Category Archives: Rants

The quest for a decent Android RSS aggregator

Posted on April 9, 2013 by paolog

Do you pick posts to read on your 7″ Android tablet from a few RSS feeds ? Do you need an Android app to aggregate them, download the posts for offline reading and present them in a clean, lightweight list … Continue reading →

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Subscribing to trac’s RSS feed

Posted on March 25, 2013 by paolog

With trac version 0.11.7 we hit a bug where requesting the timeline RSS triggers a UnicodeDecodeError. This can be fixed by changing line 224 of the file /usr/share/pyshared/buildbot/status/web/feeds.py as follows: unilist.append(unicode(line,’utf-8′,’replace’)) where we exploit the more recent resilient version Python’s unicode function: with the … Continue reading →

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@#!%&$ Windows environment variable sometimes change case

Posted on April 16, 2012 by paolog

We had this puzzling behavior of a compilation step failing on all our Windows buildslaves, when the same compilation would succeed when performed interactively. After long searching and meditating, we found out. The issue was that Windows environment variable change … Continue reading →

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Innovation in numerical analysis

Posted on January 5, 2012 by paolog

Innovation does not stop in the field of numerical analysis, which lies at the heart of industrial applications of numerical simulation and modeling. In this regards the recent paper “Multifrontal Factorization of Sparse SPD Matrices on GPUs (ACM)” by T … Continue reading →

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64 ain’t enough

Posted on December 20, 2010 by paolog

It seems a great deal to have 64 bits to address memory. Take the integer value of 264 = 18446744073709551616: that’s more than 18 followed by 18 zeros, or 18 exa (mega, M = 106; giga, G = 109; tera, … Continue reading →

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Why spreadsheets suck at modeling

Posted on August 18, 2010 by paolog

Every time I step onto an airplane I shiver at the thought that the engineers who designed it might have used Excel (or any other spreadsheeting tool for what matters) for their calculations. It’s time for a good rant against … Continue reading →

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