I just started looking at distributed data processing platforms. There is, of course, the Apache Hadoop project, but I have also come across HPCC Systems, a system used by LexusNexus Risk Solutions, and Disco, a system developed by Nokia Research Center.

At the end of this link is a page with a picture of Earth from Mars captured by MER Spirit.

I decided to do an experiment to verify that Blackbird Pie is caching tweets locally. If it does not, then it makes more sense to stick with Lifestream for everything or to use screen captures.

At the beginning of the year, I added the right sidebar that contains content from my Twitter account. The motivation was to automatically capture tweets I make, most of which are retweets referring to articles I have read. I like that the content is automatically captured (although a lot ends up being redundant), but I do not like that it is in a different “stream” than my blog posts. All of the information is kept in sequence on the feed streams page, but that is not quite what I want. For instance, there is no way to comment here about any of those tweets, so for a while I have wanted a way to get tweets inlined in the blog feed.

Version 0.2.1-r1, a maintenance release, of the Geneagrapher is now available.

Tonight I installed VMware Player on my Windows machine to experiment with a few things. After getting it installed, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu image and created a virtual machine with it. Everything went pretty smoothly.

There are thousands of underground coal fires around the world and more than one hundred in the United States (see Deep Underground, Miles of Hidden Wildfires Rage). Most of these fires start due to mining activities, but some fires started are ignited naturally. They are difficult to extinguish, and can burn for years, decades, or longer. Amazingly, there is naturally-occurring coal fire in Australia that is believed to have burning for 6000 years so far (see Burning Mountain)*. According to the article linked above, some scientists estimate that three percent of the annual coal emissions are caused by these fires, but they admit there is a lot of room for error in their estimates.

I have not been very active here lately. The explanation in one word: parenthood.

A new Chinese supercomputer -— Tianhe-1A -— has achieved 2.5 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. Not bad! Jaguar was at 1.75 petaflops in June’s Top500 list. More information here.

I am locked in an epic battle with slugs determined to destroy the cucumbers and squash in my garden. They have taken the initiative repeatedly and struck from the shadows. In fact, I had cucumbers and squash growing in May that were completely destroyed long before I knew what was hitting me.