normals - a processing experiment

As part of a visualization I'm attempting to create, I was doing some experiments in processing. One of the experiments involved distributing points randomly on a sphere, and drawing the normal vectors for those points. Add in a trackball for rotating, panning, and zooming and it ended up being a pretty cool interactive toy by itself.

my tracks for android

my tracks for android... I've been threatening to write something like this for years... glad to see Google finally beat me to it. Now, I just need an android phone.

firefox 4 first impressions

After only a few short hours online with the new beta release of firefox 4, I can already tell I'm going to like it. I have yet to find any issues, and it loads pages lighting fast. I highly recommend anyone thinking of testing the waters with this preview release to go for it.

playing poker during class

What should the punishment be for students playing poker during class?  Well, for my recent "Foundations of Object Oriented Programming" class, there was no punishment -- rather, playing poker was required.

plasmodium protein interaction network visualization

I was recently finishing my write-up about using processing to create interactive art. In that article I wanted to mention the animation and physics processing libraries by Jeff Traer Bernstein and while looking up the references I was reminded of this visualization. It has always been one of my favorites, so I'm finally getting around to sharing it.

parallel ssh tool roundup

So I'm in the market for a good "parallel" ssh tool.  Basically, I want to ssh and type some commands like I always do except that instead of one command output, I want the command to be run on a bunch of machines and I want responses from each.  I've used things like mpiexec in the past, but I was hoping for something more ad-hoc.  I just want to specify hosts on the command line (with no prior setup).  I really don't even want to required ssh keys or having the same password if I can avoid it.  Like I said, just ssh as usual, run some commands, get multiple results.

Anyway, these are the tools I've come across (in no particular order).  I'll outline what I regard as the advantages and disadvantages of each below.

1. pdsh - "a high-performance, parallel remote shell utility" from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2. pssh an implementation of some parallel ssh tools in python
3. dsh - dancer's / distributed shell
4. pydsh - a python version of dancer's shell
5. clusterssh - "a tool for making the same change on multiple servers"
6. mussh - "a shell script ... to execute a command or script over ssh on multiple hosts"
7. sshpt - "SSH Power Tool (sshpt) enables you to execute commands and upload files to many servers simultaneously via SSH"
8. multixterm - part of the expect project
9. clusterit - "a collection of clustering tools, to turn your ordinary everyday pile of UNIX workstations into a speedy parallel beast"
10. dish - "The diligence shell 'dish' executes commands via ssh/rsh/telnet/mysql simultaneously on several systems"

go python!

Python 2.7 was released yesterday - and it looks like some cool python 3 features were back-ported.