flash on firefox 3

finally upgraded to firefox 3, and i had some trouble getting the adobe flash player recognized. i installed it, made some links to places i thought it might be looking, all with apparently no effect. the thing that finally made it work was when i symlinked /home/user/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so to /opt/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so.

amalgam and dream

recently came across some interesting work by jasper vrugt. AMALGAM is a self-adaptive global optimization algorithm. basically you start with a latin hypercube to get some initial sampling and feed those points to generate a couple of new points from each of a set of different global optimizers such as genetic, swarm, etc. after you sample that second generation of points, you can evaluate the quality of those optimizers on how well they pick new points for that type of problem. for each successive generation, you can sample more points from the optimizers that have done well. strikes me as similar to cover's optimal portfolio theory in the way it weights the winners. DREAM (differential evolution adaptive metropolis) is a sampling algorithm that has some advantages over markov chain monte carlo (mcmc) methods while maintaining desirable statistical properties that i don't really understand yet. useful for optimization and parameter fitting for high-dimensional inverse problems.

open source cad

narocad and solidmodeller are two open source cad codes out there. looks like somebody is finally using opencascade.

software carpentry

i've read that the software carpentry course is a good way for scientific computing people to learn software engineering. audio lectures also available.

quantitative finance firms

jane street looks like an interesting place to work, with offices in new york, london, and tokyo. looks like they have a strong cs background (they use ocaml). they recruit at top schools, including mit and imperial college.

packages i need to check out

some packages i've come across recently that look interesting enough for further investigation. zhu3d epix alberta (finite element) candystore peercast edna grisbi homebank demerge nostaples tic98 unpaper cil (c ast generator) arrayterator coverage.py ipdb very nice ipython debugger on windows, got it working in powershell but not cygwin xterm or spyder spyder dev chat says there are issues, maybe someone's working on it pudb borland-esque text debugger depends on urwid, which requires *nix or cygwin lightyears rpyc snakefood pstplus

tet mesh improver

the stellar package at berkeley claims to improve tet meshes for finite element simulations. i should check it out some time, if i'm ever lazy enough to use a tet mesh again.

math tutoring

mathnasium looks like an interesting service. maybe some day i could open a franchise. i think the hardest part is finding out how each student learns and then learning how to teach that way.

python design optimization

this article looks like it might be interesting. multidisciplinary design optimization, with a significant section on software issues and python.