Lev Lafayette's journal

It's been a very busy week for Linux and HPC courses with pretty much all of Monday and Tuesday teaching classes almost entirely made up of RMIT researchers. Once again received excellent feedback; I always feel a little embarrassed and proud at the same time when the class applauds at the end of the training sessions. This coming Monday I fly out to the Australian Institute for Marine Science to spend two days teaching some of their researchers on such topics and training their sysadmins on cluster management and various scientific software installations. Spent the better part of Thursday and Friday writing up the documentation for this. In the meantime I have also submitted a paper for eResearch Australasia on Vocational Engineering with High Performance Computing : A Necessity for a Productive Knowledge Economy. The practical import of this paper is recognising that industrial processes have an optimal degree of complexity, and as traditional industrial employment transfers to developing countries, new processes (and employment) will come from HPC engineering applications - as distinct to new research discoveries which also are coming from HPC data processing. Tangentially related was a very pleasing request for republication from a Linux advocate in Indonesia who had taken the effort to translate a previous presentation of mine (An Introduction to Slackare) into Bahasa-Indonesian.

Two regular gaming sessions this week have gone very well; last Sunday's 7th Sea Freiburg went well, with an mission into the catacombs of the city's cathedral to recover a key that opens a chamber to great (yet destructively unbalancing) riches. Of course there was a particularly hostile ghost there which didn't agree with anything being taken away. Then there was the gargoyles which made escape rather difficult. Although being a somewhat more heroic game, the PCs did somewhat better than Thursday night's Masks of Nyarlathotep team, who are completing the final chapter of story in central Australia. Half the investigators are incapacitated following an encounter with armed cultists followed shortly afterwards with a flying polyp; their friendliest encounter has been with mimi, and they're not always so friendly. It is, in many ways, heading towards a typically conclusion of a Call of Cthulhu story as a tiny group half-dead and half-mad individuals struggle their way through an ancient alien underground maze far from civilisation seeking to prevent the the destruction of the planet.