Allen Day's Blog » Uncategorized

Threaded Jobs with Sun Grid Engine

allenday — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:44:59 +0000

I needed to submit some jobs to SGE today that use pthreads to take advantage of SMP systems. From the attribute/resource list visible with qconf -sc all.q, you might think a qsub -l cpu=4 would work, but it doesn’t. It submits the job, but lets other jobs that don’t specify the number of CPUs needed to be allocated to the same exec host. Next, I tried qsub -l slots=4 and got the error message Unable to run job: denied: use parallel environments instead of requesting slots explicitly..

A quick google search for the error message turned up This discussion on the ROCKS mailing list that specifies how to set up a parallel environment, so I followed the instructions. I don’t fully understand the what this incantation means yet, but now qsub -pe serial 4 causes the job to fill 4 slots on a single exec host, which is what I needed.

Field Trip – Huntington Botanical Garden

allenday — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:52:32 +0000

Went there on Saturday. I had no idea that it is so close (~1/4 mile) to CalTech. Ling took a bunch of photos, which I have posted to Flickr.

Xbox Live! Mr. Driller = scam

allenday — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:37:00 +0000

I was so psyched when Marc told me this was coming out on Xbox Live! Arcade. I’m a HUGE fan of Mr. Driller 2 coin-op version, and I was hoping this would be an Xbox, HD version of that.

They let me down. The XBLA Mr. Driller is based on Mr. Driller 1, which is not nearly as good because the width of the playing field is only 9 blocks, while the width of the field on Mr. Driller 2 coin-op is 15 blocks. The wider field makes the game more complex, a lot harder, and therefore a lot more fun and playable.

Oh, and did I mention the XBLA version online multiplay sucks donkey dick?

I have tried every version of Mr. Driller I can get my hands on, and none of them except the coin-op are any good. I might just have to start making space in my garage unless someone gets the MAME ROM working.

bookmarks on bookmarks

allenday — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:30:23 +0000

I just found Chris Garrett’s excellent article on bookmarking via copyblogger. I’m consistently surprised by how many people I know are on Facebook and MySpace, but not on Del.icio.us, the best social site of them all. As discussed in the article, Del.icio.us also consistently trumps Digg, Reddit, and the rest with top-notch content on the “popular” and “network” pages.

Of course I Del.icio.us bookmarked the bookmarking article. Self-referential, meta-fun!

Encoding for iPhone, iTouch, and PSP

allenday — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:43:02 +0000

Robert Swain’s FFmpeg / h.264 encoding tips saved me a ton of time getting an optimal set of h.264 encoding parameters. Even as an advanced user and occassional hacker on the FFmpeg codebase I haven’t seen some of the tricks used here! He even has some iPod and PSP specific pages. Thanks Rob!

Mowser Plugin

allenday — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:32:16 +0000

I just installed the Mowser Wordpress Plugin from Mike Rowehl. It’s a good solution for making the blog viewable for mobiles, and I like it a lot better than the mobile template in use on the TinyTube blog, which was a hack to get working anyway.

Need to figure out if this Mowser thing has mobile-compatible CAPTCHA support, that was an even bigger hack IIRC.

Hello, world!

allenday — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:51:57 +0000

Giving blogging another go.