Forking Mandriva and OpenOffice.org: Poor Management versus Competent Technology

There have been two fairly significant forks in the Linux world in the past few weeks; one is a large number of the developers of Mandriva now concentrating on on that technology under the new title Mageia. As advocates of that this new Linux distribution state: People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company..

Installing CGAL on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library) provides efficient and reliable geometric algorithms in the form of a C++ library data structures and algorithms for triangulations, Voronoi diagrams, polygons and polyhedra, arrangements of curves and their applications, mesh generation, geometry processing, subdivision and parameterization, as well as estimation of local differential properties, and approximation of ridges and umbilics, alpha shapes, convex hull algorithms, search structures , interpolation, shape analysis, fitting, and distances, and kine

Vive la différence! L'affaire du foulard

Much has been made of the fact that France, the has banned the burqa, l'affaire du voile, with the exception of places of worship. Earlier in the year a law was passed that scarves covering the face were banned in schools and hospitals, as well as on public transport. Women, who violate this requirement will be fined €150 Euros and given a course of lectures on the basics of the secular foundations of the French Republic. Men, who force women to wear burqa, will face up to a year in prison.

Installing OpenMPI on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

Open MPI is a message passing interface that combines the merger of three major MPI implementations (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, and LAM/MPI) to create a complete MPI-2 implementation. MPI is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers.

Installing Mono on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

Mono is used to develop an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime.

To install change to the appropriate directory. Download from Novell. Extract in the sensible place. Change to the extracted directory, check then run the sample config and run make, make install and make check. After this create a module for the environment variables and logout.


cd /usr/local/src/MONO/
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.8.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-2.8.tar.bz2
../config
make
make install
make check

Installing BigDFT on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

BigDFT is a Density Functional Theory (DFT) parallel electronic structure code using a wavelet basis set. Wavelets form a real space basis set distributed on an adaptive mesh. Surfaces and isolated systems can be simulated with the proper boundary conditions and GTH or HGH pseudopotentials are used to remove the core electrons.

September 11 and Religion

The Los Angeles Times has reported Obama's speech for 9-11, where he claims that it was the perversion of religion, rather religion itself that was the cause of terrorism. This is a challenging statement and whilst politically expedient, it certainly should be subject to scrutiny. After all, it is often in the name of religious justifications that some of the greatest secular crimes have occurred.

Thoughts on a UU Seminary in Australia

At the ICUU/ANZUUA conference there was some discussion of the possibility of a Unitarian-Universalist seminary for Australia. "The time is right", was a commonly expressed statement indicating a confidence in our current capacity and needs. The following is a preliminary sketch on how ANZUUA might proceed in establishing such a seminary with some references to how it is conducted at Meadville-Lombard and Starr King in the United States.

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