EVOL.reverse

Eu: Talvez não estejamos ainda suficientemente maduros.

Ana: Estás à espera de cair de uma árvore?

I first read about this on “Angels & Demons” (Dan Brown) where the author further suggests that Christmas celebration was inspired on a ancient cult to the Sun. I searched the web and found some argumentation. Baffling…

“What is there in common between the fight against avian flu, the development of drugs against malaria, the quest to understand the first instants of the Universe and research on climate change? All these topics require a huge amount of computer power and data storage capacity that can be satisfied with the Grid.

In the last week of September, over 500 scientists and software engineers from Europe and around the world met in Geneva for a conference devoted to the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, the global Grid computing infrastructure project led by CERN, which is changing the way science is done. One example that the experts assembled in Geneva discussed is how Grid computing is helping in the battle against avian flu and other diseases.

During the month of April, the Grid was used in the fight against the lethal H5N1 avian flu virus. Thanks to the Grid infrastructure of the EGEE project, six laboratories in Europe and Asia analysed 300 000 chemical compounds in search of potential drugs for treating the disease. This research, which involved 2000 computers linked together around the globe, in part thanks to software developed at CERN, helped to identify the most likely compounds able to inhibit the enzyme N1 that is part of the virus. In one month, the collaboration achieved the equivalent of 100 years processing on a single computer. ”

Source: CERN

Rodolfo has posted (in portuguese) about his experience at the OpenBSD hardware hackathlon that was held last week in Coimbra, Portugal. Great stuff, thanks!

During last week, several OpenBSD developers, including project founder Theo de Raad, were gathered in Coimbra for a OpenBSD hardware hackathon (photos, photos and more photos). The event wasn't announced at OpenBSD-PT because the hackathon is restricted to developers only. Some of the stuff people worked on include:

• grange committed a new driver for IBM serveraid controllers.
• Jordan, kettenis and marco are doings all kinds of crazy acpi stuff.
• dlg and krw are working on a new method for offering more openings to scsi drives in the scsi midlayer.
• uwe is working on making his new shiny camera work on OpenBSD.
• Matthieu has been commiting the new x.org code.

Pedro Almeida was the main guy making this happen and so we all owe him a beer (or two or three). Developers the flyed to Veneza for OpenCon.

Images taken from someplace else.

Also, I’m keeping a list of books I want to read on my read-queue page. Check it out.

The article on the “Origin of Quake3’s Fast InvSqrt()” is such a good reading for people interested in programming I had to link it here.