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Thursday June 25, 2009
• Field Day This Weekend

AG6RF
has never really participated in a Ham Radio Field Day. Never
officially. But this weekend I just might. The local Oakland amateur
radio club will be setting up and operating a field station (battery
powered) at the Sequoia horse arena up in the Oakland hills, near the
Chabot Space and Science Museum.
Field Day actually runs from Saturday 11am Pacific Time thru Sunday
2pm. Amateur radio operators all over the country are encouraged to
operate off the grid and make as many contacts with other hams as they
can. It’s actually a contest, with complex rules for making contacts
and garnering points. I never join contests, but I do like to make
contacts. So Saturday I just might take the van, radio, and a few
antennas out to Pt Reyes for a few hours, and then join the Oakland
club at Sequoia on Sunday.
There’s more information about Field Day on the ARRL website.
If I do get to operate from my mobile station in the van, I'll be on 20 or 17 meters.
( Jun 25 2009, 05:31:09 PM PDT )
[Ham Radio]
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Monday June 22, 2009
• Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Released 
It's live! The latest update of the Sun Studio compilers and tools is now available for free download.
Release notes, readmes, and documentation.
Available now on the OpenSolaris repository
( Jun 22 2009, 10:26:10 PM PDT )
[Sun Studio]
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Sunday March 22, 2009
• Choose a Programming Language, Any Language... Over at Nerd Central, slashdot.org, there's a lively discussion going on about programming languages. It all started when a soon-to-be Computer Science graduate in the U.K. asked which programming languages should he learn in depth?
Follow along »the discussion thread. Some of it is very revealing, including the one reply "Give up on CS and go to nursing school."
( Mar 22 2009, 12:29:47 PM PDT )
[Misc.]
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Tuesday March 17, 2009
• Sun Studio Express 3/09 Released! Sun Studio Express 3/09 compilers and tools was released today!
You can download it off the Sun Studio portal.
Available on Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the latest Linux distributions
(Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux Enterprise, CentOS, Ubuntu), new
feature highlights since the Sun Studio 12 release include:
- C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest x86
architectures from Intel and AMD including SSSE3, SSSE4a, SSe4.1,
SSE4.2 compiler intrinsics support
- C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures
- DLight - New tool to utilize and visualize the power of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology (see the DLight Tutorial)
- dbxTool - New standalone GUI debugger
- MPI performance analysis in the Performance Analyzer
- Full OpenMP 3.0 compilers and tools support
- NetBeans IDE 6.5 including new remote development feature
This release is a preview of the next major release of Sun Studio 12, and you can participate in the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access program.
By participating in the Early Access Program, you will have the
opportunity to evaluate new capabilities of Sun Studio software,
provide your feedback to the product team and influence future product
releases.
Participating in the Early Access Program
- Download Sun Studio Express 3/09. Sun Studio Express 3/09 is the official build used for the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program.
- For installation instructions and new feature information, see the March 2009 Express readme. Then check out the Express wiki pages to learn more.
- Visit the Early Access Forum to discuss issues and receive advice from the Sun Studio community, including Sun Studio engineers
- To submit a bug or request a feature (RFE), please visit: http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/. Please populate the field titled "Release" with the value "Sun Studio Express."
- Complete and submit the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Evaluation Survey,
which will be available March 25. This is the primary way to provide
your feedback to the product team.
Yea!
( Mar 17 2009, 05:51:45 PM PDT )
[Sun Studio]
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Wednesday March 04, 2009
• Jack Schwartz (1930-2009) I learned yesterday that one of my mentors has passed.
Jack Schwartz was a professor of mathematics at NYU’s Courant
Institute when I was there in the mid 1960’s. He founded the Computer
Science department at NYU.
Jack also devised one of the first time-sharing systems, SHARER, to
which he invited some brilliant NYC high school students to develop.
Many of those students went on to important careers in the field.
But what I remember most about Jack was how warm and generous he
was, even tho his reputation as a mathematician, as John Markoff puts
it in his obituary in today’s New York Times, was fearsome.
