Kneth's Korner

GotoCon 2012 in Århus I attended GotoCon 2012 in Århus last week. To be more precise, I attended the Big Data track Monday. My educational background is somewhat related to supercomputing (yeah, I did my share of Fortran-77 programming as a graduate student), and I have over the years worked on various “Big Data” project: bioinformatics, credit card fraud detection, building Linux clusters, etc. Currently, I work for a small NoSQL database vendor, and our solution could fit the Big Data quite nicely.

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Taking TypeScript out for a spin Microsoft announced a new programming language by the name TypeScript this week. The driving philosophy behind the language is to extend JavaScript. Since I have done my shared of JavaScript programming - and given talks, taught classes, and written articles and a book on the topic - I decided to take TypeScript out for a spin. The language comes with a specification (97 pages) and a compiler.

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Open Source Days 2012 I’m going to the Open Source Days 2012 conference this weekend. This year’s program is really interesting, and I’m looking forward to spend two days listening to geeky talks. The organizers have ask me to take the role as chairman. Saturday I will chair the session of web programming, but I’m not sure about Sunday. Actually, for me the conference began yesterday. I gave a full day course on JavaScript programming.

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Morse codes and Arduino My son Svante came home Friday and told me that he had been working on Morse codes in science class. We talked a bit on how to translate sentences to Morse code. Yesterday evening I had to construct a translator using my Arduino board, a LED and a LCD display. The program is pretty simple. It processes the message - letter by letter - and shows the current letter in capital and the Morse code on the second line.

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GNOME 3 - a review After the arrival of GNOME 3 and Unity, we have seen months of discussion on the future of the free desktops. Both GNOME 3 and Unity have been considered as a step backward. Many old-school Linux users believe that these new offerings are worse than the good well-documented desktops like GNOME 2 and XFCE. Over the years I have used many different desktop environments and window managers.

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Free chemistry software - quantum chemistry In the previous part of the journey into free chemistry software I wrote about molecular mechanics. The molecular mechanics view of a molecular system is a classical mechanical view i.e., the atoms move according to Newton’s law. Quantum mechanics revolutionized the view of the atomic world. The Schrödinger equation is a general model and number of parameters is limited. Solving a Schrödinger equation for an atomic or molecular system is often referred to an ab initio calculation.

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Saved by Dropbox I have installed Dropbox on my laptops and my phone. On my laptops I use it for two purposes: synchronization and backup. Initially, I used it for synchronization of my private and my work laptop (both computers are running Linux). The laptop at work is a bit unstable. It crashes probably 3-4 times a week, and I believe it has something to do with the temperature of the processor.

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Emacsforum 2011 Peter Toft and I are in the process of preparing Emacsforum 2011 with some help by Troels Henriksen (at DIKU) and Keld Simonsen (from KLID). The program is almost ready for publication, so I will not say too much - but there will be something for scientists and developers. Even our Evil Twin will be represented. The mini-conference takes place 12th November 2011 at DIKU. The is no conference fee - and there will be no benefits.

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Free Chemistry Software - Molecular Modeling Molecular modeling is a very large and important field of chemistry. As computers have increased in raw computing power, the usage of computers to calculate molecular properties is not a specialized fields for the few. Today, every chemist can perform calculation for even large molecules. Roughly speaking, you can divide the calculations in two separate groups: molecular mechanics and quantum chemistry. The first is based on classical mechanics, while the second group uses quantum mechanics as a underlying model and equations.

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Free Chemistry Software - Utilities One of the major annoyances as chemists in front of computer is faced with is the vast number of file formats. The good news is that most file formats are text files so it is possible to reverse engineer them by looking at a number of examples. One open source project called OpenBabel tries to help chemists in converting between the formats (currently OpenBabel supports 113 file formats related to chemistry).

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