Apparently I'm going to Crete in September! My paper's been accepted for Cluster 2010!!!

Last year I also had a paper in the same conference but, unfortunately, I couldn't go :S The conference was in New Orleans and I would really have liked to see that city again... Well, I guess I can cheer myself up with this news! Crete: I'm coming!!!!!! 

I found this interesting article on the web: Dr Eng Lim Goh (SGI's CTO) gave a talk at a  Greater London Linux User Group (GLLUG) meeting and, more interesting, showed a demo of a single image Linux running on a 2,048 cores, 16TB RAM SGI machine based on Intel Nahalem EX blade servers. The article can be found here.

I'm sorry I wasn't there for the demo, I would really have enjoyed it!

 Source: The Inquier

Yesterday we had our BSC annual meeting! Indeed, it was a special annual meeting, since we celebrated the 5th anniversary of BSC (officially born in April 2005). This year, the HR department decided to focus on the diversity of the different nationalities represented at BSC. We are coming from 28 different countries, very different from each other.

The HR department asked all the people coming from each country to get together and prepare something to explain their traditions, culture, language, festivals to the other people. We Italians got together and decided to clarify, once and for all, a widely discussed issue. We decided to do it in our own way and this is the result. I hope you'll have fun watching the video!

If someone had told me that one day I would give a talk at MIT when I started to do this job, I would have probably laugh... a lot. But life is strange and that day arrived: I went to MIT (CSAIL group) to give a talk! I talked about some of the research I've done in the last years (here you can find the abstract) regarding automatic load balancing of HPC applications using smart hardware resource assignation.

The building where MIT is hosted (the Stata Center) is a pretty unique building, very chaotic outside, impossible to understand inside... luckily I was guided around the building, I could have never found my way. Here is a picture of the building:

The best part was, however, meeting with people there: I had a wonderful time and interactions and I really enjoyed brainstorming with the students, the researchers and the professors! I had a great host (thanks again Lamia!) who put together an intensive and interesting agenda. Even the Sun was shining and bright that day in Boston.

What can I say more? Happy to realize one of my little dreams ;) 

Yep, as you can guess I'm working with PDFs these days. One of the things I often need is to merge (whole or parts) PDFs, or remove some pages, or just add pages in the middle of another PDFs. You can actually do most of these operations with a simple PDF printer or Acrobat Distiller. However, if you, like me, don't have Acrobat Distiller (or you don't have Windows at all, even better), there are a couple of tools that may be useful: Ghostscript and pdftk.

Ghostscript (gs) is an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF, it is a very common tool and you will probably find it already installed in your Linux box (if you have Windows, you can still install it but then you will have to deal with the graphical interface... somehow).

PDFtlk is a PDF... Toolkit (what a surprise, eh?). I like the description they provide on the official web site:

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

Both tools can help with merging several PDF files into a single PDF. For example, let's suppose you want to merge file1.pdf and file2.pdf (in this order) into combined.pdf. You can simple issue one of the following commands:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combined.pdf -dBATCH file1.pdf file2.pdf

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output combined.pdf

More info and examples here and here. Enjoy your PDFs!

I know, I know, who needs to count the number of words in a PDF? and, even if you need, can't you just cut/paste the words from the PDF to MS Word and have it count them? Well, the answer to the first question is: I do! Actually many researchers do. Quite often, in fact, we have a word count limit when we submit a paper and we need to submit the paper in PDF. Now, it happens that Acrobad doesn't provide this useful function :S

The answer to the second question is: NO! I'm not going to open Acrobat and MS Word and do the cut and paste just to count words. Besides that... com'on... MS Word?? Are you serious? I don't have it on my machine!!! (And I'm not planning to install it to count words....).

So, here is the solution:

pdftotext FILE.pdf - | wc -w

yes, as easy  as that...  no, are you sure you still want to start Acrobat, open your PDF,select everything, cut, open MS Word (wait for a little while... or a long while...), paste the text, go to the menu (I don't know which one...) to count the words? Naaaaaahhhh....

A friend of mine showed me this article, I find it funny:

A French teacher was explaining to her College class that in French, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. House is feminine "la maison." Pencil is masculine "le crayon."

A student asked, "What gender is computer ?"
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups male and female - and asked them to decide for themselves whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was
asked to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men's group decided that "computer" should definitely be of the feminine gender (la computer) because:
1.. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2.. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;

3.. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review; and
4.. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your pay cheque on accessories for it.

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine le computer) because:
1.. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2.. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;
3.. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem; and
4.. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won !!

 In my opinion computers are women:  you think you know what they are thinking and doing... but you are wrong!

[source: Gleez]