lev_lafayette's blog

The Worst of English

Presentation to the School of Languages, Friday December 14, 2012

1. Phonemic representation

Can "ghoti" be pronounced "fish"?

gh is pronounced "f", like "enough".
o is pronounced "i", like "women".
ti is pronounced "sh", like "nation".

The first published reference is in 1874, citing an 1855 letter that credits ghoti to one William Ollier Jr.

Replace Latin Swedish with Unicode in PhpMyAdmin

When establishing a website database (e.g., Drupal, Wordpress etc) with PhpMyAdmin (e.g., through CPanel) one may be surprised to discover that the default character collation order is in latin1_swedish_ci. For most "plain text" ASCII-style posts this isn't a problem. It becomes a problem however when an article is supposed to display characters which require a different character set. A personal discovery of this nature was with Esperanto diacritical characters. Characters which latin1_swedish_ci cannot display will be replaced with "?", one per character.

Grafic++ Install with Environment Modules

Grafic++ MPI/C++ code to generate initial conditions for cosmological simulations using multiscale gaussian random fields, based on Edmund Bertschinger's GRAFIC-2 package. Provides a replacement for both grafic1 and grafic2.

Download from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/grafic/

Extract in a sensible place, change to that directory


cd /usr/local/src/GRAFIC
wget
tar xvf grafic++-1.1.3.tar.gz

Load requisite modules and export FFTW variables (as they won't be found). Seriously, it will drive you nuts if you don't do this.

Espresso Installation with Environment Modules

Espresso (Extensible Simulation Package for Research on Soft matter) is a "highly versatile software package for performing and analyzing scientific Molecular Dynamics many-particle simulations of coarse-grained atomistic or bead-spring models as they are used in soft-matter research in physics, chemistry and molecular biology."

Download the tarball and extract in a sensible place.


mkdir /usr/local/src/ESPRESSO
cd /usr/local/src/ESPRESSO
wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/espressomd/espresso-3.1.0.tar.gz

President's and Secretary's Combined Report to the Linux Users of Victoria, Inc, Annual General Meeting, 2012

To begin with it is necessary to say that circumstances has meant that this will be a report that combines the duties of President and Secretary, a matter that will be discussed further. Overall however, looking back over the past year, it can said that this has been another successful for Linux Users of Victoria. Starting from September last year, we hosted a very successful Software Freedom Day, which was extremely well-attended by relevant members of the community, providing an excellent opportunity for networking and planning.

OpenMPI 1.6.1 with PGI compilers installation issue

When installing the latest version of Open MPI (Version 1.6.1) with PGI compilers (specifically 12.5), the installation fails.

The following configure option are set:


CC=pgcc CXX=pgcpp F77=pgf77 FC=pgf90 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/${BASE}-pgi --with-openib --with-tm=/usr/local/torque/latest --enable-static --enable-share

For Torque "latest" in this context is only 2.4.17, however that shouldn't be the issue. The make fails as follows:


make[6]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/OPENMPI/openmpi-1.6.1/ompi/contrib/vt/vt/tools/vtunify'

Dunlop Armour Review - Big W Purchase

Following attempted postings at:
http://www.bigw.com.au/sports-leisure/bikes-accessories/bikes/mountain-b...

I ride approximately 20km per day, to and from work. About half this distance is hills and bends (following a river) and about half is inner urban and mostly flat.

For the past six months I have struggled daily with this bike.

To change gears without the derailleur slipping the upper gears have to turned in the opposite direction to the lower gears. This is not documented in the user and maintenance manual.

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