"This page is not intended to replace reading the Xgrid Admin Manual but rather to supplement it. Additions here concisely hit highlights and integrate issues beyond what is covered in the frequently asked questions."

"The goals of the journal are to promote sharing of high-quality scientific software (e.g. there must be a test suite with 100% code coverage), promote discussion of best practice in research software development, and to enable researchers to be rewarded through publication for the time spent on developing software tools for others to use."

"OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions for real time computer vision.

OpenCV is released under a BSD license, it is free for both academic and commercial use.
The library has >500 optimized algorithms (see figure below). It is used around the world, has >2M downloads and >40K people in the user group. Uses range from interactive art, to mine inspection, stitching maps on the web on through advanced robotics."

"A new floating-point arithmetic called precision arithmetic is developed to track precision for arithmetic calculations. It uses a novel rounding scheme to avoid excessive rounding error propagation of conventional floating-point arithmetic. Unlike interval arithmetic, its uncertainty tracking is based on statistics and its bounding range is much tighter. Generic standards and systematic methods for validating uncertainty-bearing arithmetics are discussed. The precision arithmetic is found to be better than interval arithmetic in uncertainty-tracking for linear algorithms. "

"Our numerical studies suggest that the proposed CP-WOPT approach is accurate and scalable. CP-WOPT can recover the underlying factors successfully with large amounts of missing data, e.g., 90% missing entries for tensors of size 50 × 40 × 30. We have also studied how CP-WOPT can scale to problems of larger sizes, e.g., 1000 × 1000 × 1000, and recover CP factors from large, sparse tensors with 99.5% missing data.…"

"Solving the current problems in science communication requires the intervention of strong companies such as Google. But it will take more than technical advances to provoke scientists into taking full advantage of the web. We need pressure, and perhaps compulsion, from journals and funders to raise publishing standards to the new level made possible by such tools. Google Wave may not be, indeed is probably not, the whole answer. But it points the way to tools that build records and reproducibility into every step. And that has to be good for science."

"Thanks to O'Reilly and the RailsConf organisers, we're introducing ActiveResearch, an extended satellite meeting at this year's RailsConf in Las Vegas. ActiveResearch is a great opportunity to meet and greet others working with Ruby and Rails in a scientific or technology discipline. We'll have some special guest speakers, a series of more informal lightning talks, finishing things up with a round table discussion of the state of the art, and some drinks and nibbles."

One of the reasons I've been kind of quiet lately.

Frickin' expensive. But perhaps, maybe, worthwhile.

Important.

Calling R language commands from inside Ruby programs.

Nice list of Mac technical software

Great idea (and implementation) for using MacFUSE to handle cluster computing jobs.