MATLAB, Cold Fusion, Conferences, XFCE

[tcpip]

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.

Comments

[rialian.livejournal.com]

===XFCE is pretty much the only desktop I use now...and I am thinking of trying the new Mint based off Debian. I tried Lubuntu...nice, but not quite as usable for me at XFCE.

[ferrouswheel.livejournal.com]

I just upgraded to Natty, I wish I hadn't because I really don't want Ubuntu UI to be a clone of OSX.

I'll probably try XFCE or Xmonad when I get the time to set them up and learn how they work.

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

All that is far beyond my lamentably non-technical brain but I like the Art Deco and your spititualized , libertarian socialist ideas .

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Cool developments! Did they mention if the coder would be included with MATLAB's basic price?

[vaelynphi.livejournal.com]

Hrm... still skeptical of the 'cold fusion' device, but it sounds interesting.

[jujulilianan.livejournal.com]

hasn't matlab had matlab code to c as an expensive option for years?