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Thursday, February 26, 2004
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} Meet the new Vice-Chairman of the Board -- Comment()
Yesterday I was at the board meeting of the Finnish Operations Research Society (FORS). I was elected to be Vice-Chairman of the Board. I do hope I have the energy to raise the recognition of OR and optimization in Finland during this year.
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GNU/Linux Summit -- Comment()
I was today the the GNU/Linux Summit in Helsinki. The best presentation for me was about LSB (Linux Standard Base) by Mats Wichmann.
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-- Comment()
Yahoo! Vs. Google: Algorithm Standoff: "There's a new report out from the guys who brought us the Google keyword density analysis. [...] They compared 2000 low traffic, non-competitive keywords in the hopes of seeing the algorithms more clearly, without any possible search engine tweakings related to high-traffic keywords." [Slashdot]
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Additional notes about Elmer -- Comment()
I received some questions concerning my notes about Elmer. First I should say that I'm not a neutral party as regards Elmer. In September 2003 I took responsibility for leading the group which has been developing Elmer for over ten years. So, I am not a developer of the system, but I do have a strong interest in making Elmer a success story. The Elmer software is targeted to the professional who knows mathematical modeling and numerical methods. It is not suitable for a novice, at least without the guidance of an experienced colleague. This Spring there will be a new manual for the Solver component, and the existing manuals will be updated. In addition, the developers have plans to go Open Source with the Solver component of Elmer during 2004. Most of the software development effort (perhaps 90%) has been dedicated to the Solver component, plus solving numerous real-life applications. The weakest part of Elmer is the graphical ElmerFront component, which is used for defining the geometry, physical properties, and the mathematical equations. Currently the developers are searching for portable software which could replace or complement the existing graphical interface. This front-end software should be priced reasonably, and be made available for free to academic users. This is a difficult set of requirements. Recently, Elmer has been boosted to include discontinuous Galerkin elements, automatic mesh refinement, and block preconditioners. In a few areas Elmer has no competitors, and with these new techniques the system can solve large real-life problems even on desktop systems. So far Elmer has mainly been used for consulting services in multi-physical problems. By going open source the developers hope to get yet additional functionality to the modeling capabilities of the system.
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Videoconferencing between Mac OS X and Windows -- Comment()
PR commented the entry on iChat AV and the H.323 videoconferencing standard. I gave up on ophoneX some time ago. I managed once to get a connection to a Windows system, but this was probably due to the fact the the other user was a videoconferencing professional. However, Marratech Pro is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and offers collaborative features in addition to sharing audio and video between users. The two-user version is available free of charge, multi-user features need a separate software component. In my test the audio quality was excellent, and also the video from Mac OS X to the Windows system using iSight. The video stream from Windows was not so good, but sufficient. In addition, there is a new beta version of iChat, which supports videoconferencing with AIM on Windows.
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