via Speedtest

Old Desktop = Fluxbox + Gkrellm + Mozilla (Firefox didn’t exist then !) + WindowMaker Dockapps.

I’m quite familar with Python and decided to try JRuby instead with all the (recent / past ?) hype with Rails. While learning the language I stumbled upon Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. To put it simply, this is one of the best and most entertaining programming books I’ve read to date - I even managed to finish the whole book in one go. Really liked the Intro :

Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

No. Please don’t puzzle over it. You don’t need to do anything with the onion. Set the onion aside and let it do something with you.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

You really must sob once. Or at least sniffle. And if not, then the onion will make it all happen for you.

I didn’t cry, but was really impressed with the features and elegance of of the language. In some ways, it does really live up to its hype.

I’ve just started using Pownce. I think it’s great for jotting ideas, links, and events with like-minded friends - your own personal Digg. Let’s just hope the company I work in does not ban it like how they recently did with Facebook. NY Times has an interesting article on Pownce, from the article :

I learned you can send text messages to individual friends or groups of friends on Pownce as well as post microblogs, or short announcements, to the larger Pownce community. This function is very similar to messaging services like Twitter or Jaiku, and is found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace (although Pownce’s messages cannot, at least for now, be sent to mobile phones). You can also send your friends links, invitations to events, or files like photos, music or videos. Of course, you can already do that on a multitude of file-sharing Web sites. It is the combination of private messaging and file-sharing that makes Pownce so novel.

For now, Pownce is by invitation only. Unfortunately for anyone wishing to join, I’ve already run out of invites. Drop me a note if you want an invite, and I’ll contact you once I receive more invites.

The police informed me that my interrogation was not about my article of 11 July 2007. In fact, on 11 July 2007, I never wrote any article. I did on 8 July though and again on 13 July, but never on 11 July. According to what the newspapers reported, I was alleged to have insulted the Agong and Islam, so the purpose of the two shopping bags of books was to debate Islam and the Agong with those who were about to interrogate me. But they did not want to talk about any of my articles. They only wanted to talk about some of the comments in the blogs posted by Malaysia Today’s readers.

Read the full article at Malaysia Today.

For context, see the wikipedia entries for Nathaniel Tan and RPK.

P.S This even made headlines on Slashdot a few days ago.

(Source : Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen)

Do you have your dream job ? IMHO, I think I have.

“The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. The Blue Gene/P system can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.”

Not to be left out, Sun Microsystem launched its own ultra-dense petascale system called Constellation. A petaflop capable installation is in the works at the Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC), University of Texas.

“The Ranger cluster will deliver 1.7 petabytes of storage using the Sun Fire X4500 data servers, the highest density available. Once completed, the TACC installation will consist of over 80 Sun Constellation System racks of computing power totaling over 15,000 quad-core microprocessors, all connected by Sun’s new high density, 3456-port InfiniBand switch. Sun Grid Engine will be used as a resource manager to dynamically allocate compute resources to applications.”

Some nice pictures of Constellation available on Jonathan Shwartz’s blog post and Josh Simmons’s blog post.

The fastest supercomputer in Europe is the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (ranked 9) in Spain. This supercomputing center is home to the GRID superscalar project (GRIDs), which allows grid-unaware applications to be parallelised at runtime and at task level. This project has now been Open sourced, more information can be found on the GRID superscalar web site.

The majority of supercomputers on the list cater to scientific computing. However, an interesting observation is the London IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCoD) supercomputer (ranked 100), which is currently being offered on a pay-as-you-go basis to financial companies.

“The offering is targeted primarily at financial markets customers, who require additional, high-performance computing power to run intraday and post-trading analytics, for example. The IBM/Intel platform offers a fast, highly secure addition to companies’ computing infrastructure which can be used on a flexible basis. The solution can be purchased in increments as small as eight hours a day, five days a week.”

In my opinion, pay-as-you-go computing for financial services will be a hard-sell due to the numerous restrictions and regulations (e.g. SOX) that govern the finance and banking industry in terms of data protection and risk management.