Dale Anson wrote to tell that he added Zenburn to the Lipstik look and feel. Since Lipstik isn’t much maintained, he also added to the Graphite theme from the Substance look and feel project.

Then, he added a Zenburn editor scheme to jEdit. With this scheme, and Lipstik or Substance Graphite, you get a nice Zenburn editing environment in jEdit.

Thanks to Dale, jEdit now joins the expanding list of editors, environments and tools which contain the eye-friendly Zenburn colours. Well done!

Check out a screenshot of Dale’s jEdit port.

Update: I slightly misread Dale’s email, and now the wrong part is removed.

The invisible hand has decorated the statue of Mr. Adam Smith with a traffic cone!

The invisible hand has been mischievous

This year I was a guest in three weddings: in Finland, in Serbia and in Scotland. All of the weddings were beautiful occasions with lovely people, and I remember each of the weddings in different ways. I’ll not discuss the weddings themselves more here, but shall concentrate on the places instead.
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Take a Rubik’s cube. Shuffle it. It can be solved with at most 20 moves. That is a fascinating result!

From the article:

Finally, we were able to distribute the 55,882,296 cosets of H among a large number of computers at Google and complete the computation in just a few weeks. Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation.

And now, some late-night number shuffling.

First, let’s make an educated guess of one quad-core 2.8 GHz Intel Nehalem doing about, say, 11.2 GFLOPS. Then, given 1.1 billion seconds spent for the task, the total task used up a total of about 2^63 floating point operations (an interesting power of 2, no?). Google’s computers did this in “just a few weeks” (2 weeks = 1209600 seconds), so that’s about 2^43 floating point operations per second for the mystery number of computers, i.e. the computers achieved a total of 10185 GFLOPS = ca. 10 TFLOPS. Divided with the GFLOPS per CPU, that’d mean about 909 CPUs, given the initial guesstimated specs for the Nehalems.

Yes, an easier way to calculate is to find how how many parallel units there were by calculating 1.1 billion seconds / 1209600 seconds = 909, but the above description is nicer to follow. YMMV.

So, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, and factoring in some uncertainties about the times, Davidson, Dethridge, Kociemba and Rokicki used a grand total of about a 1000 or so quad-core Intel Nehalem 2.8 GHz CPUs (or equivalent) for the task.

Anyway, 10 TFLOPS in itself is a nice number but really nothing special. It is not enough to reach even the 500th supercomputer position of the June 2010 list of top500.org. However, do keep in mind that the number of CPUs used for the Rubik’s cube task was obviously but a small fraction of the real ultimate Ninja CPU power that Google can harness at will.

And now, good night!

Back in late June, I was discussing algorithmic trading and HFT (high-frequency trading) with some friends. A sudden realization hit me, and I realized exactly why I’ve had this nagging idea that wide-spread HFT usage is fundamentally a bad idea due to the weird market behaviour it most likely leads to.

Here’s a cleaned up mail I sent, with some links added. What do you think?
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I recently had the luck of finding out about a computer game called Osmos.

The game itself is very simple; you’re a blob of energy or somesuch, and you grow bigger by consuming blobs smaller than you. You can move around by expelling small pieces of your mass, this makes you smaller and more vulnerable to other blobs.

Sounds maybe too simple? Well! Not quite, the blobs have inertia, there is repulsing blobs and so on.

Also, the presentation is simply so wonderfully calm and beautiful. Set on an ambient music background, playing the game has some sort of tranquilling effect on me. It’s kind of like watching a lava lamp, and playing it too.

Check out the Osmos demo, and if you like it, buy it. It’s only $10. I bought it and I think it’s well worth the money.

You’ve perhaps read part I and tried it. Everything works until the moment when you need to electronically sign a document. The web browser barfs an error message, you cannot sign anything.

The good news is that this is super simple to fix.
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Here are step-by-step instructions about how to get the Swedish e-Legitimation to work in Linux. The instructions are specifically for Nordea bank customers.

You need the “pocket calculator” cardreader (I used Todos NCR1), a suitable USB cable and a card with an EMV chip. If you have Nordea-issued bankkort or VISA you’re OK.

Note: These instructions are Debian-specific but they should work with other distros too with appropriate, slight changes.

Update: Signing will most likely be broken for you, but you can fix the signing too.

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Apple released their mysterious tablet computer, called iPad.

The marketing slogan used for it is “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelieveable price”. Indeed, it is revolutionary in the business model it represents.

The hit products which Apple has made recently include the music player iPod, the smartphone iPhone, and now the table computer iPad. What do all these have in common? Snazzy UI, yes, but also the closed hardware and the tight lock-in with the Apple App Store (and iTunes for media content).

On a more abstract level, every single one of those devices give the vendor more or less exclusive control over what you can and cannot run or view in your device.

Is this the magical and revolutionary new way of the future? If so, count me out.

BBC reports that “The head of Russia’s federal space agency has said it will work to divert an asteroid which passes near the Earth in the 2030s.”

The asteroid in question is 99942 Apophis, which currently stands at 1:250000 odds of smashing into Earth on 2036. 99942 Apophis also has a close fly-by on Friday, April 13th, 2029.

I am delighted that such a high-level instance is speaking so strongly in favor of asteroid protection.

Indeed, Apophis could be a good candidate to practise deflection, since we already know it’s coming and know the orbit relatively well too. Plus, there is enough time to act.

Some previous posts about the asteroid threat and why it is important to do something about it are here and here.

Today is the day when my native country, in 1917, stopped being a Grand Duchy of Russia and started being an independent nation.

For Finns 6th of December is a very important day. Flags fly, and there’s a traditional military parade in some city. People light (usually blue-white) candles to remember the independence and most importantly the people who died defending the independence.

Another big tradition is the President’s Independence Day reception at the Presidential Castle in Helsinki. They air that on television, and most of the nation (something like nearly half!) sits and watches who is invited, how the movers and shakers are dressed, and who, if any, will cause a scandal this time.

A nice thing is that the reception is streamed on the Internet too, and therefore can be seen from abroad too. So my plans for today are to make some nice food, tuna fillets with leek-onion white wine & parsley sauce and mushroom-leek risotto, open a white wine and watch the reception via Internet!