Science and productivity by Dr. Christine Corbett Moran
I splurged and bought two galaxy printed items of designer clothing the other week from the lovely http://www.blackmilkclothing.com/. Some colleagues and I couldn’t help but think about possibilities of extending this further: what about layers of astronomy themed clothing each featuring the same image taken in a different wavelength? Interested seamsters and seamstresses or people with an idea how to print high resolution images on fabric, please contact me! Read More …
SSL stands for the secured socket layer and it is the way many websites handle encrypting your data as you communicate to them and helping you to verify that they are who you think they are, making it more difficult for others to view your traffic. As simple as using SSL is, many services don’t use it. What happens then? Well if an eavesdropper, let’s call her Eve, is somewhere on the same network as you are, for example if you are at a coffee house and she is sitting a few tables down from you, she can run any number of freely available tools (or one she wrote herself) to observe your network traffic. Sounds like a rather far fetched scenario, if you aren’t familiar with how easy it is to be Eve(il) if you so choose. Read More …
So the basics are there, with full recovery from 23 failures over 1000 timesteps on 32 processes: context: https://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/fault-tolerant-computing/
As a first step to writing my own simulation code while attempting to do something useful, a few days ago I started writing a code to explore failure and recovery from failure in a distributed computation. By failure in this case, I mean when one of the computation units goes down. My test system is N harmonic oscillators on N nodes (or processes on a shared memory machine). Read More …
Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …
Kliq soft launched this weekend. You can schedule a meetup (dinner, drinks, you name it) in just a few thumb taps with your local facebook friends or be adventurous and be introduced to a friend of a friend. This is just a taste of what’s to come. Get Kliq on the iPhone App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/lt/app/kliq/id412169676 or visit http://kliq.in. Read More …
The Kliq beta application has recently been submitted to the iPhone app store. Kliq allows you to schedule a meetup with nearby facebook friends or a friend-of-friend at a nearby location in three thumb taps. A tech nugget and anecdote: Kliq uses SimpleGeo to go from the user’s GPS location to a set of possible Read More …
A week ago I hatched a plan to educate myself in a more structured manner on what exactly Wikileaks stands for, its history, and its possible futures with the idea of developing a more concrete and informed opinion (and since I have a habit of taking action with respect to my opinions, thereby guiding my Read More …
Phygg featured on MIT Technology Review. Phygg was down for a bit today due to overload, upgrading my hosting and starting to do some analytics. Having your site go down is a tangy bitter shot of success and failure in the same glass. Here’s to steady uptime and a great phygg community to come! Read More …
My Sunday afternoon recover-from-jetlag hack was creating http://www.phygg.com. Phygg is designed to help sort through physics papers and discussion topics related to arXiv.org in the style of digg.com, initially focusing on astrophysics. I’m going to be using phygg to track papers I find interesting, so feel free to follow the rss feed. In addition, I’m hoping to convince a few of my astrophysicist colleagues to join in on the posting and voting, so stay tuned. Read More …