Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, March 26, 2004

Modeling electrostatics -- Comment()
Here we use the Poisson equation to model electric potential, and use Elmer to solve the model. This is case number 10 of the tutorial. The result is shown below using isosurfaces for displaying the potential and color to show the electric field magnitude:

-- Comment()
"Free Culture" is: "Thanks to [...] the courage of a great publisher (Penguin), Free Culture launches today with a free online version of the book, licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can get the book here, though at the moment, only the bittorrent version is apparently up. Later today, there will be a direct download available from the Free Culture site, and from the Amazon site." [Lessig Blog]

How Microsoft tried to hurt a competitor -- Comment()
Letter shows Gates tried to enlist Intel to hurt competitor: 'In June 1990, Bill Gates wrote a letter that began "Dear Andy" and ended with the Microsoft co-founder imploring Intel chief executive Andy Grove not to invest in a potential competitor, a jury was told Wednesday.'

Apple Cluster for Bioinformatics -- Comment()
I predict that Apple will sell loads of these clusters... The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics: "[...] provides a faster, easier and lower-cost path to scientific discovery. You'll get rapid access to data analysis with minimal administrative burden in one comprehensive, industry-leading solution. [...] In about 30 minutes you'll be ready to run BLAST, HMMER, fasta and more from a powerful, easy-to-use Web interface - the setup process installs over 200 bioinformatics applications on your cluster. [...] iNquiry provides the open-source software most often used by today's bioinformaticians. Many tools, such as BLAST and HMMER, use the G5's Velocity Engine for vastly improved performance over most other processors. iNquiry's powerful Web interface lets you share your cluster with other researchers in your organization (or keep it to yourself). Since it's open source, you can even add your own applications, too."

Apple releases Xgrid T.P. 2 -- Comment()
Xgrid Technology Preview 2: "Building on the enthusiastic response to the first preview, Xgrid Technology Preview 2 adds a command-line tool for submitting and monitoring jobs from the command line and support for the Message Passing Interface for tightly-coupled computations."

Feet size 13 (or 47 in Finnish units) -- Comment()
On Wednesday I bought a new set of shoes to replace my worn Eccos. There was a pair of Gore-Tex shoes by Sievin Jalkine (a Finnish shoemaker) at the shop for 30% discount. Suprisingly the size and shape of the shoes fit me perfectly.

Usually I have trouble finding big enough and wide enough shoes., This time the first pair I tried on was the best pair of walking shoes I have ever owned. In fact, in addition to water-proof protection the shoes also offer anti-static protection, and other fine features besides. I'm a happy walker today. Especially as the Finnish weather now varies between frozen and melting snow, which is not so good for the shoes.