The NY Times published an article today about how several large libraries have rebuffed offers from Google to scan their collections, aiming for broader distribution of their content by preferring to go with the Open Content Alliance. The OCA has recently reached an agreement with the Boston Public Library to scan content, and will be scanning 136,000 books from the Library of Congress. This content will be indexed and made available through the OCA website and Yahoo!
It is laudable that several institutions are trying to make their content available to the widest possible audience. They are standing on principle, disagreeing to cede complete control to a private entity.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Google, IBM and cloud computing research
Google and IBM recently announced setup of a data center for access to students to work on cloud computing. They expect to setup 1,600 processors by the end of the year. This should be a fantastic resource for students to build and run some large applications.
Google has published a bunch of research that has gone into building their applications. In particular, MapReduce - a programming model based on functional programming - allows programs to be automatically parrallelized. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."
Google has published a bunch of research that has gone into building their applications. In particular, MapReduce - a programming model based on functional programming - allows programs to be automatically parrallelized. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Anand wins!
Vishwanathan Anand is the world chess champion. He won the championship tournament played in Mexico City in September 2007. A hugely satisfying result to a never-perfect system for determining who gets to be called world champion.
Anand won the 14-player double round-robin tournament with a score of +4. He was +3 in the first half of the tournament, but only a half-point clear of Gelfand. Both Kramnik and Gelfand lost round 9 to give Anand a 1.5 point lead. He was two points clear ahead of the field after round 11, and coasted to the win from there on.
It remains to be seen if FIDE can sustain a fair and well-run world championship system. Hope springs eternal. And at least for the next year or so, Anand can savour the view from the top...
Anand won the 14-player double round-robin tournament with a score of +4. He was +3 in the first half of the tournament, but only a half-point clear of Gelfand. Both Kramnik and Gelfand lost round 9 to give Anand a 1.5 point lead. He was two points clear ahead of the field after round 11, and coasted to the win from there on.
It remains to be seen if FIDE can sustain a fair and well-run world championship system. Hope springs eternal. And at least for the next year or so, Anand can savour the view from the top...
Monday, May 07, 2007
Office supplies
One of the things I keep seeing stocked in our office supplies cabinet is floppy disks. No one uses them anymore, of course. They are sooo 20th century! No one seems to know who orders them, either. Perhaps the Office Depot guys put in whatever they want. If so, it is nice to be able to go in and sell a bunch of random things.
The latest joke is the anti-bacterial pencil. The box says that the anti-bacterial protection is for the pencil, not the person. We all had a good laugh about it, as I suppose do OfficeDepot and PaperMate at $1.25/pencil.
The latest joke is the anti-bacterial pencil. The box says that the anti-bacterial protection is for the pencil, not the person. We all had a good laugh about it, as I suppose do OfficeDepot and PaperMate at $1.25/pencil.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Kramnik is the new world chess champion!
The match in Elista is over. Kramnik and Topalov were tied after 12 games and played a 4-game rapid tie break. Three of the four games were decisive, Kramnik winning the fourth.
I had said earlier that Topalov was a deserving champion. After the toiletgate shenanigans, I was rooting for Kramnik. He managed to overcome the one point penalty (from foreiting the fifth game) and prevailed. Mig has a good quote on his blog: "I don't know if the better player won today. But looking back over the past few weeks I'd have to say that the better man certainly did. Hail the new and improved world champion! Or, dare I type it, hail the new World Champion!"
The games themselves were very exciting, though the quality was often affected by nerves. They usually are exciting when Topalov plays! Reports and game scores can be found on the Chessbase site.
The next thing to look forward to is a resumption of a regular and fair system of determining future world champions. FIDE has for too long been a highly unprofessional and highly political organization. That needs to change.
I had said earlier that Topalov was a deserving champion. After the toiletgate shenanigans, I was rooting for Kramnik. He managed to overcome the one point penalty (from foreiting the fifth game) and prevailed. Mig has a good quote on his blog: "I don't know if the better player won today. But looking back over the past few weeks I'd have to say that the better man certainly did. Hail the new and improved world champion! Or, dare I type it, hail the new World Champion!"
The games themselves were very exciting, though the quality was often affected by nerves. They usually are exciting when Topalov plays! Reports and game scores can be found on the Chessbase site.
The next thing to look forward to is a resumption of a regular and fair system of determining future world champions. FIDE has for too long been a highly unprofessional and highly political organization. That needs to change.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Topalov-Kramnik match
A match to "unify" the world chess championship is under way in Elista, Kalmikia (FIDE president Kirsan Ilymzhinov's backyard). Kramnik followed up his fantastic Olympiad performance by going up 2-0 after the first two games. After a couple of draws, the psychological games began and resulted in the toiletgate scandal.
Instead of continuing the hugely interesting games, we had the edifying sight of Topalov complaining about the number of times Kramnik needed to visit the restroom and getting a pliant FIDE appeals committee to change playing conditions. The full details are too silly to elaborate. Kramnik forfeited game 5, refusing to agree to a change in conditions not approved by him. The match seemed to be over then, before Kramnik agreed to play game 6 under protest. Kramnik has clearly been wronged, and there is a huge outpouring of support for him.
