December 12, 2010

Centre for High Performance Computing national meeting

SANReN backbone

The Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town has an annual meeting to showcase flagship projects and listen to other people’s experiences at similarcentres around the world.

The 7-9th December 2010 saw the Centre for High Performance Computing’s national meeting held at the Westin Grand hotel in Cape Town, next to the International convention centre, CTICC.

I am contracting at CHPC, and have blogged before about it.

Dr Happy Sithole is director of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), an initiative funded by the Departmentof Science and Technology (DST) and managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR). He opened the Plenary session, discussing High Performance Computing and Data curation - the latter being slipped in as a target for the next big project at CHPC, a petabyte-scale database facility.

September 6, 2010

Using the Centre for High Performance Computing, Cape Town

I have recently been contracting at the Centre for High Performance Computing. This is just an update on how to map the particular problem I have onto the computing cluster.

First steps

It is an explanation of how to get to the much easier job of splitting the main task up into bite-sized pieces that can be fed independently via a job submission system called MOAB.

Task description

Each day satellites MODIS(NASA) and MERIS (ESA) do afew passes of a polar orbit over our region of interest, African coastal andinland waters. The (large amounts) of daily data arrive via a dedicated satellite link - about 1 Gig every day. They are in “swaths”, about 20 or so files from 10Meg to 800Meg.

September 2, 2010

Eavesdropping today's smartphones

There have been a number of countries, like UAE and India that have demanded access to encrypted communications of Research-In-Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry smartphones. These efforts are misguided, and unfairly target RIM’s business.

Public key encryption

We need a quick primer on today’s encryption. We pick the standard scenario where Alice wants to talk to Bob, and Charlie is trying to listen in.

In the old days Alice had to get a ‘secret’ to Bob before they can chatter. This was vulnerable because there was always the possibility that Charlie could intercept that initial exchange.

August 22, 2010

wikileaks and the twitterverse

Last month wikileaks published a large tranche of Afghan war documents, that the Pentagon doesn’t like. Actually, they want it all back, if such a thing is possible in the download age.

Crowd-sourcing

This is the new ’enemy’ - the indiscriminate information age. Even during the case, wikileaks gave its followers - 120 thousand and growing - a sharply-focused feed into this continually-evolving situation. Wikipedia is there to helpfully keep the permanent record, written by the crowds, not by chosen editors. We choose our own news these days - I don’t read what just one editor says.

August 4, 2010

My first tweet

When I first started this blog, I started with a self-referential piece .

There I covered snail mail, fax, email, Usenet News and instant messaging (AIM and others). Since then I have been blogging, and I have stats on what people look at. My most popular posts appear to be those on Zulu weddings, and my visitto the school where One Laptop per Child was launched in Nigeria.

Since then I learned IRC, (which you see below), which is a more refined tool than the old unix “talk” where you just banged a message on their screen. I like IRC, and especially the Cape Linux Users Group IRCchatroom. A busy linux users group, where we get together once in a while,either for technical talks or Geek dinners. It is my first port of call if I am stuck on some problem to do with programming or system administration.

July 24, 2010

Centre for High performance computing in Cape Town

Sea surface temperature around Africa

Last month I started a contracting job with the Marine Remote Sensing Unit - a collaboration between the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and University of Cape Town.

I have some history in parallel processing, mostly with Inmos, a British microelectronics company that built the Transputer, a ground-breaking microprocessor of the 1980s. I had been looking for an opportunity to work at the CHPC for a while, and took the chance when an opening arrived via the clug-work mailing list run by the Cape Town Linux Users Group.

April 26, 2010

Kiwix - enabling offline copies of wikimedia projects

Wikimedia projects, including the flagship English Wikipedia, have been restricted in access to people with internet access. kiwix is opening that up, via its offline reader.

I have blogged before about kiwix - this article is an effort to tell other people how to do the same.

Kiwix is a cross-platform reader of zim files. Zim is an open, standardised file format to store Wiki content efficiently for offline usage. It is compressed (LZMA), with fast resolution of inter-article links. It is simple (one file), and optimised to run on really small devices like phones.

March 31, 2010

Using Freeradius with Mikrotik wireless routers

I inherited a wireless setup of three Mikrotik routers in the roof of a set of office suites in Cape Town, South Africa. They were connected to an ADSL router, but the owners problem was there was no accountability on usage.

Mikrotik

Mikrotik make a numberof Single-board computers, known as “Routerboard"s, and licence a proprietary operating system called RouterOS for use on these boards.

This was my first time to come across the Routerboards, and I like them. I was asked in because Mikrotik specialists in Cape Town are hard to find, and harder to schedule.

March 5, 2010

Zimbabwe sanctions

I was invited to participate in BBCWorld Service ‘Africa have your say’ call-in programme to discuss Zuma’s request to Gordon Brown that sanctions be lifted. I was given 30 seconds very near the end of the programme, and I handled it poorly. This post is to make up for it :)

Africa have your say

I have blogged about Zimbabwe here before. the bbc programme was prompted by Jacob Zuma’s official visit to the UK, and his request for the lifting of Zimbabwe’s sanctions.

March 1, 2010

Kiwix install at Kwena Malapo school Johannesberg

Kwena Malapo school

Kiwix, an offline wikipedia selection, is installed at Kwena Malapo school.

I have blogged before about creating offline copies of wikipedia for use in school computer labs that do not have internet access.

Wikimedia, the umbrella organisation behind wikipedia and other related projects, is also keenly interested in offline uses of wikipedia. From November through January, the offline taskforce had a series of IRC meetings where we attempted to answer questions relating to the use of these offline copies. We came up with four recommendations, one of which addressed schools, and another cellphones.