lev_lafayette's blog

Now the fun starts

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.

Unit 101: Financial Management

Notes from the textbook Michael E. Bazley, Contemporary Accounting (6th edition), Cengage Learning Australia, 2004 and the study guide.

Study Guide

Financial Literacy

A core problem exists in the assumption that what is profitable for an individual entity is profitable for an economy as a whole. This is raised on a divisional/entity level in the Contemporary Accounting textbook: ".. the maximisation of a division's profit may not always ensure the maximisation of the profit of the entity" (p13).

Two articles by the LVRG come to mind on this matter, one is a long-term index of real-estate prices to GDP and the other is a recent empirical study on the correlation of speculative investment to financial collapse.

Managing People in the GFC

By raising the question "Global Financial Crisis or Opportunity?" in the first order requires a proper analysis of what sort of global financial crisis this is in order to discern whether there are any opportunities that can arise from it.

Which Bank?

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

Installing OpenFOAM 1.5 on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

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.

Annoying older Mailman bug with certain MIME types.

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.,

Bahasa Indonesian Lesson Five

Immigration

Like most other places in the world, when entering a country you will need to notify immigration of why you are visiting, how long for and where you are staying. Keep an eye out for signs like "Bea Cukai" (Customs), "Permeriksaan Paspor" (Passport Control)

"Permisi, Saya mau melihat Bapak/Ibu-mu paspor" (Excuse me, I want to see your passport)
"Kami di sini untuk berlibur/urusan bisnis" (We are here on holiday/on business)
"Kami di sini selama empat belas hari" (We are here for forteen days)

Installing Velvet 0.7.31 on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

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."

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