Once upon a time, there was an impressive organisation called the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, which was originally established in 2000 to provide supercomputing services to the University sector in Victoria. Unfortunately, the Board decided that VPAC would close its doors in 2015, and the successful experiment in a single provider for university high-performance computing systems came to an end.

Abstract for Aotearoa New Zealand Software Engineering Conference, September, 2026

Recently, I passed a ten-year streak of doing Duolingo every day. It's not like I do the bare minimum either; for the past three years, at least, my end-of-year Duo report records me in the 0.1% of learners on their application. My profile lists a rather impossible list of languages, many of which I looked in my early years and, I must admit, were handy whilst travelling through Europe. These days I'm concentrating on standard Chinese and French, whilst last year I completed the Spanish course as I was travelling to South America. In other words, over the years, my language learning has become more functionally-oriented rather than experimental.

Despite this regular use, I have mixed opinions about Duolingo. I will argue that Duolingo is the best language-learning application currently available. Nothing else comes to mind that has an extensive range of courses, that has a similar depth of content, that has regular updates, expansions of content and alignment to CEFR language competence. It continues to improve in areas such as spoken content, grammar, and conversational use of a language.

Given a DNA or protein sequence, Maximum-Likelihood (ML) Phylogenetics searches for an evolutionary tree that would most probably have produced the observed sequences. This probability is based on a statistical model of how sequences evolve.

For example, consider the DNA sequences for the following primates with standard DNA nucleotide abbreviations: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). For what it's worth, a single 7-letter sequence like "ACGTTAGC" is normally too short to build a meaningful tree.

Species Sequence Difference
Human ACGTTAGC
Chimp ACGTTAGT Differs from Human at position 7
Gorilla ACGCTAGT Differs from Human at position 4, 7
Orangutan ATGCTAGT Differs from Human at positions 2, 4, 7

Recently, I had noticed that when I add an attachment (e.g. to email, via a web browser), GNOME's GTK file picker was only providing a list from recently opened items. Previously, it provided a PATH selection, which was a lot more useful for me. When the file picker opens, normally, there is a left-hand sidebar containing items like "Home", "Documents", "Downloads", etc. A normal workaround if this isn't available is to select Ctrl+L to open a location-based entry box, but this wasn't available either. The following question arises: How do I revert to the previous PATH-based menu?

Wuxi is home to China's National Supercomputing Centre and the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. This system came to global attention in June 2016, when it topped the global Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, far surpassing the second system (also Chinese, the Tianhe-2A) let alone the third (Titan, from the United States).

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Guizhou, China's National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zone. At first blush, the choice of Guizhou seems to be an unusual one. With a population of 38 million, it ranks 17th in the list of administrative divisions and 18th in population density, and it is even further behind in terms of GDP (22nd).

This presentation covers the science of Earth's "energy budget" of heat inputs and losses, and describes the overall climate system. It continues with a description of the Industrial Age, the introduction of direct temperature measurement, and the resulting temperature rise from burning fossil fuels. This is followed by a description of how Greenhouse Gases operate on a molecular level, the increase since the pre-industrial period, and the carbon cycle.

With at least three disciplines of interest - energy and climatology, public economics, and high-performance computing - there is the issue of whether current trends in artificial intelligence are environmentally sustainable. The following is a basic sketch of electricity usage, needs, and costings.

Environment Modules allow users to dynamically modify the $PATHs in their shell environment. In particular, it provides the ability to switch between different software applications and versions. It is a very handy tool for developers who want to test against multiple versions or compilation options of an application and for users on a multi-user system (e.g., high performance computing) where both consistency and the opportunity to introduce newer features needs to exist for different research groups. The two major environment modules systems are the older, Tcl-based system, and the newer Lua-based system (Lmod). Both allow default versions of a software application to be set as in the $PATH when invoked. This can cause problems and should be disabled.