The three years I spent working in the computer center at the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS), from 1965-1968, were
the most important three years in my life (so far). It started my
career in computer programming for science and engineering. We were all
quite young, and Jack, and the director of the CIMS Computer Center,
Max Goldstein, were our “father figures”. And as such, we mark his
passing.
( Mar 04 2009, 09:34:30 AM PST )
[History]
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Thursday February 26, 2009
• OM 14 Music Festival My other life is involved with this:
WHAT: 14th Other Minds Music Festival
WHO:
Nine international composers—Michael Harrison (USA), Dobromiła Jaskot
(Poland), Ben Johnston (USA), Catherine Lamb (USA), Chico Mello
(Brazil), John Schneider (USA), Linda Catlin Smith (Canada), Bent
Sørensen (Denmark), and Chinary Ung (Cambodia)
WHEN: Thursday-Friday-Saturday, March 5-6-7, 2009 7pm Panel Discussions, 8pm Concerts
WHERE: Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) 3200 California Street (at Presidio Ave.), San Francisco
TICKETS:
Single concert tickets $25–$35 ($25 student, $31 JCCSF members, $35
general); Festival passes $60–$150 ($60 student, $74 JCCSF members, $79
general, $150 premium seating); Students 17 and under free on concert
days. Tickets available online from www.otherminds.org or through the JCCSF Box Office, (415) 292-1233 (M–F 12–7pm, Sat. 12–5pm), www.jccsf.org/arts (JCCSF subscription series tickets also available)
INFORMATION: (415) 934-8134 • www.otherminds.org • otherminds-AT-otherminds.org
MORE:
The
14th Other Minds Music Festival (OM 14) brings together nine of the
most exciting and innovative composers from around the world for
concerts and artist talks. The festival, produced by Other Minds
Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian and Associate
Director Adam Fong, continues its annual tradition of bringing together
in conversation and concert the most creative voices from across the
musical spectrum. The concert presentations feature four world premiere
performances including The Tavern by American legend Ben
Johnston (b. 1926), the US premiere of a work by Estonian Arvo Pärt for
eight cellos, a special presentation in memory of Mauricio Kagel
(1931–2008), Harry Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales and Barstow, “de-composed”
songs based on Brazilian classics, and three more world premieres
including a new work commissioned by Other Minds, and Tone Clouds by La Monte Young protégé Michael Harrison, composed for just intonation piano and San Francisco’s Del Sol String Quartet.
The
14th Other Minds Music Festival is presented by Other Minds in
association with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP), the
Eugene and Elinor Friend Center for the Arts of the Jewish Community
Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) and the Polish Cultural Institute for
the Arts. The Festival begins on February 28, 2009, with four days of
private retreat for guest composers at DRAP in Woodside, California,
and continues with concerts on Thursday, March 5; Friday, March 6; and
Saturday, March 7, 2009, at the JCCSF.
And you can hear some of the composers and performers of OM 14 on my radio program. Details at otherminds.org/mfom
( Feb 26 2009, 04:59:26 PM PST )
[Misc.]
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Wednesday January 28, 2009
• Couldn't Cut It. Just couldn't cut it. So I gave in and upgraded Photoshop for my MacOSX 10.4.11 system. Gimp just didn't satisfy, and I never liked the results. So we're back with Photoshop.
However, I have had some crashes. And even Firefox now sometimes crashes.
So do I have to upgrade to 10.5?
Ugh.
( Jan 28 2009, 10:42:21 PM PST )
[Photography]
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Thursday January 08, 2009
• Yet Another Blog As an experiment, I've started another blog
Compile My Code - blogs.sun.com/run
Meditations on compiling C, C++, and Fortran
( Jan 08 2009, 01:20:17 PM PST )
[Sun Studio]
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Friday January 02, 2009
• Not so fast Well, using Gimp as a replacement for Photoshop is not as easy as it would seem. And, I'm growing increasingly more frustrated. It doesn't seem to do as nice a job as similar operations in Photoshop, and it's a real pain to use. It might be lack of familiarity on my part, but I think I'm going to have to give up on the plan and go back to Photoshop. Gimp is proving to be too aggrevating.
