Google have announced Google Chrome OS. This is interesting on several fronts.

Firstly, and most obviously, this is an open statement of war on Microsoft. It is written in the text of the announcement "We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better." This device will have no MS APIs on it. None. Nada. The end of the MS lock in.

Which bank gets confused about some fairly trivial technical and security issues on their own helpdesk system?

OpenFOAM (Open Field Operationa and Manipulation) is a computational fluid dynamics toolbox which simulates "anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetics and the pricing of financial options." All this and free and open source as well.

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of e-mail to support various extended formats. However with older versions of Mailman there is a serious bug which affects the archives.

MIME allows the following:

• Text in character sets other than ASCII
• Non-text attachments
• Message bodies with multiple parts
• Header information in non-ASCII character sets
• etc.,

From their website; "Velvet is a de novo genomic assembler specially designed for short read sequencing technologies, such as Solexa or 454, developed by Daniel Zerbino and Ewan Birney at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), near Cambridge, in the United Kingdom."

Developed by D.E. Shaw Research, Desmond performs high-speed molecular dynamics simulations of biological systems using parallel algorithms and numerical techniques. The README.txt explains the horror that will prevail...

NAMD is a parallel molecular dynamics code for large biomolecular systems. Version 2.7b1 has some advantages over 2.6 and an extensive user's guide. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA providing a computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units or GPUs. It should make NAMD awesome, if it works.

Dreadmwidth/Livejournal Collaboration for ARCS v0.1, May 11, 2009

1. What is this?

A proposal to use the free and open source technologies used by Livejournal (livejournal.com) and further developed by Dreamwidth (dreamwidth.org) to create an effective social collaboration and journaling site for Australian researchers.

2. Background

The Access Grid FAQ v0.2, May 11, 2009

Contents

1.0 Administrivia
1.1 Where can I find an up-to-date copy of this FAQ?
1.2 Who wrote this FAQ?

2.0 About Access Grid
2.1 What is The Access Grid?
2.2 Where is it used and by how many people?

3.0 Setting Up Hardware and Software
3.1 What software is required?
3.2 What hardware is required?

4.0 Basic Operations
4.1 How do I manage the Venue Client?
4.2 How do I join A Venue?
4.3 How do I enable sound?
4.4 How do I enable video?
4.5 What is multicast/unicast? How do I change between multicast and unicast?

Underworld is a "3D-parallel geodynamic modelling framework capable of deriving viscous / viscoplastic thermal, chemical and thermochemical models consistent with tectonic processes, such as mantle convection and lithospheric deformation over long time scales.... Underworld utilises a Lagrangian particle-in-cell finite element scheme (the prototype of which is the Ellipsis code), and is visualised using gLucifer."