Lev Lafayette's journal

Leaving Geneva we took the train to our next leg of the journey, Montpellier. I readily admit that it never has been a location that I had paid tremendous attention to, but now I've discovered the error of my ways. With over half a million inhabitants, approximately a third are students attending one of the three higher education institutions in the city. The main purpose of my visit was to visit CINES (Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur), one of the three major peak computational facilities for France, where several of their staff meet with me to discuss and compare various computational architectures and strategies. In evening we made our way to Ecusson, the historic old town of the city, a delightful maze of narrow streets, limestone buildings, and unexpected plazas, retail, and drinking establishments. I was particularly taken by the unexpected discovery of a busy plaza dedicated to Jean Jaurès, founder of the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, and overwhelmed by the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Montpellier.

The following day we took the train from Montpellier to Barcelona, making it the fourth country of visit in four days. To be honest by this stage I was getting quite tired of the ritual of waking early, journeying in the morning, visiting an HPC facility in the afternoon, and trying to get some sightseeing done in the evening. Most of the first day in Barcelona was coming to terms with the stunning ocean views from our apartment and - despite being a weekend - getting some more mundane work done. The following day however made our way to the Gothic Quarter, where we had lunch with Andrew S; I think the waiter was pleased by the fact that I ordered my meal at least in part with Catalan as well as Castilian. The desire for independence is strong in the city, and many buildings are adorned with the Estelada. We accidentally stumbled into a great local government exhibit of first president of the region, Josep Tarradellas, who spent most of his time in exile (Franco didn't particularly care for his politics), before making our wy to the the local section of the Barcelona City Museum, which of course, the underground Roman and Visigothic ruins were quite the highlight. Now getting ready to see 65dos at Razzmatazz - and debating whether to see The Chemical Brothers on Thursday night at the same venue.

There was something quite perfect about landing in Doha, capital of Qatar, listening to The Clash doing "Rock The Casbah". The end of the first leg of the gruelling journey with plentiful but poor in-flight entertainment there was one good LP from the selection, the Hits Back compilation by aforementioned band. To their credit, Qatar airlines is quite comfortable and the airline food (which they keep on providing) was of a very high quality. From the transfer from the massive Doha airport it was another several hours before landing in Frankfurt, a stunningly simple transfer through German customs and then to Five Elements Hotel, an extremely well-priced and comfortable hostel in the middle of the red light district.

The following day the first port of call was the Goethe University library where I had made a previous request for some hard to find material from Friedrich Pollock. I was astounded to find the library special collections staff had put aside several folders of original typed and handwritten material, which I am sure (based on the foxing) that I was the first person to open in seventy years. After taking numerous photos of that material it was a short walk to Institut für Sozialforschung to be an academic fanboy. It was mostly deserted as it was undergoing renovations, but nevertheless did engage in a bit of an explore. It is difficult to underestimate the importance of this small group of serious and careful radical intellectuals to my own spiritual development. A homecoming in so many ways.

After that made a journey to the Struwwelpeter Museum, Frankfurt's long-lasting fictional children's character, them to the very impressive Frankfurt Zoological Gardens, where had a bit of a chuckle at the collection of exotic Australian birds. The day ended with a visit to the Alte Opera for a bit of high culture to listen to Schumann concert, although with some amusement almost ended up at the wrong concert (who would have thought would have two different shows on at the same building, at the same time, at the same price, with the same seating numbers?).

Today was spent almost entirely at the Center for Scientific Computing at the Goethe University, discussing their various system configurations, and sitting through one of their training courses on high performance computing using Slurm. It was a very comprehensive course but I felt that it could have done with more hands-on activities. As it was the in-class conversation with the systems staff and researchers was excellent. Aferwards they took us out to some traditional Frankfurt dining at Lamer Esel (The Lame Donkey). Apropos this I have written a presentation for the four HPC centers I am visiting in Germany and Switzerland, A Cloud-HPC Hybrid Model for HPC Centres. Now it is time for the train and a weekend in Schwarzwald

Wednesday was a training day for Edward to Spartan transition workshop, which went very smoothly and also had a visiting sysadmin of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (who, in his evening hours, was a lead Pirate Party Senate candidate in the state). Thursday was mostly spent at an Amazon scientific computing immersion day which regrettably contained too much marketing material, not enough compute time. It can be quite telling when a course is not designed by educators. Other major work-related events was the installation of a metric tonne of software - an interesting feature of EasyBuild - as more dependencies are installed, installation processes become easier.

Only one major gaming event this week, being GURPS Middle Earth last Sunday. In lieu of our regular game members of our mid-week group visited the Melbourne Swordplay Guild on invitation from kits_the_dm, to engage in some backsword immersion in preparation for playing some Backswords and Bucklers. Content for issue 31 of RPG Review has been positively powering along and it should be released this weekend.

As mentioned in passing, caseopaya and I are visiting Europe in two months. At least for one of us it's a working trip however. I currently have plans to visit the The Goethe Center for Scientific Computing, then the High Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart, then to the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, then on to CERN, before reaching Barcelona for the OpenStack Summit, and visiting the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. It is just as well I have concentrated on German, French, and Spanish in Duolingo in recent weeks. Yes, it is fair to say that there is a degree of excitement for this planned trip.

Gave a lecture this afternoon at the University of Melbourne on the Edward and Spartan HPC systems as part of the postgraduate course on cluster and cloud computing; seemed to go well. The Spartan HPC/Cloud hybrid system is certainly novel, if not unique, in its architecture and it's great to have come online with students from the course to provide the initial beta-test group. UoM students will also be receiving several training instances from me in the coming weeks in the form of HPC and Cloud Computing courses.

