This seemed like a reasonable question to ask since the title of the post was "Interviews: Ask 'Ian' From Debian". From that I assumed he had something to do with Debian. I don't know all the people in the Debian community as I don't use it currently. It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
I like what Debian is doing and believe it is very important. I also think it is a generally well thought-out system (altho there are annoyances with any distro). But the main problem I see with Debian (and what is keeping me from running it again at home) is that it is and has been behind the current linux technology. By this I mainly mean that it has taken so long for Debian to release a stable 2.2.x based distribution. Why do you think Debian has slipped in this regard and what can be done to fix it? Most servers running Debian now run VA's modified "slink and a half" distro to get the 2.2.x kernel if my impressions are correct (if they aren't, give me new ones). So, why has Debian been slow to release? I do not believe excessive quality control is a good enough excuse (I consider a delay this long while other distros have reasonable 2.2.x releases to be excessive). It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
I don't feel like writing a long rant here since I've discussed this with so many people so many times, but I really feel I must respond to the constant trashing the biotech industry gets from people who don't really know what is going on. Most of these people have uninformed opinions which are unfortunately widely disseminated, read, discussed, and used as foundation for other people's opinions. These silly memes are really spreading like a "scary mistakenly-made bio-engineered virus". Biotech companies ARE trying to make money, but they aren't going to make money trying to push eugenics on everyone. We aren't even LOOKING at trying to make a 'perfect human', we are looking at diseases and understanding life processes and how to keep them working in the face of various forms of malfunction. Here is the main thing people don't get: Everything is done very precisely and carefully. We don't just throw a bunch of DNA in a vat or mix genes randomly. We find certain sites of interest (often called 'targets') and study them. Then pharmaceutical companies see if they can make a useful drug for the given 'target'. I think raising fear about genetic research is just too easy for many 'journalists'; they do it without really looking into what they are talking about, just spew what they think MIGHT be happening, it attracts readers and discussion I guess. I have nothing against informed opinions, but I see NO evidence that Jon Katz knows what the hell is going on in genetic research besides what he reads in other mainstream press. It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
We do the same sort of thing at work (analyzing genetic data), we use a regular cluster of dual-cpu p3s and GNQS queueing software to queue the many runs of the same algorithm on different sets of data. It works great and we didn't need anything fancy like myrinet since intranode communication is unnecessary for this type of application. It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
One of the most important things in my mind about choosing a first language for a younger person or new programmer is that they keep interest. Therefore I think a major requirement should be that they can do something neat (and perhaps even useful) without too much trouble or overhead of learning tons of stuff. Therefore I believe that Perl or Python are good starting languages. With Perl they could easily make text-based games for eachother or their friends, and after awhile make a pokemon card database or card builder or something. Doing something like this in C takes much more time for a new programmer. I highly recommend the book "Learning Perl" for a new programmer since the first chapter leads the reader through an increasingly capable program (I think one of them is an app to track grades or something). Python might also be a good language, but there is some 'learning overhead' to object orientation. It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
We have a beowulf cluster and I have some nice techniques for dealing with the management of nodes. We do not, as of yet, have any monitoring software. What do you use or suggest for monitoring and management? I've seen bWatch but didn't think it was that great for what I wanted. We use va systemimager (www.systemimager.org) to install and update nodes, along with rsync to upload and download data and code to the cluster. What do you use for such tasks? It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
HAHAHAHA, I recognise that from a wrestling thing I was watching last night! It is so classic that a first poster would be a big professional wrestling fan!
HAHAHAHAHA! It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
Now there is reason to believe that the last message was a troll, BUT... The main reason I do not consider writing HTML coding is because there are no control structures. Heck, there aren't really even any data structures. But I myself would get upset if people saw what I do all day (PHP/perl webapps with financial data) and said, "You call HTML programming?"
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This seemed like a reasonable question to ask since the title of the post was "Interviews: Ask 'Ian' From Debian". From that I assumed he had something to do with Debian. I don't know all the people in the Debian community as I don't use it currently.
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
I like what Debian is doing and believe it is very important. I also think it is a generally well thought-out system (altho there are annoyances with any distro). But the main problem I see with Debian (and what is keeping me from running it again at home) is that it is and has been behind the current linux technology. By this I mainly mean that it has taken so long for Debian to release a stable 2.2.x based distribution. Why do you think Debian has slipped in this regard and what can be done to fix it? Most servers running Debian now run VA's modified "slink and a half" distro to get the 2.2.x kernel if my impressions are correct (if they aren't, give me new ones).
So, why has Debian been slow to release? I do not believe excessive quality control is a good enough excuse (I consider a delay this long while other distros have reasonable 2.2.x releases to be excessive).
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
I don't feel like writing a long rant here since I've discussed this with so many people so many times, but I really feel I must respond to the constant trashing the biotech industry gets from people who don't really know what is going on. Most of these people have uninformed opinions which are unfortunately widely disseminated, read, discussed, and used as foundation for other people's opinions. These silly memes are really spreading like a "scary mistakenly-made bio-engineered virus". Biotech companies ARE trying to make money, but they aren't going to make money trying to push eugenics on everyone. We aren't even LOOKING at trying to make a 'perfect human', we are looking at diseases and understanding life processes and how to keep them working in the face of various forms of malfunction. Here is the main thing people don't get: Everything is done very precisely and carefully. We don't just throw a bunch of DNA in a vat or mix genes randomly. We find certain sites of interest (often called 'targets') and study them. Then pharmaceutical companies see if they can make a useful drug for the given 'target'.
I think raising fear about genetic research is just too easy for many 'journalists'; they do it without really looking into what they are talking about, just spew what they think MIGHT be happening, it attracts readers and discussion I guess. I have nothing against informed opinions, but I see NO evidence that Jon Katz knows what the hell is going on in genetic research besides what he reads in other mainstream press.
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
We do the same sort of thing at work (analyzing genetic data), we use a regular cluster of dual-cpu p3s and GNQS queueing software to queue the many runs of the same algorithm on different sets of data. It works great and we didn't need anything fancy like myrinet since intranode communication is unnecessary for this type of application.
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
One of the most important things in my mind about choosing a first language for a younger person or new programmer is that they keep interest. Therefore I think a major requirement should be that they can do something neat (and perhaps even useful) without too much trouble or overhead of learning tons of stuff.
Therefore I believe that Perl or Python are good starting languages. With Perl they could easily make text-based games for eachother or their friends, and after awhile make a pokemon card database or card builder or something. Doing something like this in C takes much more time for a new programmer. I highly recommend the book "Learning Perl" for a new programmer since the first chapter leads the reader through an increasingly capable program (I think one of them is an app to track grades or something).
Python might also be a good language, but there is some 'learning overhead' to object orientation.
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
We have a beowulf cluster and I have some nice techniques for dealing with the management of nodes. We do not, as of yet, have any monitoring software. What do you use or suggest for monitoring and management? I've seen bWatch but didn't think it was that great for what I wanted.
We use va systemimager (www.systemimager.org) to install and update nodes, along with rsync to upload and download data and code to the cluster.
What do you use for such tasks?
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
HAHAHAHA, I recognise that from a wrestling
thing I was watching last night! It is so classic that a first poster would be a big professional wrestling fan!
HAHAHAHAHA!
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
Now there is reason to believe that the last
message was a troll, BUT...
The main reason I do not consider writing HTML
coding is because there are no control structures.
Heck, there aren't really even any data structures.
But I myself would get upset if people saw what I do all day (PHP/perl webapps with financial data) and said, "You call HTML programming?"