Also, the version of Gimp on the OpenSolaris repository is a few versions behind. The version for MacOSX 10.4+ is up to date. That's annoying, but I'm not willing to waste time compiling the thing just to get the latest version on my OS laptop. Hrrrmph.
But right now I can't justify the expense of yet another Photoshop upgrade (YAPU) to the family CFO, so I'll probably drop back to 10.3.9 until I can sell enough used books, or one of my cameras, to pay for it.
Tough times.
Even tougher, come to think of it .. it's vacation over and back to work on Monday.
( Jan 02 2009, 09:48:15 PM PST )
[Photography]
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Sunday December 28, 2008
• 'Tis the Season to Upgrade One
of the real conundrums this time is worrying over how to upgrade my
working system. I’m a “trailing edge” person .. I’d rather not upgrade
my software unless it’s absolutely necessary. So my primary, not-for-work-but-just-for-me system is a 1 GHz PowerPC Mac G4 running OSX 10.3.9. (The system I use for working-from-home is a 2 GHz AMD 64 laptop running OpenSolaris).
I should really upgrade to 10.4.11 (I believe 10.5 doesn’t run
PowerPC’s) because a lot of the upgrades for software that I do use is
no longer being made available for 10.3.9.
So I’ve been experimenting with 10.4.11 on a second internal disk
drive. I can now boot either 10.3.9 or 10.4.11. The only trouble is
with Photoshop .. my version 8 won’t run on 10.4 without an expensive
upgrade. I refuse to pay it.
I also believe strongly in open source software, so I’ve been trying
to replace my Photoshop habit with Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation
Program, http://gimp.org),
which does run on 10.4 (under X11) and not on 10.3.9. I’ve been using
Gimp on my OpenSolaris systems because Photoshop doesn’t run there, and
on my Solaris SPARC workstation back at the office, so I’ve had some
worthwhile experience with the thing over the years.
[Read More]
( Dec 28 2008, 12:39:30 AM PST )
[Photography]
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Thursday December 18, 2008
• Because I Can: Sun Studio on Ubuntu under OpenSolaris over VirtualBox! 
I installed Sun Studio Express 2008.11 on Ubuntu 8.10 running on my OpenSolaris 2008.11 platform using VirtualBox to host Ubuntu as a client OS.
Now, there's no real reason for doing this... Sun Studio Express runs just fine on OpenSolaris natively. But I just wanted to see what it would look like on Ubuntu.
The only wrinkle in running Sun Studio Express on Ubuntu was having to install the Java JDK, which apparently is not part of the default Ubuntu 8.10. But I was able to find it on the Ubuntu repository and install it using their package manager. Very easy.
I tried this only because someone on one of the Ubuntu forums asked if Sun Studio Express compilers and tools ran on Ubuntu 8.10.
Clearly, the answer is YES. And you might find some more information
here:
http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunStudio/Installing+Sun+Studio+on+Different+Linux+Distros
and here:
http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunStudio/Sun+Studio+Linux+Platform+FAQ
Lots of fun here.
( Dec 18 2008, 11:24:17 AM PST )
[Solaris]
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Friday December 12, 2008
• I Love OpenSolaris 2008.11 
I've been using »OpenSolaris 2008.11 for almost a month now as my primary working environment on my Acer Ferrari 4000 AMD64 laptop. It has replaced SXDE (Solaris Express Developer Edition). And I'm really excited about it. It blows all previous versions of OpenSolaris away, at least in this laptop environment.
I love it!
What I especially appreciate is that finally they got the wireless networking working (almost) seamlessly. (Well, with the Ferrari I have to use an Atheros chip set AirLInk 100 PCI card because the built-in one isn't supported). But now the daemon automatically searches for available wireless networks and lets me decide which one to join. And if I should decide to plug in an ethernet cable, it automatically senses that and switches to the ethernet connection. (Just like my Mac!)
Besides, I've got all the apps I need to work. And the update manager notifies me whenever updated packages are available to download from the repository. Installation was really easy and it automatically preserved my Windows boot volume.
