Ink pot used to write declaration of independence

American history.

I learnt about history yesterday. Philadelphia was the capital is USA
in the country's early days. The declaration of independence was
signed in the room below.

I'm in Philadelphia!

I'm here, and breakfast potatoes are great! In Australia we've only
just caught up on the USA's hash brown technology. But the Americans
have discovered a way to infuse more fried-goodness per volume of
potato! Also they can make bacon from turkey; I had to re-read that
entry on the menu to.check I wasn't mistaken.

As I predicted QF93 took off late and I missed my.connection at LAX,
it would have taken too long for me and my bags to change terminals.
The staff were very helpful, and booked me onto US796 - direct to PHL.
My bags were with me too since I had to collect them in LAX
for.customs.

But that's not all. US796 taxied to the runway and then waited for 20
minutes before the pilot said he'd drive us back to the terminal as we
had a broken air conditioner that we needed to maintain cabin
pressure. We left on the fixed plane about 1.5h late. I got info PHL
at the time I would have with my original non direct flights, so
really I shouldn't complain.

The hotel is very nice. It's -2c outside and time to check our some
local places/historic things.

The can opener wasn't working...

The can opener wasn't working, but the problem was solved.

Geeks being geeks

Matt finishes a long black, then finishes a Rubik's cube.

Papers and presentations from ICLP

Three new papers about parallelism in Mercury have been added to the papers page. Associated with each paper is a presentation that was given at ICLP 2011. The presentations are also available on the papers page.

I am the first author for two of these papers.  One of them has been published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

Intel blogs and whitepapers have good titles but basically no content.

For instance http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/finding-non-trivial-opportunities-for-parallelism-in-existing-serial-code-using-openmp/

This is titled "Finding Non-trivial Opportunities for Parallelism in Existing Serial Code using OpenMP" Sounds promising right? This is exactly the kind of work that I think is important (if I didn't I wouldn't be working on my thesis). However the article doesn't actually use OpenMP to find parallelism, only to exploit it. They use conventional profiling techniques to find places where parallelism might be useful but all the analysis must manually be done by the programmer. This analysis is: 1) finding the hotspots within the call graph 2) deciding if the hot spots can be parallelised 3) actually parallelising them.

The final step is done using OpenMP, so it's a parallelism annotation rather than re-writing the code completely, but this isn't new, we've seen OpenMP before. The rest of the article (like many of Intel's articles) is an advertisement for their software, in this case the different profilers that can be used. They also slip in references to other tools of theirs.

I'm probably not their intended audience, other people may be able to get more useful information from these articles such as "Use a profiler to work out where parallelism is likely to be a benefit" but that doesn't stop the article from being a giant advertisement which bothers me.