Wednesday night went to see The Residents perform their Shadowland concert (Youtube link, of Vooruit Gent). Their lengthy avant-garde peformance art is like a punk version of Laurie Anderson - which is somewhat reminiscent of J.G. Thirlwell with a carnivalesque motifs. I like the style and I particularly liked the concert. But it does remind me that I have now four outstanding reviews for Rocknerd. Just as well there is a long weekend to see if I can through these.

Under the aegis and approval of the RPG Review Cooperative, I have started a petition to WoTC to release Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition under an Open Game License (like 3rd edition and 5th edition). This is not about whether one like 4th edition or not - but rather of equality and fairness (someone will probably make a SJW comment about it). Appropriately the third Crux Australi newsletter has been released, including mention of the weekend's gaming convention, Conquest.

First three days of this week were spent at La Trobe University conducting another round of HPC and Linux courses. They were a good class, engaged and interested - at least those that made the effort to turn up were. Next week I have another round except at Deakin University and using (primarily) Australian's most powerful computer Raijin. It uses a different scheduler and resource manager to what I typically work with and has some rather different licensing approaches, so it has also met that I've spent the other two days at work reconstructing the three-day teaching manuals and testing code for the course. Speaking of work, it has been rather grim days. There was a farewell lunch today for several more of our staff as the company begins to move towards a skeleton staff for HPC maintenance alone.

Whilst I am not at the point of public disclosure I must admit an choice issue has been gnawing at me for the past several days (just as well I have been busy), which is generating (quite unreasonably) a great deal of anxiety. Yes, it is potentially extremely disruptive to my life but honestly only relative to this particular stage of my life - I wouldn't be feeling anything like I do fifteen years ago. Worse still, it is somewhat embarrassing because the available choices are extremely beneficial. I apologise to my dear readers for being so cryptic, but I do keep a public journal (even on a now-obscure platform) and as a result I must keep a level of confidentiality. To an extent getting this down is catharitic.

Continuing work on Duolingo goes well. Contrary to some expectations I am not suffering much confusion in vocabulary from taking multiple languages. Attended German class at the CAE on Wednesday and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Duolingo training had a very positive effect. On the way home we encountered a fledgling Tawny Frogmouth. Not exactly the first wildlife rescue we had conducted in the area we whisked it off to the 24-hour vet, where it's doing very well.

Yet another round of HPC and Linux courses conducted this week, three solid days of raising a small group of researchers from basic command line knowledge through to submitting PBS scripts of increasing complexity and finishing with MPI programming. In several days, another set of courses will be conducted, this time for the RMIT SPACE research centre. On a related topic, next Tuesday will be the Annual General Meeting for Linux Users Victoria with an interesting talk on cross-compiling for the web also featured.

Provided another submission to the Victorian Parliamentary committee this week on end-of-life choices, this time on behalf of the Isocracy Network. Also received two confirmations to be a speaker in October, one from the Open Source Developers' Conference where I will be presenting on vocational Linux education, and a short presentation to the Victorian Secular Conference on The Political Imperative of Secularism. Sunday week I am giving the address at the Unitarian Church on The Modernisation of Buddhist Karma.

Social media in Melbourne has raised the ante quite significantly in the past twenty-four hours with the announcement then sudden cancellation of Operation Fortitude. After the Federal government reconstructed Australia's immigration service into a paramilitary Border Force, this Friday they were supposed to engage in a search for illegal immigrants on the streets of Melbourne. With Melbournians reacting that they didn't particularly want a "do you have your papers?" policing, it was cancelled, with an almighty cock-up of a media release.

Three days this week was pretty much taken up by conducting Linux, HPC, and MPI training courses for a number of postgrads, almost all from RMIT. Another good class who started with zero background in the subjects and who by the third day were working their way through MPI programming. Of some note was the attendance of the first economist in the three years or so that I've been running these courses. I've had a longstanding desire (and it really wouldn't be that hard) to compare local economic development with different council rating systems as a time series - not really requiring HPC but certainly does require a geospatial person, a valuer, an economist, and a programmer to be on the same project.

On another significant IT-related issue is Heartbleed which, hopefully, most people have heard of by now. From a technical perspective a failure in the bounds-checking by some versions of OpenSSL to malformed heartbeat requests allows for an attack vector on server memory of affected systems. From a user's perspective it means that passwords on many major sites have been compromised over the past two years. Whilst Filippo Valsorda has produced a useful tool to check whether a site is currently affected, there is no easy way to check if a certificate have been re-keyed. What can be provided is a handy list of many sites that were compromised last Tuesday, a day after the bug was made public.

Recently a study has been released claiming that the dingo is a separate species. Whilst it looks serious enough the university press release on a certain date, made me think that this could be an "poisson d'avril" as the proposition is so counterintuitive. Certainly species is a complex subject with some interesting edge cases (e.g., hybrids, ring species), but the general principle of species representing a population of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring is true. The paper argues - through morphological analysis of museum examples, not genetics - that the dingo was a separate species some five thousand years ago and is now being threatened by extensive hybrid speciation. Personally, I find their claim highly dubious. Not only is there significant evidence that the dingo's arrival was somewhat earlier, mitochondrial DNA analysis indicates that the dingo has much less differences with the domestic dog than wolves. So whilst morphological analysis is useful for a quick rule of thumb, genetic analysis is a much better determinant.