Kramnik's conduct with the "classical championship" had been a bit dodgy, with him refusing to grant Kasparov a rematch and avoiding playing against any other worthy opponent. I thought Topalov had a better claim to being called world champion. But Kramnik has got off to a great start in this match and it looks as if the Topalov camp decided to use every means at their disposal to turn things round.
Instead of continuing the hugely interesting games, we had the edifying sight of Topalov complaining about the number of times Kramnik needed to visit the restroom and getting a pliant FIDE appeals committee to change playing conditions. The full details are too silly to elaborate. Kramnik forfeited game 5, refusing to agree to a change in conditions not approved by him. The match seemed to be over then, before Kramnik agreed to play game 6 under protest. Kramnik has clearly been wronged, and there is a huge outpouring of support for him.
Kramnik's conduct with the "classical championship" had been a bit dodgy, with him refusing to grant Kasparov a rematch and avoiding playing against any other worthy opponent. I thought Topalov had a better claim to being called world champion. But Kramnik has got off to a great start in this match and it looks as if the Topalov camp decided to use every means at their disposal to turn things round.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
netgear MR814v2 and centrino 3945ABG do not talk
Tried configuring a 
Toshiba notebook
with builtin Centrino 3945ABG to work with an old Netgear 802.11b router (MR814v2). It would not work with 128-bit WEP enabled. It would work if I disabled encryption. Did not find any information about this on Netgear or other support sites. I did upgrade firmware on the router as well as for the wireless device (v10.5.1.57 date July 2, 2006) without any success. A bunch of other cards including a a couple of Dell builtin wireless chipsets worked just fine with this router. I guess it is time to buy a new router, and take advantage of 802.1x security features while I am at it...
Toshiba notebook with builtin Centrino 3945ABG to work with an old Netgear 802.11b router (MR814v2). It would not work with 128-bit WEP enabled. It would work if I disabled encryption. Did not find any information about this on Netgear or other support sites. I did upgrade firmware on the router as well as for the wireless device (v10.5.1.57 date July 2, 2006) without any success. A bunch of other cards including a a couple of Dell builtin wireless chipsets worked just fine with this router. I guess it is time to buy a new router, and take advantage of 802.1x security features while I am at it...
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Microsoft and Ipods
A very funny video about what would happen if Microsoft designed the packaging for the Ipod.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
tuning Windows for faster downloads
I see consistent download speeds of about 1 Mb/s from Comcast on my W2K system at home and 4+ Mb/s from another computer running Linux. I was bothered by this but not enough to do anyhing about it. When an XP laptop running on better hardware could do no more than the measly 1 Mb/s, I decided to do some digging into the performance setup.
How does one measure download speeds? There are a bunch of websites running applets that will run some diagnostics and give you details. I like this one available from the Argonne National Laboratory:
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/
It gives you information about upload and download speeds, and underlying network characteristics.
It turns out that the default TCP settings on Windows are very conservative and limit download speeds on networks with larger round-trip times between the two end-points, ie. your average cable or DSL setup. It does not make a difference on faster LANs such as those at work. A few tweaks to the registry and the obligatory reboot later, the Windows boxes were doing much better.
You have to add three new entries:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
TcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
Tcp1323Opts REG_DWORD 3
THESE CHANGES APPLY TO BOTH W2K AND XP. (I have done it on both.)
What does this do? This reserves more space for the TCP buffer where packets can accumulate, allowing the sender to send more unacknowledged data rather than having to send a small amount of data and wait for an acknowledgement before sending more. It allows more bytes to be "in transit", thus achieving faster downloads.
More details at:
http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.htm
RFC 1323, referenced above in one of the registry keys, describes extensions to the TCP protocol for achieving better performance.
If you want to get really hard-core with tuning TCP/IP, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has published a tutorial.
How does one measure download speeds? There are a bunch of websites running applets that will run some diagnostics and give you details. I like this one available from the Argonne National Laboratory:
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/
It gives you information about upload and download speeds, and underlying network characteristics.
It turns out that the default TCP settings on Windows are very conservative and limit download speeds on networks with larger round-trip times between the two end-points, ie. your average cable or DSL setup. It does not make a difference on faster LANs such as those at work. A few tweaks to the registry and the obligatory reboot later, the Windows boxes were doing much better.
You have to add three new entries:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
TcpWindowSize REG_DWORD 131400 (decimal)
Tcp1323Opts REG_DWORD 3
THESE CHANGES APPLY TO BOTH W2K AND XP. (I have done it on both.)
What does this do? This reserves more space for the TCP buffer where packets can accumulate, allowing the sender to send more unacknowledged data rather than having to send a small amount of data and wait for an acknowledgement before sending more. It allows more bytes to be "in transit", thus achieving faster downloads.
More details at:
http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.htm
RFC 1323, referenced above in one of the registry keys, describes extensions to the TCP protocol for achieving better performance.
If you want to get really hard-core with tuning TCP/IP, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has published a tutorial.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Glut of chocolate
Cadbury was left with a glut of chocolate products at the start of the year, after the installation of a new SAP-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system led to an excess of chocolate bars building up at the end of 2005.Link to article on Zdnet. According to it, Cadbury began this ERP implementation in 2002.
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