Anthology of Interest

I'm trying to get my program running on Westgrid SGI machines at the University of Alberta, but the MPI implementation is slightly different. Just enough to crash stuff that works on Linux PC's, Mac's, and AIX RS/6000 SP's. Bah!

SGI programming information for people who don't yet have a cross platform bookmark manager set up:

• MIPSpro™ C++ Programmer's Guide
• Origin 2000 and Onyx2 Performance Tuning and Optimization Guide
• Guide to SGI Compilers and Compiling Tools
• Message Passing Toolkit: MPI Programmer's Manual
• Memory Management Control Programmer's Manual
• MIPSpro 64-Bit Porting and Transition Guide
• MIPSpro Auto-Parallelizing Option Programmer's Guide

Also of interest to the HPC C++ programmer, Todd Veldhuizen's Techniques for Scientific C++. Good stuff there.

... how about the opinion of an actual musician who is trying to get his stuff heard?

First, a link to Digital Copyright Canada on the Music in Canada Coalition.

The recent media coverage of the Canadian music industry's attempts (and apparent success) to have Canada's "archaic" copyright laws overhauled had got me thinking about what it really means when I buy a CD. Or what does it mean when I buy software, either by downloading it through a service like Steam or buying a box at a store. Recent /. discussion on what exactly you are paying for when you buy software was quite interesting, with respect to Valve denying access to some people with pirated steam accounts, which apparently got a few (a lot?) of valid accounts as well. Should a software company be allowed to remotely disable your game if they think you have not paid for your copy?

The recording industry in Canada has convinced otherwise respectable musicians such as Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo (2 CDs in my collection) and Tom Cochrane (3 CDs) to do press conferences about how downloading is killing the industry and how the Canadian government has to step in and update the copyright laws to stop it.

From BoingBoing, here is an article on how intellectual property policy is made. The gist of it is that the people who want more rights go begging to policy makers with weak economic models and anecdotes, expecting increased legal rights which are supposed to lead to more creativity and innovation, and that policy makers in general simply capitulate. The lack of investigation and empirical data on the impacts of creating artificial monopolies in the form of intellectual property rights is lamented. Empirical evidence regarding the impact of "database rights" in the EU is presented.

It's an interesting article, more so than the practice abstract above might suggest. Another interesting article, from an IEEE newsletter via Marli: IP Fundamentals. The IEEE Spectrum Intellectual Property archive has other interesting articles. Engineering is all about the intellectual property. Oh my yes.

Upgraded S9Y tonight. Hopefully Tamara will be able to get trackbacks figured out. Got some shiny new themes, but lost the plugin which used to run fortune for me. Oh well.

Update

The fortune plugin was causing some problems and I couldn't immediatly nail it down... upgrading Tamara's blog to S9Y 0.7 worked fine, but mine did not. So I ended up recreating my database, and only later realized that it was the fortune plugin that was causing the problems when I couldn't find it to add it back it. Just more of me making life hard for myself by being silly.

A test, of trackbacks on Walter's blog...

I saw this in some guy's sig on the latest /. poll about your biggest responsibility, and thought it was kind of interesting. That site links to this one, which looks to give Americans who are seriously considering moving North information on how to do so. That intern links to this Globalist story about how society is changing in both Canada and the States.

Anyway, kind of interesting.

Tamara was axing about how to change the colours in her Emacs, which one can do in the ~/.emacs file with a little lisp. But there is something better than just setting the colours by hand, there is a whole lisp package devoted to colour themes for Emacs.

It's at in the Emacs wiki here. It's pretty cool; I'm currently using the Arjen theme. There is a whole theme gallery available.

I came across a plotting package for Python that I have not seen before, called biggles. It seems pretty slick. Together with Numeric, I should be able to do lots of stuff in Python that I do in Matlab. This is only important because I want to be able to plot graphs of the results of my FDTD simulations as it runs, and be able to generate plots of things like source functions, to help estimate how many time steps may be required.

There is a MATLAB data file loader for Python, which is part of SciPY. Unfortunatly, it won't load the data files written by Phred, even though both MATLAB and Octave can read them. I guess I'll have to cast all the results to double before writing the data out. Blah.

I was rummaging through my drawers the other day and came across an ATI Rage XL that was hidden away. I have a spare machine for Userful work, and it had a multiheaded colorgraphics card in it. Since I am no longer doing multiheaded stuff specifically, I threw that Rage XL in. Wow! It is much, much faster!

So I decided to see if I could get some games working. So I installed Half-life, and then I installed Valve's Steam thing, which is used to distribute updates and stuff (among other things). It works great in Windows... hmmm, can I make it work in WineX (a.k.a. Cedega?)?

There's an installation script and howto available from linux-gamers.net which makes the CVS version of WineX easy to install. I was under the impression that one had to install IE6 to get Steam to work, however...

