In a couple of hours, I’ll be waking up to catch a flight to Reno, by way of L.A. That’s right folks, behold the efficiency of the American Airlines flight scheduler. Anyway, in Reno, my teammates and I will…wait, what? Teammates?

Right, so in the past month or so, a groups of us undergrads here at Stony Brook University have been building a kick-ass supercomputing cluster. That’s right, tens of thousands dollars worth of equipment, with Debian, NFS, Infiniband, Xeons, and more, to create a truly powerful computing cluster, capable of rendering pollen particles, simulating molecules and oceans, and defeating benchmarks in a single bound. I’ve been busy helping make it all happen.

We’ve been preparing for the SC07 Cluster Challenge, an event to be held next week in Reno, on the SC07 conference floor. Six teams of eager undergrads will be competing to run the benchmarks faster, and to impress the judges more. Wish Stony Brook luck!

A short update: I’ve just upgraded the site to Drupal 5.3, so if you notice any issues, please let me know. I do have some posts in the pipeline, so keep checking back! (Or, you can just subscribe, RSS link is top right, email form is bottom right).

I’ve posted a Comment Policy for this blog, and I’d love to get reader suggestions. So, I’m making a special exception: when commenting on this post, you can ignore the comment policy! I will read all the feedback.

So, what do you think of the comment policy?

I’ve made a slight change to how I’m saving interesting sites I come across on the web. Before about a week ago, I was using Yahoo’s Del.icio.us service (bkudria on Del.icio.us), but now, I’ve switched over to the, in my opinion, much better Ma.gnolia.com (bkudria on Ma.gnolia.com).

I have whipped up a short script to update Facebook’s status, Twitter, and Kopete’s status all at once. The Facebook portion of the code comes directly from Kerry Buckley’s script

Some interesting links this time. Click and be amazed!

Paul Graham writes about Stuff, about clutter and the mental handicaps it creates:

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blockquote cite=”http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html”>Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.

Paul Graham writes about stuff, and getting rid of it.

I don’t know much about games, but I do know that I enjoy some games, and I don’t enjoy others. And another thing I’ve noticed is that the games I like to play don’t always have the flashiest graphics, the coolest sound effects, or the most modern gameplay and interfaces. Which is all to say that I like to play some older games, and even though they aren’t the flashiest, coolest, or most modern, they are still fun to play. Turns out, people 7 or 10 years ago could still write compelling stories, construct fun and clever game mechanics, and overall create great games.

Here is the list of my top 7 favorite games from Abandonia:

Jens Alfke: "I once had the idea of a charity that would collect discarded [bluetooth] headsets from yuppies and distribute them to mentally ill homeless people. Just by wearing the headsets, they would eliminate the social stigma attached to talking to themselves on the street; this would help re-integrate them into society." Brilliant.

Simon Willison writes “Six cool things you can build with OpenID”. He suggests some site-specific hacks for OpenID, including a Last.FM mashup. [Martin Atkins][] [comments][ma comments] that a neutral method of exchanging this information would be nice, and suggests, of course, RDF. But what should we use as a URI? Why not use [Wikipedia][] URIs? They are a public resource, after all.