Blogs

Samuel Amess, Builder of Willsmere

Samuel Amess was the stonemason who received the contract to build Willsmere, constructed between 1864 and 1872. Initially planned according to the design of G.W. Vivian and Frederick Kawerau of the Victorian Public Works Office, worked was halted almost immediately with reports of inferior works on the foundations. An investigation followed and Frederick Kawerau resigned. Samuel Amess was brought in and continued construction using Vivian and Kaweru's designed.

New South Wales, The Cornwall Chronicle, 19 August 1863

New South Wales, The Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston, Tas. : 1835 - 1880) Wednesday 19 August 1863

NEW SOUTH WALES. Sydney, 12th August. The breach of promise case, Holmes v. Robinson, has resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff — damages £1OO. The weather continues very wet and stormy. Three bushrangers, one of whom is supposed to be Ben Hall, have been captured at Murrundi.

The Contributions of Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners Lee signature

Meeting Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a little like meeting Johannes Gutenberg in recognising an inventor who has fundamentally changed the way we engage in engage in communication and provide information. As a person who has been interested in the pragmatics, phenomenology, and political economy of such technologies for more than two decades, the lure was two strong, listening to his speeches at both ANU (for LCA) and the University of Melbourne, where he spoke on various contemporary developments especially on the legal circumstances surrounding the suicide of Aaron Swartz.

To get one issue out of the way, as many have remarked, TBL is not a great public speaker. He speaks quickly, tangentially, and without a conventional narrative - not unlike his own invention. But that's a rather trivial concern for who we're dealing with here. Anything more than a passing criticising of the inventor of the world wide web for poor public speaking skills is not unlike criticising Martin Luther King Jnr, for not inventing the world wide web. It should be added that on one-to-one questions and answers that he is able to focus his knowledge exceptionally well.

Disabling Javascript; A snopes.com Inspiration

Snopes.com, the "Urban Legends Reference Pages" is an excellent site for debunking said material. Email chain-letters particularly annoy me because people simply don't do any verification testing at all; a particularly bigoted and false email circulated prior to the last Australian census is one which particularly annoyed me. Although I was even more annoyed when one person showed complete indifference to the facts and continued circulating said email. Almost made me want to become an imam out of spite towards the vile bigot.

Installing OpenFOAM : A Detailed Guide

Installation of OpenFOAM (and Paraview) can be carried out through several different methods, depending on the user's desires and the Linux distribution and package manager that is being used. Essentially there are three main methods; either installating with the Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) common on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc., with various front-end implementations (e.g., aptitude, Synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center), the Red Hat Package Manager (rpm), common on SuSE, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, etc., with its front-ends (e.g., yum, up2date, urmpi), and compiling from source.

Schrödinger, Maestro and Remote Connections

The installation of the chemical simulation suite, Schrödinger on high performance computer systems is hardly unusual. What is problematic is when users wish to access the GUI package, maestro, remotely using x-windows forwarding. Except when a user is extremely close to the system it is extremely likely that the graphic representation will be frustratingly slow for manipulation. There is, however, some ways around this.

JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) Installation.

For those fascinated by the world of analysis of Bayesian hierarchical models using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation (and let's face it, who isn't?), there is a delightful program called JAGS. Unfortunately it is a little stubborn to install.

Download the latest version from our friends at Sourceforge and extract in a sensible place (e.g., /usr/local/src/JAGS.

Now witness some example failures to install, which a reasonable person would assume would be sufficient.

Rmpi and INLA: A couple of different R packages

Some R libraries and packages are easier to install than others. The typical method is to download the tarball and run R CMD INSTALL -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 from the Linux command line or install.packages(c("pkg1", "pkg2")) from the R command-line after selecting from chooseCRANmirror(). But not every R package follows this contention.

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