- I went to Italy for the Euro PVM/MPI 2005. It was ok. Not a darn thing started on time, which was amusing (just a contrast between the Italian way of doing things vs. the American way of doing thing). Ironically, my best meal was at the hotel in Naples where I stayed overnight to catch a 6:40am flight home — I had rabbit and some kind of pasta that I had never heard of in a pumpkin sauce. Wow, it was fanstastic…
- At the same time as my Ital trip, the girls went to Flordia and saw the grandparents and had a great time. Bethany, our nanny, went with Tracy to help manage the trip.
- The squyres.com server has moved to a new, faster, bigger, and generally mo’ better machine. We’re still slowly making changes here and there (e.g., my photo album is half broken — we need to figure out how to fix it in light of some security issues; arrgh!), but it’s performing quite well. Part of the delay in this entry was getting the blog software going again.
- Kaitlyn is now walking up a storm. Some video clips (having your audio volume up is essential — be sure to watch the “Rampage” video first) available at http://jeff.squyres.com/pictures/ in the 2005 October folder.
- Kathryn just took her first 2 steps, but doesn’t really show as much interest in it as Kaitlyn (yet).
- Took the munckins in for their 1 year old pictures. It was a total disaster, but we managed to get a small number half-decent pictures. We went to http://www.portraitinnovations.com/, and although we purchaed too many physical pictures, the nice thing is that you get everything on CD (including the pictures that we didn’t buy).
- I’d just like to say: shared memory is the devil. Whoever thought that it would be a good programming model for high performance computing was on crack. Sure, any idiot can share a big, honkin’ matrix among several threads/processes and get reasonable performance. But to get really, really high performance, especially in NUMA machines where you really have to use process and memory affinity to minimize non-local memory accesses, is a PITA. Writing the code is a bit complex (if you don’t understand pointer math — really understand pointer math — you’re sunk), but debugging it s RPITA.
- Kaitlyn likes to fling things
- Kathryn likes to hug people (quite aggressively).
- Saw Kicking and Screaming on the flight to Italy. 1 minute.
- Saw The Wedding Date on the way back. 2 minutes.
- Saw The Replacements on TBS. Some fun moments, even though it was wildly unbelievable. 7.5 minutes.