Returned this morning at stupid o'clock from a week in New Zealand. First leg of the journey was Wellington for three days where I acted as MC for Multicore World, at the Wellington Town Hall, with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
caseopaya managing registrations. The organiser, Nicolás Erdödy, founder of Open Parallel has this well-intentioned obsession with making NZ a centre for parallel programming. The basics are quite sound; multicore computing is inevitable, but the production of software that takes advantage of this is quite rare. Somewhere will become the leader of this activity - why not NZ? Particularly impressive were the visionary talks by Tim Mattson of Intel and Barbara Chapman of the University of Houston. Full programme (PDF) is also available.
Following Wellington we flew to Dunedin and stayed for the three days at the beautifully restored folly, Larnarch Castle, founded with a family history appropriate for a Scottish gothic-horror-romance, involving somewhat odd marriages, hints of corruption, semi-incestuous relations, and suicide. Whilst in Dunedin, visited our secret South Pacific base and researched some of its prior history as a Freemason's Lodge as well as noting how the new tenants are taking good care of the place (and have turned the main hall into a studio). More officially, gave a presentation to the Otago University Systems Research Group on Teaching High Performance Computing To Scientists, where I argue for a combination of early introduction, graduate level summmaries and detailed studies, and easier tools.
Returning to Wellington for a night, organised a cheap-and-cheerful dinner which included a number of people from the left-liberal, roleplaying, free software, and the local Unitarian-Universalist group. Attendees includedmundens, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
luciusmalfoy, ferrouswheel (whom I must discuss more about artificial intelligence), tatjna (who I must discuss more about Isocracy), and earlier in the week ehintz. It was quite a joy bringing some people together who had common interests but had hitherto had been on the periphery of each other's social circles.
One other item of note; on the various plane trips managed to watch again most of Peter Jackson's representation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As per previous considerations the film series becomes more increasingly ridiculous as the special effects is cranked up; the third film is just horrible in terms of a ruinous representation of a fair narrative. Nevertheless amused by the "Air Middle Earth" flight safety video. I always wanted to be a wizard. Finally and, alas, whilst we were away Mr. Chirpy 'fell off his perch', as they say.
caseopaya managing registrations. The organiser, Nicolás Erdödy, founder of Open Parallel has this well-intentioned obsession with making NZ a centre for parallel programming. The basics are quite sound; multicore computing is inevitable, but the production of software that takes advantage of this is quite rare. Somewhere will become the leader of this activity - why not NZ? Particularly impressive were the visionary talks by Tim Mattson of Intel and Barbara Chapman of the University of Houston. Full programme (PDF) is also available.Following Wellington we flew to Dunedin and stayed for the three days at the beautifully restored folly, Larnarch Castle, founded with a family history appropriate for a Scottish gothic-horror-romance, involving somewhat odd marriages, hints of corruption, semi-incestuous relations, and suicide. Whilst in Dunedin, visited our secret South Pacific base and researched some of its prior history as a Freemason's Lodge as well as noting how the new tenants are taking good care of the place (and have turned the main hall into a studio). More officially, gave a presentation to the Otago University Systems Research Group on Teaching High Performance Computing To Scientists, where I argue for a combination of early introduction, graduate level summmaries and detailed studies, and easier tools.
Returning to Wellington for a night, organised a cheap-and-cheerful dinner which included a number of people from the left-liberal, roleplaying, free software, and the local Unitarian-Universalist group. Attendees included
mundens, luciusmalfoy, ferrouswheel (whom I must discuss more about artificial intelligence), tatjna (who I must discuss more about Isocracy), and earlier in the week ehintz. It was quite a joy bringing some people together who had common interests but had hitherto had been on the periphery of each other's social circles.One other item of note; on the various plane trips managed to watch again most of Peter Jackson's representation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As per previous considerations the film series becomes more increasingly ridiculous as the special effects is cranked up; the third film is just horrible in terms of a ruinous representation of a fair narrative. Nevertheless amused by the "Air Middle Earth" flight safety video. I always wanted to be a wizard. Finally and, alas, whilst we were away Mr. Chirpy 'fell off his perch', as they say.
