SIEminar: "The Debugger, a programmer's best
friend." - 26 February, 12:00
If you do any amount of programming, you have certainly found that at some
point during its development your code did not work as expected. Perhaps it
simply crashed and told you that a core dump was created; perhaps it always
gave you an "incorrect" result or perhaps it just behaved
"oddly" given some input combinations. In any case, you were face
to face with a "bug". And what did you do to correct your code? If
the answer was to put "printf"s around the code and run it again,
you should attend this talk in which we'll see an introduction on how to
debug your programs with a debugger. The debugger (available for most
programming languages) is a really easy-to-use tool that lets you run your
application in a special mode, so that you can run it step by step, or stop
at certain points, inspect variables, etc., which is a great aid to find what
is wrong with your code without the need of changing its source.
Supercomputing Hall of Fame
With some delay, here you have the long awaited "Supercomputing Hall of Fame"
for the second semester of 2008. In total, 1274932.2 CPU hours were delivered during this period
(roughly equivalent to 145.54 years in just one CPU). By resource, Condor delivered 519661.9
CPUhours, LaPalma 408194.01 and Chimera 347076.29. Full details of the breakdown by users
can be found at the
SIE Forum for
Condor,
LaPalma and
Chimera.
Survey about the Web-based project reports application
From the SIE we would like to thank all those of you who have used the new
Web-based application for the submission of the yearly project reports. We
appreciated your patience and cooperation while we fixed some small problems
and glitches. We recognize that this application can be substantially
improved, both in functionality and user interface; for this reason we are
running a survey at
http://marta/sie/survey2/survey.php?sid=24B4D5. We thank those who
already completed it, and invite all others to do so before Friday 27
February. The results will be published on Thursday 5 March.
Useful tools
Recently we have found a few tools which we consider pretty useful, and would like
to let you know about.
- wput: the companion to wget, it uploads files to a ftp directory.
For usage instructions, just type wput
--help (type rehash first if the shell says command not found), or
visit http://wput.sourceforge.net/.
- JabRef: a Java-based open source bibliography reference manager.
Type jabref to launch it. See
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/SINFIN/Software_pages/JabRef_soft.php for more details and relevant links.
- Doodle: If you're trying to organize a meeting, and choosing
the best date and time is becoming a nightmare, with an exponentially increasing
number of emails exchanged among potential participants, Doodle
can help you. Give it a try! Also, Meet-O-Matic
might be a valid alternative.
- Zotero: "Free, easy-to-use Firefox
extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives
right where you do your work - in the web browser itself." To learn more,
visit the Zotero website.
OSIRIS SNR Calculator
The
OSIRIS SNR
Calculator requires that Java 1.6 be installed, and that the appropriate
MIME type and associated application be set in the browser. Java 1.6 is
installed in all desktop Linux PCs, though it's not the default version,
while the MIME type can be easily added. If you wish to use the OSIRIS SNR
Calculator from your Firefox or Opera browser, follow the simple,
step-by-step instructions in our latest
SIEpedia
article.