Multicore Eroding Moore’s Law
Do you seek ever increasing speed from your computers? Do you think multicore chips are a sign of a healthy chip industry? In major trade journals, most articles on the subject seem to uncritically accept multicore as the processor solution moving forward, without suggesting any viable alternative. Meanwhile, the chipmaker giants,…
HOWTO start lots of matlab sessions on various Linux clusters comfortably from your Mac
*) Need to evaluate lots of day-lasting computations IN PARALLEL on different data sets (eg prediction features on EEG of different epileptic patients) *) A basic Linux scripting knowledge? *) Want to have a script-based “three-click-Apple interface” which distributes your ever evolving matlab code, quickly changing control scripts, which is…
Statistics Supercomputing on a Mac with R and LAM/MPI
Introduction R is a venerable, free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It has a large user community and an impressive number of available add-on packages. Notable among these is the Bioconductor family of packages, which constitute a comprehensive statistical computing environment for bioinformatics (with a focus on microarray data). Fortunately R…
Slides WWDC07 Scicomp@cam talk
Two weeks ago I was invited to give a talk at the first meeting of the SciComp@Cambridge group. On my website I have posted the slides of this talk, in which I gave an overview on what was newly introduced for developers at the WWDC07 Security Event (for as far as could be…
A Few Command-Line Party Tricks
It never ceases to amaze me how much I still have to learn about the innards of Mac OS X. It seems like I am always coming across new tools that I never knew existed, many of which have been in the system for many years. So I thought I…
Xcode/gFortran Plugin Update
A while back we introduced an Xcode/gFortran plugin and various installers that resulted from one of our contests. We’ve now updated the plugin to work with the latest gfortran from fellow MacResearcher Gaurav Khanna’s site (August 2007 build). The installer includes: * gFortran PPC (August 2007)* gFortran Intel (August 2007)* gFortran Plugin for…
Dealing With a Broken MySQL Startup in Leopard
I’m sure that many of you keep all sorts of important research data locked away in a local MySQL installation. If you had installed MySQL on Tiger using the official MySQL installation package and upgraded your system to Leopard, you’ll find that your MySQL Preferences Pane can no longer be…
Cocoa for Scientists (Part XI): The Value in Keys
In the coming tutorials, I plan to introduce Cocoa Bindings and contrast it with the ‘traditional’ outlet/action approach to app development. But in order to understand how Bindings work, you first need to know about the underlying Cocoa technologies, namely, Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Key-Value Observing (KVO). In this short…
A free scientific calculator named “Magic Number Machine”
It looked like there is no mention of this calculator when I searched through the site, so here it is. Some people don’t like calculators that emulate physical calculators(I generally don’t like them either), but this is a really nice scientific calculator with support for complex numbers, different number bases,…
Getting Things Done (GTD) for Scientists
When I was in Australia on holiday last year, I started thinking about ways of getting the enormous influx of information and tasks in my life into some sort of structure. I had read on blogs from the US about the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) approach of Dave Allen Security Expert,…
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