Fractional Futurist

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Author: MC

  • Google Music Manager on Linux (Wine)

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    UPDATE:  Google have finally provided a native Linux client, just login to http://music.google.com/ and click ‘Add Music’ to install it. Last week I received a Beta invite for Google Music.  I jumped straight onto it only to meet the message “Music Manager is only available for PC and Mac”.  Being an avid Linux user I…

  • Navigation Mesh path finding in MMORPG Bots (updated)

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    One of the biggest challenges in writing a Bot (autonomous character) for an MMORPG is the navigation.  You have a few choices, ordered by complexity; Steering: Quite simply, given a destination you steer the character towards that point.  If it gets stuck you try jumping, reversing, strafing left/right.  This is obviously the most primitive form of…

  • MacBook Pro 17″ 2011 – Intel SSD woes solved (kinda)

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    I recently upgraded my work laptop to the new MacBook Pro 17″ (2.3Ghz i7, 8GB RAM), being ever the tinkerer I was keen to replace the stock HDD for one of the latest SATA III (6Gbps) solid-state drives. After a brief bit of research it boiled down to two options OCZ Vertex 3 240GB or,…

  • World IPv6 Day

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    World IPv6 Day is fast approaching (June 8th 2011), excerpt from their website; On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations…

  • Earthquake Data (fixed)

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    I just noticed that the Earthquake Data I’ve been collating had some minor errors (no lat/long), a quickity quick fix to some of the regular expressions and its back to normal.  A total of ~31,020 earthquake events, updated daily from data provided by the fine people involved in the GEOFON Extended Virtual Network project.

  • Consuming Twitter streams from Java

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    A while ago I was playing with the Twitter Streaming API, one of the first things I wanted to do was collect a lot of data for off-line analysis (in Hadoop).  I wrote a hacky little utility class called TwitterConsumer.java that did just the trick. Basically you just initialise it with a valid Twitter account…

  • Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8: DRIVER_TIMEOUT

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    I have been using the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 host bus adapter on quite a few Linux machines recently.  Supermicro/Marvell only provide stable drivers for Windows and a select few (outdated) Linux distributions.  I had to rely on the open-source support in the drivers/scsi/mvsas tree of the Linux kernel. Running this card with 8 x 2TB hard…

  • Reading ZIP files from Hadoop Map/Reduce

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    This post has been obsoleted by my update here: Hadoop: Processing ZIP files in Map/Reduce One of the first use-cases I had for playing with Apache Hadoop involved extracting and parsing the contents of thousands of ZIP files.  Hadoop doesn’t have a built-in reader for ZIP files, it just sees them as binary blobs. To solve…

  • Earthquake Data

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    With today’s events unfolding in Japan I went looking for sources of earthquake data when I stumbled upon the GEOFON Extended Virtual Network and after a quick bit of scripting I collated all the data into a simple CSV format making it easier to analyse. I have published the collated data on a new page…

  • Simple Speed Tests

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    OCZ 30GB SSD $ hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 3358 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1679.46 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 452 MB in 3.01 seconds = 150.05 MB/sec Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB $ hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 3372 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1685.85 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads:…

  • Open MPI Master & Servant Example – BogoMips

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    In yesterdays post I introduced a simple ‘master & servant’ technique where I used the rank-0 node to collate results from all the other nodes. To do this I used the methods MPI_Send and MPI_Recv to send/recv 128-byte MPI_CHAR strings. Today I am extending the example by sending/receiving MPI_FLOAT‘s to demonstrate that native C/C++ numerical…

  • An Open MPI Master & Servant Example

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    Building on the Getting started… post from last week I’ve knocked up a quick example showing one way to get your MPI processes to communicate with one another. master_servant.c: #include <stdio.h> #include <mpi.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int numprocs, rank, namelen; char processor_name[MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME]; MPI_Init(&argc, &argv); MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &numprocs); MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &rank); MPI_Get_processor_name(processor_name, &namelen);…

  • Getting started with Open MPI on Fedora

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    Recently rediscovered the world of parallel computing after wondering what to do with a bunch of mostly idle Linux boxes, all running various versions of Fedora Core Linux. I found this guide particularly useful and decided to elaborate on the subject here. Background Open MPI is an open-source implementation of the Message Passing Interface which…

  • Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 working on Fedora Rawhide

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    Long story short, I installed Fedora Core 10, enabled fedora-rawhide.repo and upgraded to Rawhide (17th Feb ’09), giving the following post install/upgrade: acl-2.2.47-3.fc10.i386 apr-1.3.3-3.fc11.i386 apr-util-1.3.4-2.fc11.i386 apr-util-ldap-1.3.4-2.fc11.i386 attr-2.4.43-1.fc10.i386 audit-libs-1.7.11-2.fc11.i386 audit-libs-python-1.7.11-2.fc11.i386 authconfig-5.4.7-1.fc11.i386 basesystem-10.0-1.noarch bash-4.0-0.4.rc1.fc11.i386 binutils-2.19.51.0.2-12.fc11.i386 bzip2-1.0.5-3.fc10.i386 bzip2-libs-1.0.5-3.fc10.i386 ca-certificates-2008-7.noarch checkpolicy-2.0.16-3.fc10.i386 chkconfig-1.3.41-1.i386 compat-db45-4.5.20-5.fc10.i386 ConsoleKit-libs-0.3.0-3.fc11.i386 coreutils-7.0-7.fc11.i386 cpio-2.9.90-3.fc11.i386 cpp-4.4.0-0.19.i386 cracklib-2.8.13-2.i386 cracklib-dicts-2.8.13-2.i386 cronie-1.2-7.fc10.i386 crontabs-1.10-28.fc11.noarch curl-7.18.2-9.fc11.i386 cyrus-sasl-lib-2.1.22-21.fc11.i386 db4-4.7.25-9.fc11.i386 db4-utils-4.7.25-9.fc11.i386 dbus-1.2.4.4permissive-1.fc11.i386 dbus-glib-0.80-1.fc11.i386 dbus-libs-1.2.4.4permissive-1.fc11.i386 dbus-python-0.83.0-4.fc11.i386…

  • DVB Support for the Videolan Client (VLC) on Fedora Core 5

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    The version of the Videolan Client (VLC) for Fedora Core 5 from freshrpms does not include DVB support. [foo@localhost ~]$ vlc –program 4704 dvb:12207000:0:3:27500000 VLC media player 0.8.5 Janus status change: ( new input: dvb:12207000:0:3:27500000 ) status change: ( audio volume: 256 ) status change: ( play state: 1 ) [00000295] main input error: no…