In June 2008, Los Alamos National Lab announced the achievement of a numerical goal to which computational
scientists have aspired for years—its newest Linux-powered supercomputer, named Roadrunner, had reached a
measured performance of just over one petaflop. In doing so, it doubled the performance achieved by the world’s second
fastest supercomputer, the Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermo

Originally posted from Overcoming the Challenges of Developing Programs for the Cell Processor

What are you doing, François? You have been sitting there working on that message for almost an hour. Surely
your cousin doesn’t need to know every detail regarding our wine cellar—after all, you told me you wanted to let
him know about yesterday’s wine, not all of them. Quoi? This is a different
cousin? And, you had to let your parents know, and yo

Originally posted from Cooking with Linux – Warp-Speed Blogging

In the late 1980s, processing power and memory performance were increasing by more than 40% each year. However, due
to mechanical limitations, hard drive performance was not able to keep up. To prepare for a “pending I/O
crisis”, some researchers at Berkeley proposed a solution called “Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive
Disks”. The basic idea was to combine several drives so they appear as one la

Originally posted from Increase Performance, Reliability and Capacity with Software RAID

If you didn’t already know, I’m a mutt-addict^H^H^H^H^Huser. At this point, I can’t even remember when I started
using mutt. All I do know is that every time I try another mail client, I just get frustrated by how long it takes to
go through my e-mail. Well, that, plus try to navigate a GUI e-mail program with vi key bindings—it (usually)
doesn’t work.

Why try other mail clients i

Originally posted from Hack and / – Mutt and Virtual Folders

I was sure last month that we’d wrap up this film-trivia Twitter game, but, as you’ll recall, I ended that column
with “Oh. We’ve run out of space. Again.”

This month, I’ll skip the prelude and jump in. You should follow the triviabot at twitter.com/FilmBuzz, and you can find back columns on the Linux Journal</s

Originally posted from Work the Shell – FilmBuzz Trivia Goes Live

The Kindle has been out for a year now, and Amazon has had plenty of time to work out any kinks in the software and
hardware. It should be a rock-solid device, right? I decided to find out. After spending some quality time with the
Kindle, I now can say the answer is mixed. Some things work great on the Kindle, but other things just don’t, and some
of those things probably never will work righ

Originally posted from A Look at the Kindle

One of the watchwords for modern Web developers is scalability. Whether we’re following the latest news about
Twitter’s servers or writing our own applications, developers always are thinking about whether their system will be
scalable.

This issue has been particularly prominent during the spring and summer of 2008, as Ruby on Rails (my preferred
platform for Web development) has been c

Originally posted from At the Forge – Memcached

I’ve been a fan of tiny computing devices for a long, long time. I started my obsession for having a “PC in
your pocket” with the Hewlett-Packard 95LX and stayed with that platform for a long time—graduating to a
100LX, then a 200LX. The 200LX was eminently hackable, as it was basically a PC/XT running DOS 5.0 with CGA graphics.
At one point, I had the 200LX doing some crazy things, incl

Originally posted from Hacking the Nokia Internet Tablet

What on Earth is that, François? Something to make your job easier? Come on, mon
ami, let’s be honest. I don’t work you that hard. So what does that thing do? Quoi? It’s a combination corkscrew, pen, pocket knife, compass, notepad, wine thermometer,
music player and crumber? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard

Originally posted from Cooking with Linux – Really Useful Gadgets…Sort of

What’s black, red, gold or silver all over? It’s a music and video player, e-mail client, personal organizer, Web
browser and high-speed modem. Oh, and it’s a telephone.

Yes, you guessed it, it’s the RIM BlackBerry Curve. Like a lot of LJ readers,
I’m addicted to gadgets. At one point, I carried a cellular phone, an MP3 player and a PDA everywhere.

Originally posted from The BlackBerry in a World without Windows