Science (RSS)
Lifelike Animation
Posted on Saturday, September 06, 2008 at 12:53 PM by Malcolm
From the story: "The woman above is not real. I mean, she was real once, when real actress Emily O'Brien provided Image Metrics (you know their work from GTAIV) with 35 facial poses in front of a pair of digital cameras. From there, O'Brien was dismissed so the animators could go to work. Apparently "ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real." And the results, while not always perfect, are pretty extraordinary."
Edited on: Saturday, September 06, 2008 4:48 PM
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Online course on multi-core performance from NCSA
Posted on Thursday, September 04, 2008 at 9:30 AM by Malcolm
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is offering a new Web-based course, "Introduction to Multi-core Performance." This tutorial helps current and prospective users of multi-core systems understand and use the technology to accelerate their research. Multi-core processors, which hold the promise of enhanced performance and more efficient parallel processing, are a key stepping stone on the path to petascale computation. Applications that run on multi-core systems must be optimized to take full advantage of the improved performance offered by multi-core technology. To browse the course catalog, go to ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/browse.php . To create a login and take a course, go to ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ .Edited on: Thursday, September 04, 2008 10:42 AM
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS)
Google Browser: Google Chrome
Posted on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 11:18 AM by Malcolm
Google will be launching a new opensource browser, Google Chrome. The news was accidently leaked when a copy of the comic book describing the browser was released.
Edited on: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 12:46 PM
Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:01 PM by Malcolm
Windows Vista is not for Intel, it has been claimed. The chip giant will not be installing the new operating systems on its many thousands of desktop PCs. It has "no compelling case" to do so.
