Petascale Tools Workshop 2013

The Petascale Tools Workshop is for computer scientists who create tools that enable apps to run efficiently on the world’s fastest supercomputers. Supercomputer performance is measured in petaflops: 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second. That’s blazing speed, thousands of times faster than the fastest MacBook Pro.

Pat Metheny: Be the Worst

Pat Metheny encourages musicians to “be the worst” in whatever band they choose to join. Of course, he does not mean to play poorly.

Rather, he encourages us to surround ourselves with the best musicians we can find so that we can learn from them. The concept is explored further in the book Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Ade Oshineye.

RVM Saves the Day for Octopress

Octopress is a lean blogging engine that happens to power RayHightower.com. Earlier today, after a quick update to the blog, I encountered the following:

$ rake generate
/Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/bundler-1.2.4/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:187:in `stub_source_index170': uninitialized constant Gem::SourceIndex (NameError)
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/bundler-1.2.4/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:353:in `stub_rubygems'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/bundler-1.2.4/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:250:in `replace_entrypoints'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/bundler-1.2.4/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:14:in `setup'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/bundler-1.2.4/lib/bundler.rb:116:in `setup'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/rubygems-bundler-1.1.0/lib/rubygems-bundler/noexec.rb:77:in `setup'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@global/gems/rubygems-bundler-1.1.0/lib/rubygems-bundler/noexec.rb:89:in `<top (required)>'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p448/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:116:in `require'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p448/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:116:in `rescue in require'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p448/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:122:in `require'
     from /Users/rth/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448@octopress/bin/ruby_noexec_wrapper:9:in `<main>'

$

Not good. What happened?

Successful Companies Are Built Around Communities

Seth Godin is on a mission. Technology enables us to form communities that stretch beyond traditional boundaries like age and social status. Godin is convinced that revolutions within and between communities will yield huge opportunities for those who have the courage to take action. Don’t waste the revolution!

I had the opportunity to hear Godin speak at a Chicago area event some time ago. This post was inspired by the presentation.

FeeddlerPro for RSS

Yes, the name appears misspelled. But FeeddlerPro is my choice for RSS on iPhone and iPad. Feeddler has long been my favorite RSS reader. The developer’s decision to add support for services beyond Google Reader (Bazqux Reader, FeedHQ, and The OldReader) sealed the decision for me.

Second Choice

Feed Wrangler was a close second. I like Feed Wrangler’s minimalist approach to RSS. However, the app is missing a few features that FeeddlerPro already has baked in.