I would normally never post about anything like this but let’s face it vdov.net has been ridiculously dead recently. This is probably due to the fact that it’s around the end of the semester and we’re all pretty busy. Personally I’ve been writing reports and preparing for my talk at ASMS this year. I was driving home from seeing Hot Fuzz, which is freaking awesome and you all should see it, when I heard this PSA from the Office of National Control Policy and the Partnership for a Drug Free America. It is in the whole “Above The Influence” series of ads that I absolutely hate with a passion. Now I hate them even more.

FEMALE VOICE: (Computer voice) Being popular was all I could think about last year. I wanted to, like, be cool with everybody. I listened to music that I didn’t like and laughed at stuff that wasn’t funny. I programmed myself to be a totally different person to everyone.

Computer voice starts to change into a real human voice.

FEMALE VOICE: But I wasn’t myself. Now I’m not pretending to like indie rock or anything like that. And people think that’s cool.

MALE VOICE: Live above the influence. Above weed. Check out abovetheinfluence.com. Sponsored by the ONDCP and the Partnership For A Drug-FreeAmerica.

It turns out this has gotten a fair amount of press on the internet from the usual indie sites (the PSA is actually really old), and I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion. Hence the reason I normally wouldn’t post this. But c’mon, this is absolutely ridiculous.

Recently I’ve hit the limit of my simulation capacity on my machine at work. This is a 8-core (2 x quad-core) Xeon machine with 16 gigs of RAM. So it’s quite capable, albeit somewhat pathetic in the grand scheme of people doing multi-phase fluid dynamics (I need to be submitting jobs to a capable supercomputer). As I moved to larger, more detailed systems, at some point they all just started failing. I was astonished to find out that I had indeed hit the limit of my memory addressing in a 32-bit environment. Not that this is all that incredible … I just had never hit this boundary. I have been getting around it lately by decomposing my domains into smaller pieces to be handled by each individual processor, but at some point I have to reconstruct all this data and analyze it effectively. So this morning I finally bit the bullet and reinstalled my Debian machine AMD64/EM64T. Then I recompiled a whole bunch of stuff and got the appropriate 64-bit applications, and viola, I’m in heaven. Now I can pull in and cache 11GB data sets in one analysis application like it’s nothing. I realize this is nothing too spectacular but it’s new to me. Brilliant. That is all.