And now what did you do TODAY?

[Salt Peanuts]

Went out to a sculpture museum in the morning. Our daughter enjoyed it and it was funny to hear to trying to say the word "sculpture." Just came back from driving to meet up with the guy buying my camera, only to get a call from him while waiting at the location that his car broke down on the highway and that he can't make it.

[grawk]

This is slightly more than 48 cores (on the itty bitty test cluster). Then there's the little 1408 core cluster we just got running and the big ~28000 core system that we finish up next week.

[crappyjones123]

that sounds like fun dan. chris what kinda stuff are you running? (assuming you can talk about it vaguely)

i wasted some time on a 32 core mainframe at my dept running some silly simulations. like modeling the burj khalifa floating on a submarine. very strange results but fun to run nonetheless. the labbie was obsessed with navier stokes equations and was always trying to make a 10 second sequence of a tidal wave look as realistic as possible.

Edited June 23, 2012 by crappyjones123

[Dreadhead]

Dan I believe we're getting on a 80k core machine if all goes to plan hence my excitement.

Crappy it is a hydrodynamics simulation (not RANS) and it is more massively serial than parallel in that we need to run millions of cases for statistical reasons. I mostly do the theory that goes in but dabble in the statistics and debugging. Stupid code is written in C# which is possibly the slowest compiled language I have ever seen. At least there is a way to get it running on Unix so we can throw computers at it.

Edited June 23, 2012 by Dreadhead

[luvdunhill]

Chris, do you use R much? My "supercomputer" has 1TB of memory which is kinda fun to play with.

Edited June 23, 2012 by luvdunhill

[crappyjones123]

while taking a class on financial engineering and models i had to come up with something for a final project. obviously i waited until the night before thinking i could probably cook up something relatively A worthy in C++ or R. Turned out either I had to write functions from scratch or use the plethora of libraries available for C#, a language I did not know. Similar to C++ but its so freaking quirky. Ended up spending all night learning C# and turned in a project in the morning with bugs. Figured my professor would run it and email me back and by then I would have had time to debug it.

Worked out luckily. Got an A for the most extensive project in the entire class.

[crappyjones123]

Chris, do you use R much? My "supercomputer" has 1TB of memory which is kinda fun to play with.

holy hell. initially i read that as 1tb of hard drives and i was wondering why that would be fun to play with.

[Dreadhead]

Nope never used R. I got involved with this project only a few years back and the language decision predates me. What's funny/sad is that they were always aiming for fast code and recently we found a Microsoft document that basically says if you want to do numerical stuff don't use C#.

[Voltron]

Decided to reclaim the porch from the wisteria that was cut back to nubs in the fall.

[HeadphoneAddict]

Some fucker has been setting fires in the Woodland park and Divide area outside of Colorado Springs, 20 since Monday. All were contained quickly, until today.

My 18 year old daughter is at work at the riding stables in Garden of the Gods, which is at the bottom of the mountain that's on fire. They're preparing to evacuate the horses.

This could be a terrible disaster, with all the homes and lives that could be destroyed.

[swt61]

Decided to reclaim the porch from the wisteria that was cut back to nubs in the fall.

My favorite seat at Mayberry. I remember reading my Kindle in that chase.

[HeadphoneAddict]

I'm so blessed - now someone snagged my main credit card number and went on a $2000 shopping spree. Card is canceled, new one is on the way, and now I'm changing the automatic billing for dozens and dozens of accounts that are applied to that card every month (Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, iPad data, Flickr, uReach fax, nook account, SiriusXM, blah blah blah). Bastages...

[shellylh]

That sucks Larry, sorry.

[Absorbine_Sr]

I was there about a month ago Larry so I can sympathize.

[Absorbine_Sr]

Decided to reclaim the porch from the wisteria that was cut back to nubs in the fall.

I miss Mayberry and look forward to visiting sometime again in the future.

[Dusty Chalk]

Hey, all youse guys who do modelling work -- do any work in Java? I just did not get a job at a company and one of the reasons was that I had zero familiarity with some popular modelling tools for Java. Seriously? WTF? I bet it's slower than C#.

I guess the real question is, what are the most popular mainstream modelling tools? I should probably at least have a passing familiarity with them.

[crappyjones123]

Most if not all back end financial stuff is written in C++. But with so many flavors optimized to particular needs and niche models i don't know if it's fair to call them all C++ even though they all sprouted from there. I guess I don't follow the argument. If you know how to code you know how to code. The rest is syntax which IMHO can be picked up a lot easily than say actually understanding encapsulation or polymorphism and being able to implement them in one language. Again the assumption is working on some oop language. Outside oop I don't know much but I can't imagine the syntax being that hard to pick up. Also if you are smart enough to understand the theory behind objects would it be a terrible stretch of imagination that you could pick up non oop languages kinda quickly too?

