Haven’t posted for a while; things have been a little manic. I’m posting this while waiting for the car to be serviced, so I have some time just to sit still. There are no interwebs here in the Ford showroom, at least none that I can use, so my words will have to be uploaded later. It’s currently morning on Thursday
23 October.
The Great Building Project is progressing well: check Facebook for photos etc., also friend me using the email address on the Contacts page if necessary.
Work-wise we have some new interesting hardware arriving soon: a Dell R905 server with four quad-core Opteron processors (i.e. 16 cores in total) and 128GB RAM, for running large statistical analyses. This is a pretty serious machine. It certainly ought to let us analyse those multi-gigabyte datasets more quickly and more easily. We use Stata and R generally, both of which can take advantage of multiple processors and talk nicely to our PostgreSQL databases.
I have been writing small pieces of code to solve the programming projects/puzzles at Project Euler: the idea is that you have to write a short program to (say) “Find the 10001st Prime Number”, “Find the sum of all prime numbers under 2000000”, “Find the sum of all even terms in the Fibonacci sequence not exceeding 4000000” and so on. None of the programs are very hard to write: most of them are very simple; however, it’s interesting nonetheless.