I wrote an OpenMP Tutorial for my computer architecture class. It’s pretty basic but it introduces OpenMP and provides a few code examples. I couldn’t really find much out there comparing it to Pthreads which was the major question I had while working with it.
Any comments would be appreciated.
GigaOM is reporting that Time Warner Cable is expanding its initial trial that requires users to pay per bandwidth used rather than the traditional fixed monthly rate.
It is especially unfortunate one of the cities listed as being part of the trial is none other than Greensboro, N.C — only an hour or two down the road. I imagine its only a matter of time before Time Warner Cable makes the switch wholesale.
This is infuriating for a large number of reasons. Cable companies are grabbing on to anything they can in hopes of increasing revenues in the face of the growing popularity of online media. Furthermore, I recently tried to make the switch to something other than Time Warner Cable, but found that is all but impossible. Believe it or not, there are no other cable companies providing service in the Raleigh area. There is AT&T DSL in the area, but for the current price I pay I would be getting half the speed I currently enjoy. DSL is simply too slow for the price. The alternative to AT&T and cable, satellite service, will not work for people like me who live in an apartment complex that charges a monthly fee on top of a $115 non-refundable deposit. Satellite internet service is typically a lot more expensive than cable internet anyway.
If Time Warner Cable does make the switch to metered broadband as it is surely to do, I encourage you to vote with your feet, as I will be doing, and switch providers.
Easy Latex is a surprisingly good WordPress plugin that allows you to write inline Latex on your blog. For example:
$$ y(t)=Rcos{(sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}t - \phi)} $$
becomes:
As you can see, it works quite well. It even caches the rendered results to lighten server load. I had originally tried WP Latex, written by Wordpress parent company Automattic, but on my server it would not even render the example Latex code correctly.
Unfortunately, the developer of the software, Manoj Thulasidas, decided he wanted to generate a lot of back links with his useful plugin so he made the first two instances of Latex per post link to two sites of his choosing. He also cluttered the admin page with extra junk, including a google adsense ad block and another jumble of links to his page. I found all of this distasteful so I stripped it all out. Since the plugin was released under the GPLv3 I’m releasing my patch to save others some time. Download: Easy Latex Clean Patch
To apply the patch simply save it in the directory of easy-latex.php and run the following command:
patch -p0 < easy-latex.diff
If you run into any issues, or have any questions, let me know.
Yesterday, I got lucky and was the first one to try installing the trunk version of OpenMRS after a major update. The setup wizard had a bug that made it impossible to use. It’s a trivial bug, only requiring a two line patch, but somebody had to write it…right?
Unfortuantely, I know nothing about OpenMRS, Hibernate, or Spring but Ben Wolfe was kind enough to tell me exactly how to fix the bug.
<bwolfe>: andrewaclt: put a Context.openSession() and Context.closeSession() into the InitializationFilter class near the final code
You can see the bug and patch. It’s not much, but at least I’ve contributed in some way. 
I’ve found three more bugs, but they are all minor and I’m going to try and fix them before I pollute their bugbase.
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