Lev Lafayette's journal

Gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on Tuesday night on Universal Numbers; a good turnout an some excellent questions. Rounding errors are tragically common in computing and lead to very expensive and sometimes fatal mistakes. Unums can prevent such mistakes, and is a truly revolutionary change in hardware, however the challenge remains to implement them in hardware. I was first introduced to them some two years ago by John Gustafson who initiated their development, and I have been quite remiss in not presenting such a talk already.

On Wednesday headed off to Sydney for the one-day OpenStack Australia Day conference. There was superb turnout (around 350) with over half the attendees interested in the tech stream rather the main stream (read: "managers") and a a result the techs were shunted away in the conference venue's dungeon. Nevertheless was pretty happy with some of the talks, in particular Shunde Zhang's careful and balanced explanation of StackBuffet and GUTS, and was of course very interested in NCI's tests of parallel computation in cloud environments (kudos for actually having the courage to say "Parallel jobs can run on the Cloud, but is it HPC? Not at the moment").

The Asylum was a hive of activity this evening for several Ingress players from different factions, although team Enlightenment certainly had the numbers. Took the opportunity to go out and meet the younger players some of whom have caught on to playing Pokemon Go, Ingress, and Geocaching simultaneously. As previously mentioned so much of my Ingress time from previous years has now been taken up by Duolingo, but when there's an Ingress party outside your front door it's an opportunity that shouldn't be missed.