Of course there are always a couple of annoying things. Like sometimes when I switch between wireless and ethernet, or between wireless networkds, I don't always get a working DHCP host IP address assigned. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts. (Disconnect, reconnect, disconnect again, reconnect again ... Ah! There it is .. were' connected.) That doesn't happen on my Mac laptop. So I filed a few bugs and we'll see what happens.
The most intgriguing new feature is the "Time Slider" that automatically takes a snapshot of any changed files onto a ZFS filesystem that you can recover later. It just works, silently, in the background.
And there's a mess of apps on the repository to play with. Especially, of course, Sun Studio Express 2008.11 and OpenOffice 3.0. Firefox 3.0 and Thunderbird are already installed. And it all looks great!
But it's all here and working!
( Dec 12 2008, 04:23:31 PM PST )
[Solaris]
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Saturday November 29, 2008
• Not Again!?! Not that same old Unix trap. I can't believe I fell into that trap again!
It's been over 12 years since I gave up being a full-time programmer (Fortran, C, assembly) to become a full-time tech writer (uh, sorry, Information Engineer). But I still play with C, Fortran, and some Java and PHP occasionally.
So last night I was testing out the new release of Sun Studio Express by creating a simple little C code that does numerical integration to compute pi. It's a textbook piece of code I've used before. So I copy/pasted the code into the editor window and saved it as sum.c, and built the object file sum.o and executable sum.
But when I attempted to run the program in a terminal shell, nothing happened. The program just sat there. No output, no exit, no prompt.
I checked the CPU monitor, nothing was running.
I checked and double checked the C code, the compile arguments, everything seemed ok. I even started removing statements. Still, nothing happened.
Then I ran it in the new GUI debugger, dbxtool. It ran perfectly, and exited as expected. What's going on?!?
I checked and double checked everything. Was I going mad? Have I been away from programming for too long? Am I getting old?! Is this programmer's Alzheimer's?
Nah, suddenly, out of the blue, it came to me.
rchrd% which sum /usr/bin/sum
Of course! There's a command-line app called sum. It computes checksums! And, for security reasons (so they tell me), my $PATH variable is set with dot (.) at the end of the list, not at the front. (Actually, I should have run the local executable with ./sum -- generally a good rule to follow, but forgot, again!)
Solution: change the executable file to pi. Now it worked perfectly.
I had to laugh. How many times in my 30+ years with Unix have I been bitten by this one? Too many to admit to.
I guess one of the pitfalls of being an occasional programmer is that you tend to forget where the brambles are, and keep walking into that thicket over and over again.
( Nov 29 2008, 07:33:09 PM PST )
[Software]
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Wednesday October 22, 2008
• Software Developer Resources There's now a complete compendium of resources, including tutorials, manuals, blogs, articles, etc, for developing software on Solaris and OpenSolaris. It's about as complete as you can get, thanks to Alta Elstad.
It's on the »Solaris Developer wiki pages: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SolarisDeveloper/SWDevInfoRes
( Oct 22 2008, 11:25:35 AM PDT )
[Solaris]
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Wednesday October 08, 2008
• OpenMP Tutorial at Supercomputing '08 in November Tutorial S08: A Hands-on Introduction to OpenMP (Full day)
Sunday, November 16, 2008 »SuperComputing ’08, Austin, Texas
Instructors: Larry Meadows, Intel Corporation, Tim Mattson, Intel Corporation
If you are planning on attending the 20th
Anniversary of the SC Conference, to be held this year in Austin from
November 15 through 21, and if you are interested in gaining a working
knowledge of the OpenMP parallel programming model, then please
consider registering for this tutorial, to be held on Sunday, November
16. This is a full day hands-on tutorial. We will alternate lectures
with hands-on exercises designed to teach the basics and some advanced
topics in OpenMP, including the new OpenMP 3.0 features
UPDATE: The slides and code examples from this tutorial are now available on the OpenMP.org website.
( Oct 08 2008, 02:14:20 PM PDT )
[OpenMP]
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