“La sombra del viento” (”The Shadow of the Wind”) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I just finished the book “La sombra del viento” (”The Shadow of the Wind”) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. This is a novel that has managed to sell around 10 million copies, I think. Quite amazing!

The book is quite nice and the story is gripping, though I guess it won’t get him the Literature Nobel Prize. You shouldn’t have much difficulty in finding it, or you can always get it at Amazon.

But what I found quite amazing is that while I was reading it, most of the people I talked to about it didn’t know the author (I have to confess that I didn’t know him either before starting the book). How come we have an author that manages to sell 10 million copies of a book and gets comparatively so little attention in the media? Comparatively with sportsmen, for example. I always find incredible how much attention the news devote to sportsmen, in particular football players… it is just amazing: they even show us every day how they are training, how they travel to a new city, and all sorts of silly stuff like that!! Why does our culture value so much football and so little so many other professions that really make a difference? When was the last time you saw on TV news the work of a doctor, a scientist, a writer ….?

Anyway… the book is nice. Read the reviews at Amazon, turn off the TV and have a go at it!

“Compilers and More: Accelerating High Performance” and “Imagining the tech world in 2050″

Just a couple of interesting articles that I found off HPCWire, to read when time is more plentiful…

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Compilers_and_More_Accelerating_High_Performance.html
http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9933345-80.html

Ofertas de trabajo en el CESGA

La Fundación Centro Tecnológico de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) ha convocado tres puestos de trabajo para los proyectos:

- FORMIGA (proyecto de I+D de financiación autonómica). Dos puestos que requieren tener una titulación entre las siguientes:
a. Técnico Superior en Administración de Sistemas Informáticos
b. Técnico Superior en Desarrollo de Aplicaciones Informáticas
c. Ingeniero Técnico en Informática

- BEinGrid (proyecto de I+D+I del VI PM de la Unión Europea). Un puesto para Ingeniero INFORMÁTICO O SUPERIOR DE TELECOMUNICACIONES, O CON LAS MATERIAS APROBADAS NECESARIAS PARA A OBTENCIÓN DEL TÍTULO DE INGENIERO INFORMÁTICO O INGENIERO SUPERIOR DE TELECOMUNICACIONES A FALTA DE REALIZAR EXCLUSIVAMENTE EL PROYECTO DE FIN DE CARRERA, U OTRA TITULACIÓN SUPERIOR.

Más información en la página WEB del CESGA, en el apartado empleo.

The Longest Chain (SPOJ)

Well, certainly I don’t have time to work on this right now, but this exercise has caught my eye, and it will be the first one I will look into when I have some spare time. Getting a low score on this one is very easy, but getting a maximum score of 1000 ….
bch

Introducción a la programación paralela en MPI (Fortran)

These two weeks I’m rather busy with an intensive course I will be teaching at the ULL on “Introducción a la programación paralela en MPI (Fortran)” or “Introduction to Parallel Programming with MPI (Fortran)”. The course is given in Spanish, but all the materials are in English. Anyone is welcome to look at the materials, which can be found at http://www.iac.es/ensenanza/aula/course/view.php?id=22 (you can enter as a guest). When the course is finished, I’ll be back with more Eternity II and SPOJ programming practice posts…

“The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman

Yesterday it was a local holiday, so I managed to finish the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman.

Well, thousands of pages are devoted to this book, so everybody has probably heard about it already… The book deals with globalization, and at times it is interesting reading, but overall I don’t think I would recommend it. Basically my main criticisms are: the book is too long, at around 635 pages with a small font; the view is too American centered; it has way too many anecdotical evidence, long e-mail excerpts, etc., and one has the impression that the same ideas are repeated over and over.

I was about to put it down quite a number of times, but at least it was good that I didn’t, since I found the latest chapters the most interesting ones (the ones that deal with moral issues of globalization, the negative aspects of globalization, etc.). The first chapters spend too much time discussing the incredible feats that you can do thanks to globalization, and this is perhaps more interesting for other people, but for people like me, who basically every day communicate with people around the globe, make use of the so-called Web 2.0, etc. it comes as not very new information (some obviously does, but I guess is not something as striking as to find nearly 500 pages of it amusing).

I think if the book was a bit more concise and if it had more data, and not so many opinions, it could have been more valuable…

Brute-force solver for Eternity II (in Fortran)

An interesting programming puzzle (with a $2M prize!!) is the Eternity II puzzle. At Yahoo there is quite active group (of which I am a member) to discuss all things Eternity II.

Recently I have made available in that group (with nickname Txibilis) a
solver written in Fortran. Needless to say that the solver doesn’t solve the real puzzle… So far, a puzzle of size 13×13 is feasible, but the real puzzle is a monster 16×16, which is far beyond what this solver can do… Still, the puzzle is a nice excuse to learn about code optimization, etc. Soon (I hope) I will be releasing parallel versions (with MPI and others) of the code.

Building A Virtual Cluster with Xen

I just visited the Cluster Monkey page, and I was amazed to see that my article on Building a Virtual Cluster with Xen got nearly 48000 visits!!! I guess it was a popular one… I should update it, since Xen has had a lot of progress since I wrote it.

Anti-blot system (SPOJ)

I just decided a couple of days ago to start a daily “programming gym” session, to keep my programming skills sharp, since otherwise there are long periods of time in which I don’t do any programming, and the “trade” suffers.

Languages to practice will vary, but at present the focus will be in Fortran. And the problems to solve will come from Sphere Online Judge.

The first program to try has been ABSYS, and here is the code for it:

PROGRAM ABSYS
IMPLICIT NONE

CHARACTER :: mas, igual
CHARACTER (LEN=50) :: dato1,dato2,resultado
INTEGER :: sets,count,idato1,idato2,iresultado

READ*, sets

DO count=1,sets
READ*, dato1,mas,dato2,igual,resultado
CALL convert(dato1,idato1)
CALL convert(dato2,idato2)
CALL convert(resultado,iresultado)

IF (idato1 .EQ. -1) WRITE(*,’(I0,A,I0,A,I0)’) iresultado-idato2, ” + “, idato2, ” = “, iresultado
IF (idato2 .EQ. -1) WRITE(*,’(I0,A,I0,A,I0)’) idato1, ” + “, iresultado-idato1, ” = “, iresultado
IF (iresultado .EQ. -1) WRITE(*,’(I0,A,I0,A,I0)’) idato1, ” + “, idato2, ” = “, idato1+idato2
END DO

CONTAINS

SUBROUTINE convert(dato,idato)
CHARACTER (LEN=*) :: dato
INTEGER :: idato, pos

pos = INDEX(dato,”machula”)
IF (pos .EQ. 0) THEN
READ (dato,’(I50)’), idato
ELSE
idato = -1
END IF

END SUBROUTINE convert

END PROGRAM ABSYS

The program is trivial, but there are a couple of things to note:

In Fortran, to print a number with just the minimum necessary width, the edit descriptor is I0.

There are no intrinsic functions to convert a string to a number or viceversa, but instead we use what it is called an internal file, and we can write something like “READ (dato,’(I50)’), idato”

Fortran Compiler Comparisons

Just yesterday, Polyhedron Software announced a comparative study of different Fortran compilers, which can be found at: http://www.polyhedron.com/compare0html