Thursday November 6th, 7:00 P.M.
PICKLE CENTER,
TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTER CENTER
N. BURNET& E. BRAKER,
10100 Burnet Road
Entry is free.
On Saturday I swam one mile at Lake Marble Falls, about 90 minutes north west of Austin TX. The swim started at 9am on a cool and crisp morning with clear skies. The temperature of the water was just perfect, and I was tempted to swim even slower just to enjoy the scenery.
See also: Highland Lakes Challenge – Day Four, 2008 Race Results
The swim at Lake Marble Falls is amazing. We swim under the bridge, follow the winding river through the 150-or-so-million-year-old canyon, past an incredible boulder that leans off the shore over the lake, and take quick glimpses of interestingly designed docks and houses as we swim to the dam. Then, we round a buoy and make our way back, swimming under the bridge again as we swim to the finish. It’s one of everyone’s favorite swims.
It’s not too often that the Australian cricket team is so serverely defeated. Where is Shane Warne in our time of need, eh?
IT WAS not the defeat that was significant, but its manner. Australia has lost before, but it has been a long time since it was so comprehensively taken apart. Throughout the fourth innings, Indian supporters waited for the feared fightback but it never came. Australian cricketers are highly regarded in these parts for never throwing in the towel. Everyone knew they can be beaten but not broken. No one expected them to be brushed away like dust off a table, not on this pitch, not Australians. No one expected the visitors to cave in or to depart with their tails hanging between their legs.
Sometimes technical folks get passionate about an idea. If they get totally carried away they might write a magazine article, peer-reviewed paper, or start a PhD. Or, they can invade unsuspecting internet forums and try to convince people by force. As reported in a blog post: Fix Your Timestep: Crazy Internet Stalker!
Sometimes it’s necessary to destroy the village, in order to save it.
Be warned – if you get your numerical integration wrong, you’re going to hear about it!
Digg this story to add more fuel to the fire.
As reported in the Australian media:
McCain goes for jugular, but misses
Senator Obama was devastating in repeatedly tying his Republican rival to President George Bush’s unpopular policies, but Senator McCain responded with the best line of the night: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
Unfortunately, as Senator McCain spelt out his economic policy, it became apparent that it had many similarities to Mr Bush’s.
As reported by the Austin American Statesman and Texas Freedom Network, the religous right have nominated several evolution deniers to a curriculum review panel.
“It’s simply stunning that any state board members would even consider appointing authors of an anti-evolution textbook to a panel of scientists,” she said. “Are they coming here to help write good science standards or to drum up a market for their lousy textbook?”
The textbook, Explore Evolution, is intended for secondary schools and colleges, according to its U.S. distributor, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute in Seattle. Because of that, the State Board of Education could consider it for the state’s approved list of science textbooks in 2011.
The decisions made by the curriculum review panel may well affect what is taught to our daughter in biology class here in Texas.
[C++] Linking libstdc++ statically.
Making C++ binaries that will work properly in different Linux distributions is somewhat painful. The problem is not so much linking libstdc++ statically – it is just a library, after all – but the runtime support required by C++ code in general, to enable features like RTTI and exception handling.
Jason Schonberg will show some basic features of the GNU Debugger at the October 16th talk. Core dumps and their common causes will be examined and discussed. GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside’ another program while it executes — or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed. As described at the GNU Debugger website (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/), GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
- Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
- Make your program stop on specified conditions.
- Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
- Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
The GNU debugger supports the languages found in the Gnu Compiler Collection. These include Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal (and many others). GDB can run on most popular UNIX and Microsoft Windows variants. Digital copies of the first chapter of “The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse” will be available. As usual, questions can be asked during and after the talk.
Young Australian Skeptics
