Malcolm Yoke Hean Low

Ebook: HPC for Dummies

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:37:59 +0800

This special edition eBook from Sun and AMD shares details on real-world uses of HPC, explains the different types of HPC, guides you on how to choose between different suppliers, and provides benchmarks and guidelines you can use to get your system up and running. Get it here.

Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:35:29 +0800

An interesting article by Tom DeMarco, author of the 1979 book "Structured Analysis and System Specification" and inventor of the data flow diagram.

The Read Green Initiative

Tue, 12 May 2009 17:26:59 +0800

The Read Green Initiative offers millions of people FREE access to an alternative, environmentally friendly way of enjoying favorite magazines, books and other publications. Simply select your free one-year digital subscription to any featured magazine and read it with Zinio's interactive reader.

NTU supports Earth Hour

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:45:45 +0800

Free Wireless Broadband Access to NTU Wifi Network via SMS Registration

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:07:26 +0800

(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\ and a password for access to the NTUwireless network.

Leap Year Bug in Microsoft Zune Player

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:45:13 +0800

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.

Google Code University - Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:40:19 +0800

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.

Obama Wins Historic US Election

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:09:45 +0800

Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:50:53 +0800

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.

10 Great Tech Books

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:59:11 +0800

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

The links to these books on Amazon are listed in this page.

Professor Who Wrote 200,000+ Books

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:17:17 +0800

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.

Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:24:42 +0800

Links to Programming Languages

6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

Oxford and Cambridge offer lectures on Apple's iTunes

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:21:12 +0800

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!

Why Lazy Functional Programming Languages are Good for Multicore

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:25:25 +0800

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.'"

Stanford frees CS, robotics courses

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:02:52 +0800

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.

How Videogames Blind Us With Science

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:17:56 +0800

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."

Lifelike Animation

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:53:10 +0800

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."

Online course on multi-core performance from NCSA

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:30:02 +0800

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/ .

Google Browser: Google Chrome

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:18:52 +0800

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.

Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:01:38 +0800

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.