Also one doesn't NEED to work in emacs or some super super lean editor and then compile stuff. At least I don't see such a need. Work in a sufficiently advanced IDE and it should give you plenty of help writing code and getting used to the syntax. So many people in my dept stuck to vi just for the hardcore points when the rest of the team was working in eclipse or CodeWarrior. Gui's aren't always a bad thing. Developers can get microsoft stuff for free.

My naive suggestion would be to spend a few hours looking at the libraries they use for whatever the job requires prior to the interview if possible instead of picking a 500 page Wiley manual to learn java or the like. One part of the interview at rutgers for financial engineering was reading their library for parsing parallel threads in C++ which apparently wasn't natively supported and then answering questions on how one would solve specific problems with some screwy classes.

Ps. Fuck java and whoever made it.

Edited June 24, 2012 by crappyjones123

[Dusty Chalk]

Amen to that.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I'm doing -- one potential interview requires a code test -- it's hard, too...well, I mean, I knew the answers as soon as I saw the questions, but it's enough code that it's going to take a while to code it all up, and hence I'll be using the exercise as a refresh on Java as I go (I was actually quite good back then -- wrote a recursive and reflection-based generic object debugger just for the fun of it). It's actually been kind of fun. The first exercise I did I got working with only two bugs (I.E. on the 3rd iteration).

But she made it sound like it was some sort of CAD tool or something -- I honestly didn't even understand the question, from a coder's perspective -- I mean, beyond an editor and an IDE and knowing the libraries that are out there (and how to look up the ones that one doesn't know are out there), what else is there? She made it sound like there was, in the scientific modelling arena. I think I'm going to get back to my recruiter and just ask him to ask them -- from the perspective of, if I want to get into this field, I do want to learn the software in the area, and see if it's a freeware tool or something that I can look up. I'm going to kill myself stab myself in the thigh if she said Mathematica or something and I just didn't hear her because I was on a fucking cell phone.

[Dreadhead]

Good luck with the learning process Dusty though it doesn't sound like you need it. As far as java goes I have seen it uses when people didn't want to redevelop the GUI for all the platforms they want to use.

We actually developed a simulation tool in Matlab over a 2 year period (bosses choice not mine). Worked out well really.

My hands down favorite is still Fortran. It's fast and it speaks engineer.

[crappyjones123]

Matlab. How did I forget that? Maple is another one. I love Mathematica for having the greatest help tab in the history of all languages. A monkey can write a reasonably difficult program in it given the entire help section. Now if they could just stop using those damn square brackets they seem to be married to...

[NightWoundsTime]

Had a charitable moment last night involving a cute blonde thing. I'd like to think I'd help anyone in her situation though.

I was on a Walmart run, long story. Walked out a weird side door and this girl was coming looking all panicked. She asked me if I had a cell phone she could use. I let her make a call in privacy but I could tell whoever she called was useless. Then she starts trying to ask for money but she was so cute about it, and her story was solid enough, that I emptied out $16 bucks from my wallet supposedly for gas. Convoluted as it was, story involved her grandmother going to the hospital with a high heart rate, doctors slowing it down too much and telling her to hurry up and get there. She'd somehow gotten locked out of the house without her purse , and granny had the house keys.

She also said she'd asked two of Tallahassee's Finest for help, and that they were total fuckheads about it. Not her words. The story stands up though. In the end she took my phone number and gave me a call from the disposable phone in her hand, told me where she supposedly works, and promised to pay it back. We shall see.

Edited June 24, 2012 by NightWoundsTime

[The Monkey]

Can you confirm that she made a call with your phone?

[Salt Peanuts]

Woke up for the second straight morning with massive pain in my neck. So much for testing out bikes.

[NightWoundsTime]

Can you confirm that she made a call with your phone?

Yep. One local number. And one local number received. So there are trails. Just looked up where she called, local business. All is well I think.

Umm, except that no contact by now probably means bad for granny, which why I'm all no worries about it, and will continue to be for a while. Sounded like the girl lived with her grandmother.

Edited June 24, 2012 by NightWoundsTime

[NightWoundsTime]

It was a body shop/towing company. She must have made the "I have no money but I'm an honest good person and can you please bring you some gas and I'll totally pay you sometime." She borrowed my phone on pretense of no signal on hers.