Hmmm, I seem to have been demoted from Apprentice to Observer. Not that I'd used my former status as Apprentice to make any article postings... I still find it odd, since I have several certifications as apprentice from others who are certified as apprentice or higher. Oh well for now.

On another note, I just spent about 2 or 3 hours reading some of the recent articles and discussions here on Advogato. I can remember when Slashdot was only half as good, and it's only gone downhill from there. Advogato sure has some very intelligent discussions relating to software development. I've picked up a few really good references to some tools and techniques that I hope to use in AFAPI related things.

Our SC2000 paper was revised, and hopefully will now be readable by most users of the proceedings later this year. We had a tough time getting a fully working Postscript document to covert to PDF without introducing errors. Computers are so advanced, yet it is still a major problem to distribute documents electronically in a way that is truely portable across platforms/OS. My advisor's solution of using troff works for him, but our collaborators on this project use LaTeX, and well, the two don't mix well. I guess it's a universal problem: the perfect "versioning control system", "project configure and make facility", "programming language", or "portable document format" just don't exist yet, and probably can't due to some yet undiscovered law of nature :-).

The UKLUG group has gotten a small subset of their machines set up and configured as a video wall with AFAPI and VWLib. For now (and probably for quite some time), their stuff is housed in the KAOS Lab. This has prompted me to look into some unfinished business with the merge of VWLib into the AFAPI distribution. But classes start this Wednesday, so who knows when I will get a chance to resolve the issues with the merger. I've got other higher priority things to work on.

Speaking of higher priority things, Hank & I are working this week on our final version of a paper to be presented at the Annual Linux Showcase in Atlanta on October 12. It's "yet another paper" about KLAT2 and it's FNN.

Hmmm, what was I saying about having time to try doing an AltiVec version of our LINPACK optimizations??? Oh well. Anyone reading this know how to make human clones? I need two or three more of me :-)

Oh yeah, that takes funding... maybe next month :-)