njr 3.0

The incredibly slow speed of Apple's 10.2 Terminal app when antialiasing is enabled has annoyed me for months. In my mail window, I've turned off line wrapping and scrollback in an attempt to speed things up – it helps, but not that much. I had assumed it was a CoreGraphics font rendering problem, but I discovered today that it's not.

An article on Apple's x11-users list mentions that you can get vanilla xterm to use FreeType, and thereby CoreGraphics font rendering under Apple X11. xterm -fa Monaco -fs 12 reacts instantly, at least in comparison with Terminal's horrendous 0.2-second response time, and looks identical save the weird X scrollbar.

3:43 PM | Radio
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From Slashdot to the New York Times in 3 days, not bad. This article briefly mentions the tests we've been doing with the MILC QCD code.

1:51 PM | Radio
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I've written a sync script for my iPod. When run, it:

• exports Palm Desktop addresses to the iPod's Contacts folder*
• exports Palm Desktop events to the iPod's Calendars folder*
• copies Palm Desktop memos to the iPod's Notes folder, one folder per category
• creates an iCalendar file containing the Palm Desktop to dos in the iPod's Calendars folder
• synchronizes music from designated folders to same-named playlists on the iPod (I use this for copying recorded streams and radio to my iPod).

If anyone's interested, the script is available as a compiled script (source included), or view the source in a HTML rendering.

* Exports don't work properly yet because I can't get UI Scripting to properly call Palm Desktop. I've posted to applescript-users and hopefully can find a workaround.

11:12 PM | Radio
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NCSA's PS2 cluster got mentioned on Slashdot. The Pablo group, of which I'm a member, has been working on PS2 stuff for the past few months. (I'm not involved; I just hear about it at meetings.) Getting random scientific applications to run on it is not easy, between single-precision floating-point, data layout issues, constrained memory, and horrendously slow disk and network I/O. Not that we expect to get real work done on the cluster: it's primarily a proof of concept for HPC work on later generations of gaming hardware.

Pavan Tumati's pioneering work on porting computational chemistry to the PS2 is mentioned as well. As is, he's done a lot in his free time, much more than we have with an actual funded project.

8:57 PM | Radio
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Received my second replacement Sidekick from T-Mobile today, which
arrived in the open position, complete with incredibly scratched-up
screen—far worse than the screen on the original device I've
been using for the past seven months. I wrote about the broken first replacement
last week. It's going back in the morning.

3:10 AM | Radio
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