There should be little doubt that the future of computing is a multicore future. If nothing else, the clock speed/heat trade-off provides a fundamental hardware tendency. But as is well recognised, parallel programming is not the easiest task in the world, hence the importance of teaching core concepts. One of these is Amdahl's Law and the subsequent Gustafon-Barsis Law. The following is an attempt to explain these concepts in an accessible and allegorical manner which educators and trainers may find useful.

A presentation to the Linux Users of Victoria Beginners Workshop, February 15, 2013

Previous comments concerning VASP installs still largely apply.

1. It still performs ab-initio quantum-mechanical molecular dynamics (MD) using pseudopotentials and a plane wave basis set.

2. It still has an weird and frustrating license which is open source (if you pay them) but not free.

NWChem is a suite of computational chemistry tools that are scalable both in their ability to treat large scientific computational chemistry problems efficiently, and in their use of available parallel computing resources from high-performance parallel supercomputers to conventional workstation clusters.


mkdir /usr/local/src/NWCHEM
cd /usr/local/src/NWCHEM
wget http://www.nwchem-sw.org/download.php?f=Nwchem-6.3.revision2-src.2013-10-17.tar.gz
tar xvf Nwchem-6.3.revision2-src.2013-10-17.tar.gz

Officially Google Hangouts doesn't support Slackware Linux, limiting support to "Ubuntu and other Debian based Linux distributions". Realistically, what one is after is the Google Video and Talk plugin, but this also isn't strictly available for Slackware. Of course Google, being a little more evil that they think they are, does not release the source code for this enviable technology. What is a poor Slacker to do?

On Sunday, October 27th 2013 a post was made on the Linux Australia mailing list concerning an offer the GNOME Foundation in association with several FOSS provided for a three-month internship for women, specifically "to get more women involved in FOSS". On Tuesday, a poster (perhaps inspired by Sunday's post) argued against "special programmes to address an imbalance between the sexes", suggesting that such programmes are harmful, that merit "shines through inner strength", and that sex-specific programmes should be replaced with programmes for "'incompetent women in IT,' or at least to widen eligibility to include hamsters and fish."

There was, unsurprisingly, a small storm of discussion that resulted which can be mostly be broken up into two perspectives. The first were those who agreed, more or less, with the original poster with the suggestion that any gender disparity in IT may actually simply be "just how it is", that employers are almost always gender-neutral, and that any gender-specific programmes should be abolished. The second group agreed that employment should be gender neutral, but in wasn't, and there were a variety of causes (conscious and unconscious discrimination) for the disparity that justified the existence of such programmes.

In 1856, Ellen Tremayne, a housemaid, travelled to Australia aboard the Ocean Monarch. But Ellen travelled with a trunk full of male attire bearing the name "Edward De Lacy Evans". Was Ellen really a man impersonating a woman? Speculation was rife aboard the ship, with inneudo that he was forming "sexual attachments" with the women he shared a cabin with, including one Rose Kelly, Mary Montague, and Mary Delahunty.

MATLAB (registered trademark implied in this post) is a popular closed-source graphical product for matrix mathematics. Whilst I certainly prefer in most cases the extremely compatible open-source competitor Octave for all the well-founded usual reasons, MATLAB does have a small mountain of libraries and a small fortune backing it, both of which aren't quite always available to the GNU Octave people. So in some cases, based invariably on user requests, some dealings with MATLAB is sometimes required.

EFY Times, a technology website from India, often provides some interesting Linux and open source news and advice. But sometimes that advice really needs to be taken with a grain of salt. An example, is 10 Basic Linux Commands for Beginners.

Recently I had the experience of encountering antireligious bigotry by a free software advocate. I will not mention the person by name, but I will describe their attitudes and the effects, and by the way of elaboration on why all forms of prejudiced discrimination is not just morally wrong, but damaging to free software as a movement. The experience occurred just prior to Software Freedom Day among the organising committee.