I installed DCOM98, because that's commonly needed for IE6 installation (and InstallShield, a common game packaging system). But I could not get IE6 to install in any way. I always crashed out before showing a window. So I decided to just try installing Steam. The install went ok, but Steam itself would not run.

I looked through the output of cvscedega Steam.exe, and noticed a missing dll (msvcr70.dll), so I downloaded that from dll-file.com, and ran it again. Then I saw something that absolutely amazed me:

err:shdocvw:SHDOCVW_TryLoadMozillaControl Can't load the Mozilla ActiveX control

It turns out that this guy wrote a Mozilla ActiveX control. The fact that a fairly major app took the time to optionally make use of it when it was unable to find IE's ActiveX control was even more amazing. So I downloaded and installed it. I had to get another dll, msvcp70.dll, but after that it worked, aside from missing fonts. That was quickly solved by copying ttf files from my Windows installation and following the Fedora Core 3 Release Notes regarding fonts. The last thing was to turn on FreeType support in the config file.

So now I have a working Steam installation on a Fedora Core 3 machine. Now I'll just wait to see if the games themselves work ok... they should though. I've had Half-Life and Counter-Strike (and Day of Defeat, etc) working under WineX before.

A nice touch is that the Steam system tray icon appears in the Gnome Notification area on the panel.

Nifty!

Tamara was wondering this morning if Canada had a DNA data bank for the identification of criminals. This came up because someone in Halifax is doing a lot of B&E of late and cut themselves in one of the houses they broke into.

Sure enough, Canada has a DNA data bank. Here is a link to the National DNA Data Bank website, and for the would be CSI's out there, a link to the Sample Collection manual.

Apparently, the RCMP was the first police agency in North America to obtain a conviction based on DNA evidence processed by it's own forensic labs.

I noticed a long time ago that opening a connection seemed to take a long, long time, but that after that the connection was normally quite fast. I though that maybe it was my router taking its time opening a connection, or maybe something to do with Snort running and my Ethernet card being in promiscuous mode. Today it occurred to me that it might be just DNS name resolutions taking a long time. I tried putting the UVic name server in my resolv.conf and sure enough, everything seemed faster.

Shaw's DNS servers must either be really loaded down, running on really old hardware, or not properly caching results.

Update:

It turns out that I suck. This page has info on Shaw's DNS servers, and the ones I was using weren't even listed. They were probably from my old Calgary configuration and I just never changed them. Turns out the first one I had listed wasn't even running a nameserver any more. I changed to the Victoria nameservers, and everything is just peachy.

UVic has a shiny new super computer... too bad I probably won't ever get to use it. It's a NEC SX-6 (the top500 page has more info), and will be used primarily to study climate change. A story about the new machine is in The Ring (the UVic paper).

I wonder if I could get Phred to compile on that thing....

I realized the other day that I have been using the standard library function pow(x, 2.0f) in many places where I should have been using x*x, and I though that maybe this was a little slow. It seems that pow() is generally implemented using exp(y * log(x)), which is going to be a lot slower than simple floating point multiplies when raising a number to a small integer power.

I wrote a program to make sure though, and sure enough. For 100,000,000 items, pow(x, 2.0f) took 5.13 CPU seconds, and x*x took 0.58 CPU seconds (as measured by clock()).

Again on a Parliamentary note, Bill S-15 was recently read in the Senate. S-15 is interesting because it deals with spam; junk email. The bill describes penalties for spammers, establishes a do not spam list, and calls for a "Internet Consumer Protection Council" which would set standards aimed at reducing spam.

One slightly alarming thing is that anyone who wants to operate an ISP would be required to be a member of the council. This is a barrier to entry; another (potentially expensive?) hoop to jump through for those wishing to start an ISP. On the other hand, the formative years where kids started ISP's by buying a bunch of modems is arguably over. We are now in a time when largish companies (i.e. containing people who know how to jump through hoops and having the capital to do so) control a basically mature market. With that in mind, perhaps increased regulation with the aim of reducing spam is appropriate.

Did you know that in Canada, photographers do not automatically own copyright for photographs they take under commission? So if you hire someone to take pictures at your wedding, you own the copyright on any photographs taken unless you specifically agree to assign the copyright to the photographer in a contract (I think, contracts can be tricky, and IANAL).

This makes sense. If you think of taking photographs as a service, it makes sense to pay a hourly rate plus expenses (film, in the old days), and have the expectation of owning the results at the end. If you commission a painter to paint your portrait, it's not unreasonable to expect that you own the painting when it has been finished. Things get a little more cloudy when you ask who has the right to sell prints of that painting. It's even more difficult with photos, since they are infinitely reproducible, especially in digital form.