Leftfield and The Magic Flute; Linux, Pascal and MASSIVE

[tcpip]

Following my attendance and review of Hawkwind last week, I have attended and reviewed a Leftfield concert, also on Rocknerd. reddragdiva must be surprised at the quantity of externally-produced content, and it ain't over yet. If an interest in space rock, electronica and punk seems to be an unusual combination, I should also mention that caseopaya and I also received tickets from Khat K, to attend the Victorian State Opera opening night of The Magic Flute. A fairly accurate (but atrociously written) summary of plot synopsis and themes is available. We had superb seats a few rows in and central, next to the Austrian ambassador's group, and attended the cast party afterwards. It was a fairly standard version of this romantic fantasy compressed somewhat (thank goodness) from the historical five hours to three. We both preferred the more earthy romanticism of Papageno and Papagena to the supposedly sophisticated and enlighted Tamino and Pamina.

Today attended the LUV-Beginners workshop which featured Alex Gerber giving an excellent presentation on user-experience for newcomers to Linux. On a related note I have started producing content a 'blog dedicated to learning how to program using Pascal on a Linux system. Least anyone think that this is somewhat archaic, read the initial post on why this is actually a good idea (Pascal is retro, but not backward). I intend to spend about two months writing a post a day on this 'blog and then, after editing and friendly advice, port it to Wikibooks, as the existing example is not really satisfactory. Finally, on other IT related news Monash University and the Australian Synchrotron have opened the MASSIVE cluster. They have a nice website which yours truly has worked on.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

Ooh, I hadn't noticed you'd posted that!

[tcpip]

I hope you don't think I'm colonising Rocknerd...

[reddragdiva]

Go for it :-D

[tcpip]

BTW, I notice that comments are disabled for the Hawkwind review...

[reddragdiva]

Whuh? So they were. I have no idea why. (And re-enabling them required an annoying trawl through the interface ...)

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

Ah! Mozart's "The Magic Flute"; that music is truly magical. I'm very happy for you. *smile*

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I must agree with you there, the music was very good. Indeed, I preferred the music to the actual play which was, I felt, lacking in substantial dialogue with a rather trivial exposition of the the thematic content, e.g., rationalism versus superstition.

I guess Mozart was a better composer than playwright :)

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

MASSIVE's website is pretty, but where's the computing hardware specs?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point. I'll harass the content-provider about that tomorrow.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

They're here, linked from the frontpage:

http://massive.vpac.org/services/resources

[longi.livejournal.com]

Finally, on other IT related news Monash University and the Australian Synchrotron have opened the MASSIVE cluster. They have a nice website which yours truly has worked on.

Have you played quake on it yet?

Within a week of the CUBIN research centre opening at UniMelb, someone had:
Played quake on it.
Used it to watch porn on the giant array screen.
Got stoned and used it for fractal zooming.

You gotta render some bondage fairies on it or something.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

As a GPU-based system it would actually be ideal for such research activities... Alas, as far as I know it hasn't been used in such a manner. The best we can do is note that one of our (smallest) clusters is used as a BZFlag for Friday afternoon at beer o'clock.

I know, frightfully dull of us...

[longi.livejournal.com]

Wow I used to play that on my SGI Indy R5000 about a decade ago. DECR had a server running on an SGI Origin 350 (which I believe they finally decommisioned last year).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a bit of an ancient classic. It does have the advantages of being simple with excellent gameplay.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

New Album!



You ripper! Still remember seeing them at the Metro in Sydney in 2000. :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's right. They did tour NSW and New Zealand but not Melbourne.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I just discovered that I missed them by a week up here :(

Pascal Revival

[ferret-otaku.livejournal.com]

Reviving Pascal may be appropriate to help people learn about:
- Structured programming
- Pointers
- Data structures
- How to avoid GOTO (mostly)
- Recursion (Yeah, not always a good thing)
- File handling

Yes, programmers SHOULD already know the above, but I believe programming in Pascal helps reinforce discipline in programming style.

Re: Pascal Revival

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Those are indeed very good reasons. Pascal is an excellent language to learn how to program...

Imagine a person starting with PHP.. I mean it has immediate utility and all, but....