Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/04/2011

Internetic (Technologic Remix) The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964) High Definition [HD] Denis Leary - I’m An Asshole Brown Sugar-Rolling Stones

April 23, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

LU Decomposition in C (and under CUDA)

As part of any major project, it occasionally happens that you assume something is a ‘solved problem’ when its really not. In my case it was solving small linear systems, of the form Ax=B, where A is an nxn matrix, B is a n vector. This is a problem that’s been solved in libraries such as LAPACK, LINPACK, BLAS, etc etc. The issue appears when you’re trying to do this stuff within a specific hardware environment (CUDA), and you cannot call host functions from the device, and the cuBLAS libraries cater only to large matrices processed in parallel ...

April 18, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

CUDA Compute 20 Error and other issues

There’s a quirk of using older CUDA drivers is that the latest NVIDIA SDK code examples are not backward compatible, i.e compiling the 3.0 SDK against the 2.3 toolkit (that I’ve spent the last day doing) is a fools errand (Thanks very much to @thebaron on #cuda on freenode and tkerwin on StackOverflow.) Basically, the 3.x drivers reclassify newer cards based on the; previously, the ‘compute’ value (a measure of OpenCL adherence) would max out at 1.3, but now the range is extended up to 2.0, but the 2.3 toolkit does not recognise this value, so craps out. ...

April 14, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Why Belfast Needs a Hackerspace

I was sitting in Sinnamon on the Stranmillis Road, enjoying a coffee, a sausage roll, and my Kindle, reading the latest 2600. One article immediatly stood out to me, ‘A World Spinning’. The main focus of the article was the world-changing domino effect, toppling regimes across the middle east, all caused by one, little textfile. The textfile in question was a US Embassy cable highlighting the indemic corruption in the (ex) Tunisian Government. As most know, this leak was from WikiLeaks; a rag-tag loosely knit chaotic alliance of hackers across the globe, all with the the same general aim to allow open and plain discourse and stopping governments across the globe from hiding secrets from their citizenry; big secrets and small… Of course, as with most things to do with hackers, the aim isn’t that simple; having spoken to some of those involved, it was abundantly clear that some elements within Wikileaks purely want to screw with governments that (they feel have) wronged them, but others are simply motivated by the cat-and-mouse challenge of acquiring, validating, securing and releasing information in a hostile environment. ...

April 7, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/03/2011

BB King & John Mayer Live - Part 2

March 23, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/02/2011

Rebecca Pollock - stars and moon. (original) gang fight! knocked out! Best action scene ever. ever. ever. – Endhiran (Robot) We Humans Are Capable of Greatness Halo Reach Tribute

February 23, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Bolsters Code-Related Rants (An ongoing collection)

Logging functions being called with just a variable and no comment as to what the hell it is logging has functions more than logging.info, use them! Debug = useful information if something breaks but isn’t interesting during normal operation info = useful and generally interesting information warn = something went wrong, indicating something should probably be refactored / fixed,_ but the system could recover from it._ error = oh dear jesus fuck the entire site evaporated into a swarm of zombie locusts, I better put something in the error log. ...

February 12, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/01/2011

Still Unemployed 13 Global Warming NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere Germaine Returns : Foamy The Squirrel Bill Bailey - ‘God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit…’ Kittens In My Christmas Tree!

January 23, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Rant: Job Applications

Inspired by Barry Haughey’s recent facebook post; Dear International Banking Conglomerates and other major employers, I just spent 3 hours of my life writing custom cover letters, answering pointless assessment questions, and entering my ‘skillsets’ on 4 different occasions for an application for one job… Just gimme the bloody job already; you’re big enough and ugly enough to have been able to pick up all that infomation from either a) My extensive and detailed resume, b) my attached university transcript. ...

January 8, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/12/2010

Lego Antikythera Mechanism Ascent - Commemorating Shuttle Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review Tron Lightcycle Test Drive Parker Brothers Choppers TRON Legacy.wmv New York City Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation)

December 23, 2010 · Andrew Bolster