tcpip: (Default)
Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2011-05-09 11:38 am

MATLAB, Cold Fusion, Conferences, XFCE

MATLAB 2011a has been released as is typically with its parent company a pleasant miniconf was held at the Rendezvous Hotel in Melbourne, which has an ridiculous name, is ugly from the outside, but with some very nice deco features. The "great new product" for this release was the MATLAB coder, which allows conversion from MATLAB code (e.g., design and prototypes) to C code for actual implementation, a procedure which was often conducted manually. I asked whether it was capable of converting MATLAB code written for parallel computation to MPI-compatible C code; the speaker agreed that would be "awesome"... but no, it wasn't available. I further asked whether there was any plans to give the MATLAB coder export ability to other languages commonly used in engineering and the sciences, such as FORTRAN. This answer this time was "probably not".

Attended the "Singularity Salon" at the Melbourne University Graduate House on Thursday and participated in a very good discussion about some very interesting recent - and surprising - developments in cold fusion, a sufficiently important topic (OK, it's probably the most significant scientific discovery of all time - if it's true) that makes up the first 'blog post on lightbringers.net. Agenda for the Humanity Plus Conference was also discussed , where I get the Sunday morning slot (just as well I'm a morning person, right?) with a terse abstract. Also received confirmation today that my paper has been accepted for the New Zealand eResearch Symposium, focussing on teaching the value and practise of High Performance Computing, appearing at the same time my new passport came in the mail (this would possibly send a superstitious person into a flurry, I'm sure).

I have recently made a change to my default desktop environment in Linux on both my home and work machines. Ubuntu's latest release comes with Unity, which managed to break my GUI (I mean, NVIDIA, who uses that?). I am a little unhappy with Ubuntu in general for reasons that Jeff Waugh points out in detail, along with the refusual to implement some basic design issues. I thought about moving to a Fedora/GNOME 3 combination, but that didn't seem to be to my liking either. Finally, I have settled - and quite happily - with XFCE, a small, fast, mouse-capable WM. Oh, and yes it does have a cute rodent logo which had no effect at all on my choice.

[identity profile] notthebuddha.livejournal.com 2011-05-09 06:22 am (UTC)(link)
Cool developments! Did they mention if the coder would be included with MATLAB's basic price?

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2011-05-09 06:48 am (UTC)(link)
Alas no... I comes with a hefty price tag (about $9K), which I suppose is fine if you're in a engineering company that's churning out a lot of embedded devices or similar..

It would be great if the same could be done for FORTRAN, R etc. and other languages that regularly find themselves interacting with MATLAB.

[identity profile] notthebuddha.livejournal.com 2011-05-09 09:08 am (UTC)(link)
if I can ever get done with finals and my own multiprocessing project, I'll have to see if I can round up some other translators, and see if MATLAB-to-c-to-*-to-Fortran looks like something worth having.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2011-05-09 02:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Also... have a look at Octave; free and open-source implementation of the core functions of MATLAB.