I sent a patch to the Trilinos team for the broken Solve() upper triangular routine in Epetra_CrsMatrix.cpp. This is my first patch accepted and consolidated into a public release. Cool :-)

In the middle of this page, there is some info on how to get damn small linux distro onto your LAKS clock. By booting from the USB clock, it is possible to mount and read NTFS partitions without knowing the Windows password.

Hubble is now compiled for Windows (with Cygwin's help) and has a new core developer.

Rene Tegel (nanobit) fixed severe issues into the GPU code involving multithreading. He added support for SMP computers as well. Finally, he got Terragen, a landscape generator into the framework. Videos of artificial landscapes generated by the GPU Team can be downloaded here. The GPU cluster has now some simple statistics online.

Latest news for the GPU project...

Some update: I found a job at university, but only for six months. I have to work on some Trilinos code. I am sympathetic with people looking for jobs these days. It has been a hard time. In the meanwhile, I could give lectures even in "Quantitative methods of Business Analysis". I still have to ask my student if he passed the exams. No wonder if not with such a teacher.

A P2P Search Engine

The GPU project features now a plugin/frontend couple written by nanobit, that extends GPU with crawlers that index the web, in a similar manner as Google does. It is possible to query the network on this web interface or by downloading GPU (link here). Best is that it is possible to run GPU under wine, or under VMWare. This is good news, cause the port under Linux using Kylix is still ages away from being useable. Several improvements were done, in particular network connectivity should be better now, although not all problems are solved as usual. Spartacus keeps running since April as network node.

Ouff, my thesis in computer science is finally out of the pipe and is here, written in latex and published with html2latex and pdflatex. When I begun the study, I never thought I could reach such spiritual height :-|

Spartacus strikes back

Spartacus is finally running with both Suse Linux 9 and XP. Nigia did an impressive job, he changed motherboard and processor (now an Intel Pentium IV), built by himself a power switch for the old chassis and painted it white.

Spartacus is used as meeting point for the GPU project during the day, but I have to shut it down during the night because with that noise it is impossible to sleep. During the night, another host, an Internet Access Point in Poschiavo, acts as meeting point.

Nigia found that CPU and RAM of Spartacus are okay. But the Shuttle AK39N is dead. Now, he ordered a MSI board. Let's hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, as usual.

A tip to check for weak encryption

This is a short empiric tip from my experience, while I worked for a security company: if you have an encrypted file, and you are able to compress it at 75% of its initial size, you probably have an XOR crypted file, with a short key. If you read on literature how to crack a Vigenere, you will be able to crack a XOR, too; because they are the same. The fact that you can compress indicates that there is still much redundancy. Ciphertext generated by good ciphers never compress!

Little trouble with OpenOffice and Excel

OpenOffice 1.1 has a very powerful export function to create PDF. A bug I found in both OpenOffice and Excel is that they cannot create 3D graphs, if the numbers you are using are below 1. This happens if you want to plot probabilities for example. OpenOffice and Excel, they simply trunc the decimal part while plotting the graph!

News for GPU: Welcome to Iran, Brasil, Malaysia

Interesting news pointed out by Slashdot: Interplanetary Internet is coming...

21 grams

Not a film worth the money. Life is enough hard without it. Gratuit violence.

GPU project

GPU was quoted in a paper by Jim McKeeth. Link is here. The paper was presented at BorCon 2003, the Borland Conference in California.

All recent news for the project:

• GPU 0.845: Feynman-Kac initial release
• Network crash not caused by GPU
• Statistics, FAQ, first big network crash
• GPU enters 3D era, <yaymiss> node, globetrotter